Sigismund only knows one thing, and that thing is pain.

He splashes desperately in water that isn’t even so deep that he shouldn’t be able to stand up in it. It should barely reach his knees, even. But water is an overwhelming force, even in tiny quantities.

Was it not tiny drips of water caught in the cracks that splits a mountain’s stone to gravel in the first place?

Sigismund doesn’t have time to think about it. He only has time to swim.

The giant catfish did not follow him past where the narrow, deep channel widened again into the fast-moving and shallow water that is almost impossible to swim. After one of its long and rigid tentacles gently caressed his spine, he did not care how much additional injuries he sustained in swimming away from it with a broken foot. He would not be letting that thing touch him again. The caress had a suggestion of strange intimacy and no creature should have feelers on their face like that.

There is not room to kick or to swim with his arms. Any attempt ends with banged shins.

The best he can accomplish is to hold his knees to his chest and try to float with his head above water. The problem with this tactic is that it puts his spine at the mercy of the stony river bottom. He takes several hits to his back, each one creating another terrible bruise.

And then the current drags him along, scraping his back on the sharp stones of the riverbed. A sunken log rends holes in his sturdy raincoat. Two of the poisoned arrows float freely out of the quiver. They get caught in a tangle of debris in the limbs of a cypress. That old tree stands with its knees in the water, guarding a safe, slow section of the riverbank from entry.

Sigismund tries, ineffectively, to make for that island of calm. When he sees a fat snake with wide stripes sunning itself on one of the exposed knees, he changes his mind. He stops trying to do anything but continues to go with the flow.

The river grows with tribute added by smaller streams at regular intervals. It increases its width and depth in tandem. Sigismund is too cold and too hurt to even shiver. He floats and almost wishes for death to just take him right then.

The thought is fleeting.

He doesn’t have time to get philosophical. Over the normal sound of the movement of water, he catches the cadence of the characteristically loud auditory stimulation of rapids. This noise is his only warning.

The first rock smashes against his shoulder, nigh yanking it from the socket. The second rock attempts to put a fresh dent in his skull.

Sigismund keeps his arms to himself and does his very best to just keep his head above water, not receive any more dents in it, and somehow continue to survive this ordeal. He squeezes his eyes tightly shut to avoid staring his death in the face.

The rapids fling him about like the winnower flings chaff.

And like the grain separated from the waste, he endures.

The rapids are nearly the end for him. They seem eternal in their length, though it is only a few hundred yards before the sound of them suddenly quiets.

Sigismund hears a different cadence in the crashing of waves upon rocks. The dissonance of it is not of distinctly separate things, but of a single, long note.

He peeks open his eyes to observe.

And what he observes terrifies him.

Ahead, all he can see is a drop. The trees that flank the river simply end. There is open air visible directly ahead. There is no avoiding it.

He knows this is the fall.

Sigismund has been to the waterfall before, but never beyond it. A few kids when he was younger took turns sliding down the slippery rock and not all of them returned from the bottom of the pool it drains into. He will never say whether this was an accident. It has been so long since the bully who teased him for his mismatched and ill-fitting clothing struck his head on that rock and drowned that he actually believes the story he made up about the circumstances of that death.

Certainly, the other boys who were there said no differently. After all, they’d only just hung his grandfather. It must have been terrible luck that the boy banged his head while sliding down the rock.

Now it is Sigismund’s turn to slide down the length of the stone worn into such glassy smoothness by decades of moving water. And out of karmic terror, he holds tight to the back of his skull to protect his delicate noggin from justifiably appropriate harm.

The long slide spins him around as he falls. He was perhaps smaller the last time he went down it. His descent is neither controlled nor slow. The bow waves around wildly as he keeps his grip on it, and it does not break when he attempts to use it to stabilize his balance.

But the slide ends.

He knows what comes next, but he wishes that there had been some change in the intervening decades. For what comes next is the slide abruptly drops out from underneath both him and the water that pushes him along. Unlike the water, which drops relatively straight down, the man arcs a short distance out.

Of course, what makes riding the slippery rock down to the waterfall so dangerous. The basin it falls into is deepest at the direct point where the water lands. Larger objects, however, land a little further out than that.

When the water is low due to lack of recent rainfall, this means that the landing zone for people riding the rock is dangerously shallow.

Thankfully for Sigismund, it has rained a lot recently indeed. This is both the cause for the water’s swiftness, it’s ability to have kept him off his feet so thoroughly, and also provides a cushion of safety on which he can land.

That cushion is deceptive, however, for landing on water is still a rough landing.

And Sigismund takes that landing directly on his broken foot.

The fiercely cold water has had plenty of time today to numb his senses and drive its needles of pain into his flesh. But the brief flight through the air and the sudden transition into being fully submerged knocks the wind out of him entirely.

Which is unfortunate, as he needed that air.

Sigismund finds himself once again struggling to swim to the surface of a pool of water with his broken foot, bruised everything, possible concussion, and now definite hypothermia. It is a familiar, horrible sensation. He kicks desperately and paddles his arms to escape the bottom of the river.

And, for once in this horrible series of very unlucky events, he swims upward without incident.

The water at this location is relatively calm. It is relatively easy to swim to the edge of the pool.

The deep pool is ringed with a pebbly beach. The gentle slope gives him an easy way to crawl out of the water. He crawls on his hands and knees onto the gravel. For the first time since yesterday, he kneels on dry ground in relative safety.

Everything hurts.

Sigismund looks around the pool to see if it is still the same place that is fixed in his memory. The trees are taller, straight pines with rough bark and sharp needles stand sentry over the quiet pool. On the opposite bank, two deer observe him impassively. He does not disturb them from this distance.

The pool is almost a perfect circle, with the waterfall at one side and a slow-moving trough at the opposite end is the outlet where the river continues its journey to the sea. A turtle suns itself next to a recently fallen log. The tree in question appears to have been hit by lightning, and a dark scar of burnt wood runs down the side of it with a texture like an alligator’s back.

He drags himself away from the freezing cold water, inch by painful inch. With great relief, he rolls onto his bruised and damaged back. There is sunshine here. He lays, not content, but definitely in better straights than before. That turtle has the right idea.

Like a reptile, he waits for the sun to do its job and fills his carcass with warmth before he turns into an ice cube. His missing boot exposes the extent of damage on his broken foot. Continuing to use the limb has caused additional damage, and the extent to which this means that the injury may be permanent likely depends entirely on how soon he can find treatment.

But there is no hope of treatment soon. He somehow has to make it through the woods, with that horrid slavering thing out there likely still on the hunt for him.

Sigismund determines that if he can survive moving through the woods toward the safety of civilization at all, then he can survive that journey a few hours later, while dry.

Exhaustion takes him, and he sleeps, laying out in the sun, fully exposed.

Sigismund naps in the sunshine as his clothing dries. It isn’t by choice, and it isn’t how he would have spent the time at all. But it was a necessary thing and his exhausted corpse does not have the energy to carry on without it.

He isn’t sure how much time has passed when the thought reaches him. He recalls, with the sudden clarity of insight, that the monster which had tried to devour him could not cross the river.

And the thought that wakes him from his dreamless sleep is that he is now on the same side of that body of water.

He runs his fingers through his hair and looks up at the sky. Ducks flock overhead, escaping the oncoming months of bad weather.

Sigismund wishes he could fly, too. He wishes it with all his heart.