Chapter 117
A moment of deathly silence followed as the severity of this situation hit.
"Creeper!" Avalina cried, "Lay down on the ice, quick!"
Creeper looked like he'd been turned to stone. He didn't move, staring down at the ice beneath his feet.
"Creeper!" Avalina shouted, "Lay down!"
A faint cracking noise made itself known, and Avalina gasped.
"Creeper!"
The goblin paid her no mind, and Avalina realized what had happened. He was frozen stiff with fear. Complete fear.
Another crack, a little louder this time.
The warmer weather over the past few days had weakened the ice severely, and although it was quite thick, it was extremely unstable, due to the fluctuating temperatures. The sun was shining quite warmly today, despite the cold, and the blanket of snow over the ice was not helping. Rather, it was insulating the ice, warming it. Filling it with porous air pockets and lowering the density.
Casting her gaze around, Avalina happened to look down and backed away with a gasp.
One of the many springs that fed the massive lake was practically right by her feet. Flowing water was a hazard to all ice formations, ceaselessly eating away at it from the bottom up. . .following the frozen flow line along the surface, she froze in horror as she realized it led right to Creeper. And his weight, though small, was just enough for the melting ice to give to.
The ice under the goblin's feet sank with his weight, but did not quite break.
Yet.
Creeper reached behind him and latched onto a wooden limb protruding from the ice, obviously frozen in place, and refused to move another inch.
"Creeper, you have to come to me, now!" Avalina cried, "Come here!"
The goblin shook his head in terror, his eyes fearfully blank, and gripped the limb with every appendage he had.
'Don't make me come out there,' Avalina thought fearfully.
'Don't make me, don't make me. . .'
The ice crackled another warning, and Avalina knew it was now or never. There was no rope, nothing light enough or long enough to use to throw to Creeper. She would have to go and get him. Or watch him drown.
Forcing her terrified limbs to work, she lay on her stomach and carefully eased onto the ice. It did not move under her weight, much to her relief, but the memory of it giving to the goblin was not encouraging.
Nor were the frozen flow lines a few feet off to her right.
Shaking, she inched closer to the goblin, trying not to think of the freezing Death that lay directly below her.
"Creeper, come here!" She begged, "I'll meet you halfway!"
Creeper wasn't hearing her, instead staring down at the ice below him that had sunk slightly with his weight. He could feel the faint ripples of the water through the limb he was gripping, and that thought alone froze him to the spot.
The cold seeped through to Avalina's skin and she shook harder, feeling it creep through her pores, sifting in and beginning to freeze her blood.
'Little closer. Little closer.'
She fancied she heard a small 'crick' in the ice, and she froze herself, afraid to move for a moment, listening.
She had to force herself to finally start moving again. She had to get Creeper and get them both to safety.
The ice groaned directly beneath her and she gasped, feeling it shift very slightly as the current from the spring pushed lightly against it.
"Creeper," she whispered, too terrified to speak out loud, "Come here. Now!"
Creeper paid her no mind.
She was less than six from him now.
Sliding forward some more, the weak part of the ice that had given under the goblin sank slightly under her weight, right before a series of creaks and groans ensued. This was followed by cracks shooting across the ice like arrows, splitting it in a dozen different places, stemming from the flow line.
Avalina shrieked in terror and gripped the ice, scared stiff.
'Dont'breakdon'tbreakdon'tbreakdon'tbreak,' she thought in terror, nearly crying in fright.
'Please don't break. Fates, help me!'
Sliding closer to the goblin an inch at a time, she felt the ice slowly begin to shift again, and she knew it was all going to crack wide open any second.
"Creeper, grab my cloak!" She cried urgently, not daring to come any closer. Slowly, she slid the end of it across the ice toward him, a few inches from the frozen, spiked limb he clung to.
Creeper did not respond.
"Creeper!"
She tried a second time, but aimed too high and snagged her cloak on the end of the branch.
The ice shifted again, and nearly choking on her fear, Avalina slid closer to the goblin as quickly as she dared and reached up, grabbing his leg and yanking.
He may as well have been part of the limb.
"Creeper, come *on!*" Avalina snapped in fear.
"You're gonna get us both killed!"
Creeper finally looked at her, and the frozen terror in his eyes froze her heart.
"Creeper, I'm here," she tried to reassure him, "But you've got to let go of the limb now. Come on."
Like a fly from a web, Creeper, slowly unstuck his limbs from around the wood and reached for her.
