Chapter 12 | Part 2

She stopped walking at the edge of the field, suddenly too tired to move.

The vision was coming back. Not the fragments—the whole thing. Complete, coherent, demanding to be seen again.

Maris leaned against a fence post and let it take her.

The boat first.

It was always the boat. Small, barely big enough for two, its wood dark and weathered by something that wasn’t quite salt. It rocked on water that moved wrong—too thick, too alive, like oil that had learned to breathe.

Black water.

Not dark. Black. The kind of black that swallowed light, that went down and down forever. Things moved beneath the surface—shadows and shapes and suggestions of mass that shouldn’t exist. The water itself seemed aware, curious, hungry.

Wind. Chaos. Something overhead.

The sky was wrong too. No stars or moon or sun, just twilight pressing down like a weight. Shapes moved through it, vast and indistinct, and the wind carried sounds that might have been screaming or might have been language she didn’t understand.

And then—the hand.

Grey-dark skin. Long fingers. Reaching up through the chaos, grasping for the boat’s edge, for air, for anything solid. The hand was real in a way the rest of the vision wasn’t—fixed, stable, an anchor in the maelstrom.

The hand slipped.

Water claimed it. Grey-dark fingers disappeared beneath the black surface, and the emptiness where they had been felt like a wound in the world.

Someone was drowning.

Not metaphorically or symbolically. Actually drowning, in water that wasn’t water, on a sea that shouldn’t exist, beneath a sky that had never known stars.

The boat remained, empty and rocking.

Maris came back to herself with a gasp.

She was still leaning against the fence post. Her hands were shaking. Her headache had doubled, trebled, become something that existed as its own entity behind her eyes.

“Stop,” she said again. But the vision didn’t listen. It never listened.

The boat. The water. The hand. Over and over, burned into her mind like a brand. This wasn’t like her usual visions—scattered, fragmentary, open to interpretation. This was specific. Fixed. A moment frozen in time, waiting for her to understand.

A stable image, some part of her mind supplied. The seers in the old stories had written about them—visions that didn’t change, that showed the same thing no matter how many times they came. Things that would happen. Not might. Would.

Someone was going to drown in black water.

Or already had.

Or was drowning right now, as she stood here shaking against a fence post, too weak to help even if she knew how.

The grey-dark skin. The long fingers. Not human proportions, she realized. The hand was too long, too narrow, the joints bending in ways that suggested something other. Elven, perhaps? She’d never seen an elf up close, but the stories described them as different. Wrong, if you were being unkind. Beautiful, if you weren’t.

Beautiful hands, drowning in black water.

She laughed, and the sound came out broken. This was her life now—seeing death, unable to stop it, waking in fields with no memory of falling. The visions had taken everything else from her. Her home and work, her family who had stopped visiting years ago, uncomfortable with a daughter who saw things that weren’t there and couldn’t control when she stopped being herself.

“What do you want?” she asked the vision, the universe, whatever was doing this to her. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

The vision didn’t answer. It just played again, on endless loop behind her eyes. Boat. Water. Hand.

Maris started walking again.

Riverhold was closer now, its walls growing more distinct with each step. The pull in her chest had strengthened—not painful, but insistent. Something there. Something waiting.

Maybe she was walking toward her death. The visions had never shown her own end, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t coming.

Maybe she was walking toward something worse.

But the alternative was standing in this field forever, watching a stranger drown over and over, too afraid to move.

She’d learned years ago that not moving was always worse.

End of Chapter 12.2 —> 12.3: The Grass Where She Fell: The Disorientation