1

After a long, long time....

Jonathan opened his eyes. His face was on the sand. His face was wet and at first he thought it was the waves lapping as they passed, rising and falling, as they always would.

But no. It wasn't that.

He was too far from the water.

That wet substance sticking to his face was his own blood.

He put his hands on the sand, a ground as unstable as himself, and pushed himself up. He struggled to stand. There was something he had to do. He was confused, but at least he could still remember that.

Jonathan set off at last, staggering over the sand, but he didn't get very far.

Not because of him. Not because his body had betrayed him.

He stayed on his feet. Though he wasn't sure how, after seeing that.

After seeing Elizabeth lying on the sand, looking up at the sky, except her eyes were dark and empty. Dead, like her.

He couldn't fool himself. He couldn't because he was beginning to remember what had happened right in front of his eyes, with nothing he could do. But also because she was on her back. Perhaps on her side, or face down, Jonathan would have been able to approach her with his heart in a fist, saying that she was surely alive.

But like this...

She was too visible. Her chest was cut open by the knife. The blood, which had already dried. The entrails that glimpsed through the wound.

Above all her face.

She hadn't gone pale yet. But there was no air passing between her lips.

She was dead.

She had been killed and he hadn't been able to do anything. Jonathan clenched his fists.

"Where are you? Come out of wherever you are, you son of a bitch! "But deep down, he knew it was pointless. He'd crushed him, so why would Adam hide?

No, it didn't make sense that he'd left him here after he'd won to begin with.

According to him, he wanted him as a partner, didn't he?

He should be on a ship, on his way to the palace...

"If he's left, "Jonathan began to talk aloud, to himself. Maybe it would help him think, "How? I wrecked his ship. I also killed all his crew, so he could have left alone in his boat, but the boat is still in the harbor.

He could see it from here.

No doubt about it. Even though his vision was stained with tears.

"And what the hell does it matter? I've lost and she's dead. What the fuck does it matter? I don't care if the son of a bitch learned to walk on water. Who the hell cares!"

Oh, shit.

Jonathan got dizzy and fell to his knees.

He narrowly avoided falling on Elizabeth. On her dead body.

"I'm sorry. I..."

They weren't friends, let alone anything more than that. Acquaintances, that was the most they could be called. So why did he feel like his heart had been ripped out again?

Why couldn't he stop crying?

"Shit. It wasn't supposed to end like this."

Jonathan took the corpse in his arms, rising to his feet again. All along the coast, the dead rose with him, but not only those who had fought on his side, also Adam's soldiers, whom he had abandoned.

And when Jonathan set out, back to the mansion, the dead walked with him.

He vaguely had the feeling that there was something strange. But he couldn't care less. Unsteady as he was, he made it all the way to the mansion. Opening the doors, pushing them open with the full weight of his body.

He staggered at that moment.

And so he knocked a candlestick off a small table, at the same time. He didn't catch it. Nor did he try to. Incidentally.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

He grabbed the edge of the bedside table, just to have a handhold.

"What am I doing? What have I been doing all this time?

He walked down the hallway, rounded the corner and into the living room. All the way he couldn't help but think that he was now the only person living in this town. Everything else was dead, dark. Empty.

He made a move to leave Elizabeth's body on the table, for the moment at least. But he realized there wasn't enough room.

For some reason, something so trivial filled him with rage, and he threw everything off the table.

The candles, the silverware, the plates and the tablecloth.

Not even the plates exploding on the floor woke him up.

He placed Elizabeth there.

"What now?"

Bury her, as he had buried the assassin whose name he still didn't know? No. No, no way. She deserved something more. They may not have been more than acquaintances, but she deserved more.

"It's not up to me. Maybe at the office..." Elizabeth had left so recently, but talking to himself was already becoming a habit. Would it help him not to succumb to madness, or would it be pushing him into its arms?

In any case, as he had said, he went to the office.

