maybe you were the ocean
But he turns his cheek into nothing.
It’s only empty space behind him, followed by an endless ocean that churns wave, after wave, after wave, but on his tongue he’s already aligned the perfect set of words to meet her with a joke about the two of them sharing body heat for survival. With his lips slightly agape as though he means to speak (because he had, he had been so sure she would be there with him) they slip out with the realization and are lost somewhere in the space Eszka isn’t filling. There are no soft colours to remind him of continents; no eyes that resemble the sky draining of colour.
There is no laughter, only sea.
It’s only in this moment that Wane first recognizes the scale of the error he’s made in not looking behind him when he plunged into the water first. He had thought at the time he’d heard a second splash of water being thrown and the distinct crackle of ice giving way underfoot, but perhaps he’d been wrong. Perhaps she is safe and sound, crashing in the surf, waiting in Nerine like he had begged her to. But if she didn’t wait, where is she now? In the water still? Under it?
And just like that a choice is laid out before him:
Does he plunge back into the freezing water to find her, at home or otherwise, or does he keep going for the sake of his newly founded family?
Who needs him more?
The decision is a catalyst, even if he doesn’t realize it at first. It’s agonizing, but faster than he had expected, and he shuffles sideways to see it through with his next steps. Only, he doesn’t need to — because there, in the distance, carried to his ears on a warm, embracing wind that has no business in this frozen wasteland is her voice, shrill and frightened, but here. Eszka is here. Eszka is safe. There’s no decision left to make, and the thought of that on it’s own is almost enough to warm him. Wane cranes his head to the left to try and pick her out from the gathering crowd on the shoreline, not once wondering how it is that all of these horses have come from different directions with different timelines and all managed to land on this same shoreline together.
It doesn’t matter if she’s here.
The first thing he sees in the distance is the small and fragile outline of Briella, exhausted but alive, and not alone. Wane finds a wave of relief washing over him that he hadn’t realized he would be as thankful for as he is. Beyond her, then, is Eszka (has to be), and as his eyes flit from shape to shape they finally settle on one that looks softer than the rest.
He’s almost picked her out from the crowd when everything changes again.
Because it twists then, the wind, and cruelly so — growing dark, and cold, and wicked.
Like the culmination of the earth’s wrath, manifested here and now by snow and ice. It’s violent, pelting snow and ice back and forth against every plane of his already aching body. It blinds them, as rage is apt to do.
And nearly the instant she is found, Eszka is lost again.
Holding onto the conjured image of her face, he stumbles left with unseeing eyes. He calls out, too, for Briella and for Eszka, but the howl of the wind comes round to obliterate the sound of it nearly the second it falls out of his throat. The only choice now is to keep trudging forwards, because waiting to be battered by the wind and ice from every angle would spell out his own demise, he’s certain. Briella and Eszka were both survivors. They would keep moving, too.
So, that’s what he does.
The snow is a wall of white before him. It cries out against his ears as torrents of whirling snowflakes fall again and again across his face, building cities on his eyelashes as though they mean to stay. There is one moment though, where the storm quiets just enough for him to make out a call through it, distorted though it may be. It sounds like her, so he continues blindly in the hopes that at the end of this path he’ll find Eszka again.
The truth is that he doesn’t know what path he has taken, just that he’s on one, the worn earth telling underfoot. It isn’t a choice so much as it’s a conclusion:
The left.
