It was as if the universe had turned itself inside-out. One instant I was leaping through dazzling winter sunlight, the next I was drowning in darkness.
Literally drowning.
I opened my mouth in shock, and immediately icy water rammed itself down my throat, striving with an almost sentient malice to flood my lungs. I coughed and thrashed, forced myself to slam my jaws shut on the reflexive coughing fit that would have emptied me of what little air I had left. Suddenly I realized I had my eyes closed, and forced them open to peer into the large, water-filled space about me, lit from somewhere by a dim, silvery glow.
Air. I needed air! Frantically I looked about, but could not find the surface. Panic threatened, but then I remembered what an Army diver had once told me. A moment's searching revealed a small swarm of bubbles flowing past to my right-rear. Desperately I followed them, my body's steely armor dragging at me.
An eternity later my head broke surface, followed less than a second later by my skull slamming into solid rock. Lights flared behind my eyes and I started to sink again, inhaling water instead of air. I coughed, wheezed, then shook off the impact, ignoring the pain to look about me. I found myself in a pocket of air slightly higher than the top of my head, trapped beneath a broad, gently curving ceiling of stone. There was no sign of my son.
"Ashadh!" I shouted, looking wildly about, my ears ringing with the echoes the stone mockingly flung back at me. My heart squeezed itself into a small, painful lump when I realized he hadn't surfaced. Gulping a deep breath of air, I yanked my head back under and dove downward into the cold, crystal-clear water, my eyes searching for a small, scaled form. Aided by my armor, it didn't take me long to reach bottom. Frantically I searched, finding nothing but sand and stone. Finally, I swam toward where that dim, silvery glow seemed to be coming from, a strange familiarity nagging me from the edge of my thoughts.
The glow swiftly grew brighter, resolved itself into two separate sources. One was fairly bright, the other was much dimmer, seemingly obscured by something. That something turned out to be some sort of pagoda-like structure sitting on the bottom, its roof held up by a series of elaborately-carved stone columns. I didn't bother to examine it though, as a muffled thrashing sound came to my ears from within the structure.
I rocketed forward, spotting the sphere of the Lung hovering between two of the outer columns and seizing it with my left hand as I went past, homing in on the thrashing, my body already beginning to cry out for air. Within, I passed more ranks of stone columns, that second glow growing stronger, at last resolving into another sphere of the Lung, hovering in the exact center of the building, just above a shallow, bowl-shaped depression set into the stone floor.
The thrashing seemed to be coming from overhead. I looked up, and found another air pocket partially filling the upper reaches of the pagoda's peaked stone roof. Ashadh was there, paddling madly to keep his head above water, and not succeeding very well as his own armor worked to drag him under. Jamming the sphere I held into my mouth, I launched myself upward. Even as I reached for him I could see his frantic thrashings slowing as he began to exhaust himself and he started to slowly sink, then my hands closed on him and I thought hard on a small ranch house lost somewhere in snow-covered mountains. . . .
Snap.
Brilliant sunlight stabbed into my eyes. Dazzled, my feet out of position, I hit the ground hard, reflexively hugging a screaming Ashadh to my breast as snow flew and water splashed all about us. It took a few seconds for my son to realize who he was clawing wildly at, and my scales collected a few more scars before he subsided, trembling violently.
Human voices shouted to one side and I rolled to my feet, still cradling Ashadh in one arm as I blinked painfully, waiting for my eyes to once again adjust. Eventually I could make out the ranch house roughly thirty meters away, and several people hurrying toward us, a pale Stefan in the lead, followed by Lucifer and Wolfman, both troopers loaded for bear and scanning for targets. "My Lord! What happened? Are you well? Is Ashadh--"
Ashadh twitched at my tone and looked up into my face, his eyes wide with shock and apprehension. Abruptly he ducked his head and butted it against my breast again and again, his ragged croon almost a whine. He was sorry, he was sorry, he was sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry!
I blinked and gave my head another shake, then looked back at my motley crew. "Let's get him inside."