21. Awakened

                                    

                                          

💧




"Are you awake?"
It's hard to answer coherently when you've got water in your ears and up your nose, everything smelling just a little bit salty. The ground is soft, but wet and cold. She must've passed out in a puddle because her entire face feels strange and dewy, if not a little red. It doesn't help that rain pours down from the sky aggressively enough to completely blur her vision, the trees around her becoming nothing but shadows, the grass nothing but a puddle.
There are pieces of wood lying around everywhere. Most of it is gone though, the river expanded up shore and took the final pieces of the boat with it down its mighty streams. Chepi doesn't know how she managed to get this far up the shore of the river, sleeping under the nearest tree, but she thinks it might've been either the angel or the demon who carried her tired self from the crashed boat to the nearest, driest place.
"Mhm" Is all she can mumble, blinking her eyes open and trying to sit up. It's cold and it's wet, nothing feels dry and everything feels terrible. And yet somehow, when she looks up at the demon and angel standing above her, they look like nothing happened last night at all. Fresh and ready to go, despite the rain pouring down their necks. True soldiers, that's what they are. Real, true soldiers who Chepi can not relate to.
At some point through the night, the storm got progressively worse. The waves became higher, to the point where they would crash on board and fill the boat's floor with cold, clear liquid. The wind howled in their ears and kept them awake, but it wasn't loud enough to keep them alert. Nodding from and to sleep, trying not to close your eyes and then desperately trying to keep them closed. The wind got colder, water filled their boat and soaked them wet and soon it began to rain again, hard enough for them not to be able to see where to steer the boat at all.
It was clear halfway through the night that they would not be able to last a moment longer. The boat crashed against the shore despite their desperate attempts at keeping it afloat, with even Chepi standing up to help them. No matter how many scoops of water she tried to throw out of the wooden thing, it wouldn't help at all, and soon she found herself up to her knees with water. The boat was sinking, and once it crashed, there wasn't much left of it at all. Saving it was pointless, and now there are mere pieces of it left and the rain still hasn't stopped.
They were forced to stop their travel down the river, basically, because the storm broke their boat and left them stranded here on the forest path right next to it. Chepi guesses that they are about three or four days away from the fairy kingdom's border, after which they'd be just half a day's walk away from the neutral loophole between the higher and lower realms. Going with the boat would've been much faster, just one more day of rowing and then one day of walking across the border and to the loophole. Anemone and Evangeline can't have been happy about how things turned out, but Chepi couldn't care less.
In fact, she's happy. This means that their trip to the loophole is severely delayed, and she has more time to figure out a way to escape before it's too late.
"We leave now, come on, get up"
Chepi accepts Evangeline's outreached hand, and lets herself be dragged up from the wet ground. Everything feels wiggly and moist, so she's not very happy. But once she has dusted herself off and managed to realise that nothing on her body will stay dry anyway, she can only look up at her two travel companions (or dare she say, kidnappers), and realise that they are in a much worse mood. Anemone looks like she's about to throw someone against a tree and break their skull, while Evangeline looks like her normal, cold self except... wait for it... colder.