Well, they did not run far.
After all both Elias and his older companion who eerily resemble the Evolved were in no way in a state to actually run far at all. So when Elias slipped, and fell into a fit of coughs and heeves. It was no more than an unfortunate expectancy.
To Elias' surprise though, the older boy did not run without him, he instead dragged Elias back onto his feet and continued to run back in the direction of the ship, the wrong ship in Elias' mind. The wrong ship at least had full grown evolved, those glass swords that evolved carried tended to have abilities similar to the hero's in fables, similar even to Elias when it acted right. So even though Elias and the–
What even do i call him?
Even though Elias and the other kid had not spoken another word, they both instinctively knew what awaited.
The boy looked at Elias intently, his expression was tired, but not nearly as exhausted as Elias knew he himself felt. "What is your name?"
Elias continued to cough as they moved across the ice. His lungs hurt even now that they were no longer sprinting. "Elias. Why?"
The older kid nodded. "I'm Idris. And what do you mean why? Is sharing names between each other so odd?".
No it wasn't particularly odd, what was odd to Elias was that Idris though right now was the time to try and have leisurely conversation.
"That's not what I meant."
Idris had not yet slowed down at all. So Elias kept pace. They remained silent, especially because Elias' replies sounded obviously laborious. They didn't run anywhere specifically far but did not have any reason to imagine they were still being chased. Maybe the squid found more important prey.
"You said you dragged the squid down so deep it let you go? But you dont know what a trueborn is? You're obviously lying." Idris looked down at Elias with a smirk, but a weary smirk if nothing else.
Elias scoffed. I mean that could've been true, from what he could understand, he did seem to have some sort powers. Like the beasts of the river actually. And both the feeling he felt when burning the toad, and when his eyes were closed underwater– they were almost identical. But never in his life had he heard of a trueborn.
"No, i didn't say that at all." Elias replied with an irritated note in his voice. But he didn't care to argue. In the situation he was in, it didnt really matter what he was, because he was weak, and being herded back to a group of newly found enemies. And he had no choice but to follow, or die by tentacles. "But what difference does it make if i am or not?"
Elias didn't know what Idris' relationship to these trueborn were, so he hoped to probe and at least find out if he would want to claim to be one for leverage, or refute it for his safety.
Idris looked down again, that weary smirk still plastered to his expression. "Well if you are, since you are, then i guess we are similar."
Elias was forced to hold back a sigh of relief. This –trueborn– was entirely too confident and that worked in Elias' favor. He neither confirmed nor denied since Idris had shown no signs of hostility even after his preconceived notions. That meant at least for now, being seen as one of Idris' kind was not entirely bad. He eyed Idris down again, retracing the gills underneath his chin.
I would bet that's what they are.
The relief Elias felt was a thin, fragile thing, and it shattered the moment the air around them turned frigidly still. He had been so focused on the strange ridges of Idris's gills, the odd tinge of his skin, that he hadn't noticed the vibration running through the ice—a low, rhythmic thrumming that didn't belong to the wind or the shifting tides.
Idris felt it too. His weary smirk vanished, replaced by a sharp, predatory focus as he scanned the white horizon. "We're moving too slow," Idris hissed, his voice dropping an octave. "And if it's chasing us, we need to get to the others fast."
Elias opened his mouth to ask how he knew, but the words died in his throat. A shadow, vast and undulating, passed beneath the translucent floor of their world. It was a dark blotch against the deep blue, moving with a terrifying, liquid grace that made their frantic sprinting look like a crawl. They had assumed, no, in all honesty they knew better, but they'd hoped the creature had found easier prey, or perhaps been deterred by the distance from the ship. They were wrong.
The predator wasn't just following them; it was leading them.
What they did not expect though, was that the weaver squid either also knew there was help there, or simply swam far enough forward in the same path as them to cut them off.
