BEN BRIAR

The water walkers realised that we could not stand on the water like they could. They spoke perfect English and looked normal enough. They were all shouting over each other which was indescribable to translate and it carried a haunting feeling of dread in my stomach. Jennifer was sick from hypothermia. I've seen many of my coworkers suffer from the gnawing chill, their temperature too hot while their skin was too cold.

Medication is  provocation and treatment is tedious. I too have experienced it and it is an illness that makes you wish you were dead until you get warm. The thought of death unravels in your mind like the festering poison of a snake come to be the Grim Reaper at your doorstep.

I know it to be reconciled best with motivation and inspiration. I can't tell Jennifer anything that could get her hopes up when we are in the middle of nowhere on a world that is not our own. Or maybe it is our own and we are prehistoric, like dinosaurs, but less impressive.

Their savage behaviour stopped when I told them that the girl was sick. I couldn't blame them for their vicious selves, we would be but the same if the dinosaurs were revealed to not be extinct.

They agreed to form a line to an "underwater station", which I conceded would be better than staying on an iceberg. We crowd surfed over the heads of the people in line which was almost everyone. I held Jennifer's hand and told her to be strong. I could not be strong for her because I was simply weak and puzzled at the sight of the impossibility of walking on water.

This way, the sun was radiant and dried any damp patch on my jacket. I can't remember what it was like in the ice. It was as if I was sleeping the entire time without trying to sleep. When I woke up was when I felt the most pain. I'm not claustrophobic, but it was frightening enough to give anyone a phobia of the polar regions.

A sudden outburst of gasps and screams bellowed from the people that carried us on their hands and above their heads. I looked to my left, nothing there. I looked to my right and there was a man surfing a wave without a surfboard. It looked like the man was controlling the wave, making it loom over the line of people and ourselves.

The passing along of our bodies picked up the pace in panic. The man strained his hand and changed the froth of the waves into spikes. Like a conductor, he mediated the wave to an abrupt end as the liquid spikes fell from a height. In an instant, the people carrying us were stabbed and sent into a disarray.

Jennifer and I fell into the water with the rest of the people that were slain. Whoever this man was, he had aimed for the ones carrying us in the moment. The water walkers no longer stood on water, their bodies sank to the ocean floor because their life had been stolen from them by the individual with a power even more absurd than that of standing on water.

Bending water was simply impractical on Earth. Static electricity can barely do the trick, but the figure with water stained on his face like a mask manipulated waves like it was a party trick. Or a weapon of mass destruction if this place we were in is suffocated by water. It's just a matter of how much the user is able to agitate the seas and what he plans to do with the power.

That's to say if this is even real life. I might still be frozen in that iceberg and my mind is deceiving me. Nothing is making sense and my problems are getting worse.

I worry for Jennifer that she is not drowning because I can only focus on reaching the surface. The water parts above me and my surprise makes me want to swim back down. But the man is able to pull both Jennifer and I into the air. We are held there by a beam of water. We are able to swim around in it, but the beam follows us in whichever direction that we swim in.

The water walkers have scattered like ants from my perspective. They had the nerve of leaving us here after treating us like royalty because a villainous person announces his arrival in the slaughtering of a dozen by manner of spikes. Imagine if they actually had a queen in this world. Would the Queen's guards leave her to be strung out if terrorists held her hostage? I don't think so, they always look ready and willing to serve the Queen till death do they part.

The man formed a platform out of water which he stood on and elevated towards us, now that his wave was nonexistent. The water below us was red with the gushing blood of the people and the rushing water that was drawn from the ocean to make the man's creations. I looked over at Jennifer who had fainted from the attack. This was a bad thing because if you slept with hypothermia, it was harder to wake up from it.

I said, "Jennifer... wake up."

"Don't converse with her." There was no mistaking that voice. A voice not heard in ages by the ears that the bearer of the voice used to pull on if he got angry at me. My ears. I had not heard it for the longest time and it hit me straight in the heart when I realised I knew.

Only one would pull on the lobe of my ear, pull it in close to his mouth until it filled my eardrum with his breath and would rasp something because he was infuriated by my behaviour as a child, but not overly strong enough to ruin the hearing of his only child by shouting. I only knew him when I was a child and only remembered him when he was young. My father looked exactly the same as he did in my last memory of him. But now he could control the water.