The morning after Abigail's accusations, Thorn woke up with an absolutely immense feeling of dread, and he was quite glad for the dark around him. It matched his mood perfectly, and the cold allowed him to dress in layers upon layers of frayed, black band merch. He was on his third cup of overly bitter coffee. Beneath his kitchen window, the lights of Slakshaven glistered. What should have looked serene filled him with a twitchy, nervous fear, as though he alone was responsible for the lives of all the people in the city below him.

May was out, somewhere. He wondered why she bothered still - hadn’t Abigail told her there was nothing to be found? Perhaps she knew of other, more secret archives, or was scouting out every cemetery in Threoo for family graves with missing teenagers.

His nerves were on fire, and the shadows were agitated, too energized. Thorn could feel them bashing at his mental walls, saw them forming kaleidoscopic patterns on the floor that wouldn’t be silenced. Something was up, something perhaps unfamiliar to him. He sipped his coffee and realized it’d gone cold while he’d been staring out the window. Thorn wandered over to the sink and poured it out. In his gut, the itch was no longer subtle, but deep and impossible to ignor. The pain of it was screaming at him, telling him to kill.

His wounds, freshly made overnight while May was asleep in his living room, itched too, in insufferable rhythm with the murderous second heartbeat inside of him. He sighed, considering cleaning them out again. It would be something to do.

Then - as sudden as lightning against a clear sky - a pull came forth from the agitated shadows. It yanked him off his feet, down to the floor, where the enthusiastic dark swallowed him whole. Immediately he was stretched thin. Thorn became liquid, one with the cold, no, freezing darkness. It was excited, energized, without the usual laziness of a snake challenging prey. There was no thought that could have terrified him more. He tried to push back - it was too soon - but he couldn’t gain a hold on something physical. The current within the darkness was pulling him along, tearing him towards some destination, a victim - already? With jerking movements he sped across the island. Through the forest. A familiar disorientation came over him, his consciousness spread thin, everything that made him Thorn struggling to stay together.

Not yet - Gods, not yet, he thought, with the small part of him that could still manage to think. He wanted to fight it, he really really did, trying to gather the strands of dark that had been his body. They would not come to him. Unwilling, he kept moving, fast, towards a man or a woman unaware they were already dead.

Then he blinked - he had muscles again, he realised, and it was exhilarating - he was on his back in wet grass. Still with that fire in his nerves; the shadows still chaotic around him, but, as he now realized, not because of him. He tried to stand. His muscles were his, unsteady, but under his control. What had happened? The desire for murder was still in his blood, still slumbering in his veins. But they weren’t yet blackened, his movements were still his own. He had not killed, while in the shadows.

So where was he?

He climbed unto unsteady feet. Had May killed someone? Hidden the urge from him, was now slaying someone with bloody nails and of something else’s volition?

He looked around. He was on top of a hill. There was nothing here but grass and low stone walls; the lights of a town in the distance. Not Slakshaven, no; Slakshaven was larger. The wind was beating around his head, blowing wet hair into his eyes. It was raining still, large drops pelting his shirt and shoulders. Against the dark of the horizon he saw the silhouette of a farmhouse. All it’s lights were off, but a reddish glow coated the fields on the other side of it. Thorn started towards the building. The shadows whispered at him, so softly he thought he might have imagined it.

‘Come,’ they said, ‘Come and see…’

Had it been May? Had she killed, did it feel like this from the outside? It could not have been. He’d seen her last night, before she’d headed out for some library or other. The rain grew thicker, the wind stronger; Thorn was cold, colder even than was usual.

‘Thorn-!’

Somewhere behind him, a voice on the wind - the old skugabor turned around. May stumbled towards him. Her eyes were wide, but her nails unbloodied and her veins blue. He relaxed. Whatever this was, it hadn’t hurt her, not yet.

‘What the hell is going on?’ she said.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, and looked back at the farmhouse. The peculiar glow - fire, despite the thick rain?- still came from the fields behind it. ‘I don’t think this has happened before.’

May nodded, something resolute coming over her.

‘Let’s go look,’ she said.

Thorn started walking, and the girl followed. As they approached the house, the glow faded before dying down completely, easy as a candle snuffed out by the wind. The farmhouse appeared deserted as they walked across the grounds. Doors, windows were shut; no lights brightened the dark, no dogs barked when the intruders walked onto the driveway. Shadows danced on the ground, the walls, as there were no humans eyes they could betray themselves to. The stench of fear clung to the air, no matter the effort of the rain to wash it away, and Thorn knew something terrible had happened here.

‘This wasn’t us, was it?’ May said, her voice small.

‘No,’ Thorn said, wondering how he could be so sure. ‘We’re just spectators here.’

‘Too late for the show,’ May said. They’d reached the fields that had been glowing moments earlier. Its grass was burned, the soil black and wet with rain. The farm’s buildings wereperfectly untouched. The darkness was ecstatic around them, buzzing with a gleeful energy that could be nothing other than bad news. The field, void-like, stretched out before them.

‘There’s bodies in it,’ May said. She pointed with her chin to the middle of the blackened field. Thorn could barely see the dark silhouettes against the ashes. He struggled to step forward. He was convinced the void would swallow him whole again if he’d set foot on that dark soil. But it was just that. Soil.

