The Shape It Left Behind

“Sometimes it’s not the body that undoes you. It’s the space beside it where someone should be.”

As we walked into the camp, a shudder ran through me—not the dainty kind, not cinematic. This one rooted itself deep, somewhere in the base of my spine, and spread outwards like a low, deliberate tremor. The kind your body registers before your mind can name the reason.

Then I saw it.

Splayed in the dust like an accusation was a shadow panther. Its body sprawled awkwardly beside the fire pit, half in ash, half in ochre, as if even in death it refused to lie still. The great thing had collapsed with a kind of violent finality—limbs at odd angles, fur matted with blood now crusted to near-black. A gash opened its belly in a grim grin, thick and surgical, the sort of wound that speaks of precision rather than panic. The blood hadn’t soaked in so much as claimed the dirt around it—leaving the ground darkened, corrupted, as though the very earth had recoiled from the touch.

I couldn’t look away.

The fire nearby popped softly, a single ember leaping skyward in lazy defiance. No one moved to stoke it. The air felt… brittle. Like the camp was holding its breath, unwilling to breathe the same air as the thing that now lay broken in its midst.

And beneath all that—the stillness, the stink of blood, the residual heat—you could feel it. That terrible, cloying absence.

Something was missing.

Someone.

A dreadful thought crept up the back of my throat like bile. It didn’t announce itself; it didn’t have to.

Who's dead?

The question struck with such force it physically staggered me. I slowed, the ochre dust curling up around my feet as if trying to hold me back from the answer.

Grief hadn’t caught up yet. But it was coming.

I turned to Paul. His silhouette had stiffened beside me, that reliable outline of him seeming a little less grounded now, as though whatever had shaken this place had cracked even his foundations.

"Where's Jamie?" I asked, my voice more thread than sound, the knot in my stomach twisting tighter, coiling around ribs. Of all the outcomes my mind had conjured, his absence felt the sharpest. My breath caught as I braced for an answer I didn’t want.

"Probably still near the river behind the tents," Paul said. His voice was soft—too soft. It floated rather than landed, the edges rounded off by something heavy. Grief. Or the beginning of it.

He stopped walking.

The motion was so small, so ordinary, that it took me a beat to realise he wasn’t moving with me anymore. He just… halted, as if the thought of going any further was too much. As if to walk past that monster, past the weight of what had happened, was something his boots refused to consent to.

I stopped too, one foot still half-raised, unsure whether to stay still or run.

The campfire crackled again, indifferent. And the silence thickened.