Once there, he sat down behind the desk she had occupied and started rummaging through the drawers. Maybe it was silly, but he hoped to find a clue, at least, as to how she wanted to be buried.

A hole in the ground wasn't the only way.

Perhaps cremation, although the very word brought back bad memories and he wasn't sure if he could do it.

Maybe sinking the corpse in the sea. Many cultures did it. Many others considered it an aberration, even though, like a "normal" burial, it's simply giving back to nature.

Jonathan wasn't interested in anyone's opinion, however.

Except Elizabeth's.

He needed to know. It didn't feel right to just bury her and, to be honest, he didn't want to accept this. He supposed a part of him was just trying to postpone the inevitable. Whichever way he did it.

Jonathan found official documents.

And more and more official documents. Nothing that interested him. Nothing that had anything to do with him.

Nor with him.

Nor with her.

It was a very impersonal workspace.

"Her room, perhaps?"

He'd never been there, but as soon as she'd died, would the first thing he'd do be to sneak in? He had no bad intentions, obviously, but he would feel like an intruder. Like some kind of weirdo.

He put a hand to his head.

God, how it hurts.

"And what do I expect to find? A letter with instructions about her ideal funeral?" He squirmed in that chair, laughing at himself.

Alone.

All alone in the world.

"She didn't expect to die. She could talk about it as a suicide mission, but she believed... she had to believe she could do this. She wasn't ready to die."

Who was?

One of Jonathan's hands had ended up in front of her face, fingers spread wide, but he wasn't peeking through them. He could barely see beyond those fingers. His surroundings felt like the stage of a play.

It's all fake.

Staged. Loose and depthless, like pieces of cardboard.

"What do I do now?"

Now there was no one to answer.

Only silence.

2

Jonathan didn't like to drink.

He drank socially, to have fun and share experiences with his crew, to be one of them, they would feel as if he was looking down on them otherwise.

But he didn't like the way drunks looked.

The things they did or said under the influence of alcohol. Deep down, Jonathan did despise those who gave up the reins of their mind to alcohol.

However, things were changing.

He emptied one of Elizabeth's bookshelves. Bottle of wine after bottle of wine. The world was shattered, like broken glass, but the number of times he saw everything couldn't compare to the bottles he had emptied.

He could barely stand, in fact.

He was staggering from side to side, as if in a poor attempt to dance. Repulsive. Everything was repulsive. Though perhaps it had nothing to do with his urge to vomit.

I'm the most repulsive of all.

Jonathan took the last swig from the last bottle and then put it back on the table. He'd been standing for a while, so his vision was coming into focus. So not too much.

He'd overdone it. And quite a bit.

He didn't feel on top of the world, not even temporarily.

He felt even shittier than before he'd started drinking. That's right, nothing had changed. Elizabeth's corpse was still on the table and he still had no idea what to do.

He hadn't found anything to give him even a hint of what he would have wanted, even in his room. Elizabeth had not thought

He hadn't found anything to give him even a hint of what she might have wanted, not even in her room. Elizabeth hadn't thought she would die.

For one thing, she suspected she was the kind of person who didn't give a shit what happened after she was dead.

Because she'd still be dead.

As for him, he didn't want to bury her.

He didn't want to burn her either. It might be a habit, but every time he thought of bonfires and dead bodies, he saw the flames where his family had burned in his mind's eye. Now he could only think of that act as a repulsive ritual.

Send her to the bottom of the sea? Not that either.

Elizabeth hadn't been prepared to die. And the same went the other way around. He hadn't been prepared for her to die.

He hadn't even been able to say goodbye.

Or apologize.

He'd begged for her life, but that didn't seem enough for him. Jonathan covered his face with his hands, closed his eyes.

Thus the silence drifted by... For what, a few seconds?

A few seconds until he snapped and knocked the bottle over with one arm, causing it to explode into a thousand pieces.

"I don't have to if I don't want to. Say goodbye to her," Jonathan realized as he spoke.

As he looked at the symbol on his hand.

Episode 27: END