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I felt my consciousness fading. Alarm pushed one last spike of adrenaline through my bloodstream and my eyes flew wide to take in the thick, fluctuating dark. My hair flowed in and out of sight as I struggled against the overpowering force dragging me into the deep. The hold of something I couldn't see only seemed to creep further up my leg, tightening until I thought my ankle might snap from the strain.
How long had I lasted with vile water weighing down my lungs, filling my throat until I had no air bubbles left to follow back to the surface should I wrangle my way free? Too long. The pressure at my temples grew unbearable, my thoughts turned sluggish. Confused. What was I fighting, and why?
Surrender never felt so compelling, like returning to sleep after a too-long stretch of day.
My eyelashes were just fluttering shut when I saw movement, and my fear returned in full force. I was too weak to fight, but my delirious, fanciful mind held just enough strength to conjure up potential horrors lurking in the deep. Creatures of sharp claws and sharper fangs that would relish in tearing apart live prey before I got the chance to drown semi-peacefully.
Something touched my face, and I shuddered involuntarily, unable to do so much as conjure a conscious thought bidding my arms to move. I squeezed my eyes tight, because I wanted no hint of what would happen next. Like closing ones eyes before being struck by a train, it couldn't change the outcome, but it bought my heart a few more moments of denial, that in turn brought a plagued sort of peace to my heart. That close to death, the only thing I had left to barter with was the amount of turmoil I would carry with me to my wet grave.
A sharp laceration tore through my ankle. Had I any air left, I might have gasped. Alas, I had nothing, besides a future that hinted at more pain. Pressure hugged beneath my arms and around my waist, soft. Not at all like the restrictive force working its way up my leg, though precise points dug into my jaw, forcing my face to loll this way and that, a marionette jerked along on strings.
A harsh slap broke me from my stupor, delayed in speed from the higher density of water, yet undeniably a palm striking my cheek. Human. Not beast.
I blinked slow, low-lidded blinks, warding off the internal darkness creeping around the corners of my vision.
It was Frey. Nearly white hair swirled mystically around an uncommonly handsome face that broke with relief at my small proof of fading life. Then, he disappeared, and I wondered if I imagined him, the final hallucination off an oxygen deprived mind.
For a second time, my consciousness faded, swallowed by the potential for an empty eternity.
That eternity seemed to only last a second. Then, cold pressed against my back. Ice cold, the type that stung and clung to damp skin.
"Wake up," Frey murmured, each word a low grunt in time with a crushing blow to my chest. "Come on now, wake-"
A barrage of new voices, distant and fast approaching, drowned out the rest of his sentence.
"-alive?"
"-she okay?"
"Where's Damon-"
"What happened to-"
"-Altair?"
"I don't know," Frey replied. "He should have been right behind me... I saw no sign of the other boy-"
My body seized to expel the filthy lake water pouring out my mouth, which gushed down the sides of my cheeks, over my neck. Soaked strands of hair molded to my skin in waves. Tears blurred my vision glistening blur of colors and vague shapes.
I was rolled onto my side to better allow my coughing fit to run its course, the movement jostling aching ribs.
"Damon," I rasped, propped up on one trembling elbow atop a long, uneven strip of ice forming a meandering path the lake shore, no doubt the means by which Frey got to me so fast. "We need to find Damon."
"You need to stay right where you are," Frey countered, not unkindly, but firmly.
Lyra dropped down in front of me and, shaking my shoulders roughly, demanded, "Where is he? Where did you last see him?"
I allowed her abuse without complaint, barely registering it at all. "I'm not sure," I choked , each word scraping my tender throat raw on its way out. "He was right behind me - and then he was gone!"
Cass pulled her back, looking faint. "Give her some space."
"I will not!" she practically shouted. "Not until we find him!"
"They've gone to fetch the teachers," said a frightened second year girl in a tremulous voice of her friends that I'd noted earlier skipping stones over the lake surface. "They should be here soon."
Not soon enough, though. It could never be soon enough.
"The one who went down with me - Altair, I believe you called him? - he is still down there looking, so it is best not to panic as of yet," Frey said, trying for a semblance of calm.
My stomach plummeted at the news. "What? No, no, no, no, no! It's not safe down there! He's not safe!"
I lurched onto four quaking limbs, unable to rise to only two without collapsing all over again. Brushing off the pairs of hands attempting to coax me back onto my side, I snatched the first unprotected wand I saw, a smooth gray rod laying abandoned on the ice inches from Frey, and, against my every instinct, I rolled into the water once more.
