Thin Walls

"Worst part wasn't what I did. Worst part was lying there listening to them laugh around the fire, knowing I used to be someone who could sit with them."

The camp appeared on the horizon like a judgement.

I'd spent several minutes face-down in the sand, breathing dust and shame in equal measure. But eventually I'd found the strength to stand. To walk. To put one foot in front of the other and pretend that I was still a person capable of existing among other people.

The first thing I noticed was that my leg didn't hurt.

Not the way it had before. The constant screaming agony that had become my companion over the past day had faded to a dull murmur, a background hum rather than a symphony of suffering. When I'd fallen, I'd expected the wound to tear open again, expected fresh blood to soak through bandages that were already saturated. But when I'd finally gathered the courage to look, the gash had closed. Not completely healed — I could still see the angry red line where the shadow panther's teeth had torn through muscle — but sealed. Functional. The flesh knitting itself together with a speed that had no business being possible.

Clive had kept its end of the bargain.

The realisation brought no relief. No gratitude. Only a sick certainty that the price I'd paid would follow me for the rest of my life, however long or short that turned out to be.

The second thing I noticed was the fires.

They ringed the camp's perimeter like a necklace of flame — small blazes positioned at regular intervals, their orange glow creating a barrier of light against the encroaching darkness. The sight stopped me in my tracks, my exhausted brain struggling to process this new development. We hadn't had these when I'd left. Someone had built them in my absence, had turned our makeshift settlement into something that looked almost like a defended position.

Almost like people were actually trying to survive here.

"Where's Chris?"

Karen's voice hit me like a physical blow.

I turned to find her standing a few metres away, her expression expectant, her eyes already scanning the landscape behind me as if she expected to see her husband following in my wake. The question was casual, innocent, the kind of query any wife might make about her spouse's whereabouts.

It nearly dropped me to my knees.

My face went rigid, muscles tensing with the effort of maintaining composure. I couldn't meet her eyes. Couldn't look at this woman whose husband I'd just assaulted, whose marriage I'd violated in ways she would never understand unless Chris chose to tell her. And even then — what could he say? What words existed to describe what had happened at that lagoon?

"He decided to stay at the lagoon a little longer," I heard myself say.

The lie came out smooth. As if some survival instinct had taken control of my vocal cords and produced exactly the response that would buy me time, would delay the reckoning that I knew was coming.

Karen's eyes narrowed, something flickering in their depths that might have been suspicion or might have been simple concern. "I'll go and fetch him," she declared.

She turned on her heel and strode away before I could respond, her figure growing smaller as she headed in the direction I'd just come from. Toward the lagoon. Toward Chris. Toward a truth that would destroy everything if it ever came to light.

My mind spun with possibilities, each one worse than the last. What would happen when she found him? Would he tell her? Would he remember? Had his wounds healed like mine, or would he be lying there bleeding, unconscious, evidence of my crimes written across his broken body?

A sickening thought surfaced, pushing everything else aside: Would Clive make the same demands of Chris that it had made of me?

The notion filled my mouth with the taste of old pennies, metallic and wrong. I gagged, barely managing to swallow down the bile that rose in my throat. If Clive started whispering to Chris, started making demands, started pulling the same strings that had turned me into a monster...

I couldn't think about it. Couldn't let myself spiral down that particular hole of horror, not while I was still standing in the open where anyone might see my face and read the guilt that was surely written there.

Paul and Nial were huddled near the main bonfire. I forced myself to walk toward them, to adopt the posture of someone who had nothing to hide, to become the wounded survivor returning from a healing session rather than the criminal fleeing the scene of his crime.

"What's with all the extra fires?" I asked, my voice steadier than it had any right to be.

Paul's face was etched with worry, lines I hadn't noticed before cutting deep grooves around his eyes and mouth. "We had to set them up," he explained, gesturing toward the ring of flames that surrounded us. "We need to increase our visibility and security after what happened. We can't risk another attack."

The logic was sound. Shadow panthers hunted in darkness, and fire meant light, and light meant we might see the next assault coming before teeth found flesh. But even as I nodded my understanding, a more practical concern surfaced through the fog of guilt that clouded my thoughts.

"It's going to consume a lot of wood," I observed, my eyes tracking the hungry flames as they devoured their fuel.

Wood was finite. We had supplies, yes — Beatrix had brought equipment through the portal — but maintaining this many fires around the clock would burn through our resources faster than I wanted to calculate. Days, maybe. Before we were back to darkness and vulnerability.

"I know," Paul acknowledged, his shoulders slumping with the weight of leadership he'd never asked to carry. "But we don't have much of a choice. Not until we can get more security in place."

My gaze shifted to Nial, who had remained silent throughout the exchange. He sat slightly apart from Paul, his eyes fixed on the dance of flames before him with the kind of empty stare that suggested his mind was somewhere else entirely. Back home, probably. With his wife. His toddler. The life he'd been ripped from and might never see again.

"This is why we need your help," I said, holding his gaze when he finally looked up. "We need to get those fences built as soon as possible."

The words felt hollow in my mouth. Practical concerns, survival logistics, the business of staying alive in a world that wanted us dead — it all seemed so distant now, so irrelevant compared to what I'd done at the lagoon. But this was how it worked, wasn't it? This was how monsters kept functioning. They talked about fences and fires and resource management while the blood on their hands slowly dried.

Nial's expression was a battlefield — reluctance warring with grim understanding, denial fighting acceptance. "I get it," he said finally, his voice heavy with exhaustion that went beyond physical tiredness. "But it's all so overwhelming. I have a wife and a toddler back home. I can't even begin to process all of this."

