Chapters 1-5| Chapter 6 |Chapter 7| Chapter 8| Chapter 9|Chapter 10| Chapter 11| Chapter 12|Chapter 13| Chapter 14|Chapter 15|Chapter 16| Chapter 17| Chapter 18|
Thea, although bone-tired, stood on the shore, holding her shawl tightly. The wind felt bitter and heavy against her body.
Her hair, untied and uncombed, blew excitedly directionless in the breeze as she looked out into the horizon: a flat black line across a light grey sky and even greyer sea. The wet air stung her skin like the salt of tears. She stared aimlessly at the vast, black ocean laid out before her. Her bare feet were entrenched in the cool, sinking sand. Cold, icy sea water tickled her toes and enveloped her ankles, gently pulling her back out with it. Once, she had felt the instinct to lift her feet out of the sand and move back; she didn’t feel the need to do that any more.
She had cast a glance at the pebbles leading up to the sand dunes and wondered how many of them she would need to fill her pockets with. She felt that she would go out with the tide and never return, wondering if there was a limit to human emotional endurance and assumed that if there was, she had reached it within a single afternoon of reading her father’s journals.
She did not know how long she had been standing there; she didn’t care, either. The tide dutifully erased her footsteps on the trail behind her as though she had never been there to begin with. Thea, for the first time in her life, was able to make a safe exit, should she wish to do so.
Thea thought of the mirror image that shone down at her from the surface of the rock pools she had passed to get to the sea. She wondered if her dreams had been a message all along. Did it matter if she chose the sea instead?
Gulls cried overhead and dipped in and out of the glittering gunmetal depths. A small crab sidled up to a mermaid’s purse, freezing momentarily every time a curious gull cast a shadow overhead.
The refreshing whispers and hisses of the water and the wind offered a strange sense of comfort to her, as though sirens waited beyond her line of sight, rolling under the waves to cloak themselves from the predatory nature of the human. The sun, as low as it was, pushed its way through the thick, silver cloud, warming her body with its narrow rays.
“You’ve always loved coming here.” Her father’s voice came from behind her. She turned to see Derrien bending over and picking up a shell. “You wanted nothing more than to beachcomb when you were a little girl.” He held the little shell in the palm of his hand and wiped the wet sand off its ridges. “You always wanted to be a beachcomber.” She turned away from him again and wiped her tears with the back of her hand.
“The little girl wanted to be a beachcomber.” She sniffed, looking at him over her shoulder and then to the shell in his hand. He held it out to her. She took it from him and studied it, rolling the shell across her fingers. “This had been a limpet. So dependent on everything else and here it is, a hollow shell.” Her finger and thumb rubbed against the smooth, white, shining interior.
“You remember though, don’t you?”
“Not really.” She shrugged. “I can barely remember being a little girl.” She thought of the little girl in her dream, collecting things along the shoreline and stuffing them into a little bag. She saw her now, skipping along, singing to herself and playing in the waves. She stopped to look at Thea with a curious tilt of the head. Her hair was the same as Thea’s: red and wavy albeit more tangled. Her eyes were the same blue but appeared bigger on a smaller face. She waved to Thea with a smile that revealed some distinguishing missing teeth appropriate for her age. Thea gently raised a hand to wave back. The little girl skipped into the waves and vanished from sight. Thea watched in disbelief and blinked. “At any moment now you’re going to reveal to me that I’ve been living under an enchantment,” she said quietly. She was looking at him again. He hadn’t seemed to notice the girl. “You’re going to explain what’s going on. You’re going to tell me why I suddenly woke up from years of sleep and felt alive for the first time.” She looked him dead in the eye. “You’re going to tell me why this has happened.”
Derrien took a deep breath. “I think you know why.”
“I want you to tell me.” She dropped the shell onto the sand. “I need to hear the words come from your mouth.”
Derrien stared at her, unable to speak. His eyes were glassy as he bit his top lip.
“Tell me it was all a dream. Tell me I’m imagining it.” Her eyes filled with tears. The anger was rising in her voice. “Tell me it’s not real.”
He said nothing and instead, looked into the distance. “I can’t tell you that.”
“You will tell me what I have a right to know.” She squared up to him. “I have a right…” she held her hand to her mouth. The sickness in her stomach lurched but she suppressed it with deep breaths. “I have a right to know.”
“Thea–”
“Please! You’ve lied to me all of my life. If you love me, you’ll tell me the truth.” he opened his arms and she fell into them, sobbing into his shoulder. He held her there for a moment with tears falling from his own eyes. His bottom lip trembled uncontrollably.
“I did what any father would do,” he said. “Please understand that.”
“You murdered Shona Lennox.”
“You understand why though, surely?”
“I do,” she sobbed. “But it doesn’t make this right.”
“It doesn’t,” he agreed.
“How long have you had this power?”
“Since… since after Shona’s death.” Derrien said. “It grows stronger every day.” She pulled away from him and readjusted her shawl. “I feel that I am no longer in control of it.”
“Promise me that you won’t harm them.”
“But they deserve to—”
“No, father. They don’t. You know that this is madness.”
“For what they did to us?”
“What they did was wrong,” she began. “But I think you have tormented them enough.”
“It will never be enough,” he snapped. “They sent us out here to die, Thea. Marooned in this strange place. Shona lost her mind, Thea! She tried to kill us all.” He ran his hands over his balding head. “She poisoned the drinking water! Do you know how long it took for me to fix that? She wanted us all dead.” He brushed what little hair he had back, away from his shoulders. “She let her husband throw himself off those cliffs, there. He fell prey to the madness here and she did nothing. She did nothing.” He looked at the looming, dark sky. “She didn’t care who lived or died and she needed us out of the way. She wanted all the power for herself.”