Isle three often had sightings of the juvenile weaver squid, which was known to make underwater 'nests' of sorts within caves near the isles. While they did not often hunt humans, they could. Efficiently. The weaver squid was able to shoot a web from it's apparatus like a spider, but the web was no simple silk. The material of the squids web was used in many armors, things like bikes and even worked as the spine for the hulls of most migration ships due to 3 qualities. The webbing was a lightweight fibrous material, in comparison to its weight, it was abnormally durable and did not separate easily.
These were the traits of an adolescent weaver squid's web. But Elias knew absolutely nothing about how that changed in the teenage squid. But he could easily feel that it was much finer, much stickier by time the squid had popped up from out of the ice, and shot a net of webbing, locking elias to the ground.
Idris swiftly dropped to cut the webbing from around Elias, it would not simply be slashed apart though, so Idris had to saw at it with his blade. Only now did Elias realize Idris had two hilts, identical. But the sword he used to break the webbing was a thin double-edged blade with a round hole punched clean through the steel near the back end.
By time the webbing had been broken, the tentacle of the squid shot up right from beneath Idris, launching him in the air, then back on the ground. Three more of its arms came out of the same hole, then the upper half of his head peaked out.
It was cliche at it's finest. If only they were in the ship, sailing through a horrible thunderstorm. But an ice storm wasn't horribly different, was it? The remaining three arms poked out and then what Elias saw next confused him.
3 shards of ice flew pass his vision, from where Idris had been, and struck the squid in the eye. It easily shook it off, but then 3 more followed. The squid raised its arms to block the shards of ice and as it did, the ridge of ice cracked,seemingly rippled, and then a sharp berg of ice pierced through the arm of the squid.
Sure Elias saw many odd things since being on this river. Many beasts he'd never seen before. But he was almost sure none could do this. He looked back at Idris, who was climbing up to a knee, breathing so entirely exhausted that you'd have thought he swam through squid infested waters, then dragged another half grown human nearly 100 meters at a full sprint.
But after doing all that, Idris hadn't seemed shaken, at least not in terms of stamina. So why now was Idris so–
That's not real though. How could someone just control ice, or anything other than their own body for that matter.
The thought was so ironic. Elias had burned two beings alive at a point in time. He'd supposedly, allegedly dragged this same squid through the depths of the river at a speed that even scared the squid, that lives in water, into releasing him. And Elias took thise facts in stride, nearly in odd stride. And maybe that was due to the fact that he was raised by humans who also had abnormal abilities. To breathe underwater, reacting at a speed that made no sense in comparison to himself. And to add to that, they were almost always in danger of dying to some beast that had otherworldly abilities. But the idea of a human, other than himself, possibly controlling ice from what, 10 meters away, that was simple lunacy.
Idris threw the sword that'd been in his hand in Elias' direction as he staggered to his feet. And though the tentacle of the squid was impaled, lodged by a shard of ice, it seemed otherwise unperturbed.
-----
Elias caught the sword badly. It hit his palm and he closed his fingers around the hilt mostly out of reflex, and it was heavier than the handle suggested. That round hole through the steel near the back of the blade caught the flat gray light in a way that made it look like a missing eye.
He looked at the squid.
The arm that Idris had pinned was already working itself loose. Not panicked, not thrashing. Just slow and methodical, the same patience it had shown this entire time, pulling the shard through its flesh with the mild inconvenience of someone removing a splinter. Dark fluid ran down the ice where the wound was. The squid's other arms had begun to spread again, feeling outward, that slow fan Elias had already learned to hate.
Idris was on one knee. His chest heaved. His eyes were on the squid but the focus in them had gone thin, the kind of thin that came after a person had spent everything they had and were now running on the smell of it.
Elias looked from Idris to the squid to the sword in his hand.
The squid's arm finally pulled free of the ice shard. It flexed the arm once, testing. Then all eight began to move.
Idris raised his hand.
Nothing happened.
He raised it again, and Elias could see the effort in his face, the jaw locked, the tendons in his neck standing out. Three small shards lifted from the ridge behind them, wobbled in the air, and dropped. Like lifting something with a muscle that had already torn.
