CHAPTER 17: FLOOD THAT REMEMBERS
They took no guild contract. Word traveled faster than horses.
A village on the lake's edge—Willowmere—sent a boy with cracked lips and a purse of copper.
"Water's rising. Not rain. Something in the water. Took three fishermen. Please."
Kael looked at the boy's bare feet, blistered from running.
No guild. No rank. Just people. Ordinary people.
They rode.
Willowmere huddled against a lake that used to be a river. Houses on stilts, docks half-sunk. The water was wrong—too still, too clear, reflecting faces that weren't looking up. It felt like stepping into a memory someone else had half-forgotten but still feared, the air thick with a silence pressed tight as wet cloth.
The elder met them at the waterline, voice trembling. "It shows you things. Then it takes you."
Torven leaned on his crutch, leg splinted stiff. "We'll take a look."
Lysa's scar pulled when she frowned. "No pay?"
Kael was already walking the dock. "Pay's the village still breathing tomorrow."
Dren flipped a copper, caught it. "I like breathing."
They hired a flatboat, poled out to the center. Even the boat seemed to glide slower than it should, like the lake resisted any attempt to cross its surface. The reflections beneath them shifted when no one moved.
The lake was glass. No wind and no fish in sight.
Kael knelt, trailed fingers in the water.
It was warm. Like blood. Too warm for autumn, too warm for anything that called itself a lake.
The surface rippled. A face formed—his own, but younger. Brisbane. The crosswalk. The truck's grille. The years between collapsing into that one heartbeat where he couldn't move fast enough to save himself.
' Oh, heavens. Not this crap again.'
The lake surged.
Not a wave—a hand. Liquid fingers wrapped his wrist, pulled.
He let it.
The lake swallowed him whole.
Pure darkness. Pressure. Then memories played.
He was back on the crosswalk. Horn blaring. Tires screeching. The impact—crunch—ribs, spine, skull. Pain in 4K, layered with the helpless knowledge that it could only end one way.
He thrashed.
'This is not real. But it sure hurts like it is.'
The water shifted. Now he was in the guild yard, watching Torven's leg crumple under the slab. Lysa's face splitting open. Selene walking away. Every failure sharpened and replayed, each image cutting deeper than the last.
His lungs burned. 'Adapt, damn it.'
He stopped fighting.
Let the water fill his mouth, his nose, his ears. Counted heartbeats while the memories drowned him. One. Two. Ten. Long enough for panic to melt into something colder, quieter, steadier.
The pain dulled. The memories blurred. The water lost its grip.
He opened his eyes.
The lakebed was a graveyard—skeletons tangled in nets, faces frozen in screams. At the center: a woman made of water, eyes like drowned stars, every line of her body shifting like she was sculpted from someone's grief.
She spoke with his mother's voice. "You left us."
Kael's chest ached—not from lack of air. '...I did.'
He kicked forward.
The water-woman raised arms of liquid. Tendrils lashed out—not one, not grazing. A storm of them, whipping, coiling, slamming.
Kael twisted through the chaos.
One tendril wrapped his torso, crushed. Ribs creaked. He used it—let it spin him, mapped the current's twist.
Another took his legs, dragged him down. He kicked with it, felt the pulse—in, out, strike.
A third went for his throat. He opened his mouth, drank.
The water burned going down. Memories flashed—his first kiss, his dog dying, the smell of his mother's kitchen. Each one a shard of something too human to fight but too heavy to carry.
He swallowed it all.
The water-woman faltered.
Kael surged up, grabbed her face—liquid, solid, both. His fingers sank in.
"You remember everything," he said. "Remember this."
He exhaled.
The water he'd drunk exploded outward—not as vapor, as force. A shockwave that shattered the lake's surface, sent the boat rocking twenty paces away.
The water-woman screamed—a sound like glaciers cracking.
Kael held on.
She tried to reform, to pull him back into memory. He let one tendril wrap his arm, felt the memory it carried—Dren's childhood, a mother's slap, a brother lost to fever. Layers of someone else's pain pressed over his own.
Dren's voice, faint from the boat: "Kael—"
The tendril tightened. Dren's eyes went blank on the deck, mouth slack.
No.
Kael ripped free, took the water-woman's core in both hands.
"You don't get him."
He compressed.
The water screamed, condensed, became a sphere the size of a heart—clear, pulsing, full of stolen memories.
He crushed it.
The lake exploded upward in a geyser, then fell still.
Kael broke the surface gasping.
The boat was there. Torven hauled him in.
Dren sat up slowly, blinking. "I… forgot my sister's name."
Lysa's scar was wet with lake water and something else. "It's back now?"
Dren nodded, slow. "But it hurts."
Kael sat dripping, chest heaving. The kind of exhaustion that reached deeper than muscle.
'I left them behind once. Not again.'
Torven clapped his shoulder. "You drowned and came back smiling. Troll blood, I swear."
Kael laughed, "Something like that."
They poled back.
The village met them with bread, ale, and tears. No copper left, but a roof for the night, the kind of gratitude that stuck longer than coin ever could.
Kael sat on the dock at dusk, sphere in his hands—now just glass, memories locked inside. The sun sank low enough to stain the water red.
He turned the sphere over.
Lysa sat beside him, scar catching the last light. "Guild's sending riders. Tribunal in three days."
Kael skipped the sphere across the water. It sank without a ripple.
"Let them come," he said. "We'll be ready."
Torven limped up, crutch thudding. "Got a name for us yet?"
Kael looked at the lake, now just a lake.
"Call us what we are," he said. "The Unbroken."
Dren snorted. "Sounds like a bad tavern band."
Lysa grinned. "I like it."