“I’ve read this story before,” Rinoa thought, her mind dizzy from the lack of oxygen. “I know I have.”
Dimly before her as she floated she thought she saw another space suit, far away. A ghost, an angel, one of Hyne’s messengers.
No, that wasn’t the right story. This was something about a sorceress, an old story from before the war. The words were slipping away from her like breath, but her mind tried to chase it anyway.
The angel, she realized, was her knight. It annoyed her that it had taken this long to think it. He was part of the story too.
Once upon a time there was a sorceress who nearly drowned. That was it. She couldn’t remember how the sorceress had gotten into the water, but it didn’t matter. It was always the sorceress’s own stupid fault in the old stories. Rinoa had thought they were ridiculous. Who would be that stupid? This was not the time for feminist theory.
But maybe, she thought slowly as the stars crept by, it was a sorceress thing. A quirk of genetics and luck, like the magic, or finding your knight. The recklessly stupid gene.
She’d managed to spin entirely away from her spacesuit-clad knight now, and had no idea how close he was. It was getting harder to think. What had happened to the drowning sorceress? Rinoa wracked her brain, but the answer drifted slowly, as she did.
The sorceress had, with her last breath, become water and reformed on the beach, in the arms of her long-suffering knight. She retreated into the element instinctively. But even if that were a lesson as well as a story, Rinoa thought desperately, what would she reach out to? She was surrounded by the void of space.
Rinoa noticed that she’d gone in a full circle. She looked hopefully for her knight, but as he drifted into view, she saw that he was still too far away.
Her breath was very slow now.
Her knight would not reach her.
Rinoa closed her eyes, and let go, and drowned.