May went ahead, and this time the older skugabor followed.

‘They’re sheep,’ May called over the pelting of the rain. ‘Burned.’

Thorn looked up at the clouds. ‘Burned? In this weather?’

It was a stupid question, he realized the moment the words left his mouth.

‘Whatever did this wasn’t concerned by the bloody weather,’ May said. She knelt down, staring at one of the corpses, hand hovering above it as though she didn’t dare touch it.

Thorn felt bile rising in his throat. What new form of death had descended here? He turned away. The wretched carcasses were twisted into all-encompassing torment, limbs stretched in all directions as though the beasts had tried to get away from their own bodies.

‘I suppose we should call Abigail,’ May said, and stood up. ‘I don’t suppose that’s an option anymore?’

Thorn shook his head, the sudden movement making him retch. He had his phone, and he had Abigail under speed dial - but she’d made it very clear she wanted nothing to do with the skugabor any more. He ran his hands through his hair. The rain had soaked through his clothes, and was busy summoning goose bumps from his skin.

‘Let’s leave her out of this,’ Thorn said, although a considerable part of him was telling him to suck it up and let Abigail know.

The dark was still pulsing around them, merging almost perfectly with the burned field.

May was looking at him with large, questioning eyes, and Thorn knew she’d figured out he couldn’t bring himself to call Abigail.

‘No one is dying,’ he said, ‘It’s sheep, not humans, we didn’t do this, and Abigail has fuckall to do with it.’

The younger skugabor took a few tentative steps towards the border of the burned circle.

‘It’s not as though she’d be able to anything,’ May said, and Thorn assumed it was mostly to convince herself. She shook her head, looking around. Thorn followed her gaze, scanning over the dozen or so bodies, each of them frozen in an image of permanent hell.

He wondered if she’d remain this stoic once she’d bloodied her own hands, had watched someone die after weeks of buildup. At that thought, the promise of murder erupted once more in his blood, setting each of his organs alight.

‘Let’s go, then,’ he said through gritted teeth against the pain. ‘No use in sticking around here.’

‘Can’t we wait a bit longer?’ she said, ‘Figure out what happened?’

‘May, I’m burning up,’ he said, ‘The dark here isn’t good for me.’

He only realized that when he said it - from the soot and burned soil a darkness was sprouting.

‘You feel that?’ he said, stepping back, the near-solid tendrils of black threatening to engulf his boots.

‘I see it,’ she said, now with something frozen in her voice.

As they left the circle, Thorn feared that dark would keep him there, suck him in, some unnatural version of a tar pit. He imagined his bones, picked dry and sinking, somewhere in the soil deep below, and shuddered. Once the skugabor had reached the farmhouse once more, Thorn looked back, unable to descern the mutilated sheep from the soil.

He didn’t think they were still lying there.

The city lights in the distance glistered, promising humans and normalcy. Warmth, maybe. The road here was nothing but a single lane of old asphalt, and sometime between the field and the road the rain had turned into snow. It blew into their eyes, clinging to eyebrows and eyelashes. Thorn lit a cigarette, gratefully inhaling the heat of it. It soothed the itch some, held it down a little longer.

‘Have you ever seen something like that before?’ May said. She was walking quicker than she otherwise would.

‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘Then again, there’s never been two of us either. Want one?’

May shook her head at the offered cigarette.

‘They warm you up,’ Thorn said. He took a long second drag, welcoming even the smallest speck of warmth into his body.

‘I don’t care, I don’t smoke,’ May said.

‘Suit yourself.’

It took them an hour to reach the city - a harbour town where Thorn had spend a few years, long ago, when Sigrin was still moving him around to avoid lingering human eyes. He hadn’t been back here since. It was six in the evening, on a Sunday - two hours before the next bus to Slakshaven would leave. They could be home in minutes if they’d let themselves dissolve into the shadows. Neither wanted to.

Thorn bought them two plastic cups of bad coffee and waited. Sometime after seven a police car drove past with screeching sirens. They could follow it’s glaring lights up the hill, and Thorn wondered if they’d still find the sheeps’ bodies.

The bus pulled up, and Thorn was glad someone had called the cops, even if he’d been unable to convince himself. They sat down somewhere in the back, and waited as five others entered, leaving the vehicle mostly empty. He leaned his forehead against the glass.

Again and again, Thorn turned the night’s events over in his mind. There was nothing that hinted at skugabor involvement, except the near happiness that had radiated from the shadows. Skugabor didn’t burn - they tore. They didn’t burn perfect circles into grassland, they just flung around blood and bits of tissue, and then had those images burned into their retinas for life. Thorn had lived on these islands for a long time, and never had something else killed. Nothing unhuman, anyway. Nothing like this. He’d long stopped fearing the dark, believing himself to be the only monster in it.

Perhaps that wasn’t entirely true.

‘Bloody hell,’ May said, ‘I can’t make sense of it. I wish I could’ve had a better look at the house.’

‘I wish I could still ask Sigrin.’

Thorn stared out the window, eyes unseeing. He felt the itching grow beneath his skin, the ants marching across his bones, that pull between his heart and his gut. It wouldn’t be long, now.