The Dead Man

“Some rivers carry water. Others carry warnings.”

Henri stood at the riverbank not far from the tents, his stance rigid, tail low and ears pinned back. His barks were sharp and insistent, slicing through the calm like warning shots. There was nothing playful in his tone—only alarm. Paul, with his back to us, was a hunched figure of urgency next to Henri, crouched low and leaning over something—or someone—that I couldn't quite see from where I stood. My pulse spiked.

My pace quickened instinctively, each step pulled forward by a cocktail of dread and adrenaline. Something was wrong. Very wrong. That creeping sensation in my stomach—the kind that whispers before your brain catches up—had already unfurled its tendrils through my chest.

As I neared, the scene snapped into clarity like a terrible photograph I would have given anything to unsee. A young man lay face down in the river, his body unnaturally still. The water moved around him with cold indifference, nudging him gently as if in mockery, lulling him into a final sleep. His limbs floated with eerie calm, but it was his feet that struck the most jarring note—shoes trapped against a jagged rock near the bank.

My breath caught, my body turning to ice as the full reality sank in. For a heartbeat, the world narrowed—just the glint of water, the weight of dread, and the sickening sense that we might be too late.

Luke’s voice broke through the silence, sharp and high with tension. "Paul, what's going on?"

Paul's response tore through the air. "Help me!" he shouted, the edge of panic unmistakable. His voice cracked under the strain, stripped bare of composure. "Hurry! He needs help."

Luke didn’t hesitate. He was already moving, feet pounding the riverbank as he dropped to his knees beside Paul. I remained frozen for a moment, my mind wrestling to reassert control, to move my limbs, to be useful.

Paul extended his reach across the water, hands clamped desperately around the young man's waist, trying to roll him free. The act was part instinct, part defiance—a refusal to let this life slip away without a fight. The water fought back, its current pushing and pulling in hypnotic rhythm, uncaring.

The river's edge felt like a threshold—not just between land and water, but between life and something else entirely. I forced myself forward, boots crunching on the grit. Paul’s silhouette blurred for a second as he slid down into the river without pause, the fabric of his clothes darkening instantly, his expression one of grim determination.

I quickened my pace again, the ground falling away beneath my feet with each urgent step.

"Help me roll him," Paul's voice cut through the tension, taut with urgency. It was a command, yes—but also a cry for support, raw and desperate, carrying the weight of too many unknowns.

Without hesitation, I turned to Luke, planting a firm hand against his left shoulder. The pressure I applied was more than physical—it was a shared understanding. Go. Now. He met my gaze with a nod, the flicker of resolve flashing in his eyes before he waded forward, water lapping around his legs as he positioned himself across from Paul.

The river, which just moments ago had seemed so indifferent, now felt charged—as though aware of the life it might still hold in its grasp. The silence between us hummed with tension, each of us attuned to the other's movements.

"Go," Luke signalled, steady despite the weight of what we might find. "I've got him."

I crouched immediately, bracing myself against the current, my palms scraping over the slick, jagged stone beneath the stranger's feet. The cold bit through my skin, but I didn’t falter.

"Three. Two. One. Roll," I counted aloud, surprised by the control in my voice. My pulse thudded like a drum, but my hands moved with the focus born of necessity.

With a determined tug, I freed him—feet dragging across the rock as I pulled, breaking the river’s hold like snapping a chain. My arms strained, the muscles burning, but I didn’t stop. Not until he was clear.

Then came the voice that cut through the river's babble like a blade.

"Who the fuck is that?" Kain’s shout cracked the moment wide open, his panic rising like steam. His terror mirrored the jolt that spiked through me—because I didn’t know. That face, pale and unfamiliar, told no stories I recognised.

I've never seen this man before.

Paul’s answer, a low murmur almost swallowed by the rushing water, held the same emptiness. "No idea." He stared down at the young man as if the longer he looked, the more likely he was to remember. But there was no recognition, no flicker of understanding—just a stranger, limp and unmoving in our hands.

I swallowed, hard. My mind raced, scrambling to make sense of it. He didn’t arrive through the Portal. Had he? Was this some consequence of the planet itself, something native or… left behind?

Yet despite the unease twisting in my gut, a thin ribbon of hope unspooled. The presence of this stranger, unexplained as it was, meant we weren’t alone. That others might be out there. Survivors. People like us.

"Is he breathing?" The words left my mouth before I could stop them, propelled by that fragile, flickering hope. I didn’t care if they sounded naïve. I needed to ask.

"I don't think so," Luke replied, his voice low and grim, the weight of the moment sinking deeper around us.

My mind raced, thoughts colliding and dissolving before they could fully form, each one scrambling to outrun the next in a frantic search for a plan. "Quick. Bring him to shore," I urged, my voice taut with urgency, a command born of instinct. The healer in me surged forward, overriding the rising panic. There might still be a chance. There had to be. I wasn’t ready to surrender him to the river just yet.

