Charlotte woke with a start in the darkness. She sat up in her room halfway up the lighthouse, heart pounding, wondering if she had simply heard the clattering of the wind throwing something up against the outer wall of the lighthouse, or if that was indeed the sound of stumbling and stomping she heard from down below.

Charlotte slipped her feet into the shoes which lay beside her bed, pulled her coat over her thick nightclothes, and blinked as her eyes adjusted, as best as they could, to the darkness.

She stumbled to her dresser at the far end of the vertical slice of the tower and felt around for the lighter which she kept alongside a few candle stubs. Her hand found the device, and she struck her thumb against its wheel, causing the flint and steel to send out sparks which ignited the device’s oil-soaked wick.

The flame would not last long, so Charlotte wasted no time in transferring it to a waxy nub of a candle which sat in a brass dish beside it. She took the dish in her hand and made her way to the stairwell. A now unmistakable crash came from below. Charlotte moved as quickly as her bleariness would allow. “Grandfather?” she called. “Grandfather, are you all right?”

Charlotte gasped as she reached the ground floor. Pieces of furniture lay all about, each one seemingly shattered by frantic violence—each of their chairs, the wooden table upon which Charlotte prepared food and medicine, and even the much larger dining table at which they two had not eaten together for years. Earthenware mugs lay in shards all across the floor, and it seemed that all of their food stores had been hurled to the flagstones and trampled underfoot.

Grandfather stood in front of the fire, which had, by now, burned very low. His shoulders heaved, and he was clutching both hands to his head. Tufts of gray hair stuck out from between his digits, rustling as he dug trembling fingers into his scalp.

The weathered man leaned heavily on his peg leg, and in the gleam of the fire's embers, Charlotte saw a dark, wet line of red liquid running down from the flesh around his knee, down along the length of the polished wood, dripping in a pool on the ground beneath him.

Charlotte stepped into the room and knelt down, carefully resting her candle on a clean patch of ground. She rose and approached Grandfather, afraid to touch him but terrified to do nothing. “Grandfather, what happened? Did you have a nightmare?” Charlotte made her voice clear and firm. She needed to provide stability at this moment.

Before she could touch him, Grandfather whipped around, his peg leg scraping nastily against the floor. Charlotte could hardly make out the features of Grandfather's face in the dim light of the room, but it was enough to tell that his eyes were a wild and gleaming red. Not merely in the way eyes get bloodshot when one works in a smoky kitchen for too long or goes too long without sleep. No, the entire whites of his eyes looked as though they had filled with blood.

Charlotte stepped back. She could not help herself. She could not keep herself from putting her hands before her as though to ward Grandfather away.

“Need medicine,” Grandfather growled. No, it was not quite a growl. It was a gurgle. It was the sound of a drowning and a dying man. It was the sound of a dog who crawled with maimed limbs through a ditch, hours away from succumbing to disease. It was the sound of a baby bird fallen out of the nest and roasting alive, naked, in the heat of the midday Sun.

“Medicine,” Charlotte repeated. “Grandfather, why didn't you call for me? Why did you do all this?”

“Can't keep it away any longer,” Grandfather wheezed. He staggered away from Charlotte, to her ashamed relief.

This relief vanished when he put his hands against the ancient stone walls and began striking his forehead against the unyielding stone. He grunted each time, the sound of naked, whimpering pain.

Charlotte dashed to him and put her arms around his chest, hauling back with all her might. She did not bother speaking anymore. There was something wrong with Grandfather’s mind. He had never shown signs of mental weakness before, but Charlotte was very well aware of the ailments which sometimes befell folk in their old age.

Yet she had never thought of Grandfather as that old, not even in the recent years when he had seemed to give up on life.

But there was no other explanation. He was a madman in this moment. Perhaps he could recover later. Perhaps it would even happen in the morning. But right now, she needed to help him, for he could not help himself.

Grandfather screamed and thrashed out with every limb, trying to push Charlotte away, but his muscles were weak from disuse. He could do nothing more than scratch at her arms and her sides, all of which were well protected by heavy clothes which warded against harm as well as they did against the cold.

Yet he managed to throw Charlotte off balance, and they fell together to the ground. Heart racing, Charlotte thought quickly and put her hands to the exposed peg leg, unfastening the leather straps which kept it attached to Grandfather's knee. The vile smell of infection rose as she pulled it away, making her retch.

