Still deep underwater and unable to hang on any longer, with a curious roaring in her ears, Si'Wren finally resorted to more drastic means and let go of her writing kit, with it's beautifully carved ivory writing sticks, and the precious clay tablets wherein was written everything she knew about her great, Invisible God Who was so much like water. Unburdened by the weight of her kit, she rose to burst at long last through the surface, gasping and straining for the life-giving air.
She quickly realized that she was so near to the far bank that, gasping heavily, she merely let herself drift in closer, and swam a few tired strokes to finally reach it on hands and knees. She dragged herself halfway out of the water and collapsed, and felt the stub-end of the arrow in her shoulder grate on a rock in the soft sloping bank. She rolled halfway over onto her side to avoid doing that again, and lay in the miry clay of the bank.
Clay. She had lost her writing kit, with all that she had written about the Invisible God, but all around her was clay, miry clay, enough clay to fill the whole world with tablets about the Invisible God. And then she realized that she still had every word she had ever preached to her Emperor, written in her heart.
Looking back upstream, she peered up at the far bank, high above the water, where her many pursuers and their leader were no longer visible.
Than she looked around unsteadily, and a little ways downstream on the same side of the river as herself, she saw the black stallion.
He was bogged down in the mud and reeds of a sheltered shallows, his head sagging ever lower as he gradually gave up his fight for life by successive stages, with weaker and weaker struggles. What a sadness, that such a magnificent creature should ever have to die!
Si'Wren turned her head and lifted up her eyes, and shifted her gaze over a little, to look up at the sky just beyond the waterfall, up into the shining white mists of it's far-flung, billowing overspray.
And then she gasped, awestruck, for there in a perfectly stationary arc stretching across the billowing, towering plumes of white mist, she saw a multi-hued sweep of pure jeweled light, arrayed in the most beautiful translucent bow of vivid colors, red above, and purple beneath, with orange-yellow and blue-green streaked through the center of the miraculously motionless curved arc.
Gasping with increasing difficulty for air from her tortured lungs, and still gazing up into the white mists, Si'Wren stared, spellbound, as the bow of colors and the thundering roar of the waterfall slowly faded from her senses.
* * *