Kaldalis wanted to cut right to the chase. He was here for a reason, and he’d wasted an unknown amount of the day being unconscious, and the sooner this was done, the sooner he could walk away from Ara and her ilk once and for all. Obviously, it seemed unwise to jump right to the matter at hand with Dalgaard, though. If Kaldalis skipped right to the idea of making peace, Dalgaard was going to turn around and walk right out the door.

Something about Dalgaard’s expression told him where to start, though. Their weary and wary tone and body language reminded Kaldalis of when they’d gone to talk to Martok. Kaldalis had, to a lesser degree, done the same thing to Martok as he’d done to Dalgaard. They both had gotten dragged along with him, suffered a traumatic experience, and then left behind.

Kaldalis had been blitzing through life at high speed without thinking clearly about what was going on in his wake. He’d been convinced that his pure intent outweighed his slapdash approach, but he’d been acting without object permanence. Martok and Dalgaard had ceased to exist as soon as they left his line of sight.

“I’m sorry,” Kaldalis began. “That’s the most important thing I need to say to you. I pulled you along into a mess you didn’t need to be in, you suffered an indescribable torture, and then I wasn’t there for you after it was over. That wasn’t okay. I’m sorry.”

Dalgaard seemed momentarily taken aback by that. Not floored or stunned or brought to tears, but genuinely surprised.

“Thank you,” Dalgaard said at last. “I know… I know you’re not a bad person, but I’ve spent this whole time thinking of you as a big-picture asshole. Putting the greater good above individual people.” They shook their head for a moment, gesturing vaguely out at the camp around them. “In the middle of all this, I didn’t expect you to think an apology was important enough to spend the time on.”

“I’ve been doing a lot of things the wrong way,” Kaldalis said, offering a smile. “I’m trying to be a better person. I haven’t had an opportunity to give you a proper apology, and I feel like if I don’t take the chance now, I might not get another one.”

“Mending your burnt bridges?” Dalgaard smirked. “So you need something from me?”

“I don’t care about the bridges,” Kaldalis said firmly. “I care about the people I left behind on the other side of them.”

“That’s not a no,” Dalgaard said, the smirk turning sour. They paused for a moment before shaking their head again. “I’m sorry. It’s been… I’ve been through a lot since the last time we’ve had a proper talk.”

“Well, I’m here now,” Kaldalis said, gesturing at the little shack that was to be his prison cell. “You got me as a captive audience, and I wouldn’t mind at all if you needed to vent a little.”

“You know how it started,” Dalgaard said bitterly. “And now that it’s over, I realize how easily you could guess at the rest. How foolish I was.”

“Yeah, but if you need to talk,” Kaldalis said, tentatively reaching out and putting a hand on Dalgaard’s shoulder. “I’m here. Even just to listen.”

Dalgaard heaved a sigh, moving to the room’s single cot and flopping down. Kaldalis found himself a bit of blank wall to lean against, giving them their space.

“Obviously, it started with Ara,” Dalgaard began. “I don’t- I… I don’t like talking about it.”

“Me, neither,” Kaldalis said quietly. “And I didn’t get it half so bad as you did.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Dalgaard grumbled. “After it was over, Monsoon came down on me. They blamed me for what Ara did to me. For the stream of it going out live, even though I couldn’t stop it if I had wanted to. They garnished my meager stream rewards, they suspended my stream for seven days as soon as the stream toggle was live.” They sighed heavily, and Kaldalis could hear the near-sob hitch in their chest for a moment. “They made her. They put her here, and made her do what she did. Monsoon violated me and then made me shoulder the blame.”

Kaldalis wanted to correct them. To tell them the truth about this world. But he stopped himself. All it would do is be a weak attempt to absolve Monsoon of responsibility, and Monsoon still deserved all the hate they could be given for putting the burden of consequence of an assault on the victim.

“And then you were gone. Off on your next whirlwind adventure. Left me to pick up the pieces of my shattered brain,” Dalgaard said. They wrapped their arms around themselves tightly. “That was when she found me. How she found me.”

“Onirioago,” Kaldalis guessed.

