“We create our own hells,” he said, his pale eyes staring unblinkingly out at the rolling, depths. An inky blackness was the ocean, waves tipped white with foam, and our ship was a lonely ship tossed to and fro. “We labor for our own destruction, but never destroyed, we only light our own eternal pyres.”
I looked down at my bleeding stomach, rolling my hand away a moment to inspect the wound, but the gushing blood warned me, and I pressed the bullet hole closed again.
Snarling with pain, I tried to answer through my clenched teeth:
“For God’s sake!” I groaned.
“God?” He turned from the sea, his pale, withered face like a skeleton, his eyes, near white, milky, like a blue sky when thin, wispy clouds pass over. Dead eyes. “What god is here but the mindless tossing of the ocean? A bed of restless dreams without a dreamer?” He stomped back toward the porthole. “I know no God, only Chaos.”
“And I know man,” I grunted. I felt a deadly pall coming over me, and knew my time was short. “Cruel men, good men, the weak, the strong. I’ve seen the brave and the cowardly in my shortened span.” A weakened cough overtook me, and I spluttered. I could smell the blood now, taste it in my mouth, could feel its slime on my lips dripping down my chin. “No one gets away with anything.” My voice was failing, but I tried to rasp out one final line. “There is a judge of the living and theā¦“
Rocked away into unbidden sleep by the growing waves of the coming storm, a horrible blackness overtakes me, black like the sea; I sunk into her depths.
~
Tale Told 