The bell was tolling, louder than before, rippling the water around him. He could feel it in his chest, hear it echoing and encompassing in the dark cold depths. A stark contrast to before the water closed in, sounding like the little silver bells he had seen the pagan priests ring during funerary processions, leading the grievers and the swaddled corpse deeper into the mires.
Terror set in when the first of the slimy digits appeared and wrapped around his arms first, crawling up his body, his legs, his neck, his head. Frigid in death, slick in decay, they grabbed and anchored, appearing from the murk just out of sight.
Had he been in a better position, he may have thought of looking toward the source, but once the whispering started in time to the sound of the bell, beating out an ancient heartbeat to give the murmured incantations rhythm, he lost interest and focused instead on freeing himself. A stream of bubbles left him, muffling the scream of frustration and blind panic as his futile struggles remained stuck fast in the grip of those floating below in the ink of uncertainty of the pool.
Golden light was cutting through, the light of midday in autumn. The water was tinted with it, mingling with the muddied greens and turning it into fine bottle glass. The bell was deafening, aided by the cacophonous choir of the dead.
Some of the whispers, he had grown to understand, plaintive wails and begging for him to stay. They fell on muted ears, hearing them but never responding, suspended between the sucking floor of the pool and the surface like a cruel joke. Light played off his pale face, off the black cross he brandished as a sick irony.
He didn't hear her breach the surface, only saw her cut through the green bottle glass and with the sun behind her head, his water-feebled mind told him she wore the halo. Bore wings the color of green and shined light behind her head in brilliant gold. It seemed to follow her in threads, clinging to her hands and hair and toes, lighting the space around her the further down she went, the closer she came.
The bell was gone, faded out to a cobweb memory, fragile in its existence from the start and with the anchor thread snapped, it held no more point or purpose. Before darkness finally took him, he felt the hands release him, felt himself start to sink into the murk and the muck, imagining the Goddess with the midday golden autumn behind her head as she descended on him, trailing the blazing sun with her into the abyssal void.
His lungs hurt, the mail felt heavier than normal. His vision was blurry, lethargic as he glanced around him on startling awake.
The tunic was heavily saturated, the chainmail and the wool as well. It clung to him, made it harder to breathe than it was already. Vague remembrances of coughing water, heaving and hacking, throwing it from his system like bad meat. He could still taste the fetid water on his tongue, on his lips.
Rot and decay.
Death.
He was held tightly in warm arms, and for a moment, he thought it was one of his people, his knights. With the haze evening out, he could see clearly that it was not and had he been in better spirits, he would have fought her for the right to walk. But he was tired, so he left it and remained leaned against her, soaked through and dripping as well, but confident. In her stride was pride, the loft of her head, the way her arms cradled him. For now, it was warm and comforting and he didn't want to be left alone.
He could almost hear her heartbeat with his ear resting against her chest, slow and steady and patient. The rock of her gait, gentle and strong. The rustle of tall grass and wild rye growing out of the edge of the bordering marshes, sticking to her wet wool. He mused for a moment that her hair was lying flat, something he didn't get to see often. It was a strange detail to take comfort in, but she was real and he was alive, the golden sun clutching at her as she made her way to drier ground. The thought that this was real gave him security and like the child he was, he fell asleep in the sun and the breeze.
He would not stay asleep for long.
A/N: Bit of practice in written-palette work for another drabble I'm working on. A short set of scratches that will have illustrations to go with them eventually. Some small Teuton and the Goddess Prussia.