"No," Paul replied.

The word landed like a slap.

"What?" I spun to face him, my voice sharp with disbelief, the single syllable cracking through the air like a snapped branch.

"I don't think it will help," he said, softer now, almost apologetically, as though each word carried too much weight. "His throat has been slit."

The final word struck like a hammer. Slit. I felt it echo in my chest, slicing clean through the fog of action and landing deep in the pit of my stomach.

I gasped, hand flying to my mouth before I could stop it. The image flooded my mind—unbidden, horrific. A gaping wound. Red staining the water. How is that possible? My legs felt unsteady beneath me as reality twisted into something more sinister than anything I had prepared for.

"Fuck!" Kain’s voice exploded behind me, a raw pulse of the same disbelief and fear curdling in my own blood.

Still, something inside me resisted. "We should bring the body in anyway." My words came out hollow, almost robotic, driven more by principle than logic. I needed to do something. The idea of leaving him there—abandoned, discarded—was unbearable. He was human. He had been alive. That counted for something.

"What good will that do?" Luke shot back, and though his voice was calm, the pragmatism in it cut deeper than I'd expected. "If he's been murdered and someone comes looking for him, perhaps we shouldn't be the ones caught with his body."

His words sent a fresh chill through me. Not just because of what he said—but because he was right. I blinked, the edges of my vision tightening as the situation spiralled from tragedy into something far more dangerous. A body in our camp would be a beacon. A risk. A threat. It meant there was someone else out there. Someone violent. Someone who had been close enough to kill.

A tremor ran through me as I fought to keep control of my spiralling thoughts. I pressed the heel of my palm to my temple, trying to stem the rising pressure in my skull, the pounding panic that had begun to drown out all reason.

First dust storms and burns and now murder!

Clivilius—the strange, awe-inspiring world I’d heard about in my father’s stories—had always carried a tinge of danger. But he had painted it with the brushstrokes of wonder. A land of secrets, yes, but also of discovery and awe. What lay before me now felt nothing like that. This was not the adventure he’d promised.

It was something else entirely.

The weight of it pressed down on me, compressing my ribs until it was hard to breathe. My knees bent slightly, a protective reaction to the swell of dread in my chest.

We’re all going to die here.

The thought was sharp and unbidden, a cold whisper that slid through my mind like a knife. And though I fought it, resisted it, the grip it took was tight.

The illusion of safety was gone. And in its place stood something ruthless. Something real.

"I'm with Luke," Kain’s voice cut through the stillness like a blade, crisp and unwavering. It held none of the rage from earlier—just a stripped-down clarity that aligned him with Luke’s wary pragmatism. He was choosing caution, and the implications of that choice clanged like iron in the back of my mind.

"Yes," Paul added, his voice softer, more contemplative. His eyes lifted to mine, and in them I caught a flicker of something raw—grief, perhaps, or guilt. A silent plea passed between us, one I felt deep in my bones. "Regardless, he deserves a proper burial." His tone held a quiet dignity, a reverence that cut through the creeping dread like candlelight in a tomb. It reminded me of who we were—who we must remain—even in the face of brutality.

"Proper burial!" Luke scoffed. The sound was harsh, dismissive, but beneath it pulsed the same fear that gripped us all. It was easier to mock than admit that the dead man's presence had shaken something loose inside him too. "You don't even know the guy."

That didn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter. Death, violent and unexplained, demanded respect. And answers.

"If we bring him in, I can do a rough autopsy." The words scraped out of me, heavy and unwelcome, as though I were digging them from some stony place inside myself. They tasted bitter on my tongue—a necessary bitterness. I didn’t want this role. I hadn’t come here to cut into the dead. But if knowledge was the only thread between life and disaster, then I would follow it, scalpel in hand.

"Is that really necessary?" Luke asked, scepticism clouding his voice. It wasn’t anger—it was reluctance, dread dressed in practicality. "I think it's pretty obvious what happened to him."

I turned to him sharply, my look cutting the air between us. His doubt irritated me more than I expected. He knows better than I do the danger we’re in. He’d seen things. He had secrets. And still, he resisted the one thing that might offer us even a sliver of understanding.

"A rough autopsy might be able to tell us more of a story of how he met his fate," I said, my tone cool but resolute. The idea of cutting open a stranger beneath our makeshift sky churned my stomach, but the logic of it was unshakeable. We needed facts. Truths. Something solid to stand on in a world made of dust and speculation.

The words I didn’t say clung tightly to my ribs: Anything we can learn might help us survive.

I didn’t have the luxury of squeamishness. None of us did.