The air braking over my damp skin made the lake seem almost like a warm embrace by comparison. Almost. I couldn't help shivering. I had been shivering nearly constantly since first stepping foot into the water what felt like ages ago, only briefly stopping when I'd grown too weak to continue the autonomic response.
A crash of bubbles lit up the space beside me. Someone else leapt into the water, too. They grabbed at my arms, my hands, the wand - anything they could take hold of to force me to surface. I tried kicking off them to propel myself away, but they managed to latch onto my still-tender ankle and reel me closer, moving to my calf, then my thigh, stopping with both hands firmly planted on my hips as we broke the surface of the lake in a great gasp for air.
We treaded water in place. I was painfully aware of the fact that, out of the two of us, I was the only one with a wand - his wand, that seemed to fit me almost as familiarly as my own. If I truly wanted to, I could have used it to get away, but that required turning Frey's own wand on its master. A perversion of how magic ought to work.
Besides, I didn't have it in me to hurt him, an internal weakness that I needed to overcome before it sabotaged me in the Final Task. The Triwizard Tournament - I could hardly fathom its continued existence. So much had happened - was still happening, even now - and I was supposed to care about a petty political competition where represented all the magical youth of my nation.
The Goblet made a mistake in choosing me, that much had been made clear. My metal had been tried again and again, and instead of growing more resilient to the stressors, I was cracking.
"I need to look for him! If he drowns and I was doing nothing, I–"
"You are not well!" Frey exclaimed, to which I cried, "Damon is not well! Altair would have checked in by now if he found him."
Then, as though my own body meant to prove his point, I doubled over in a coughing fit that nearly submerged my head once more, were it not for Frey keeping me afloat.
"I won't force you into anything, even if you act towards your own detriment," he said. At some point I'd stopped struggling against him, due to his genuine, beseeching tone, "but at least listen! You are in no state to find anyone, and will only make more work for us if we have to fish you out of the water for a second time! Do you understand? You're of no help to anyone if we have to keep an eye on you at all times. Do you even have a wand of your own to help with the search?"
I shook my head, water droplets dripping off the wild strands of my hair to stream down the bridge of my nose and into my eyelashes. "I-"
"What happened?"
Professor Aragon's voice rang with authority. Storming across Frey's hastily constructed bridge towards us. Waving his wand in sharp hacking motions in front of him, the professor reconstructed the path into something more structurally sound, widening and thickening the ice, even going so far as to add pillars of fencing to each side in order to prevent people from sliding right off the slippery surface. He made the changes casually, with the same ease that another might swat a way a pesky fly, hardly sparing the task any of his attention, which was instead directed to those of us in front of him. Lyra, Cass, a smattering of bystanders, then down to Frey and I in the water. Another wave of his wand had us erupting into the frigid air and dropped carefully back onto the ice, shivering.
"What happened?" he repeated, eyes flashing to me, somehow sensing that I was at the center of whatever new trouble ailed the school, as had become the pattern as of late.
My teeth chattered violently, stalling my reply. Lyra leapt in to fill in the details, while two other professors, Professor's Darlington and Gardener, skidded down the slick path to catch up to the Deputy Headmaster.
"Damon," she said. "Damon is gone! He went down and hasn't come back up. It's been - I don't know how long! Ten minutes? Fifteen? No one lasts that long without water! No one!"
I certainly wouldn't have. He went under before I did, and I had been seconds away from falling apart when Frey and Altair got to me.
"Did Damon have his wand on him?" my Head of House asked.
"I- I don't know," I replied. I hoped so. "I don't think so. We agreed on no magic."
Repeating back a hint of the source - the silly bet - that brought about our present misfortune made it sound all the more foolish. Who would have anticipated such catastrophic consequences, however? We'd done far stupider things in the past and walked away no worse for wear. Still, I ought to have anticipated the continuance of the trend where everything I attempted blew itself up in my face. Why, after everything that happened, would I agree to doing anything without a wand steady in hand?
A whisper of warmth spread down my back from Cass quietly drying my soaked clothes that clung to me like a second skin. He even had the thought to dry Frey, too, who, despite having his own wand and being fully capable of doing the deed himself, lacked the presence of mind to do so.
Meanwhile, the professors held a brief discussion amongst themselves that resulted in a slew of spare students being sent to ferry messages across the school like common owls. I didn't hear what they said. I was too busy watching for ripples in the water, for Damon, for Altair, for whatever dragged me under once to come back and try to do it again.
