4338.207 · July 26, 2018 AD
Paradise Carries Its Dead
The water is impossibly blue. The landscape belongs on a postcard. And floating face-down in the crystal shallows is a young man with his throat cut ear to ear. Kain's first hour in Clivilius teaches him that panic doesn't pause for permission, that bodies are heavier than they look, and that even paradise has learned to carry its dead.
There's what you expect from a new world, and then there's a murdered stranger floating past while you're still learning to breathe.
The bark draws them running — Henri's sharp, urgent cry cutting through the strange stillness. Kain follows on legs that barely remember how to work, cresting dunes that fight him with every step. The camp materialises below: canvas tents, a ribbon of blue water, and figures clustered at the river's edge around something that used to be a person.
For one terrible moment, the dark hair and familiar build make Kain's heart stop. But it's not Uncle Jamie. The relief lasts exactly as long as it takes to register the ruined throat, the grey skin, the eyes staring at nothing. Then the panic hits — real panic, the kind that steals breath and blurs vision and leaves you shaking while the world keeps moving without you.
The body floats away while Kain loses time. The others chase it downstream. And when the scream tears through camp, Glenda runs toward it while Kain lies curled in the dust, trying to remember why any of this matters.
Duke finds him there. The little Shih Tzu's cold nose against his hand is the first familiar thing since Luke's kitchen, and sometimes familiar is enough to make you stand. The dunes are murder on exhausted legs, but the view from the top stops him cold — rolling waves of rust and gold, scattered rocks like bones, and that impossible lagoon sitting like a jewel in the emptiness. Beautiful. Heartbreakingly beautiful.
Uncle Jamie is there, alive but distant, his eyes holding none of the warmth Kain grew up expecting. There's no time for reunions. The body has been recovered, and it needs carrying back to camp. Kain takes the legs because Glenda is struggling, and discovers that dead weight is heavier than living — in every way that matters.
The young man's face is half a metre from his own the whole way back. Grey skin. Empty blue eyes. A throat that tells a story nobody wants to read. He couldn't have been much older than Kain. Should have been at uni, complaining about his parents, living an ordinary life.
Instead, he's being carried through paradise by strangers who don't know his name.