Elias did not say anything about it.
"The web," Idris said. His voice had gone rough. "It's anchored under the whole section. That's how it found us every time. That's how it cut us off." He put his other hand down on the ice to stop himself from tipping sideways. "If I can fracture the shelf at the fault line—" he nodded toward the dark seam running northeast "—the whole section drops. Anchors go with it. It loses the web."
"And goes back in the water," Elias said.
"It buys—"
"Time. Yeah." Elias looked at the squid. The arms had finished spreading. One of them had found the edge of the hole and was bracing against it, the body beginning to rise. "Can you actually do it right now."
Idris didn't answer immediately.
That was an answer.
"I'll draw it," Elias said. He didn't know why he said it. His mouth made the decision and his brain caught up a half second later, by which point it was already true. "You collapse the shelf. I'll keep it looking at me."
Idris looked at him with that amber gaze. Tired. Weighing something. "With what."
Elias held up his palm. The heat was already there, building without permission, the deep-muscle sensation that came when his body decided things were sufficiently bad. His skin had started to glow faintly at the center of his palm, not enough for anyone far away to notice, but enough.
Idris looked at it for a moment.
"Don't get grabbed," he said, and started moving toward the fault line.
-----
Elias walked toward the squid.
This was genuinely one of the worst ideas he had ever acted on, and he had acted on several terrible ideas in the past two weeks. But the squid's arms were already coming up and if Idris needed thirty seconds Elias had to give him thirty seconds and the only thing he had to give was himself as something more interesting than the fault line.
He pressed his palm out and let the heat come.
Steam rose from his hand. It caught the light. The squid's arms, mid-spread, stopped moving.
The amber eyes didn't converge on him. They just collected. But the arms stopped spreading and two of them oriented in his direction and that was enough, that was what he needed, so he held his palm out and let it keep building and tried not to think about what he was standing in front of.
Behind him he heard nothing. Not a crack, not a sound. Just Idris working in whatever way ice-control worked, which apparently was not loud.
The squid watched him.
He watched the squid.
Twenty seconds. Thirty.
Then the sound came. Not from behind him. From below. A low groan that moved through the ice under his boots, up through his knees, into his teeth, and then the shelf gave.
Not quietly this time. The crack ran from the fault line northeast in both directions at once, a sound like something enormous being split lengthwise, and the section dropped into the dark water and took the squid's anchors with it and took the squid partially with it, the body dropping back into the hole as the ice beneath its bracing arm gave way.
Elias turned.
Idris was on his hands and knees.
Not positioned that way deliberately. Just down. His arms shaking slightly under his own weight. He'd given that collapse everything he had left and possibly a little more that he hadn't actually had.
The squid was gone. The hole was dark and still.
Elias crossed the ice to Idris, grabbed his arm, and hauled.
Idris came up. He was heavier than he looked. He got his feet under him and stood, but didn't let go of Elias's arm for a moment, which told Elias something he chose not to point out.
"Fault line's gone," Idris said. Still rough. "It'll have to build new anchors."
"How long does that take."
"I don't know." He finally let go of Elias's arm. Looked at the hole. "It didn't leave."
Elias looked at the hole.
Dark. Still. Nothing visible beneath the surface.
"No," he said.
The ice three meters to their left punched upward.
-----
It came through without any of the preamble it had used before. No probing, no tentacle first. Just the surface splitting and the body surging up from the dark, and two arms already moving before it had fully cleared the hole, because the fault line was gone and the old web was gone but the animal had been down there in the dark for the past sixty seconds and sixty seconds was apparently enough.
Idris moved first. Two shards of ice, smaller than before, slower than before. They hit the squid's mantle and bounced off and did nothing. A third didn't leave the ground.
The arm caught him across the side and took him off his feet.
He hit the ice hard. Elias saw the impact, saw Idris's head snap sideways, and then the arm was pulling him back toward the hole and Idris was grabbing at the ice surface with both hands and finding no purchase because the surface near the hole had gone slick with melt from the squid's body.
