No man living knew the nature of purgatory, nor of its sure existence, nor of the soul's path after death. I supposed then that we had found it, that we were sailing in the wake of all souls, though I confess it was eerie and uncanny enough, and every hour I fought rising dread with the meditations of the stoic.
In this trade of ours, a man grows accustomed to the sight of the bloodied wreckage of a ruined body, the garish ruins of what remains when the soul has fled. Such things are ugly enough. It is something else entirely, though, to behold those same heinous pieces assembled into a facsimile of motion, of movement without bone and muscle. Then one knows the horror of violence afresh and recognizes with horror oneself as an equal abomination.