I Only Summon Villainesses

There was no up.

That was the first thing the river taught me, and it taught it hard. I’d spent my whole life with a reliable sense of which way the sky was, and the flood took it away in the first second and never gave it back.

There was only the water, black and total and colder than anything has a right to be, turning me end over end in a dark so complete my open eyes and shut eyes showed me the same nothing.

I did the stupid thing first. I fought it.

I clawed for a surface I couldn’t find, kicked against a current that outweighed me by the size of a mountain, spent strength I did not have on the oldest instinct there is, and the river let me tire myself out the way an adult lets a furious child swing at its knees.

Every scrap of air I’d caught before it swallowed me was burning in my chest now, and the burning was climbing toward the bright white panic that ends men in water, and some cold clerk in the back of my skull filed the observation that I was about to drown with a full inventory of powers and not one of them worth a damn against a river.

’...Not like this,’ I thought, which is what everyone thinks. The river was not impressed.

So I stopped fighting the water and started reading it.

Tactical Omniscience is not much use when you can’t see, but it doesn’t need eyes, it needs information, and the water was full of information if I stopped screaming long enough to feel it.

There was a pull. Under the churn, a steady deep drag all going one way, and the froth and the tumbling were only the surface argument over a current that had already made up its mind. Down here everything went one direction whether it agreed or not.

Fighting the pull was death. So I went with the pull, and only fought to keep my head aimed along it, and at once the river stopped treating me like an enemy and started treating me like debris, which is a promotion, in a river.

With the Graceful robes on me, my body was lighter than a drowning man should be, and that was the only reason the current lifted me instead of pinning me.

I rode the drag with my ruined arms tucked and my broken hand screaming and my lungs a single white coal, and I let the water carry me the way it was always going to, and I waited for it to make a mistake.

It made one. They always do. The current slammed me shoulder-first into a rising shelf of rock where the channel bent, and the pain of it was the best news I’d had all night, because pain meant stone, and stone meant a shape to the world again.

I got a dead hand over the lip. Got the other elbow up. And Feather Step, the cheap little trick, the beneath-me trick, caught the half-second where the water shoved me highest and stuttered me up out of the flood and onto the shelf like a landed fish.

I lay on the wet rock and breathed. Just breathed, in great tearing whoops, while the river roared past a hand’s breadth from my face, furious that I’d climbed out of its argument.

’...We’re going to have words,’ I told it, ’you and I. Later. When I can feel my legs.’

It took a while for the world to come back. When it did, it came back wrong, because there was light down here, and light was the one thing the deep dark of the Precipice had never offered me for free.

A faint, sick, greenish glow, breathing out of the walls themselves.

Some pale weed or rot clinging to the wet stone in patches, throwing just enough light to show me the size of the cavern I’d washed into, and it was a big one, a long low gallery of dripping rock with the river tearing down the middle of it and a shelf of dead ground on either side. Enough to see by. Not enough to feel safe in.

I took the inventory I’d been avoiding.

Two fingers on my left hand, gone. Not broken now, gone, aged to nothing by a breath that should have taken the rest of me with them, and the stumps had sealed themselves into smooth grey scar.

My thigh had finally stopped bleeding, though I suspected that was less healing and more that the river had washed it too clean and cold to bother. The well behind my ribs was a dry socket. When I reached for it, for anything, the flame that answered was a candle-stub of blue I could have snuffed with a wet thumb.

I was, in every measurable sense, done.

And I was alive. Which, weighed against the last two hours, was a frankly obscene stroke of luck, and I have lived long enough to distrust obscene strokes of luck.

”Alright,” I muttered to the glowing dark, because talking kept the panic filed and quiet. ”Alright. Wren’s back that way, upstream, however far the river dragged me. So I follow the water back and I don’t die on the way and I—”

Death Sense opened.

I didn’t ask it to. It opened the way it had opened when the Archmage first crossed into range, all on its own, because something so heavy had entered the water that my own body raised the alarm before my mind could.

And out there, downstream, where the river ran off into a dark even the green glow didn’t reach, was one life force.

It was vast and dimmed. And it folded down to a fraction of the furnace it had been, guttering like a lamp with the oil almost out.

But moving against the current, slow and grinding and deliberate, the way a thing moves when it has decided on a direction and will pay any price to hold it. Dragging that street-long ruin of a body up out of the deep water one aching length at a time.

The bastard was... coming back.

For a moment I just lay there on the wet green-lit stone with my two fingers gone and my well run dry, and I felt it decide on me all over again, that dimmed enormous life turning its ruined weight around in the dark and starting the long crawl upstream toward the one warm thing the river hadn’t finished.

The green glow guttered. Somewhere below the roar of the water, stone began to grind against stone.

A tired sigh left me.

’You’ve got to be kidding me.’

And the three red eyes opened in the dark downstream, dim as dying coals, and found me.