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Kal put his mind to work.

The shore was too far away to be reached by swimming: it would be too dangerous in that current. He had to find a way to get the wreck on which they were standing closer to the riverbank. He looked at his hands: empty. If only he had an oar…

His gaze fell on the armband on his right arm. And suddenly he had an idea.

I’ve never attempted this before. But it’s our only chance. I have to try.

He focused, closing his eyes. He visualized the armband in his mind and then he imagined to hold his staff in his hand, feeling its weight and texture.

When he opened them again, the armband had become a long ad thin dark-colored rod in his hands.

Now comes the difficult part.

He focused again, but this time he attempted to change the mental image that his training had taught him to recall without effort and keep fixed in a corner of him mind.

One extremity of the rod now had to flatten and grow larger, to offer more surface to the water. It had to stop being a staff and become an oar.

His own reflexes, conditioned in years of practice, opposed him: he was doing what he had been expressly taught not to do. The mental image had to be strong, clear, immutable. Otherwise the sklerygron would lose cohesion, unless you had a greater talent than what he possessed.

However Kal refused to yield, fighting back against his own mind that insisted in trying to take back to the form it was “meant” to have the object it had been used to think of as a “staff”.

And finally he felt he had won the struggle. Opening his eyes, he saw that the rod had changed shape, adapting to his will. He felt tired, but was still surprised by the ease with which he had succeeded. He expected it would be far harder to concentrate, but it was as if, unconsciously, he had employed in that effort all of his mental resources, refusing to think about anything else.

«Where is Makar?»

It was Elef who asked that. And suddenly Kal became aware that all eyes were on him. Every look told a different emotion: Elef was puzzled, Fyra was worried, Agatha seemed sorry, as if she already knew what had transpired, and Ark looked like his main interest was in the oar now in Kal’s hands.

«He’s right. Where is he?» Fyra asked.

All Kal could do was shake his head.

Fyra fell on her knees, before swearing and beat an impotent fist on the ground. The movement made the disk sway back and forth in a worrying way.

Ark stopped her, putting a hand on her shoulder: «Fyra. I’m sorry, but now we need your help.»

Kal felt the need so say something of his own: «Ark is right. We… we’re still alive, after all.»

Too late he realized that maybe it wasn’t the right thing to say.

Fyra gave him a spiteful glare, and hissed: «Shut up.»

That glare and those words hurt him more than he expected.

«Fyra.» Ark called her back. «Look where we are. We’re sinking. Kal has used his sklerygron to make an oar, and I think that was a good idea: we need to move away from here. Can you do the same thing he did?»

She turned to Ark. She was still angry, and yet to Kal she seemed less harsh than when she had responded to him.

«How can you… how can you be so calm?»

Ark didn’t answer, instead he replied: «Can you, or can you not?»

Fyra squinted. After a few moment, she answered: «No, I can’t. But I can do this.»

She stood up and went to the wreck’s handrail. With two quick slashes with her left arm, she cut away a long vertical bar, and then a second one.

«There, make yourself useful as well.» she threw one of them to Ark, who promptly caught it.

«Give one to me too!» said Agatha, who was readily obliged.

«Me too…» said Elef, but then he stopped, looking at his injured arm.

«You stay where you are.» Kal told him. «We will split: two on one side, two on the other. Let’s keep this thing level and go that way.» he pointed at the shore, a steep slope that rose up to the edge of the trees.

Everyone did as he said, and Mak’s flying machine, which necessity had turned into a raft, started to move away from the middle of the river.

Keeping his oar’s shape was greatly taxing for Kal’s psyche, an effort compounded by the physical exertion. He’d have preferred to go faster, reach the shore and leave at least one of their problems behind them, but it was like the disk was wading in mud: probably water had already seeped inside. Soon if would sink like a rock, with them still on it if they didn’t hurry.

«We’ve done what we could.» he said, when he understood the disk was too heavy to move it closer to the riverbank. «We’re close enough to continue by swimming.»

«Swimming?» Elef exclaimed. «I, I can’t. Not with my arm like this.» He looked at Kal as If he were begging him.

He was right. They were close, but the current was still rather strong; someone in his condition would never be able to swim to shore. And if another took him on their shoulders as they swam, both would drown.

Kal rapidly looked for a solution. There wasn’t much time. The disk had already gone under, water reached his ankles.

He noticed that without he had absentmindedly turned his oar back into an armband.

I did it once. I can do it again.

«Are you able to grab on to something, with your good arm?» he asked Elef.

«Well, yeah, I think I do.»

«Then this is what we’ll do. I and the other will get to the shore, you wait here.» He immediately saw Elef starting to complain, but he continued: «I will reach out for you with my staff from there. Grab on to it and don’t let go, we’ll drag you to shore.»

«From there? Have you seen how far it is? You’ll never reach me!» Elef was despairing.

