❝ daydreams made manifest dulled eyes of honey as they trailed from one end of what they could see of the river to the other. the river had become one of palepaw's favourite sights - not only for its sheer beauty, as a cerulean canvas dotted with the scintilla of pale light and paler spray - but simply for what it meant to her clan. it was the namesake of riverclan, after all. yet palepaw had to admit her fondness for the body of water was not entirely sincere; she had thought, as a riverclanner, she owed it to her clanmates to be as much like them as she could possibly be. and mastering the art of swimming was one of those things that would help her do just that.
palepaw could swim - that much was true. she had taken it upon herself to learn the science behind it, and it had seemed something even a kit would know. to move through water, you had to move water. it was that simple, but when you were in the water it wasn't. a paradox, born of her own fear of the deep and what lurked in it - stygian creatures clinging to the shadows where they made their home, until serpentine limbs would snake, writhing, out, and up, and towards her and take her down, and make her drown.
palepaw didn't mind water. but she didn't like the deep at all.
so it was with trembling legs and round eyes the girl stood at the banks of that deep. it was a shame she was so afraid, for it was not only fear that widened those ochre eyes. that look in her eyes was a disjointed one, not quite as cohesive or organised or all that there as most looks were. and so alongside that fear was the suggestion of awe - not just the terror the seemingly bottomless body of water inspired, but a trace of reverence, of respect. wonder.
palepaw slid into the water with a deftness unexpected of a girl so scared of what she was entering. as she swam, she forced herself not to dwell on the distance between her paws and the river floor, nor the distance between here and the camp - for what if she drowned, and there was no one here to save her? - instead deigning, albeit with difficulty, to envisage she was in a shallow stream, and she was a real riverclanner. that she had known how to swim for longer than the single moon she had.
palepaw almost didn't realise when she started to drown.
she couldn't breathe in. she knew that. there was nothing to breathe it but the arctic-raw water. but heartbeats passed, seconds passed, minutes passed, and she needed air. a fierce, fiery yet numbingly cold agony gripped her - her lungs, her heart, everything - her physicality, her mind. she had to breathe. already the blackness of pure nothingness was tugging at her, pulling hard as if it were a magnetic force that would snap her brittle bones, the fragile fragments of ivory that made up her frail little skeleton, before it would dare release her from its grasp. she very nearly succumbed to that blackness until, through some force she never knew she could exert, she surfaced. if only once, if only briefly.
"help!" palepaw cried, before the water collapsed over her once more.