She has succeeded in stopping her fall. She is at last moving up rather than down, but her progress is so slow. Too slow. She can feel her lungs burning and her strength beginning to fail.

Seren, where are you? Why don’t you help me? Please!

But no vision appears to lead her to safety. No tall stranger, the image of herself, comes to her rescue.

Is this it? Is this how I fail? Will Dylan and I both die today because of something that happened over a thousand years ago?

And yet, even as this desperate thought forms in her head Tilda feels something shift, something change, as if the very water has taken on a different composition. As if her own body has altered so that it is no longer something in the lake, but it is part of the lake. Suddenly she feels that she is not flesh and bone, but liquid, her whole being melded and merged with the chill, pure water. She has lost all sense of being separate from it. She has lost her fear. The realization that she is no longer afraid, after a lifetime of fear, now, as she faces her own death in the way that has always terrified her, shocks her but curiously feels right. As if all along, down the years, she has been reading her reaction to water wrong.

Not afraid, but awed. Not fear, but wonder. Not revulsion, but … what? A need? A longing, somehow, that twisted my stomach to knots and made my pulse race. A yearning. All that time, all those nerve-tingling moments, not terror of the unknown then, but the rekindling of a far-distant memory. A memory that should have been passed down to me, but got lost, got confused along the way.