Rivers of the Night

The sobs felt as though they were echoing through Theron's heart and skull, pulsing and bouncing across in waves that seemed to force him to listen to them.

A hint of clarity returned to his eyes, and then confusion. Looking down, he saw the arms around him.

They didn't look particularly strong, a bit chubby, short stubby fingers gripping onto what remained of his torn, tattered, and blood-stained robes.

They were the arms of a middle-aged woman who had lived a long, full life, the sort of arms you would see on a loving mother and a caring wife.

To Theron… they almost felt so… so foreign.

He couldn't even recall the last time he had been hugged by anyone.

"I'm sorry, Theron. I'm sorry…"

Theron blinked, the words reverberating through his ears in an odd way. It almost felt like it was running through his chest and then exiting his ears rather than coming in the normal way. The feeling made him a bit disoriented, throwing his balance off.

The Alpha stood a distance away, a bit confused as to whether it should act or not. It could tell that Teacher Fern was definitely not a threat, but it also could see that Theron was in a bit of distress it couldn't explain.

Theron reached a hand up to pull Teacher Fern's hand away, but he almost felt as though he had just woken up from a dream. His blood wasn't circulating properly, and his hands carried much less strength than he thought they should have.

Suddenly afraid of controlling his own strength, his hand froze in the air, hovering there in the rain as though it didn't know what to do with itself.

Teacher Fern's arms tightened around him. She didn't say anything profound, she kept holding and kept crying. Theron didn't even know how to deal with the situation, his mind short-circuiting as though all the intelligence, all the thinking speed, all the deciphering abilities in the world didn't seem to be functioning at all.

Theron tried to take deep breaths to calm himself, but nothing he did seemed to work properly. In fact, every breath he took seemed to become shallower.

It felt like Teacher Fern's arms were squeezing in his diaphragm and his lungs, making it harder for him to breathe as though she was some sort of constrictor.

Logically, he knew this couldn't be the case. She didn't have the strength or clear desire to do such a thing. But the nightmare of such a thing was only making it more difficult.

"Get off of me…"

Theron's voice came out in a whisper, not having the breath to project very far. In fact, it seemed to take more breath from him.

"Get off of me…"

Teacher Fern couldn't hear him over the thunderous booms and heavy rain, not to mention her own sobs.

"Get off of me!"

BANG!

Teacher Fern's arms were separated, her body being sent flying back. She smashed against a wall of the palace that still remained.

Theron huffed for breath, trying to catch his own, but finding that it was impossible for some reason. The rain he had always loved so much seemed to become a hindrance, its heavy downpour spilling into his nose and mouth.

His lips opened, trying to grasp out. But his Arcane Resonance, even dormant, seemed to act all on its own, sucking in Water Mana from all directions and filling his lungs to the brim.

'I can't breathe…'

The thought came fleetingly and yet was like a blaring warning, rampaging through his skull like Teacher Fern's sobs.

Those sobs, those damned sobs…

His perfect recall replayed them again and again, the gurgling and gasping that came from his lungs.

He hacked and wheezed, a burning sensation coming from his throat. But this time, it wasn't the heat path, or so he thought. It was due to water going down the wrong pipe.

The pain felt excruciating, and he didn't have the mental faculties to see through the irony of it all.

He fell to a knee and the Alpha rushed him, its head nudging at him as though in an attempt to wake him up, but Theron's world was going completely white.

Gripping at his chest, he practically tried to startle his heart back into action. It should be easy, so very easy. All he had to use was the polarization concepts he had learned in the Fourth Year Botany Class. Those books in the Secret Realm's Library, they taught him about how the heart works with electrical pulses and how he could induce them with negative and positive charges.

It was so simple and straightforward. He could easily restart his own heart. He just had to focus, just focus a little bit.

A hard reset on his body, that was all he needed.

But his heart had never stopped beating in the first place. If anything, it was beating too fast, practically roaring in his ribcage. It was just that that droning roar had become such a common part of his life—much like that chilling breath he exhaled from time to time.

His heart hadn't been in a good state for a long while now.

Theron fell to another knee, his face reddening.

Something bubbled up from within him, catching in his throat in the form of a lump.

He coughed it up, bile from his empty stomach splattering onto the ground. But much like everything else, it was washed away, and the feeling of bubbling hadn't gone away at all.

His breathing only became shorter and shorter, his gasps becoming snorts of snot and water that only made the feeling of suffocation all the worse.

A cultivator like him should have been able to spend ages without breathing… but that was only if there was actual air in his lungs in the first place.

Air he had huffed out a long time ago in his inability to control his breath.

And then what it truly was rushed out.

Theron smashed his fists into the ground, waves of ice forming in rivers and tsunamis around him, the rainstorm above turning into blades of silvery blue that cut through everything in their path.

The cry seemed to expel all the Mana he had, his body running dry in an instant. And yet… he seemed to still be pushing.

At that moment, there was nothing left to suppress the fury. But what was the meaning without Mana and when a predator lurking in the dark seemed to have found its opportunity?