The ice shifted violently, and he squeezed his eyes shut and gripped the limb for all he was worth.
Getting to her knees, Avalina grabbed his arm and weakly yanked on him, trying to get him loose. Once, twice. . .
Thrice.
The goblin snapped loose from the limb, accented by another shift in the ice, and Avalina shrieked as the shift in weight made the ice split in even more places.
Using every ounce of arm strength she possessed, she half threw, half slid Creeper across the ice, skating safely back to shore.
He finally snapped out of his stupor then, scrambling for the bank before turning around to look back at Avalina.
Their eyes met for a single moment before the ice she was kneeling on broke and she crashed down, down. . .into the freezing water.
Avalina gasped in shock, the cold effectively ripping the very breath from her lungs as her body sank beneath the ice. Her hands slipped on the edge and she went under.
Briefly.
Her riding cloak was still snagged on the limb Creeper had clung to, preventing her from sinking any farther.
Breaking the surface, she gasped as she coughed in air, said air seeming to freeze her face and burn her throat as she drew it in.
Gripping her cloak with freezing fingers, she tried to pull herself up, but she was so *cold.* It leaked into every fiber of her being, twisting around and through her muscles, into her skin, blood and bones. Right to the heart it crept, filling her with ice.
The ice around her cracked some more, the spring finally rising to power now that its fault line had been broken, and the limb Creeper had clung to began to sink as the ice gave around it.
With only a few feet of yet unbroken ice between herself and the wood, Avalina could see it wasn't a tree limb attached to that branch.
It was a whole tree trunk. And it had been frozen here for weeks, getting heavier and more waterlogged by the day. . .
And as the ice shifted from around it, just enough to let it go, its weight began to pull it downward.
It was sinking.
It groaned and disappeared slowly beneath the ice, its single proud branch receding steadily.
A moment after the wood disappeared Avalina felt a fierce yank from her cloak, and she felt her body rising from the freezing water.
Teeth chattering uncontrollably, she tried to pull herself out of the hole in the ice, but the weight against her cloak snugged her tightly against the sharp edge of the ice, allowing her no room to maneuver.
The weight of the log finally forced her body over onto the solid ice again and Avalina cried out in pain, before she began to slide along the frozen surface, her cloak dragging her to her doom.
Avalina screamed in terror and tried to undo it from her shoulders, but her fingers were frozen stiff and the material was too tight and slick.
'Fates, no!'
If she had not been so weakened by lack of food and rest, perhaps she would have managed. But she was not, and the ice was too slippery to get any grip at all.
Pulled back into the freezing water, she screamed in horror as its numbing grip took a painful hold on her body once again.
"Help me!"
Avalina didn't know who she was screaming for, just somebody...anybody...
Her cries were silenced in a flurry of bubbles as the log yanked her firmly under with a last quiet, desperate splash.
Down. . .down. . .into the dark, cold depths of the lake, the water burning her eyes. Avalina's body would not obey her effectively, and she could barely move at all in this fight for her life.
'Fates, no! I don't want to die!'
The log stopped sinking, landing on a rock formation that jutted out into the middle of the lake.
Avalina was six feet from the surface. Six! If she could just. . .reach it. . .
Pulling herself down her cloak, hand over hand, Avalina fumbled weakly with the branch it was entangled on, but it was wrapped tight and her fingers wouldn't even work for her anymore.
'Help me, please! Anybody! Fates, please, no!'
Her lungs began to burn as the lack of air began to tell on her, and she feebly kicked the branch in an attempt to break it, with no success.
She tried to undo the cloak from her shoulders, but her hands were too frozen by this point to even twitch and the attempt was useless.
Weakening, she lost her grip on her cloak and floated gently upward, yanked to a stop by the wretched cloth holding her in place.
The water around her turned a darker color, and Avalina looked up, praying for a miracle. . .
The ice chunks floated together above her head, effectively covering the broken area and blocking out most of the sunlight.
She was trapped.
Avalina might have been crying in terror, but the water masked all tears.
She knew she was going to die. There was nobody and nothing around here to save her. The Horned King had saved her before, but this scenario was very different.
'He won't come,' she thought bleakly.
'Water hurts him.'
Her vision began to blacken, and right before it went dark her last thought was not a pleasant one.
'He's not coming. He hates me too much.'
The sensation of being violently yanked was the last thing she was aware of.
