We Mourn in Shifts

“Grief doesn’t knock. It just moves in and rearranges the furniture while you’re too tired to stop it.”

The camp, which had been eerily silent for what felt like an eternity, suddenly stirred to life. Voices rose up in staggered bursts, a discordant symphony of relief, shock, and the raw tremble of unresolved fear. Their return was not triumphant—it was ragged, breathless. Survivors recounting horrors they barely understood, their words overlapping and tangled like brittle twigs in the wind. The stillness that had cloaked the night cracked and splintered under the weight of their presence, and the delicate hush that had wrapped itself around me and Jamie was gone.

The air itself seemed to bristle with tension. Every footfall and fragmented sentence that drifted over from the tents sent small jolts through my body, as though the world had been reanimated but hadn't yet remembered how to breathe normally. It was like standing in the aftermath of a storm, where everything remained suspended, brittle, waiting for the next strike.

Chris gave me a brief look before he turned to go—a glance that was fleeting but loaded. It said everything we didn’t have the space to say aloud. I caught it and held it, a thread between us that pulled tight as he walked away. He hesitated, just for a breath, his back to me. That small pause was like a promise: I won’t be long. I’ll be back. You’re not alone.

And then he was gone.

I didn’t follow. I couldn’t. My body was rooted in the dust, as if moving might break something delicate and irreparable. My eyes remained fixed on Jamie. He hadn’t so much as flinched. The torchlight behind him painted his edges in a soft, orange haze, but it did nothing to soften the hollow curve of his shoulders or the way he stared blankly at the river, his focus somewhere unreachable.

There was something spectral about him now—less a man, more a shell left behind. His grief wasn’t loud. It was deep and endless, a silent scream that echoed inside itself. I recognised it. That blank stare, that unreachable distance. I’d seen it in the mirror once, not so long ago.

Jamie was still there physically, but I knew, in the way that only grief allows you to recognise in others, that part of him had followed Duke into the dark.

As I watched over him, a silent sentinel in the suffocating darkness, I tried to drown out the clamour rising from the camp behind me. Voices clashed like loose shutters in a storm—urgent, rattling, disconnected. The scraping of boots on hard-packed dust, the snapping of tent flaps caught by the wind, murmurs of confusion and tired relief—all of it merged into a distant hum, an indistinct current of white noise. But none of it could cut through the tempest that churned restlessly inside me.

Jamie's pain was not just visible—it was ambient. It saturated the air, thick and choking, an invisible fog of heartbreak that seemed to cling to everything it touched. I could almost feel it pressing against my skin. He hadn’t moved for what felt like hours, his grief so absolute it seemed to warp the space around him. A black hole of sorrow pulling everything inwards.

The questions circling in my head refused to be silenced. What had attacked us? What had triggered Duke’s panic, his injuries, the chaos that scattered us like leaves on a gale? The puzzle pieces were jagged and mismatched, their edges cutting every time I tried to make sense of them. And beneath all that confusion squatted a deeper, more primal terror—that something still waited out there, just beyond the perimeter of torchlight. Watching. Waiting.

My eyelids began to droop, the burn of exhaustion setting in with cruel persistence. Each blink grew heavier, slower. The torch beside me flared and hissed softly, its flame playing strange theatre across the sand and the river, its warm light casting distorted silhouettes that danced like ghosts across the banks. The rhythmic flicker began to pull at my focus, drawing me into a lulling cadence that both comforted and disturbed. Like a lullaby sung at a funeral.

I fought to stay upright, to stay alert—to be a bastion for Jamie. But my body betrayed me. My limbs slackened. My spine curved. With a sigh I hadn’t realised I’d been holding, I curled into myself on the cool, dusty ground, feeling the chill seep into my clothes even as weariness numbed my senses.

It was like sinking. Not into sleep exactly—but into a state of in-between. Half-aware, half-lost. Darkness crept into my thoughts with long fingers, blurring their edges, softening the ache just enough to let go. The noises from the camp receded, the night wrapped itself tighter, and in those last fleeting moments of wakefulness, I caught a final glimpse of Jamie.

He sat as he had all night—motionless, hollowed out by loss—framed by the guttering light like a figure carved from grief itself. That image seared itself behind my eyelids.

Then came the plunge. My mind slipped beneath the surface, into a murky realm of fitful dreams. Shadows slithered at the edges, voices whispered half-formed warnings, and the night refused to loosen its grip. In Clivilius, even sleep was not a sanctuary.

