The pain hit me in an instant, engulfing me in the exact same manner that it had done the first time. The fact that I had been prepared for it, that I had been waiting for it, didn’t do anything in terms of decreasing the intensity of the time. It was still the same paralysing burn, the very same feeling of suffocation.
It felt as if my body had crashed into something hard, something solid, nearly expelling the last bit of oxygen from my lungs, but somehow, I managed to keep my mouth closed, managed to keep it from opening. In the haze of it all, I reached out and found my hands sinking into a soft, sand-like substance, the burn from the water around me no longer affecting my hands.
It took a moment for my memory to take me back to the exact moment when I had found myself in the godde