«Trust me.» Kal said, looking at him in the eyes. «I won’t leave you here. I’m not losing two friends today.»

This seemed to calm Elef down.

«Fine. I’ll trust you.» he moved to the center of the disk, waiting.

Kal jumped in the water and immediately got swimming with all his might toward the shore. The river was freezing cold, and with every stroke he felt his muscles groan, but he grit his teeth and forced himself to keep going.

The instant he felt earth under his feet he rushed up the slope, until he was fully on dry land.

He turned. He saw Agatha, Ark and Fyra a short way behind him. He didn’t need to worry about them. He then shifted his gaze to Elef.

The boy had not moved from his position, he was standing still and looking in Kal’s direction.

Kal held out his left arm. He felt the sklerygron staff in his hand. Then, as he had done earlier, he tried to change the image of the staff in his mind.

This time the shape had to remain fundamentally the same. What had to change, a lot, would be the length, and this presented a different issue. To all appearances, imagining “the same staff but longer” didn’t sound complicated, but had Kal limited himself to do just that, the result would be something frail and completely useless. The sklerygron would simply assume a longer configuration, compromising its solidity. No, Kal had to imagine a whole new staff, longer than usual but at the same time no less sturdy. That the form was the same he was used to visualize, in this case made everything much harder.

Kal lost his sense of time, but eventually realized his hand held a long shaft. He immediately held it out toward Elef and watched him grab it. Then he started to pull him toward himself.

He was vaguely aware that some of the others had come to give him a hand, but he was too concentrated on keeping the staff in its new shape to understand who they were. He felt that if he got distracted for a single blinking moment, the sklerygron would fail.

The last information his senses communicated to him was that Elef had reached the shore.

After that, Kal let himself fall down exhausted, and lost consciousness.

---

When he woke up, he found Fyra sitting beside him.

«How are you feeling?» she asked.

«Well-rested.» he answered, still drowsy. His throat was parched. He sat up and looked around. He saw that Agatha and the others were close by. Elef was laying on the grass, resting, Ark was saying something to Agatha, as they both looked at the forest.

«How long was I asleep?» he asked, his voice still hoarse.

«A couple of hours, I think. With the sky overcast like this, it’s hard to know for sure.» the girl put a hand in her jacket, taking out a small flask. «Here, drink.»

Kal had seen that flask before: he had an identical one, that now probably lied somewhere in the barracks of the Rook. He blurted out: «Is that your father’s?»

«Great, if you recognize it it means your brain is still working perfectly. I was worried.» Fyra momentarily drew back the hand offering it to him. «But no, this was my father’s, it’s mine now.»

For a few moments, she looked at the flask, with a melancholic expression. Then she shook her head, as if she wanted to drive away some thought, and once again offered it to him: «But it doesn’t matter now. Come on, drink.»

She had always been like that. When they were little, she always took care of him with little gestures like that.

Kal realized he was lost in remembrance when she said: «Drink. I can immediately go refill it, don’t worry.»

He accepted the flask and took a sip. The cold water going down his throat aroused him completely from his torpor. He gave the flask back, with a «Thank you.» and then he took a deep breath. Now that he had cleared his mind, there was something he had to tell her.

But as he spoke, he realized Fyra too was saying something.

«I’m sorry.» «I owe you an apology.»

Both were left dumbstruck, looking in each other’s eyes.

Kal was the first one to try speaking again: «Apologies… for what?»

«For before, when…» she stopped, without ending the sentence. «I wasn’t myself then. I got angry with the last person I should have. I acted like you hadn’t done all that you could to…» she stopped again, sighing and frowning. «I’m sorry, I really am.»

«You mustn’t.» Kal told her. «In the end, you were right. I was insensitive, I said the first thing that came to mind. You had the right to be angry.»

«No, that’s not true.» She replied. She seemed to have calmed down. «You only said the truth. We’re still alive. So we have to think about surviving.»

At that point, she turned her gaze far away, to the north-west. It took Kal a while to realize she was looking toward Elis. Something in her pose and her expression troubled him. He had the impression Fyra had become some wild animal, patiently but eagerly looking at a prey.

«And sooner or later, we’ll get our revenge. For Mak, too.»

With that last sentence, the girl moved away, toward the river, likely to refill her flask.

Kal didn’t have the courage to tell her that when he had said those words, that wasn’t what he had meant.

Afterword

Perhaps some of you have visited the section called “Appendices”.
I’m keeping it updated regularly as the story proceeds, so that even those who don’t follow week after week are able to keep tabs on the novel’s main points.
Soon I’ll also build the “Story So Far” and “Locations” sections.
The hardest task for me in writing such documents is avoiding giving too much information.
I could spend hours thinking about how to describe a character in a few words without giving too much away.
I hope you like them and find them useful.
Ad as always: if you like what you read, tell your friends.