This cannot be real. Caenari simply refuses it to be.

The waves crash, slamming into her side again. Her nose roars with stinging aches as saline smothers her larynx, her cries becoming breathy as they lose their volition. It hurts, she thinks, to feel this way. Is this what her charges felt? Her heart aches, her throat clenches around nothing but cold seawater.

She can't bare it; it's much too agonizing.

Until a rasp calls out to her, and hands come to her arms. The storm's despair is her own; she is one with them in collective grief. She was left here, she knows it, feels; frozen in the last ice age, left her to die and rot. She does not know where she is now, nor who is pulling her from the shore and sea.

All she can feel in this moment is gratefulness. Someone doesn't want her dead. Someone wishes to give her life. Someone wishes to grant her contingency.