The Horned King paced in his chambers, seething in rage at the Cauldron for baiting him. Luring Avalina down there. Furious at himself for taking the bait in the first place. His master had been manipulating him and he had been too angry to see it. Too angry at his master, too angry at her. . .
Arawn was determined to get him back. He didn't care how. And nothing would deter him until he got what he wanted.
Avalina's sobs came back to him and the lich pushed them away, still quite angry at her.
The Invisibles had told him she had cried for hours in the stable after the incident downstairs, and the weight on his chest grew heavier at the thought, but only for a moment.
'I started hating her for destroying my chance of revenge with the Pig-Keeper,' he thought silently to himself, before a spark of anger flared up.
'I still hate what she did. That was the only chance I would ever have to avenge myself and now it is gone. And I gave her my word...'
Here the Horned King snarled in anger.
'That I would not harm the boy.'
And he regretted it with every fiber of his being. However, oddly, he felt strangely bound to keep his promise this time, instead of simply breaking it, as he had innumerable times before. Why did he feel this way? Was it because of the way she had looked at him? Or was it something else? Or many factors combined?
'But I do not hate. . .her. Merely what I foolishly promised.'
He had tried to hide the truth from himself for weeks, but it was finally pushing to the surface of his mind, determined not to die. Truth could never die. It could lay hidden, rejected, buried and forgotten, (As he had tried to do himself) but it would never disappear. For it was older than all the Lies the world had ever created.
He did not hate the girl. She did what any other mortal in that situation would have done. He could scarcely blame her for it, but that did not help his fury at her much.
What did dampen his harsh feelings toward her was the feel of her terror every time she neared him. He had wanted her to hurt, at first. He had wanted her to know how furious he was. But the feeling had grown monotonous over the weeks, and a private thought wondered if it was impossible to reverse.
His chest ached slightly at the thought.
He missed her. He missed having her near, hearing her laugh, seeing her eyes dance. . .if he could remember, it may have reminded him of more pleasant times long since past, but that was of no importance to him now.
Thinking back on his incident with the Pig-Keeper, he began to ponder on just what might have happened between them if he had killed the boy. He had never thought past that, always too furious at the fact that the boy had gotten away to think much about what would have happened afterward.
He worked out one possible scenario after the other now, turning and twisting the events in a hundred different ways, measuring them, weighing them, studying. . .
If he had killed the Pig-Keeper before the earthquake, Avalina would have died. He stiffened at the thought, before continuing his silent mental breakdown of the previous events.
If he had killed the boy after Avalina begged him not to. . .
He tried one variation after the other inside his head, but to his frustration each and every single one pointed back to the same shape Avalina was in now. Except only, with the Pig-Keeper dead, it would truly be irreparable.
But he had not killed the boy, so that meant that surely this could be altered. She was acting this way because of his actions toward her since that detestable event.
He realized now that no matter how he turned it, he could either kill the boy, or keep the little friend that had worked her way so gently into his heart.
He could not have both. And now, finally able to deeply ponder on it without Hate clouding his mind, he realized that he would rather have Avalina's tender company than the blood of the Pig-Keeper on his hands.
He pushed that pleasing image away, trying not to dwell on it anymore.
And the Cauldron had baited him into ranting everything his Hate had told him was true. But his Hate was wrong.
The Horned King's head felt clearer now than it had in weeks, and he felt as if a deep breath of fresh air had swept through him, refreshing him.
He needed to speak to Avalina. He needed to tell her. . .
'I will tell her the truth,' he thought.
'I value her more than the boy's death. I would rather have the gem of her company than the blood of my foe.'
He sighed softly.
'I have treated her unfairly. No doubt she will be terrified to come to me, but she must know.'
The lich now realized that she had been right, all those weeks ago in the library. He would have regretted killing the boy by this point if he had. In that instant, for all his knowledge he had accumulated over the centuries, she had been wiser than he, and dared to tell him, although she feared for her life.
'She is a true little friend.'
The Horned King had never thought of her like that before, and the feeling warmed him.
He stiffened suddenly, listening.
Someone was screaming.
Instantly on the alert, it only took a moment for him realize instantly who it was.
'Avalina.'
'Help me!'
There was such terror in the words his heartbeat skipped. Faintly.
Going to his window, he looked out, searching, and off to his far left, nearly obscured by the castle walls, was a figure thrashing about on the ice of the lake before they disappeared below the surface.
I've noticed I have a very uncanny knack for ending chapters in a decidedly foreboding manner lately...ah well. Poop on it, I say XD.