And I fell, towards the rushing Rubicon.
The ground dragged me with it into the river, and I fell on my back into the running waters. I was unprepared for the fall, so I sank and sank as the dark once again embraced me and I quickly grew unconscious. After some time, perhaps a few seconds or a few hours, I felt the muddy bottom of the river against my back. I was completely submerged.
“Broken Horn... I need your help still...”
Her siren's song reached all the way to me at my nadir.
My lungs filled with water as I lay in pain, ready to surrender to the final sleep, unable to overcome the blackness of the water. In a last effort to survive, my eyes half-opened in the muddy waters.
To this day, I'm not sure if what I saw then was real or some kind of feverish hallucination, but the glowing figure of a pristine white sea serpent, a yellow mass of hair and two roses encircled me before I finally lost consciousness.
And out of these icy depths—
After some unknowable timespan, I woke up on the shore, coughing water, my glasses seemingly lost. With my lungs refilling themselves once again with air, I settled down, savoring the smell of the forest.
Whether I had dreamt it or whether she had somehow saved my life, I could not be more sure of anything than the overwhelming certainty that I had to help Yellowstar.
—I rose again with a debt.