The sudden jolt of Chris shaking me awake tore me from the tenuous grasp of a light, yet restless sleep—a plunge back into the waking world that felt almost violent in its abruptness. My dreams had been muddled shadows, incoherent images chasing one another through a fog of sorrow and dread, and now they scattered like startled birds at the sound of his voice.

"Come on," Chris said, crouched beside me, his tone gentle but insistent, his hand still on my shoulder. "Let's get you back to the tent."

His words tugged me toward the present, away from the mire of dream-thoughts and aching limbs. I blinked rapidly, trying to clear the cobwebs from my mind, though they clung stubbornly to the edges of my consciousness. The torchlight had burned lower, its flicker casting long, restless shadows that swayed and bent with the whisper of wind.

I turned my head stiffly and found Jamie still seated at the river's edge, unmoving, a silhouette sculpted in sorrow. He hadn’t shifted an inch. The gentle lap of the river sounded almost like a lullaby now, cruel in its indifference, as if mocking the rawness of his grief with its eternal calm. His figure was so still, so fused with the darkness, that he looked less like a man and more like a relic left behind by some ancient tragedy.

His silence tugged at me like a hand around my wrist. I wanted to reach out, to say something that might lift even the smallest part of the weight crushing his soul—but there were no words left. Not tonight. Nothing I could offer would pierce that cocoon of grief wrapped so tightly around him.

"Okay," I murmured at last, the word rasping from my throat, sandpaper rough with exhaustion. It felt like admitting defeat. I reached up to rub my forehead, fingers pressing against the tight ache nestled behind my eyes. My face felt older than it had that morning—worn, sunken with the kind of fatigue that sleep alone could never cure.

As I rose to my feet, my joints protested, stiffened by cold and crouched vigil. A dull throb pulsed in my knees and lower back, reminders of how long I’d sat motionless, keeping watch. I staggered slightly, my balance slow to return, as though even my own body had grown uncertain in this strange and punishing place.

As Chris and I made our way back to the tent, the camp lay draped in an eerie quiet, a silence that felt unnatural, oppressive. It wasn't the peace that comes with rest but rather the hush of something broken—like the world itself had paused, breathless, waiting for the next blow to fall. The wind whispered through the settlement in hushed tones, brushing against fabric, rattling loose canvas, but even it seemed cautious, reluctant to disturb the fragile stillness left in tragedy’s wake.

In the distance, a few scattered voices murmured—soft, indistinct, the low tones of people too tired to raise their volume. Their words were swallowed by the night, rendered meaningless against the enormity of what had just transpired. Each step Chris and I took felt oddly amplified in the quiet, the crunch of disturbed dust beneath our boots crackling like broken glass underfoot.

My thoughts churned behind tired eyes—a storm of grief, unease, fear, and unanswered questions—but exhaustion sat heavily over it all, like a thick woollen blanket smothering a flame. It dulled the sharp edges of anxiety, muffled the questions clawing at my mind, offered me the first mercy I’d known in hours.

We reached the tent and ducked inside, our movements slow, the unspoken weariness between us forming a bubble of understanding. As we settled into our sleeping bags, I exhaled a breath I hadn’t realised I’d been holding. The fabric rustled softly around me, and though the tent offered little more than paper-thin protection from the unknowns outside, it felt like a sanctuary. A false one, maybe—but a sanctuary nonetheless.

Chris shifted beside me, his voice breaking the quiet in a low, tentative murmur. I couldn’t make out his words at first, but his tone carried the weight of wanting to process, to talk through it all—perhaps to make sense of what sense could be salvaged. Or maybe he simply didn’t want to feel alone in the darkness, to let the silence claim us completely.

But I couldn’t do it. Not now. Not yet.

“Chris, I'm exhausted,” I said, cutting across him more sharply than I intended. My voice was flat, brittle with the fatigue that gnawed at my bones. “Let's talk in the morning.”

The space between us stretched quiet again. No protest, no disappointment—just an understanding silence. I didn’t need to look to know he’d heard me, that he’d accepted it. The tragedy of the night had emptied me out, scooped me hollow. I was nothing but ache and tired breath, clinging to the last edge of wakefulness.

As I lay back, closing my eyes, I felt the darkness creep over me—not with malice, but with indifference. The world didn’t care how we suffered. But for now, I let it take me. Sleep rose up like a tide, and I let it pull me under.