Rou knelt at the edge of the pool, his hand reaching toward the water before he jerked it back, touching his hair instead in that nervous habit.
'Don't drink strange water in a forest full of monsters,' the rational part of his mind insisted, the part that remembered every survival show he'd half-watched on his phone during lunch breaks. 'Especially not water that glows and that monsters are afraid of.'
He sat back on his heels, wincing as his injured ankle protested the movement, and looked around the clearing again. The creatures were still there, he could hear them occasionally chittering to each other just beyond the tree line, pacing around the circle but never crossing that invisible boundary.
Whatever this place was, whatever made this ground sacred enough to keep them out, it was the only thing keeping him alive.
'Medieval era,' he thought, trying to organize his thoughts while his throat grew drier with each passing minute. 'This is so crazy, just what in the hell am I going to do?'
The sun, what little of it penetrated the thick canopy, was moving across the sky, marking hours he spent sitting there, thinking, trying not to think about the screaming he'd heard, trying not to wonder if anyone else had survived.
His phone had died at some point during the chase, the screen refusing to light no matter how many times he pressed the power button, leaving him with no sense of exact time.
'Did humanity forget? Did we destroy it all? Or did something happen that erased magic from the world so thoroughly that we don't even have real records of it?' The questions circled in his mind while his throat grew more parched, his lips starting to crack.
Three hours, maybe four, and the thirst was becoming unbearable. He'd been running, terrified, adrenaline burning through his system, and now his body was demanding water with an insistence that was getting harder to ignore.
The pool sat there, perfectly still, the faint light making it look cleaner than any water he'd ever seen. No leaves floated on its surface despite the forest around it. No insects skimmed across it. No algae grew at its edges. It was pristine in a way that nothing natural should be.
'But this is sacred ground,' he rationalized, his hand moving toward the water again. 'Sacred means holy, blessed, pure. If the monsters won't come here, if they fear this place, then maybe the water is safe. Maybe it's the safest water in this entire forest.'
His hand trembled as he cupped the water, bringing it to his lips. The first sip was everything his body had been screaming for - cool, clean, so clean it made every bottle of water he'd ever drunk taste like it had been filtered through dirt.
It didn't taste like nothing the way pure water should, it tasted like the idea of water, like what water was supposed to be before the world polluted it.
He drank more, great gulping handfuls that spilled down his chin and chest, unable to stop himself because it was perfect, because his body needed it, because after everything that had happened today he deserved this one good thing.
He drank until his stomach sloshed with it, drank until he couldn't hold anymore, drank like someone who'd been dying of thirst for years without knowing it.
Finally, gasping, he fell back onto the soft grass beside the pool, his stomach distended with water, feeling more satisfied than he could remember being in years. The clearing was peaceful, the monsters still wouldn't enter, and for just a moment he could pretend he was safe.
Then the heat started.
It began in his stomach, a warmth that felt pleasant at first, like drinking hot tea on a cold day. But it spread quickly, racing through his veins, and the warmth became heat became burning. His muscles tensed as the sensation reached them, every fiber lighting up with pain that made his previous injuries feel like gentle touches.
'Poison,' he thought desperately as the burning reached his chest, making his heart stutter and race. 'The water was poisoned, that's why nothing drinks from it, that's why the monsters won't come here, because they know—'
The pain exploded through his nervous system all at once, every nerve ending screaming as if they were being rewritten, rebuilt, reformed. He couldn't scream because his throat had locked up, couldn't move because his muscles were seizing, could only lie there as his body tore itself apart from the inside.
His cells were burning, he could feel them burning, which made no sense because nobody could feel their individual cells, but he could feel each one igniting, changing, transforming into something else.
The modern cells that had never known magic were being forced to adapt to something ancient, something that predated the world he knew, and they were either going to change or die trying.
Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes of his body convulsing on sacred ground while monsters prowled just beyond the trees, twenty minutes of pain so complete that he lost track of where he was, who he was, everything except the burning reformation happening inside him.
His fingernails dug grooves in the earth, his back arched until he thought his spine would snap, his teeth clenched so hard he tasted blood.
Then, gradually, the pain began to fade, replaced by something else. A coolness spreading from his core outward, soothing the burned pathways the transformation had carved through him. His breathing steadied, his muscles relaxed, and when he finally opened his eyes, the world looked different.
No, not different. More. He could see the water in the air, tiny droplets of moisture floating between the trees. He could feel the underground streams flowing beneath the clearing. He could sense the blood moving through the veins of the creatures still pacing beyond the sacred boundary.
His eyes, when he caught their reflection in the pool, had changed from silver to a blue so clear it looked like water itself had replaced his irises.
Before he could process what this meant, before he could even form a coherent thought about what had happened to him, the pool began to move. The water rose without him touching it, without any wind to disturb it, rising in a column that twisted and flowed through the air toward him.
'No,' he thought, but his body didn't resist as the water touched his skin and, impossibly, merged with it. Not drowning him, not covering him, but entering him, becoming part of him. The entire pool, gallons upon gallons of water, flowed into his body without drowning him, without even making him feel full.
It should have killed him. Should have ruptured every organ, should have diluted his blood until his heart stopped, should have done a thousand fatal things. Instead, it felt like coming home, like his body had been waiting his entire life for this moment, like every glass of water he'd ever drunk had been a pale imitation of what he'd just become.
The clearing was different now. Where the pool had been, only a depression in the earth remained, the water now part of him, flowing through him, being him in a way that made the distinction between his body and water seem meaningless.
He stood, his ankle no longer hurting, the scratches on his arms already closed, and looked at his hands. With a thought, water condensed from the air around them, swirling between his fingers like it had always belonged there.
The creatures at the tree line had gone silent, no longer chittering but watching him with what might have been fear or recognition or both. When he took a step toward them, they backed away, and he realized they weren't keeping him trapped anymore.
They were afraid of what he'd become.