Elias ran toward him.
He didn't think about it. His legs made the decision the same way they'd been making decisions for two weeks, badly and with complete commitment.
He grabbed Idris's wrist.
The squid pulled.
Elias dug his heels in and pulled back and for two seconds it was a straight contest of force and he lost it the way he'd expected to lose it, slowly and then all at once. The ice gave under his boots, he slid forward, Idris slid with him, and the hole got closer.
Then Elias pressed his free palm to the ice and the heat came out of him.
Not aimed. Not controlled. Just out, the way it always came out, all at once and without asking, and the ice under his palm didn't melt exactly but it changed, softened just enough at the top layer that his fingers sank in and caught.
They stopped moving.
The squid pulled harder. Elias felt it through Idris's wrist, through his own shoulder, through the hand that had sunk into the ice. His palm was burning now, actually burning, the flesh cooking slightly where it pressed against the refreezing surface. He didn't let go.
The arm released Idris.
Just like that. Patient as it had been about everything else, the squid let go of Idris and the arm went back in the hole, and the ice around them went still.
Elias pulled his hand out of the ice. The skin of his palm was red and blistered where it had sunk in and refrozen around his fingers. He looked at it for a second, then looked at Idris.
Idris was breathing. That was the main thing. Lying on his back, eyes open, chest moving. There was blood at his temple from where his head had hit but not much.
The hole was dark and still.
Elias straightened up. Looked around.
The squid was under the ice. Still there. Still waiting. It had released Idris the way it had released Elias in the water — not because it was beaten, because it had decided. Made a calculation. And whatever that calculation was, it had arrived at letting go.
Elias thought about that.
The squid had not left. It was down there, in its preferred environment, with its web gone but with whatever sensory information it had already collected about both of them. It had time. It had patience. It would build new anchors.
Idris pushed himself up to sitting. He made a sound doing it that he probably would not have made if he thought anyone was paying attention.
Elias looked at him. Really looked. The gills under his jaw were working hard. His hands were flat on the ice to keep himself upright. That amber gaze was still sharp but the rest of his face was the face of someone running entirely on fumes.
There was nothing either of them could do here. Elias understood that plainly. His power came when it wanted and left the same way and right now it was leaving, the heat in his hands fading back to that background warmth, the deep-muscle sensation gone. Idris had given the fault line everything and then some and was now upright through stubbornness alone.
The ship was a smear of blue light in the distance.
Elias picked up the sword Idris had thrown him, which he'd dropped somewhere in the chaos. He held it out.
Idris took it. Looked at him.
"Can you walk," Elias said.
Idris got to his feet to answer the question instead of answering it with words.
They started moving.
-----
The squid surfaced twice more before they got close enough to the ship that the chemical lanterns were distinct shapes instead of a smear.
Both times it came up ahead of them, cutting the angle, and both times they adjusted course and it went back under without reaching for either of them. Not chasing. Not attacking. Just appearing, checking their position, and going back down. Like it was making sure they were still where it thought they were.
By the third time it surfaced, and went back under without doing anything, Elias understood.
It wasn't driving them toward the ship. It was just not particularly interested in stopping them from going there. It would wait. It had time.
"It's not done with us," Elias said.
"No," Idris agreed.
They walked.
The lights of the camp became individual people. Elias could see the outline of Amar first, the height of him unmistakable even at distance, and then Nadia beside him, shorter, the copper hair dark in the lantern light.
They were watching.
Of course they were. Two kids running a bad fight against a Weaver Squid on the open ice was probably visible from the ship. Elias wondered how long they had been standing there. He wondered what they had seen.
He didn't slow down. Neither did Idris.
When they were close enough that he could see Amar's expression, which was doing something complicated in the space between relief and anger, Idris stopped walking.
Elias stopped a step later and looked at him.
