The basket dragged her hand down under the water, like a sail catching the current and pulling her further down. She had closed her eyes, but opening them under the water, the sting and the blurriness of the peaty brook mixed together to give everything in the water a feeling of being upside-down and inside-out. She struggled to paddle up to the surface, but disoriented, she didn't know where the surface was... in moments, her lungs were leaping for air, and she struggled not to breathe in the cold water.She kicked her feet one last time for all she was worth, hoping the great light to her right was the surface, only to be shot by the current headlong into a boulder submerged in the water. Her mouth opened in pain and she gulped in a watery lungful, and a fire of rage began to burn inside her. She felt, more than anything, the great unfairness of it all, and it was as if the lit fire grew and grew, along with her burning lungs, and the drowning water in her nose. The fire was the great pain of being completely and utterly left to die in this cold, pushed by bony hands into water with no mercy, faced with dangers she couldn't possibly overcome, and in that moment she felt right, right to drown. It was the end that was the only possibility. There was no other way for this to end, but with her death. She was too little, too alone, and too unguided to know what else to do. The fire of retribution and betrayal, unfairness and bitter satisfaction rose up in her, and in her little box, too, it seemed to catch and cause a searing warmth to travel into her hip, her belly, her heart, and finally the hand that held the silver basket.
In that moment, as she lost all hope, but gained rage, the basket seemed to catch ablaze, flames licking out on the weave, from one to the next, until it was entirely alight. It lit up under the greenish-brown, black and gray waters. And as it caught, it lifted, lifted her to the surface where she coughed and spluttered and cried tears as she struggled to take even one breath. It lifted her up farther until it dragged her, as if she carried a makeshift torch, half in and half out of the water, to the opposite bank, dropped burning on the ground, and started to burn for certain.
The bonfire of the basket flamed royally beside her, large flames now, strong, licking upward to the sky, warming her body so chilled by the stream, as she coughed and her eyes wept with the water of the little river and the tears of rage that she had never before allowed to flow. The fire was so comforting beside her; all she wanted to do was allow the bitter thoughts to exit her like the retching up of the peaty streamwater, endlessly. It flowed from her until she thought she was going to die of suffocation, a drowning her still in the thin, breathable air. The warmth of the box at her hip sent comforting waves up into her heart, her back, the little box seeming to give off more warmth than was possible, allowing her to calm her survival spasms. And she lay upon the damp bank, taking short, uneven breaths, not enough, but enough to keep her alive.
Lucif arrived within moments, its mirrored eyes reflecting her back a warped image, as her consciousness still struggled to make sense of near-death. It dragged her closer to the fire of the basket, lay itself beside her on the other side, and snuffled warm breaths onto her neck and shoulder. "Little breaths, my dear one, little breaths," it said, its voice steady but low and solemn. The worry was apparent in the gentled rigidity of its back. "Focus on breathing, now. In, out. In, out. That's right."
As Penny Rose drifted off to sleep, warmed from both sides, her last thought was that she felt proud she was breathing the way she should.
