It was the clarity of the weeks after he left that frightened her the most. The fact that in her darkest hour, torn from him and separated from her God, she could, for what it seemed the very first time, see clearly. At a time when she needed the solitude of the dark, the comfort of oblivion, her eyes had been forced open. It was as if scales had been lifted from her sight at the moment she needed to be blind and she shrunk away from the glare that mocked her pain. Her pain, which was sharper than razors and tore deeper than his claws ever would have. The light was her curse because it only served to illuminate the fact that he had gone and she walked alone. Where the light is at its brightness the darkest shadows are cast and that is what she was now, a dark shadow of the self she had found with him.

She wandered wraith like around the house that suddenly seemed full of light, every corner luminous, every object that he had ever touched seemed to radiate a glow and her tortured soul screamed and tried to turn its back, to curl in on itself and disappear into blackness only to be forced back into the light of his absence. Every room she entered vibrated with echoes of him. His eyes as they turned to look at her, the touch of his hands against her skin, his smile which only ever seemed to reach his eyes when directed at her.

She had tried to hate him. Tried to pollute his memory to blacken his image, destroy his humanity but every effort only served to remind her of his courage, his loyalty, his selflessness. His love for her. The reason he had left was because he loved her.

If she had been able to pray she would have got down on her knees and remained there until they were bloody sores to ask to descend into madness, to wrap herself safely within a silken shawl of insanity. But every day she remained alone, without him she seemed to become saner in the light of his leaving.

It was only in her dreams that madness seemed to possess her. Fragmented images of him swarmed into her mind like insects, scuttling, scratching against her fevered brain. There was no clear sight, it was like peering through a filth-crusted window trying to recognise truth in the silhouettes that flickered like phantoms. She sensed pain but could not separate it from her own. In desperation she turned to the cards to try and sharpen her visions but for once they were crowded with contradictions, with no obvious reason for the patterns, lacking the symmetry that she so needed to find within them. They offered no reassurances and no answers either, they were voiceless.

And so she waited alone, illuminated in the harsh white light of abandonment that stripped her to her very bones, left her heart and soul exposed and adrift in a sanity that became in its terrible clarity, to feel like the depths of madness.

Lost in the light it took her weeks to realised she had to leave the terrible house where his memory left her no hiding place, to lock the doors and walk away. To return to the moors where she would be able to saturate herself in the darkness of the terrible deeds that she had committed. Deeds that he prophesied would destroy her soul; where his voice had welcomed her to the night. Only there could she begin to know herself again; the self that he had loved, despite her sins.

She had avoided the room in which he had slept knowing that there the light would be at its harshest but she was unable to resist its lure on the morning of her departure.

Her heart clenched and she trembled slightly on the threshold. The room, as she had known was flooded with light, dust moats lazily circling in the air but unexpectedly she felt welcomed by it unlike in any of the other rooms of the house. The rightness of it, being where she had felt safest was somehow a comfort to her. There was remembrance of him in that room, it was as if the very objects somehow held his essence in their fibres but they did not haunt her as they did in the other spaces in the house. Here she had the feeling that although more than a month had past since their last interlude, that he had only just exited the space. The way he had left the room did not tell the story of a man who had no plans to return, had walked away entirely despite the letter he'd written. Clothes were draped over the chair, a book lay open on the bureau and on the desk the pen with which he had written his last words to her had been left on the blotter the ink, dark as lies dried on the tip. Slowly she entered her fingertips marking a trail of recollection over the discarded items. The smooth cotton of his shirts triggering the memory of how his body felt against her cheek as he'd held her against him after she'd raced into the safety of his arms when she'd been so afraid. Her gaze traced over the few other personal belongings, all of the best quality but well used, a shabby history of the man who had come to her in darkness but left her alone in the light.

Her eyes finally came to rest on the bed and there she noticed something that at first made her blood run cold. His guns were abandoned on the counterpane, the gun belt laid underneath. The fact he'd departed without his guns which she always felt to be an extension of himself were the concrete evidence that she had tried to avoid, the proof that he meant never to return. The cruel light of this realization was enough she knew to send her spiraling into the blessed arms of insanity and her soul threw its arms out in welcome. But the longed for release did not come because the light in that moment was kind and focused her attention on a single detail she'd previously missed. The firearms had not been abandoned, they had been carefully placed and that placement was to her eyes the physical manifestation of his promise to always keep her safe. The muzzle's of the pair were joined the grips facing outwards to form a letter V. He had left them so she could protect herself but also she hoped, for safekeeping. She picked one up, the weight of it felt reassuring and almost like she held a part of him, the best part of him. She left the room without a backwards glance, the guns and belt clutched in her hands.

