Page 28 of Of Blooming Embers
I sat taller in the gently rocking boat as I rowed behind Breena.
We passed a small group of people diving under the brackish surface, alternatively popping up and plopping slimy beasts into a woven rope basket on the side of their skiffs.
“Muckers!” Breena shouted gleefully, waving at them. Some of them waved back; the others were too busy diving again and again. I shuddered at the thought of swimming and excavating the muddy depths.
Sighing, I pushed against my oar, the monotonous movement both soothing and wearisome as memories of Gavrel slinked into the depths of my awareness. The way he always watched over me. When his plump lips formed a grim line. A smile that cracked on the sides when I said something funny.
Then his mouth on mine. His hardness straining at his breeches before his bath.
I bit my lip hard each time, chasing each unbidden thought away with the nip of pain.
Halfway through an hour, we reached the bog field, and my bottom lip was now raw.
Fuck.
Breena tied our vessel to a thick doombark nestled against an expansive field of water-logged hollows and bulky mounds of compacted bog moss—hummocks. A drooping fog slithered into the horizon.
She hopped onto a nearby knoll, her arms spread out at either side, stabilizing herself. She grinned. “All right, you ’lil snack. You can take your chances walking in the mud, but one wrong step, and it’ll suck you right under. Never know if it’s solid or just a bunch of peat floating in a hollow.” She made a slurping noise, her cheeks hollowing before leaping to the next visible heap.
Hesitantly, I stepped onto her abandoned spot, the mass bobbing under my boots. Peat flexed uneasily over the viscous slurry like a mottled elastic bubble ready to pop.
My blood rushed to my head, and I trailed Breena as she bounced to the next, sounds of joy bursting from her as she landed.
I breathed in, expanding my ribs so they weren’t clutching my lungs so tightly.
“Feck it!” I hollered and followed my friend as she leaped fromhummock to hummock. My friend, who was alive and safely out of the Stygian Murk.
“That’s the fecking spirit!”
We dashed and vaulted over and over. Cricket song crescendoed with each landing, only to pause as my boots met moss, then resumed behind me as I left.
A few times, the mounds threatened to collapse as I landed on them, the squelching of mud sucking at the air. My thighs burned from continually bouncing and balancing.
But I was free. Reckless and untethered. Pure delight ripped from my lungs; my gleeful squeals swallowed by the haze coating the bogland.
On my next jump, I veered off to the right as Breena went to the left, the fog absorbing her.
Unabashedly, I dashed across several, the breeze smacking into my teeth as I grinned. From the corner of my eye, an ebony shadow flew past me, the beating of wings whooshing against the mist as it tore into the obscured sky.
I whipped my head forward again as I jumped toward a smaller pile of vegetation. Too late, I realized my error as the peat licked at its wobbly edges. The lumpy moss quivered and crumbled under my feet, and my body was a stone swallowed into the thick pool of sticky muck.
With a yelp, I squirmed within the gooey sludge, but its gummy embrace dragged me slowly downward, my movements causing me to sink further.
“Breena!” I screeched, terror shredding free from my frame and leaving me to the muddy depths.
The murk and fog swallowed me, dampening my cries as my arms slapped against its viscous surface uselessly. The nearest hummock was out of reach.
My blood and breath whirled within me as I screamed.
“Calm yourself, child.” I stilled as the soft demand grated over me. A gilded glow peeled through the haze, followed by the bent form of a woman atop the lifted moss.
The fog dispersed, and I blinked my eyes as if finally seeing clearly for the first time.
Her flowy, pale hair fluttered to her chest, wispy strands brushing against her ashen cheeks and dark, gauzy robes. Her skin delicately creased into a patchwork of wrinkles like a map drawn on crumpled paper.
“Would love to, but as you can see, I’m being eaten alive by a bog!” My voice rose at the end, cresting along the ridges of my panic.
Her lips set in an unamused line as she flicked her wrist nonchalantly. All at once, I flinched, sinking deeper, as a long, thick branch flew straight at me and landed near my hand with a splat.