Charlotte stumbled backward and rose, still clutching the peg leg, which she only now remembered was streaked with blood. She took one glance at the tumorous, infected mess of Grandfather's knee and then looked away.

Perhaps it was some kind of blood infection. He needed a doctor. Yes, a doctor, and the expertise of the Rook Tribe. Surely this was something only their put-together knowledge could help.

Ignoring Grandfather’s screaming as he thrashed about, unable to rise, Charlotte hurried to the far wall where a heavy chest lay, one Grandfather had not yet attacked in his fit.

She pulled a fifty-foot length of hempen rope from it, one intended to replace their mooring line if it broke, then returned to where Grandfather lay.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” she muttered over and over again as she deftly, with skilled and practiced fingers, tied Grandfather's hands to his remaining foot behind his back. Charlotte removed her coat of seal fur and wrapped it well around Grandfather's head and shoulders so that he could not thrash his head against the ground and, in so doing, injure himself further.

He was screeching for medicine again. Yes, the medicine. What part did it play in all this? Charlotte could not remember all of its side effects, but none of them were supposed to be anything like this. She would have remembered. At the very least, if they had some kind of painkiller in them, the medicine must also be a sedative. Mother Ke’a I had explained this to her along with the properties of various other medicines some years ago.

Sedatives created the opposite effect of… whatever this was. It couldn’t have been the extra medicine which caused this. Charlotte had to bet everything on that idea. She had to dig into it and count on its sedative properties to keep Grandfather from killing himself.

With shaking hands, Charlotte boiled a small portion of hot water. It was difficult, for Grandfather had tipped over the barrel which contained their supply of rainwater, but just a bit still remained within it.

Charlotte put an entire dose of medicine into the water. It was too much for the amount of liquid used, and perhaps too much again, considering how much Grandfather had already consumed earlier in the night.

She blew on it and tested it against her own tongue until it was cool enough that it would not burn, then took it to Grandfather’s side and held his head firmly in the crook of one arm.

He bellowed and screamed for the medicine Charlotte held in readiness, but no matter what his granddaughter said, he would not calm down and acknowledge her.

So Charlotte pinched Grandfather’s nose until his mouth was wide open and gasping, and then tipped his head up and poured the medicine in a trickle down his throat.

Grandfather gasped, sputtered, and choked. Though much of the brew ended up in his beard and on his chest, at long last a portion did eventually make its way down his throat.

Charlotte stumbled back, exhausted.

Tears burned at the corners of Charlotte's tired eyes as she sat on the floor, hugging her knees, watching Grandfather slowly calm down. It was so surreal. This was not the same man who had raised her, not the same man she had spoken to only a few hours ago.

Yet, that man from a few hours ago hadn't seemed very much like the man who had raised her, either. Where had the man gone who had, every night, sat on the edge of her bed and told her stories of what a brave woman her mother had been, what a gentle man her father had been, stories of how she came from a long line of people who were not afraid to look darkness in the face and tell it “You won't hurt anyone today?”

Where was the man who had carried her on his shoulders as they traveled along the green–edged roads to the capital to see the justice of the king, to hear the laughs of the townspeople who did not know of the evil that lurks in the corners of society?

Where was the man who had laughed and cried and held Charlotte in a tight hug when those were the necessary things for a growing girl, yet who has never shied away from teaching her hard work and the arts of angling and rowing, things people on the mainland only gave to their boys, never to their daughters?

How could this all be the same man who nowadays sat bitterly in front of the fire every day and muttered to himself about how his granddaughter wanted to abandon him?

Grandfather was silent now. Charlotte buried her face in the fabric covering her knees and wept as silently as she could manage. Her golden curls hid her face like a veil, protecting her from the outside world, from the destruction which surrounded her on every side and from the broken old man whom, despite everything he had done or not done in recent years, she still loved like the father he had always been to her.

The smells of rotten pus and of excrement filled the air. Hidden as she was, Charlotte could not escape reality.

She stood. She moved to the door and opened it, shivering as the frigid winds that blew over the sea in winter bit through her nightclothes and pierced her to the bone.

She needed to move now. She couldn't wait till morning. The full Moon burned above her, that malevolent goddess. She would, at least, guide Charlotte in the way she needed to go.