I know, I wanted to say. I have a fiancée. A daughter I've never met. A life I destroyed the moment I stepped through that portal.

But those words would lead to other words, to questions about why my eyes kept darting toward the dunes, why my hands wouldn't stop trembling, why I looked like a man who had just committed a crime too terrible to name. So I kept silent and let Paul handle the response.

"I know it's hard," Paul interjected, his hand finding Nial's shoulder. "But we're all in this together. And we need your skills and expertise to help us survive in this new world."

The optimism in his tone was almost painful to hear. Together. As if we were a team, a community, a group of people who could trust each other. As if one of us hadn't just—

I shut the thought down hard.

Movement at the edge of my vision made my heart stutter. Karen was returning from the direction of the lagoon, and beside her walked a figure I recognised even at this distance. Chris. Upright. Moving under his own power. Apparently intact, though I couldn't make out details at this range.

The relief and the terror hit simultaneously, tangling together in my chest until I couldn't breathe around the knot of conflicting emotions. He was alive. He was walking. But he was also coming back, coming toward the camp, coming to a place where he might see me and remember and open his mouth to tell everyone what I'd done.

I couldn't be here when he arrived.

"It's been a long day," I announced abruptly, the words tumbling out faster than I'd intended. "I'm going to turn in."

Paul's brows furrowed, surprise flickering across his features. "You're not going to eat with us?"

The thought of food made my stomach rebel. The thought of sitting around a fire with Chris, making small talk, pretending nothing had happened — it was more than I could bear. More than anyone should have to bear, though I supposed I'd forfeited the right to sympathy the moment I'd wrapped my hand around an unconscious man's cock.

"I'm not really hungry," I said, already backing away.

Paul shot me a sideways glance, his eyes searching my face for answers I wasn't ready to give. I could see the questions forming behind his expression, the concern that something wasn't quite right with the wounded man who'd returned from the lagoon looking more haunted than healed.

"Okay," he said at last, the single word carrying the weight of unspoken suspicions.

I nodded to Nial — a gesture of acknowledgment, of shared suffering, of nothing at all — and fled.

The tent walls were thin.

I'd known that, of course. But I'd never hated that thinness more than I did now, lying on my sleeping bag with my eyes fixed on the fabric above me, my body rigid with the effort of not screaming.

The conversations from around the campfire drifted in regardless of my wishes.

I heard Paul explaining the fire system to someone — Chris, probably, or maybe one of the others who'd been absent during my earlier conversation. I heard Karen's voice, lighter now than it had been when she'd asked about Chris, interspersed with the deeper tones of her husband. They were talking. Laughing, even, at one point. The sounds of people processing trauma in the only way humans knew how — through community, through connection, through the simple act of being together in the face of overwhelming darkness.

I lay alone in my tent and listened to a world I no longer deserved to be part of.

Then Karen's voice rose above the general murmur, clear enough that the words reached me with perfect clarity: "The clumsy bugger slipped on the rocks."

Simple words that should have brought relief, that should have loosened the knot in my chest and let me breathe again. Chris hadn't told her the truth. Had claimed an accident, a slip, a mishap that explained his injury without implicating me in anything more sinister.

But the relief wouldn't come.

Instead, the words tightened the knot further, added new threads of guilt and confusion to the tangle that had taken up residence behind my ribs. Why had Chris lied? What was he thinking right now, sitting around that fire with his wife, keeping my secret as if it were something precious rather than something poisonous?

Did he even remember what had happened? The head injury had been severe. Maybe consciousness had wiped the slate, maybe the trauma had erased those final moments and left only the plausible fiction of a clumsy fall. Or maybe he remembered everything and was choosing to protect me for reasons I couldn't begin to fathom.

Either way, I was complicit now. Bound to Chris by shared secrets and mutual silence, a partnership neither of us had asked for but both of us were trapped within.

What the hell have I done?

The question echoed through my skull, bouncing off the walls of my consciousness, finding no answer and no absolution. I had hurt an innocent man. Had violated his body while he lay unconscious and bleeding. Had done it because an entity in my head had demanded it, yes, but also because I'd been too weak to find another way, too desperate to sacrifice myself instead of someone else.

Brianne's face floated through my mind — her smile, her laugh, the way she'd looked at me when I'd proposed. She'd said yes to a man she thought she knew. A man who was kind, who was honest, who would never dream of doing what I'd just done.

That man didn't exist anymore.

Maybe he'd never existed at all. Maybe he'd just been a mask I'd worn, a costume I'd put on to navigate a world that didn't demand too much of him. This place — Clivilius, with its lagoons and its panthers and its ancient whispering entity — had stripped away the costume and revealed what lay beneath.

Something broken.

Something capable of monstrous things when pushed hard enough.

I rolled onto my side, facing the tent wall, and let the tears come.

They fell silently, tracing hot paths down my cheeks and soaking into the sleeping bag beneath me. I didn't sob, didn't make any sound that might alert the people outside to my collapse. I just lay there, leaking grief and shame and self-hatred into the fabric, and waited for sleep to take me somewhere the memories couldn't follow.

It was a long time coming.

Outside, the fires crackled and popped, pushing back the darkness for another night. Inside, I burned with a different kind of fire — one that consumed rather than protected, one that left nothing but ash in its wake.

I closed my eyes and prayed for oblivion.

It was the only mercy this place had left to offer.