The horror of this place wasn’t just in the corpses it could leave behind—but in the ignorance that cloaked every corner of it. If we turned away from the truths buried in blood and sinew, we were choosing to walk blindfolded into a darkness that was already reaching for us.

This was the line we walked now—between mercy and necessity, compassion and calculation. One foot in the dust, the other trembling over the edge of something far more ancient and unforgiving.

And we would have to find a way to keep our balance.

As Paul began to retch, his entire body convulsed with the force of it, and an instinctive jolt of concern surged through me. I half-stepped forward before remembering the river stood between us—a stretch of water that might as well have been a canyon. Cold, shifting, and indifferent, it cut off any hope of immediate aid. I could only stand there, rooted to the spot, helpless and stricken, watching him buckle under the weight of shock and revulsion.

The scene before me unfolded like something torn from a nightmare—too grotesque to be real, too vivid to be denied. The peaceful ripple of the river, once serene, had turned cruel in its contrast to the human suffering now unravelling at its edge. Paul's body jolted as vomit erupted from his mouth, a visceral rejection of the horror we had all just confronted. His legs gave way beneath him, and for a heart-stopping second, it looked as though he might collapse entirely into the water. His arms windmilled, desperate for stability that the slippery stones and current refused to offer.

Across from him, Luke’s face transformed in an instant—from focused effort to startled alarm, his features draining of colour. The body he'd been gripping slipped from his grasp as though scalding, and in the same breath, Luke lost his footing. The splash as he fell was sharp, violent—a sound that cut straight through me.

"No!" The scream tore from my throat, raw and useless, rising into the sky as though volume could reverse time.

Both Paul and Luke vanished beneath the surface for a breathless beat, swallowed by the river’s silty embrace. My heart seemed to stop alongside them.

Then, with a wet gasp and the thrashing of limbs, they re-emerged—faces slick with water, hair plastered down, lungs greedily sucking in air. Relief flooded through me so quickly it left me dizzy.

"Where's the body?" Paul’s voice cracked through the silence, rough and disoriented. He looked around wildly, his eyes wide, jaw slack. The disbelief in his voice was unmistakable, mirrored in the anxious tension coiled in Luke’s body as the two men stared at each other, drenched and dumbfounded.

"Shit," I whispered, the word barely audible over the lap of the river, but it was all I could manage. I scanned the water’s surface, frantic, but it was gone.

The body—that boy—had vanished.

The wave created by their fall must have unmoored him completely, snatching him from the shallows and hurling him into the deeper current like a plaything. He was lost to us now, claimed by the river’s indifferent hands, as if the land itself had decided that his story was not ours to read.

A cold weight settled in my chest. The body that might have held answers had been carried away, and with it, a piece of our already tenuous grasp on control.

"Where's Jamie?" Luke's voice was edged with panic, slicing through the thick air like a blade. The urgency in his tone startled me—it felt jarring, almost absurd, to hear Jamie’s name invoked at a moment like this, with the river still licking the banks as if in triumph and our nerves raw from the body’s disappearance.

"He went for a walk to the lagoon," I responded automatically, the words catching oddly in my throat. They sounded misplaced, too ordinary amidst the chaos, as if I'd replied to a question about breakfast rather than the potential implications of a body adrift in foreign water.

"Lagoon?" Luke echoed, his mind clearly trying to reorient itself around this new, pressing variable.

"Downstream," Paul's reply came, curt and breathless.

"Shit," Luke muttered, his face draining of colour as his gaze flicked sharply to the river. I watched the shift in his eyes—something had clicked. The body, the direction of the current, Jamie’s whereabouts—suddenly, the calculus had changed. Alarm was replaced by cold clarity.

"We need to retrieve that body, now!" Luke's declaration rang out, sharp and commanding, his earlier caution abandoned without ceremony. The words struck me like a slap, and I blinked, startled by the abruptness of his reversal.

"But... but you just said..." Paul started, still wet and shivering, struggling to keep pace with the logic that had just done a complete about-face.

"Forget what I just said. You were right. We are better off keeping the body," Luke snapped, cutting across Paul's words like a closing door. He was already moving, hauling himself up the riverbank in a flurry of limbs and mud, sprinting before any of us had a chance to catch our breath.

Paul, clearly still shaken, wiped at his mouth, his hand trembling slightly as it brushed away a stubborn speck of bile clinging to his lip.

"Go!" I barked, adrenaline sparking again as I turned to Kain and placed a hand on his arm to urge him forward. "Go!" But he jerked away violently.

"Fuck off!" he growled, spinning out of my reach, eyes blazing with defiance.

My jaw clenched as the sting of his words landed, but I didn’t have the luxury of offence—not now. I turned instead to Paul, who was already steadying himself on the embankment, soaked to the skin but driven by something stronger than discomfort.