“Monsoon left me out to dry, and you basically vanished,” Dalgaard said. “She needed information that she knew I had, and she offered me something that Monsoon had just ripped out of my hands. Acceptance. Compensation. Someone to talk to.” They looked up at the ceiling with a heavy sigh. “Everyone was against me. She made me believe that so easily. You, Monsoon, everyone. The whole damned world was out to punish me for being a victim of a situation they put me in. She offered me protection. If I was on her team, then she and her people would be behind me, offering the support that everyone else had stripped away.”

“And then I took her away from you, too,” Kaldalis said with a grimace.

Dalgaard shook their head. “Not really. Not until later. I was her point of contact while she was in prison.”

Kaldalis grimaced. Again, everything came full circle. No wonder Onirioago’s escape attempt had been so successful. She’d recruited the most harmless-looking person on the island to act as her middle-management mastermind.

“Even after you did take her away, it only proved her right all over again,” Dalgaard continued. “Word got out that I had been working with her. All of us were made into pariahs, and everything Onirioago did to prime us to obedience came down twice as hard in her absence. Some of us were even so paranoid that we thought people were spying on us.” They laughed. “So ridiculous. As if we were some kind of cult or something.”

Kaldalis very pointedly kept his mouth shut. Courbois had been spying on them. And Kaldalis himself had thought of them as a cult more than once.

“I was in a little bubble, Kaldalis,” Dalgaard said, finally looking up at him. “I only spoke to the people I could trust because I’d been convinced that everyone else hated me. Everyone else wanted to destroy me for something that had happened to me that I couldn’t control. All I needed was one person to pop that bubble. To prove her wrong. To reach out and listen.”

“I’m sorry,” Kaldalis said. “I could have been that person, and I wasn’t. I just… No. There’s no excuse.” He sighed. “I failed you.”

“That’s… That’s a simplistic way of looking at it,” Dalgaard said, leaning back until their shoulders hit the wall behind the cot. “I wasn’t a damsel in distress. I had just gotten bullied into a corner. You’re not the only person out here, Kal, and you can’t take sole responsibility for everything bad that happens to anyone. And it’s not like it turned out badly. When I finally realized I was being paralyzed by paranoia, I started to turn things around. Onirioago promised me a path to killing Ara once and for all, and she had delivered it. I just needed to put the work in.”

Kaldalis nodded, trying to hide his grimace. Now they were getting to it. The actual matter at hand.

“I took control of Onirioago’s team pretty easily,” they continued. “They were used to getting their orders through me while Onirioago had been in prison, so they were already prepared to take commands from me directly.” They gestured vaguely out at the camp. “Obviously, it was hard to recruit more help, but once I had a cause to put behind them? Other people had been brutalized by the Jormongumo. They were easy to sell on the idea of taking care of them for the good of everyone.” They pressed their lips into a thin line. “I knew exactly how to do it. I’d been watching Onirioago spin her web, so all I had to do was mimic the motions. Find someone isolated. Find someone people trash talked. Find people who were aimless and needed a direction. And then just be a sympathetic ear. Feed their fears a little, and then offer them a group of understanding like-minded friends.”

“Are you…” Kaldalis began, but then stopped. “Are you okay now, though? You realize that everyone isn’t out to get you, right?”

“Yeah, of course,” Dalgaard said with a rueful smile. “Once I was the Onirioago, I realized that the fears she was feeding weren’t real. You were never my enemy, Kal. I know that. And she was never really my friend. I was just a tool. Just like these people are tools.” They waved dismissively around at the camp again. “But Onirioago built this group to make herself a queen. I’m doing good with them. The Jormongumo belong in horror stories, and I’m going to make sure that that’s the only place they’ll ever be found.”

Kaldalis couldn’t stop himself from frowning, and Dalgaard sat up, noticing. Dalgaard had been wronged, that much was true, but they didn’t have the whole picture. Kaldalis could fill in those blanks. But he wasn’t sure where this would end.

But, just like Dalgaard with their crusade, Kaldalis’s path had been laid before him. He just had to put the work in.

“Has anyone suggested,” Kaldalis began, tentatively, “that maybe total extermination is an slightly extreme course of action here?”