There is blood on your hands. It doesn't belong to you, and you can't see it, but it's there.
You see his face when you close your eyes. The first man you killed. You remember it; his mangled jaw, the raw flesh dribbling, the blood seeping, pooling at your feet. You remember how the light in his eyes went out as he died, and you came to the realisation in that moment, that you had taken a life.
But it isn't just his blood that stains your hands. There are others. So many others. Fathers, sons, brothers. They're all dead, and it's all because of you.
You feel only a small pang of guilt, because you know they would have killed you, too, had they had the chance. Would they have felt any remorse for killing somebody's daughter? Somebody's best friend? You doubt it. They were bloodthirsty, vicious, immoral beasts.
You had two options: kill, or be killed.
It was never easy, but neither was it hard. Finger on the trigger… and bang. They were gone. Like the flame of a candle, extinguished in an instant.
One of the last, you relished. Bullet after brutal bullet, you emptied your magazines until you were certain he was dead. Mathias. The false messiah. The idealistic megalomaniac. You put an end to his machinations, once and for all. You freed him not only from his madness, but from his punishment. In some twisted kind of way, you did him a favour. You did them all favours.
And then there was Himiko. The long-forgotten Sun Queen. The wretched spiritual entity trapping you in that place, slowly taking what little you had left away from you. Grim, Roth, Alex… and now she's trying to take the one thing you hold closest to your heart. But you won't let her.
You feel no regret when you drive that flaming torch into her body. You feel no fascination as she begins to scream, a dead sovereign turned to a banshee. You feel no disquiet when her reign of terror comes to an end.
The storm disperses, and the skies become clear. It's over.
But there was only one thing that kept you clinging to the hope that you could escape that island; that you could overcome the horrors that awaited you.
Your light in the darkness. The shining beacon you held onto with every fibre of your being as the tempest swirled around you, unforgiving and unrelenting. Your raison d'être.
You sit there on the rescue vessel: broken, bruised, and bleeding. But you're alive. And it's all because of her.
Sam.