Page 431 of Eight of Swords, Part Two

The lava,

the molten rock,

the flames…

Gone.

He’s still on an island, and it’s still night.

The water is dark, thick with swimming shadows.

He walks to the shore, into the lapping waves beneath the pure, whole moon above.

‘It was you,’ his monster whispers from behind. ‘You are the shark. You are the shadow you could not see. You were dreaming of your own mistake months before it happened, and you were the traitor you feared most.’

Lachlan stares at the water.

His voice is hollow.

‘I was supposed to protect them.’

‘Seek not the many, name the one;

the prideful hand by which ’twas done.’

‘I… killed them.’

‘Yes.’

He falls to his knees in the water.

What pours out of him then is unknowable to him, some monstrous, mountainous form of grief he’s never let himself feel before because it would swallow him whole and he always had a mission, even when they died, and that mission was vengeance, and that kept him going, kept him alive.

But he never really let himself feel it.

He cauterised the wound with more death,

with killing. It’s always been his talent.

‘I didn’t listen. I didn’t see.’

‘You blinded yourself.’

Lachlan screams until there’s nothing left but the dark, soothing waters and the parts of himself he locked away in a hell of his own making.

The monster touches his shoulder.

Lachlan turns towards him, pulls him close.

They embrace on the shore.

‘I’m so sorry. You were… you were just a kid. You were seventeen. I was seventeen. I was a child. I was… I loved them so much and I killed them.’

They pull apart.

The monster’s eyes are rose red.

‘But should the guilty heart slip free,