Idris was looking at the camp. At the evolved standing in the lantern light, waiting. His jaw was working slightly, like he was chewing on something he hadn't decided to say yet.
"You should go in," Elias said.
Idris didn't answer.
"You're injured and your power's gone and there's a Weaver Squid under the ice that knows where you are," Elias said. "So you should go in."
Idris looked at him then. That amber gaze, steady even now. "And you?"
Elias looked at the ship. At Amar and Nadia and the blue lantern light and the hull of the Wrong Ship and all the reasons he had already decided he wasn't going anywhere near any of it.
"I'm fine," he said.
Idris studied him for a moment. Then he turned and walked toward the camp without another word, which was the right choice and Elias knew it was the right choice.
Elias turned around.
The ice stretched south, flat and white and empty. He started walking.
-----
He made it thirty steps before he felt it.
A tension at his left wrist. Thin enough that he'd been ignoring it for the past twenty minutes without knowing he was ignoring it. The sleeve of his shirt, where the squid's arm had grabbed him and where the filaments had worked into the fabric. He had pulled free, he had felt the suckers release, but the filaments were finer than the suckers and he hadn't thought about the filaments.
He looked down.
Nothing visible. Just his sleeve.
He took another step.
The tension increased.
He reached down and ran two fingers along the inside of his wrist, between the fabric and skin. There. Finer than fishing line, slightly tacky, running back the way he had come. He took his fingers away and it clung slightly to them before releasing.
He pulled the strand. It stretched and held.
Elias stood on the ice and thought about this.
He pulled harder. The strand gave slightly and then held, the other end anchored to something below the surface that was patient and had been waiting for him to get far enough away from the camp that it was worth reeling in what it had left on the line.
He turned back toward the ship and saw how far he had walked.
Too far to run.
He started running anyway.
The tension went from a pull to a drag to something that worked against his legs directly, slowing him without touching him, and at twenty meters from the hole the squid had last used, he stopped making forward progress. His boots scraped the ice. He leaned into it with everything he had.
He went backward.
Not fast. Just steady. The way an anchor chain takes up slack.
He grabbed for the ice. Found nothing to hold. The surface here was flat and old and there were no cracks, no ridges, nothing to get his fingers into. He tried pressing his palm down, reaching for the heat, but it was gone, fully gone now, and his palm landed on the ice like anyone's palm.
He went into the hole feet first.
The cold was immediate and total. It always was, but this time there was no adrenaline to buffer it, no panic to override the sensation. Just cold, dark water, and the shock of it arriving all at once.
He could not see the squid. He could feel the line at his wrist, still there, and the pull of it which had changed direction now that they were in the same element.
He kicked upward.
He made it maybe four feet before the line pulled him back.
He kicked harder. His lungs were already aching. He had barely been ready for this, barely caught a breath before he went in.
Then something caught his other arm. Not the squid. A grip, a hand, fingers finding his wrist from above, from outside the hole, and the pull of it was upward and sudden and he came up out of the water and hit the ice surface on his side and lay there.
He coughed. He coughed for a long time. The sky was gray and the ice was cold and both were extremely real.
He rolled over.
Amar was crouched at the hole's edge, one arm still extended, watching him with that expression Elias still didn't have vocabulary for. Up close in the lantern light the bandage on his wrist was very white.
Behind Amar, Nadia stood with her arms crossed and her expression set in the specific way of someone who was not going to say I told you so because they felt the situation had said it for them.
Between them, Idris sat on the ice a few meters back. He was watching Elias with a look that was hard to read from this angle and from this distance. But he was sitting. He hadn't gone in with them.
He had come this far, turned around at the edge, and watched while Amar pulled Elias out.
Elias sat up. He looked at the hole. Dark and still. He looked at Amar.
He had twelve different things he could say. He had been preparing versions of this for the entire walk back before the squid took that away from him too. None of the versions had survived.
He looked at the bandage on Amar's wrist.
"Please," he said.
Amar looked at him for a moment.
Then he stood up and went to the hole.