“It wasn’t like that.” Thea pleaded. “She was trying to protect us. Shona was your best friend–”
“Don’t you tell me what Shona Lennox was to me,” he scowled. Darker clouds began to roll in, bringing with them taller, fiercer waves. They crashed against the rocks with a deafening break. Thea stepped back slightly in subservience.
“She said there were more of R.E.L’s kind coming. She said they’d kill us all and she was lying. She lied so we’d let her kill us. She tried to kill her own son, Thea.” His voice was loud and carried across the sweeping winds, echoing off the cliff sides. Thea looked around in bewilderment. She did not recognise the man who stood before her. The spray from the sea spat in her eyes as she tried to keep her focus on him. “I had to protect my family!”
“You don’t know that my uncle tried to kill you.”
“Why else would we be here, Thea?”
“Please,” she grabbed his arms. “Please let them go.”
The raging winds grew stronger, chasing the gulls away with a nip on their tail feathers. Thea struggled against the wet sand holding her feet in place and felt that she was the only creature left on the beach, cowering in the shadow of her father. “They will never leave this place,” he vowed. “I will not allow it!” Lightning crashed against the trees on the clifftops; trees burned helplessly into blackness, rocks slid from the edges and crashed into the sea. Thea wrapped her shawl around her head, attempting to secure the strands of hair that whipped her eyes in the wind. Black clouds swirled into a cyclone above the island.
“And what of me? Can I go?” she shouted. Heavy, pelting rains thrashed against their skin. Despite her fear, Thea stared hard into her father’s face, approaching him slowly. “Or would you kill us both, too?” He did not seem to hear her. She waved her arms in frustration. “Kill us both too then!” Her rage consumed her, bubbling in her gut and pulsing through her veins. She pushed him backwards with a cry.
His eyes rolled back into his head and he fell to the ground with a sudden loss of consciousness. Thea, on seeing that the waves were coming in to claim his body, dragged him out of the shallow waters and over to the sand dunes. The dry sand flew in all directions, blinding her and choking her as she attempted to breathe. “Stop it, father!” she cried. “Stop this now!” She shook his slack head and shoulders violently on the sand. She could not hear if he was breathing over the howling winds and heavy rain. “Stop it!” she screamed.
His body sat bolt upright immediately as he took a shuddering deep breath. With his exhale, the clouds instantly dispersed, taking the rain and wind with them. The tide was dying back. He groaned and held his head in his hands.
“Shona had the power.” He said matter of factly. His wide, dumbfounded eyes found Thea. “It drove her mad.”
He thought of the moment he came into the garden and saw Shona, right before he strangled her in a rage. He remembered her bulging eyes and hanging jaw. He wept into his hands. Thea stood over him.
“If this power is what you say it is, we need to leave,” she said, removing her shawl and tying it around her shoulders. “How are we going to get out of here?” She thought of Geraint’s shuttle at the bottom of the loch. She didn’t know how deep it was but she suspected it was a lost cause. She started to panic.
“I have a ship,” Derrien said quietly.
“What?”
“I have a ship. An old one. It’s hidden in the caves.”
She grabbed him by the collar in a fury that surprised her most of all. “You have had a ship this entire time…” she hissed, “and you didn’t tell me?”
He looked at her with large, sad eyes. Despite herself, she pitied him immediately. “The father I had once looked up to is dead,” she said with a hollowness in her voice. “This pathetic excuse for a man is all I have left to work with.” She let him go gently.
“We have a ship. We can go now. Right now,” he said, clambering up to his feet.
“No.” She held up a finger to silence him. “Not right this second. I’m not going anywhere until you let the others go,” she said sternly. “And I’m not going anywhere without Jet.”
“Thea, Jet… he…”
“What?”
“He’ll never be able to come with us,” Derrien said, rubbing his temples. The late afternoon sun was glowing from behind the light cloud now. The wet sand shimmered with long streaks of white tidemarks. The gulls coasted overhead on the calm winds, shrieking in delight.
“He can,” she said indignantly, “I will speak with him. I can tell him everything.” She helped him to stand.
Journal of D. Victor Smith- August 10th, 2306
God forgive me. I had to do it.
She could not be helped. I took her neck in my hands and I crushed her windpipe like it was a paper straw. Life and death and everything I thought I knew about it, disappeared. She nearly killed me. I stare at my hands every day. It’s as though it wasn’t me who did it. It wasn’t me who did it.
The Derrien I was is not the Derrien I am now. This environment has demanded change. She will forgive me.
Shona Lennox always was and always will be my best friend. I miss her face. I miss her jokes, I miss the way she teased me and knocked me down a peg or two, but I stood over that Shona’s body and I was glad she was dead. She became a monster. The witch is dead.
Forgive me. I do not mean to speak ill of the dead but she tried to kill her own son. She very nearly did! Fine, kill me and Thea but her own child? Her own flesh and blood? I would never do that. I couldn’t let it happen, either.
It’s just me and Thea now.
Jet is gone. He doesn’t know the truth. He wouldn’t listen. He’s somewhere out there. He’ll have to come back when he can’t find his own food.
Chapters 1-5| Chapter 6 |Chapter 7| Chapter 8| Chapter 9|Chapter 10| Chapter 11| Chapter 12|Chapter 13| Chapter 14|Chapter 15|Chapter 16| Chapter 17| Chapter 18|