"I'll go," he said, each syllable laced with determination. He stepped past Kain, who stood there frozen, fists clenched but unmoving.

"Introductions can wait," I said, my voice low but forceful. There was no room for debate. We were past diplomacy, past discussion. The only thing that mattered now was action—retrieving the body, protecting Jamie, and staying one step ahead of whatever terrible truths Clivilius was trying to throw at us.

Paul didn’t wait. He brushed past Kain with silent resolve and broke into a run, feet pounding against the ground, the rhythm of his urgency echoing through the stillness that had fallen once more.

I stood in the wake of it all—drenched figures, fleeing bodies, cold water receding—and felt the full weight of our fractured world pressing in. Everything was precarious: our safety, our morality, our unity. And though none of us spoke it aloud, we all felt the truth burn in our chests. The line between survival and savagery was growing thinner by the hour, and we had no choice but to walk it.

"Are you okay?" My voice emerged steady, almost unnaturally so given the thundering pulse in my ears. I reached out instinctively, placing a firm hand on Kain’s shoulder—something solid, something grounding. He flinched at the contact, his muscles tensing beneath my palm as though I’d snapped him out of a bad dream.

"I... I think so," he replied, though the uncertainty in his voice betrayed him. The edges of bravado he'd clung to earlier were crumbling. His breath hitched. Then, like a dam giving way, his composure failed him completely. "What the fuck is going on?" he cried, the words tumbling out in a raw, jagged sob as tears spilled down his cheeks—unchecked, unhidden. It wasn’t the question of someone seeking a factual answer. It was the howl of someone drowning in the incomprehensible.

I took a breath, deep and slow, steadying myself so I could steady him. I recognised the signs of shock, the wide eyes that seemed to see everything and nothing, the trembling hands, the erratic breaths. It had hit me too, once—but Kain’s version of Clivilius was arriving with blood and bodies, and no softening preamble.

"Come," I said gently, slipping into the voice I used with patients on the verge of collapse. I softened the urgency behind the word, tried to make it feel like safety, like direction. "I think you're in shock." Of course he was. Who wouldn’t be?

His nod was small, almost imperceptible, but it was enough. He allowed himself to be guided, one faltering step at a time, a hand pressed to his brow as if trying to physically contain the thoughts racing inside his skull. The sun was already climbing, heating the air, and I could feel the tight dryness in my throat—though whether from emotion or dehydration, I wasn’t sure.

"Sit down for a while," I said, nudging aside the tent flap and guiding him beneath the relative shelter of its canopy. The inside smelled of sun-warmed canvas, dust, and faint traces of antiseptic from my earlier rummaging through the med kit. I gestured towards the bare patch of ground near Henri’s corner.

Kain sank as though his bones had suddenly become too heavy to hold. He didn’t so much sit as fold, knees pulled in, arms limp across them. His entire frame seemed to deflate, like a balloon untied and left to collapse. The strength he'd shown earlier—anger, defiance, movement—was gone, leaving only quiet devastation in its place.

"Here, drink this. Probably nearly all of it," I offered, unscrewing the lid of a sealed bottle of spring water and holding it out. There was something sacred in the act, like a rite of grounding. Drink. Breathe. Sit.

He took it with both hands, fingers trembling, and raised it to his lips. He drank like he’d forgotten what thirst felt like—long, urgent gulps that moved his throat with rhythmical desperation. A quiet 'thanks' might’ve passed his lips, or maybe it was just the sound of breath. Either way, he lowered the bottle, eyes closing, and dropped his face into his palms.

I watched him for a moment, heart aching with something I couldn’t quite name. Sympathy? Protective instinct? The sheer weight of too much, too fast?

My gaze drifted to Henri, curled up at the corner of the mattress as though none of this touched him. The dog was the embodiment of calm. He blinked lazily, his head resting atop one paw, occasionally twitching his nose at a drifting mote of dust. In that moment, Henri was peace incarnate—a quiet pillar in the storm. I envied him.

Then a scream shattered the stillness.

Not a startled yelp. Not a cry for help. A scream. Blood-curdling, sharp, and high—ripped from lungs and soul alike. It sliced through the air like a knife, raw and primal, and something inside me snapped into gear.

My muscles surged into motion before thought could intervene. I shot to my feet, heart slamming into overdrive, my legs carrying me out of the tent and into the thick morning air. The dust rose around me, swirling in chaotic spirals with every pounding footfall. It filled my nostrils, stung my eyes, but I didn’t slow.

There was no time.

The scream came from downstream. From the direction of the lagoon. From Jamie.

The earth itself felt reluctant to let me pass, each step like wading through resistance. But I forced my way through it, cutting through the rising haze of dust, fear and heat, desperate to reach whoever had screamed—to reach Jamie—before the river, or Clivilius, claimed something else.