"We need to get them both out of the water," I murmured pointlessly. "Before it gets Altair, too."
"We will," Frey said, but he couldn't know for sure.
Cass slid off his robes and dropped them around my shoulders. I accepted it without complaint, because, although I was mostly dry, I still felt so, so cold, down to my marrow. He asked, "What do you think it was? Was the current too strong?"
"No!" I objected, loud enough to draw stares, but I couldn't have anyone thinking it was an accident. "Something pulled us under on purpose! It was trying to hurt us. It felt like a tentacle dragging me the lake floor."
Cass started to shake his head. "The squid-"
"The squid is docile," Professor Aragon interrupted. I hadn't known he as listening, let alone clocked his approach. "It wouldn't harm students."
"I'm just telling you how it felt!" I snapped. Under normal circumstances, the professor would have softly reprimanded me for the disrespect. Alas, the circumstances were far from normal, and he was a man who understood nuance. To somewhat salvage the situation, I numbly tacked on, "Professor."
His normally pleasant expression gone unnervingly impassive, the only outward hint at his overall concern, he merely stepped past me to peer over the edge of the ice. "Get all the students off the lake," he instructed Professor Gardener. "Something about this... it doesn't feel right, and we can't afford to entangle Durmstrang and Beauxbatons in whatever it is. Then, write the Ministry for a Mermish interpreter. I want to know what the merfolk saw."
"I'm not going anywhere!" Lyra protested fiercely. She balled her emerald-lined robes into a careless heap and shoved them into Cassius's arms, fully intent on leaping into the water to begin her own search. "That's my - that's Damon down there! I'm not about to sit around looking pretty while-"
"You will do as you are told!" Professor Darlington admonished, coming up behind her, wand at the ready and looking about ready to spar, based on the violent gleam in her eye.
I feared Lyra was more than ready to rise to the challenge, when Professor Aragon cut in, in his calmest tone, "Those two may stay, so long as they remain up here where I can keep an eye on them."
The other students filed past, across the long stretch leading to the shore. Only when it was down to the two professors, Lyra, Cass, Frey, and I, did I make the connection that he hadn't given me leave to stay, despite freely tossing Cass in with Lyra's mutinous lot. He knew I was just as close with Damon as them, so why?
I licked my bluing lips, finding my way unsteadily to my feet. "Professor-"
He gave no opportunity to plead my case. "Get yourselves checked out in the Hospital Wing. Both of you."
"But-"
"I don't have the time to debate you at the moment, Miss Lovett," he said. "Go of your own volition, or be dragged, knowing you are straining already thin resources. I will check on you later."
That condemnation was especially harsh, coming from him. It seemed as though Professor Aragon had already pushed our presence out of mind, too busy kneeling above the lake, whispering unintelligible words over the water that resulted in strange lights bubbling beneath the surface. In his distraction, his potion-stained robes dipped into the surf, with him none the wiser.
"What do you want to do?" Frey asked in lowered tones as he guided me down the make shift pier of his creation.
He meant that we didn't need to go to the Hospital Wing. If we wanted, we could merely move far enough out of sight that they wouldn't notice our return to the water and our continued search. He meant that he would follow my lead, even to his own disadvantage.
"I don't know," I whispered. "I don't know what to do." I peered up at him, lost, carefully broken apart into individual cogs incapable of movement without outside intervention, thanks to having all my decisions lead to misfortune time and again. The idea of yet another choice, no matter how minor, froze me in place. "Tell me what to do. Please?"
He moved to face me, his usual mischief replaced by an almost intoxicating sweetness, a tenderness I couldn't name. His attention travelled from the unnatural pallor of my lips down to the chattering of my teeth that I tried and failed to hide, then up to meet my eyes. "I, too, would like you visit the nurse, but only if you agree."
I swallowed, nodding once, and allowed him to lead me up to the castle doors, through the long corridors and many staircases up towards the Hospital Wing. I let him choose our route, although I knew of passages and shortcuts that might have shortened the journey. I let him choose the bed where I waited for the nurse. I let him lift all the decisions out of my hands.
While I may have been stuck behind castle walls, my thoughts remained beneath the low waves of the lake with Damon. Drowning.
Drowned.
The evening stretched long without news.
The next day, the merfolk deposited a body upon the bank, unseeing black eyes to match unfashionably long black hair that verged on shaggy.
Altair Rowan was dead. Although no one said it aloud, everyone knew we would find Damon soon, cursed to an identical fate.