At first the escape she hoped to find by leaving London and returning to the cottage on the moors seemed to evade her. The light oozed over the barren landscape consuming its somber terrain like a cancer. The wildness of the land appeared diseased, like an age-ravaged beauty in its unforgiving harshness. She despaired, feeling even more abandoned and knowing that she had bought this sickness to the place where she'd always felt safest and most at peace, tainting even the memory of her beloved mentor. Everywhere she looked, inside the cottage and outside in the silence of the wide spaces the memory of him was there, teaching her to shoot, helping her in the garden, chopping down the terrible tree, dancing, burying the man they'd killed together. There were times she wanted to tear open her skull and gouge her brain out to rid herself of the torment of his memory. If she was never going to see him again and as the seasons turned her hope began to diminish, she needed to purge herself of them and yet in the part of her that only accepted truths she knew without them she knew she would be less human and so she suffered in the light of remembrances. The sun rose and set, the moon sailed her silver light through heaven's darkness and the seasons continued to turn and although the pain of his loss remained unbearable she accepted it and wore it like an open wound and in that she found a modicum of peace.

The night was at its blackest when she was awoken from her drugged slumber by a heavy knocking on the door of the cottage. She had sat for hours in the chair in front of the fire wrapped in the course blanket from the settle. There were softer ones but she perversely enjoyed the itch against her skin; it gave her a sense of reality which at times she started to lose especially if, as tonight, she had smoked a lot of the hashish that she used to dull the edges of her pain. Eventually she'd consumed enough for her to know that a dreamless sleep would follow and she had glided up the rough wooden steps too intoxicated to undress, and fallen onto the bed. She lay for a moment wondering if it were in fact paranoia but the banging began again – this time more insistent followed by a rattling of the door handle. She slid from the bed and from the table next to the bed she removed the gun she'd taken from London and began down the stairs. Her mind was sharp, she never seemed to suffer the effects of the drugs she consumed in that way and despite the fact she had retrieved the gun, she felt no danger from the presence outside her door. Her door was, as in the time of her mentor, a place of refuge for the poor unfortunate girls who'd fallen for the charms of a boy who'd then left them ruined. She refused to cut them, offering only charms of protection and hope but still they came and it was becoming harder to refuse their needs. The door shook under another onslaught of violent knocking and it was then she began to hear a voice. The voice that she was the most familiar with in the entire world, very possibly one of the first voices she'd ever heard. As she raced to the door her mind raced, how had be found her and why was he there?

She flung open the door and found herself enfolded into the arms of the man who had been father, teacher and tormentor to her.

"Vanessa, thank God, thank God you're here and safe!"

Sir Malcolm's voice throbbed with emotion and it thrilled her heart to see, feel and hear him, in her grief she had forgotten how much she had missed him.

She tried to pull him into the cottage but he stayed her hands gently.

"Go inside by the fire." was all he said before turning and plunging into the darkness.

She did not know quite why, almost for the first time in her life she did exactly as he told her, but she did. She left the door open and returned to stand to the side of the fire. Despite the initial shock of seeing him after so long she felt calm a sense of peace wash over her. She could only think that he was there to give her bad news. News that might enable her to find the darkness she so craved, to be free of the eternal light and the suffering it caused her.

Sir Malcolm and another man, a stranger, appeared suddenly without warning at the door but they were not alone. In between them they supported, half carried a broken figure. He radiated all of human suffering and she knew even before he lifted his cruelly shaven head that the abused soul that stood before her was all that was left of Ethan Chandler.

A harsh cry tore from her lips at the sight of the man she loved and who had left her to walk his doomed path. He was filthy, dressed in rags, his face gaunt, emaciated to the point of death. His eyes when he finally looked up were red-rimmed, dead looking and spoke of horrors that no language would have the vocabulary to describe. Even as her heart leapt at the sight of him it recoiled from the lost and broken man that filled her eyes and a cold rage pieced her, her soul screamed for retribution for him, for them. But that was for another future, in this present she could not allow it to mar the joy she felt at laying her eyes on him for the first time in what seemed like forever. Her hands ached to touch him to reassure herself that he was real that this wasn't some kind of cruel dream that her tortured soul had manifested out of longing. She moved towards him carefully and for the first time he seemed to see her. Some kind of recognition touched his vacant eyes and his blistered and cracked lips seem to try to form a word before, without warning, he collapsed and would have fallen hard to the stone and earth floor without the support of the two men. She darted forward laying her hand against his throat scared with sores and marks that made her think he'd been tortured physically as well as mentally. Her deft fingers found his pulse weak but steady and she exhaled in relief, suddenly aware that she hadn't really breathed since seeing him.

"Take him upstairs."

She darted ahead, up the stairs pulling back the sheets on her bed while Sir Malcolm and the unknown man struggled with his dead weight up the stairs. They pulled his prone form onto the low, small bed and she covered him gently with the sheets and blankets her hand brushing softly over his mutilated face. She could not believe that he was actually here with her, that whatever horrors he'd faced he still breathed and she would do everything in her power to keep it that way, to heal his every hurt.

She heard Sir Malcolm thank the man and tell him to wait for him downstairs but she could not tear her gaze away from the ruin of her lover that lay like death in her bed.

"Vanessa, I need to tell you something."

She heard in the careful measure of his voice and words that he wanted to protect her and yet, and she was grateful for it, would tell her the truth or as much as he could.

"You need to tell me everything." she said as drew up a chair to sit beside the bed. "Where did you find him?"

She heard him take a breath and the pause stretched until he answered her with the worst truth she could have heard.

"In a lunatic asylum."