The age old adage says this: When you’ve taken a man's child you’ve truly left him nothing. This is not strictly true. In the wake of that loss something is left behind that will fill a man up. Absence eats anything away until it exists singularly within you. Where the love for your child was lighter than the wind, absence is a leaden weight that defines every moment from waking to rest. Every meal, conversation, sensation, is assessed only by what is missing.

Absence flows over everything, a strangling bed sheet over all moments following your loss. The chairs that had to be removed for their constant reminder. The wooden toys made only for tiny silken-soft hands. You remove all of these things because they bring to mind your grief. All of these things gone, and suddenly you realize you have made your life absent as well. It has burst outside you through some fissure and gone even further to make gaps in your life.

“Are you never satisfied?”

I would often ask it. It never deemed a response to be necessary. It is just as well, if there was one virtue of absence, it was silence.

It was its own unique torture when I had to tend to children, there were few things more terrible than seeing this vacant husk of what was supposed to be our most vibrant stage of life. I had used lavender oil for his pale features and pale hair, the mother had said he fancied going to the small stalls throughout the city; to smell all of the herbs they could scarcely afford.

That was the price for enjoying life I supposed, for one that loves every sensation, the end of all senses can inspire terror. The child at least had not had to contemplate this, his end was quick. Death may as well be lurking behind a mountain range in another continent for children. It never carves away any space in their mind, save until those shocking moments. And then those moments are over, and they exist in another world. No longer painful, just bits of wreckage somewhere far away.

It may be obvious to state that I see my son in all of these children lost to life. I hate for such a thing to be said and for it to inspire pity. Pity is empathy if it were gutless. When my wife took our child off through the woods, away from here, people pitied me. Some thought maybe I had done away with them. Yet many knew that she had taken our child to the Velamen Bridge, and the rest was written.

I tried to believe in whatever power that bridge held, to make the meaningless feeling of the act disappear. So many stories of people crossing this small, simple stone passage. Walking ten paces and suddenly, as if possessed, turning to their right, stepping onto the side of the bridge. Plummeting into the Backahast River below. Tales invaded me, a man who managed to survive the fall, only to climb back up the surrounding hills and jump off again to his death.

Creatures would wander their way onto the cobblestone structure, reaching that very same spot. An elk, leaping over the edge and missing the dark water. Striking the river bank with an audible impact. Yet, my wife was the first to bring her child with her. That was one of the most difficult things to contemplate. This woman I had known since we fished downstream from that bridge 15 years past, made into a ghost warding off children who may lose their balance. Soon I think my memory of her could be replaced by the stories others tell about her.

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These thoughtful reveries sicken me, yet they overflow the harder I try to avoid them. Sentimental states never seem to give me anything useful, however knowing this does not bring an end to them. The boy has a stern look on his face, far too stern for a child of ten years. I must lighten up his brow and his lower eyes to bring back some form of levity to his appearance. Beneath all of this absence, I cannot shake this feeling of a rising tide. The month was at an end and this child was another rarity, the flow of bodies had still remained quite slow. I found myself constantly watching the door. No longer waiting for my wife and childs’ specter as I used to at the bottom of a pint. But rather waiting for some invisible evil to come bursting through.

Fear rips through any sensation, even brushing my melancholy away. I can nearly feel some tremendous shadow and its every thunderous step. One, slamming into the mud, the other foot dragging a deep rut into the gripping soil. Two whatever shadow it was must have been truly massive. I could almost feel the vibration of a limbs impact in the ground. I realized I had my eyes clamped shut, feeling the compressed lines in my face. I wanted to open them as I felt somewhat ridiculous, but some feeling kept them closed. As if when I opened them I would not be able to reenter the world I had inhabited. That I would open them and I would see an unrecognizable place filled with everything entirely new.

The child will be gone, this hole in the ground will be an underground cavern spanning miles, nothing will be what it is. I even welcomed whatever terror could be in the outside air. I loved high-lofted tales of monsters and evil as a child. They did not frighten me. What frightened me was that there was no magic in the world. That I was doomed in this absence. That maybe that bridge was just a bridge. No mystical explanation except someone who was unhappy.

That is until a harsh knock onto the door slammed into my ears, my eyes shot open. The world was hopelessly the same. The child laid half-clothed on the cooling board, eyes staring at the endless. The hard packed dirt of this hovel stood in place as best it could. All was as it was. Though maybe what lay beyond that door was this rising tide I had felt. This sinister feeling that eclipsed my day. When I crossed round the table and through the entryway, I knew that this was the truth of it.

The door flowed open, Donavan stood there, his face a grotesque mask of fear. He had never looked so frightened, so helpless. He had always had the misguided certainty of a young man. Though in this moment he did not look certain of anything.

“Please, I have never seen anything like it. I wouldn’t have - I wouldn’t have brought it if I knew.”

His breath came in and out, as if it exhaled before it had even entered his lungs.

“They had put a canvas on it; I didn't think to look. Please, you have to do something, I don't want for both of us to die. I can’t believe I brought it here there’s nothing that can be…”

I grabbed him roughly by the shoulders and yanked him into the room,

“Take a breath! Be easy and speak to me.”

Donavan simply moved his mouth unspeaking, his eyes rolling about like a horse whose leg had snapped. He gestured slowly behind him, up the steep incline, a small cart with a mass covering it. The canvas sheet flapping in the wind. Between the rippling pattern of this canvas there were short glimpses - underneath was a gruesome palette of horrors.