I laugh bitterly. "The lies perhaps I am soft enough that I would have forgiven, because you saved my life. But locking me up and tying me to a fucking chair?"
A shadow falls across his eyes. Shame, perhaps.
"A fucking chair?" My voice trembles.
"Even Sevrin didn't tie me up like a rabid animal."
I stare out at the water. I feel something press inside me then, something quiet and final. “If you try to force me into Alarna,” I say, “you will be taking my corpse.”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
“There’s nothing left to lose.”
The edge of the deck is right behind me now. I can feel it without looking, the open space beyond it, the pull of the water below.
“If that’s the case,” I say, my voice quieter now, almost tired, “then this pain I’m in… it ends.”
Something shifts in him then. Not enough to name, but enough that I see it.
“And if the child is gone,” I add, “then there’s nothing tying me here at all.”
I smile softly. "And in truth, if Colsar is gone and the child in the womb is gone, perhaps becoming undead will allow me to see him once last time. I can wait here for him."
Teorin's face darkens. “Asharin.”
I don’t answer. I take one more step back.
He moves at the same time, but it is too late.
The cold tears through me.
It takes everything at once. The air in my lungs, the heat in my body, the last bit of control I had over anything disappear beneath the force of the water as it closes over my head and drags me under.
It is quieter beneath the surface.
Darker. The world above disappears in an instant, replaced by pressure and cold and the dull roar of water filling every space around me. My body reacts before I can think, forcing me upward, breaking through the surface with a breath that tears into my chest.
The ship looms above me. I don’t reach for it or try to swim back. The water moves around me, lifting and dropping, pullingme farther from the hull with every shift. My limbs feel heavy, slower than they should, the cold already sinking deeper into me than I can fight.
Dark forms break the surface nearby. One. Then another. And yet I don’t feel fear. Only a quiet, hollow peace. As though the weight of all of it--Yvara, Sevrin, Teorin. The pain. The pregnancy. Everything has suddenly been lifted.
It is far easier to be nothing. Nothing, I realize, is weightless.
The shadows drop into the water without hesitation, turning toward me in a way that leaves no question of what comes next.
Then there is only memory. The warmth of Colsar’s hand at my back. The way he said my name when he thought I wasn’t listening. The way everything had felt before any of this began.
I hold onto that. I close my eyes.
Then another memory. The memory of long before him, a memory I now find too painful to think of. A memory that, now that I was weightless, did not hurt.
It was the memory of what it meant to have hope. To have optimism, to have the feeling that things might get better if you just hold on. That if you push through the pain, the beatings, the disappointment, there will be a life worthwhile on the other side of it.
That version of me feels distant now, as though it belonged to someone else, someone who believed there was something on the other side of all of this worth reaching for. I no longer have the strength for that kind of faith, not when I know exactly what it costs to hold onto it.
I have seen what waits there. Joy. Safety. The brief, fragile illusion of a future that might hold. I had it, once. With Colsar. A life that felt within reach, a family that felt possible. Now it all reads like something imagined, a story I told myself long enough to believe it might be real.
There is something cleaner in this than anything this world has offered me, something quieter than the slow erosion of being used, broken, and made to endure it. Better this way than at the bottom of someone's boot.
