14 - Mavka 02 - After Awakening, Rebirth

A Rebirth II She woke up in the muck and the silt. She couldn’t remember falling asleep. But still, she was underwater. That feeling, although still disturbing at some fundamental level, was being held in place by a second feeling - a warm comfort of belonging, of being natural.

She felt out her limbs, and found that they moved just fine. If anything, they moved a little easier. She was happy with that.

The sun was rising over the bay, she found, when she crested the surface. A calm, quiet still morning that waited to be broken by the city’s unrelenting nature.

Swimming to the shore, she pulled herself to the grassy surface just beyond the rocks. Every step from the water felt like her legs were filling with more and more lead, but the sharp pervasive pain was no longer there.

She sat, and again, looked down at herself. Her clothes were completely ruined. She tried to take off her shirt abs found it essentially disintegrated in her hands…. It felt… better. Freer, more relaxing.

Then she was back in the water, and felt like laughing. She swam, a feeling of freedom that lasted but a few minutes.

And then the sadness hit.

There was just a feeling. A nugget. A point in her chest that suddenly became heavy, and she stopped. She floated there a moment, trying to understand what she felt.

She closed her eyes. As she concentrated, the feeling got larger. A pronounced sadness, in that… she did not know. That was it. She did not know.

She just was.

She continued, trying to remember and recall even the past short period. There was nothing before… before waking up that first time. Waking up in grubby torn clothes with something… something leaving her. Something going away. A brown grey shape in the water.

The water, was it a fish? No it was bigger than most fish she’d ever thought about.

She cautiously swum out to that location, where she’d woken, and looked out to where it had gone based on what she could remember. It was further out, deeper, darker.

She headed that way. Slowly, keeping near the bottom, for the surface was now being turmoiled with the rise of boats moving about, and even casual swimmers legs near the shore. The floor here was rocky with weeds, and she slipped through the fronds as she could.

Then something seemed to burn in her head. The feeling was similar to that first feeling. That first feeling that brought her back to the river mouth.

Yet. It wasn’t that way, it was further out. She couldn’t tell how far, just… had a feeling that.. there was something out there. She didn’t know what, so she thought more on the feeling.

The feeling itself seemed to only have one word she could attach to it…

“Mine.”