Charlotte returned inside only a moment to pick up Grandfather’s heavy coat, which lay crumpled on the ground. It reeked of sweat and filth, for he rarely removed it on a normal day. Yet he had not been wearing it just now, when he stood before the fire and scrabbled at his head.

Charlotte put this on over her nightclothes and hunted in the scattered rubble until she found their storm lantern. Grandfather seemed to have hurled it into the ground repeatedly, for the glass was shattered on every side. Its metal frame was twisted and bent, making it no good to her. Well, she thought. Let’s simply hope the clouds never cover the Moon.

Then Charlotte put on her gloves, gave one last look to the crumpled man on the ground, and returned to their skiff for the second time in one day.

The trip was terrifying. She was not used to rowing at night. It was an alien feeling. Charlotte had a very difficult time keeping her bearings, even with the Moon to orient her. At one particular moment, exhausted and yet trembling with adrenaline, Charlotte was seized with the paranoia that she was rowing in entirely the wrong direction, that she was destined for the open sea and would never be found again. The thought sent a shiver through her whole body that made her teeth chatter worse than with the cold, and she had to force herself into calmness by closing her eyes and fixating on the memory of Grandfather teaching her to navigate so many years ago.

She opened her eyes, adjusted her bearing with the few stars visible through the thin clouds above, and continued to row.

Even still, it was almost an hour before, weary to her core, Charlotte ran aground on Rook Island.

Charlotte stumbled out of the skiff and up to the tribe’s stone wall, fumbling along it, gasping with breaths which puffed out before her in the cold. After an agonizing minute, she found the heavy wooden gate and opened it with fingers that were numb despite the thick gloves covering them.

Nobody stood watch outside the scattered stone buildings which stood snow-capped in the night like a sleeping colony of giant tortoises. The Rook Tribe was not like the people of the mainland who kept guards about in the middle of the night to ward against criminals. Only the largest of the tribes in the archipelago did so. The Rook Tribe was not used to strangers stalking their paths after good folk were well asleep.

Charlotte found the house which belonged to Mother Ke’a and her family and pounded on it with all her might, head swirling with the sense of altered reality. Only hours ago, and yet in an altogether different world, Charlotte had performed nearly an identical action.

But unlike Charlotte’s earlier visit, no one immediately replied.

“Mother Ke’a,” Charlotte called, her voice piteous and weak. “Please, Mother Ke’a, wake up. Please, Grandfather’s gone mad.”

There was silence for a long minute before the door opened. It was not Ke’a who opened it, but her thick-limbed, towering husband, the man whom Charlotte referred to as Father Po’ke. The man wore a pair of trousers, but his heavily tattooed chest gleamed in the moonlight.

“Challa,” he said, voice heavy and slurred. It was likely due to alcohol as much as to sleep. He had been the father of the bride, after all. Rook Tribe weddings were raucous affairs.

Charlotte stood several heads shorter than Po’ke, so she clasped his forearms with her hands and looked up pleadingly into his eyes. “Father Po’ke, please, Grandfather’s gone insane. His eyes are all red and he’s screaming and breaking everything. He was perfectly fine a few hours ago, except that he asked for a double dose of medicine because he said his wound was hurting him, but—”

“A double dose?” Po’ke asked slowly. “That is... very strange. There shouldn't... be any side effects like that for… hmm... cancer medication.” He rubbed a meaty hand against his shaved skull, a dome of flesh and bone which was covered in vibrant red tattoos in lieu of missing hair, a common practice among balding men of the tribe.

Po’ke suddenly stepped aside as Ke’a showed her face in the doorway. The woman wore a thick shawl draped across her shoulders, though she clearly wore nothing underneath. Despite the ice in the air, she shivered not at all. “Oh, Challa,” she whispered, her voice heavy with grief. She sounded as level-headed as though she had never drunk a drop in her life. “He brought this upon himself, but that won’t make things any easier. He was supposed to let you go such a long time ago so you wouldn’t have to witness this.”

Po’ke seemed to suddenly understand something. “No,” he said. “No, I can’t believe that. She said he took an even bigger dose than usual earlier.”

Charlotte looked between the two of them. Her mouth moved, but she couldn’t produce any words.

They knew what was happening. They knew, and the looks of shame and sadness on their faces, outlined by the light of the Moon, told her there would be no easy cure.