Night had once more settled like a dark veil over the small town of Marais and the surrounding lands. Yet to Abby Arcane, currently standing on the deck outside her friend Liz's place, overlooking the swamp, it made hardly a difference. She barely realised what she was looking at anyway, her eyes unseeing and her mind too frayed to care.

The young doctor had been standing here for hours, time passing her by unnoticed, while her thoughts had been a jumbled mess of sleep-deprived confusion. She could not quite recall the last time she had closed her eyes to find some actual rest, and not just the fitful tossing and turning that had comprised the last two nights' attempts at doing so. Instead of blissful sleep there had been only memories and unbeckoned thoughts keeping her awake, stronger even than the physical strain of exhaustion wearing her down after days without respite.

The same memories and thoughts, in fact, that were tormenting her still, flooding her mind with images too vivid to ignore. Images of horror and death, of shattered hopes and dreams. Images of a rotten body hidden in the swamp…

A deep sigh escaped Abby's constricted throat and she shook her head as if attempting to banish the painful thoughts. All pointless efforts to grant herself a moment of relief amidst the waking nightmare she seemed to have found herself in ever since she had followed Alec into the swamp that night.

Ever since she had found him strapped to a table, cut open and torn apart like a lab experiment, really. To think the torture he had been through, the pain he must have had endured, it was too much to even comprehend. Yet Abby suspected he would have willingly suffered all of it a thousand times over, if that had just spared him his tormentor's final crippling revelation. The one piece of knowledge that had wounded Alec – and by extension later Abby herself – so deeply and permanently that even his body's immense healing capabilities had not been able to undo the damage. The truth about himself, about what he was...

To know that Woodrue had been arrested and that the men who had kidnapped Alec were either dead or gone should have been a relief. Yet none of these things managed to bring so much as a smile to Abby's face. Instead, the events following said kidnapping – the gruesome discovery in the swamp – kept haunting her, overshadowing even the tender moments she had shared with Alec at the lab the previous night. How she had promised him that they would face the darkness out in the swamp together. She and Alec.

Alec. Was that even his name?

Another of those unbeckoned thoughts that kept disrupting Abby's tattered mind. It left a painful twinge in her heart, causing the young woman to shudder at the horribleness of it all. And at how what should be unthinkable was suddenly coming so easily to her now.

Of course it was his name! An angry voice in her mind insisted, starting the young woman right back on the loop her thoughts had been going in ever since she had seen the corpse in the swamp. The corpse of the man she had spent only one single day with and yet had come to know better than most of the people she had met in her whole life. The corpse of Alec Holland.

A tear escaped Abby's eye at the thought, retracing the trail of many that had come before and leading the way for countless more she knew were still to follow.

"When I look into your eyes, I seeyou. I see the presence of the man that I once knew."

This had not been a lie. Despite all the doubts and sorrow that were tearing her apart right now, Abby knew that the being in the swamp that she had gotten to know over the past few weeks carried within him a part of Alec Holland. And that this part, as much as the moss and vines that made up his body and that connected him to the Green, defined who he was. After all, she had seen the kindness in his eyes, had felt the gentleness of his touch and had been saved time and again by the unwavering strength of both his body and his heart.

In fact, it was her own heart that was telling her the one other thing she was absolutely certain about right now. That she had feelings for this creature – this man – in the swamp. Strong, romantic feelings that she could not bear to follow, although not for the reasons most people might assume.

When Abby thought about Alec, her heart swelling with longing, it wasn't his strange appearance that made her recoil at the same time. It wasn't even the fact that at the thought of his name she always saw two sets of eyes in her mind. One a light green, framed with thin lines of laughter, the other a striking red, surrounded by the colours of the swamp. In truth, the one thing that pushed her away from Alec, tearing up her heart and her sanity in the process, was that since two days ago, whenever she thought about him, there was now a third set of eyes staring back at her. No, not eyes, really. Just empty sockets filled with death and decay. Dark hollows haunted by the ghost of a dead man...

Abby shuddered yet again and a desperate gasp escaped her throat as her lungs were suddenly struggling for oxygen.

"Thisthingis what I am. Alec Holland is dead."

Alec Holland is dead. A fact so simple and yet so utterly incomprehensible. Abby knew that her heart would keep denying it to her last breath and yet she also could not ignore that she had seen it confirmed with her own eyes. Had seen Alec Holland holding the dead body of Alec Holland...

It had been a situation too insane to put into sensible terms and looking back, Abby had no idea how she could have ever reacted as calmly to it as she first did. Right now, just the thought of it was making her head spin, intensifying the feeling of nausea that had been growing in her stomach for hours.

Once again, images started racing through Abby's mind. Memories of familiarity, of a bond the like of which she had never felt before. A hand reaching out for her, removing an innocuous piece of glass stuck to the side of her face. Then that same hand – now changed beyond recognition – reaching for her once more, and a voice like a dark rasp coming from the depths of the earth itself speaking her name. Only that it had not been the same hand at all, Abby reminded herself. In truth, that hand – Alec Holland's hand – now lay at the bottom of Skeeter Cove, stripped of its flesh and left to rot. Just like the rest of him.

The cry that tore itself from Abby's lips at the thought echoed across the water, the long overdue release of pent up horrors. She pressed her eyes shut tightly against the tears that were once more flowing freely and wrapped her arms around herself in a desperate attempt to contain her emotions. For a moment she was close to dropping to her knees, had there not been an even stronger desire keeping her afoot. The desire for answers. For someone – anyone – to tell her whether there was some sense to her conflicting emotions, or if they were just the first signs of an overwhelmed mind coming apart. Because how else could she be in love with a dead man? A man who was now not a man at all, yet with her feelings remaining the same? If Alec Holland was truly dead, then how was this anything but her going insane?

After hours without movement, Abby Arcane finally turned on the spot, feeling sick to the stomach. A curtain of tears obscuring her view, she stumbled back over the wooden pier in the direction of Liz's house. As soon as her feet touched solid ground, however, she made a sharp turn, a different destination in mind. Instead, she headed past the house and towards the boat that was tied up at the small platform down at the water.

The scientist in her knew that she was in no condition to go out into the swamp on her own, that her severe lack of sleep was messing with her mind and cognitive functions. Yet she also knew that out there was the only place she could possibly find answers. That out there was the only person who might be able to provide them.