Page 18 of Embers of Midnight
Hydration, Humiliation, and Other H Words
Seraphina
Snow keeps its own kind of silence here, a hush that edits sound until only the honest pieces remain. The river’s voice threads through it—low, even, a scrape of water under ice. I follow it because thirst has opinions and because my mess of a night needs one thing that makes sense.
Heat bleeds off me in slow waves. It skates over the crust, finds the weak spots, and turns them to slush, which is a great way to leave a trail and a terrible way to feel stealthy. I pick my way down a shallow slope, ribs tight, mouth a kiln. The air tastes like pine and metal and the edge of something I still don’t have a name for.
The bank shows itself as a softer dark in the dark, reeds glazed white along the edge, a rim of ice with lace-thin teeth. I stop a pace back and try that mental trick again—heavy iron door, cool latch, lower the heat, be less. The furnace inside me growls likeit knows about unions and doesn’t care about my management style.
The water twitches when I breathe on it. Steam slicks up in a thin, apologetic fog. I hold my head to the side so my breath skates past and the surface can pretend I’m not a space heater with hooves. Slow. Careful. Tongue low, lips barely breaking water, angle from the winded side, don’t think about the way the horn hums when I get close to cold.
Cool hits and for one bright second it’s perfect—knife-clean, mineral, not flavored like fear. My whole chest says yes. I swallow and the heat spikes to fight it on the way down, but it still lands where I need it. I do it again. And again. Steam ghosts up and slides off my face. The ice licks and reforms in the wake of my mouth like it wants the drama. I give it none.
The sense of being seen gets in under the edges the way cold does: first as data, then as fact. I register weight in snow about thirty, thirty-five feet back in the tree line. The noise isn’t sloppy or eager. It isn’t afraid either. It’s deliberate. I could pretend I don’t notice.
I keep drinking because fainting from dehydration while dramatic strangers watch is not the brand I want to launch.
Whoever they are in the trees, they don’t come closer. Breath patterns shift once, then even out. It reads like patience. Which I don’t hate, given that I am currently a hellhorse auditioning for a hydration commercial.
I drink until the ache behind my sternum drops from blade to pressure. My jaw throbs from holding my head just so. The horn settles a half-note lower. The river talks under everything, that steady scrape I could live inside if I had the option.
I lift my head.
They’re there—four figures in winter kit that looks like it belongs in a film with a bigger budget than my whole life. Tall as fuck, big without reading clumsy. Far left: heat halos off him in a faint gold that makes the snow behave, his eyes the same warm metal—banked-coal gold that steadies instead of blazes. Second from the right: shadow behaves around him like a trained animal; silver eyes catch light like wet ink and don’t give it back. A crow sitting on his shoulder. Third: a clean line in human shape, pressure dialed so steady it changes how the air sits; his eyes are storm-blue, not flashing—measuring. The last one moves like starlight put on legs and a bad joke; his eyes are green the way dusk keeps a favorite.
They stand like they meant to be exactly here—weight even, coats unbothered by the weather, the kind of quiet that edits a clearing. Snow hushes itself. Breath comes easy for them in air that hurts everyone else. None of them fidget. None of them announce anything. They don’t read like a search party. They read like an answer I didn’t know I was asking.
Fantastic, my brain offers, because sarcasm is a coping mechanism. I shift into hellhorse mode and the first people to see me look like giants escaped from a Romantasy Pinterest board.
Something about them scrapes a match along that new seam in my chest and makes it glow. It isn’t fear. It’s not safety either. It’s a pull, like gravity introduced itself and I forgot to decline politely. I stand it. I drink again, because priorities.
A branch breaking happens upslope, sharp and ordinary and enough. The spell of looking breaks. My body does what prey does even when it could stomp a truck: it chooses movement.
I run.
Snow takes the first two strides like it forgives me. The third gouges, the fourth prints, and by the fifth I’m back in the line my body decided belongs to me now, breath stacking clean, hooves finding the hard under the soft. The river keeps to my right, then drops away behind scrub and a slide of rocks. Trees stitch themselves tighter in front of me like the forest wants to see how I solve puzzles when my lungs are on fire.
I don’t look back. The pull in my chest tethers me to them anyway. It feels like a string threaded through a ring I didn’t know I wore, drawing soft every time one of them breathes wrong. I hate it on principle. I don’t have a principle that wins here.
Heat tries to climb my throat. I swallow it. The horn hum rides my teeth. The snow changes sound from hush to squeal as I hit a slope I didn’t see from above. I choose right to keep from being a very embarrassing tumble of myth.
The river swings back into play ahead—wider here, black under a thin skin that does not deserve the name ice. The banks pinch, then open into a stretch I could maybe clear if physics agreed to a short engagement. I count strides, judge distance, lie to myself twice, and commit.
I’m wrong by half a body length.
The river hits like a verdict.
The moment the ice breaks, there’s no crack, no shout, no warning. Just a quiet, malicious give—like the river is done with me. The cold doesn’t hit me, it devours. All at once. Belly, chest, throat, eyes.
I jerk my head up but there’s no up anymore. Just white roaring and black pulling. My body screams in parts—lungs want air, muscles want ground, everything wants out. But nothing goes. Only in. Water. Darkness. Pressure.
I want to fight. I want to roar. But I can’t open my mouth, and that’s good, because if I could, I would. I’m blind animal now and that means: snap, kick, sink.
Heat lashes out—reflex. I boil the surface, I steam like a damned wraith, but the water laughs. It doesn’t negotiate. It tugs. Pulls. Claims. It has time.
I don’t. I’m fracturing. My ribs don’t remember how to breathe. My heart punches like it never learned rhythm. I can’t see. Or I see everything.
My hooves hit nothing. My horn hits ice, then rock, then pain. My body wants up. Upupup. But there is no up. Only water, counting me down. Slow. Final.
