xihe | FIC: pheres dysseu, drowning

4.15 SWEEPS | 9 YEARS OLD

(575 words, drowning mention! alsooo I just noticed this ate second symbol?? so feel free to resend if you remember :o)

There’s no glass on the viewing pane, just a rotted net that you make quick work of. The rope dissolves under your claws, and then you’re wiggling your way in, a stream of bubbles escaping from your snout as you push past the sills.
This is the deepest into the river you’ve ever gone, and to be honest, at first, you were kind of scared! Not of the ghosts, like your hivemates are always warning you (like you’re a wriggler who still believes in that sort of thing!), but of running out of air. But the pain in your central cavity is managable: it’s barely even a tickle still, even though you must be twenty feet down.
Maybe even thirty!
It’s a relief. You’ve been working up to this for the entire sweep, ever since Whydah first brought you down here and showed you the ruins, but it’s one thing to hold your breath when you know the surface is just a quick teleport away, and another to hold your breath down here, where you can’t even tell up from down. Even with the hive’s spires to orient you, because crushed or not, you know they’re pointing up,there’s still a creeping sort of apprehension building in your fear glands.
But it’s still worth it, because the hive is amazing.
The way the room is laid out, you think it must be the respite block, because it’s so big! Even with the glow of your eyes brightening up the room, you have to stay close to the wall, because you can’t see much farther past it. Still, it doesn’t look a thing any room in your hiveblock, or even Sipara’s. For starters, the walls are creepy: even in the water, they look slimy and shiny and wrong, like they’re cocoon that’ve gone moldly. And for second, there’s things floating in the water everywhere.
It takes you a moment to realize the strange, shining thing twining in front of you are more ropes, brighter in colour than the one you ripped through to get in. They’re hooked to the floor, and must be hanging from the ceiling, because they go up and up and – oh!
You thought they were just tangled, but though the strands are loose, they’re woven like a basket, and they’re furniture. Sort of! The thing in the center is a respitebench, and there’s a resting station, and oh, when you push away from the wall and drift towards the center to investigate, the thing you’d just thought was a rock- that’s an actual nutrition mesa, with mossy drawers and everything.
But when you tug on the drawer, your fronds wrapping tight around the rusted handle, you can’t get it open. No matter how hard you kick, it stays stuck as tight as a clam.
And, oh. Maybe that was dumb, because the burn in your air sacs is switching from irritating to a sharp, stabbing sort of pain, and your airtube is aching with the need to breathe. If you don’t head up soon, you’re going to drown, and that thought makes the creeping fear spiral into panic.
(You can’t die down here, or else your hivemates will turn you into one of their dumb ghosts.)
The ruins have been down here for sweeps and sweeps, and they’ll be here tomorrow, so you take one last, quick look around the room, and then with a kick out of the window, you start the swim up.