He was flat on his back, lying on the uneven fiberglass surface of the small boat they had found a few hours earlier.. Even if none of them really knew how to navigate, they had chosen to steal it to escape from Entry Island, where the Jester’s asylum was located. Unfortunately, the gas tank had run out of fuel not even halfway through, which had them rowing for the better part of the trip. Noah volunteered to start, then decided to take a nap when it came to Isaac’s turn.

He couldn’t stop thinking about his nightmare, however. Everything that had just happened, was it really only a dream? That was the most logical explanation, considering how the night so far had been very traumatic, yet it felt as real as surreal. The images of the girl he had murdered burned in his mind. He had made an inexcusable mistake there could be no atonement for. Over the course of the next few minutes, he remained stuck in a bottomless cesspool of self-loathing.

“Oh my god, you absolutely suck at this! At this rate we’re not going to reach the shore today!” said Isaac a little too loudly.

“But…” quietly complained Jacob, “it’s hard with only one hand…”

“You don’t need two hands! I showed you how to it, you’re just not-“

“Shut. The fuck. Up," loudly grunted Noah.

He wasn’t in the mood to hear Isaac’s irritating voice, much less deal with his annoying personality. He wanted some quiet to reflect and meditate on his own actions and his own person, and to calm the chaos in his head and the pounding in his chest. Isaac made it difficult.

“Hey, it’s not my freaking fault!” Isaac answered back.

“I don’t care whose fault it is, just shut the fuck up.”

“Fine! I won’t try to help anymore. We’re just gonna sit here and wait for someone to recuse us. Nope, it’s fine. I’m done," he whined. He then sat on one of the benches, silently sulking with his armed crossed.

Frustrated, Noah got up and approached Jacob to take the oar. There was no resistance from his companion, as expected. Which was just as well, because he was in the mood to throw everyone overboard should they have pissed him off further.

About ten minutes into the task, though, he started to relax despite the building fatigue in his biceps. It wasn’t their fault. They weren’t his enemies. In fact, it was them who had given him the strength to move on when he had committed his crime. On the edge of the precipice, he was ready to let the ink-like creature end him.

Yet, even if he knew it was wrong to blame them for anything, he found his inner demons contradicting his own reasoning, making excuses for his own negative attitude.

Isaac had always been obnoxiously loud, a bother to everyone around him. Jacob was more tolerable, but he was one of the most unskilled people Noah knew. Those two were just about the last people on Earth he would have chosen to spend his final days with. Hopefully, the nightmare would be over as soon as they reached the land, but his gut told him otherwise. Better get used to them as soon as possible, he thought.

Perhaps as an act of mercy from fate, the wind rose a little, giving a gentle breeze that pushed them to their destination, only requiring a minimal effort to advance amidst the waves from that point on. He kept going for half an hour.

After a while, seeing the morning light and the land in the distance allowed him to obtain some sort of serenity, despite all the horrors he had caused and witnessed. He also found some form of comfort found in the simplicity of rowing. Taking refuge in the menial was new to him, but he had no doubt their trauma would leave them changed forever.

His moment of calm faded when Jacob asked for his and Isaac’s attention. “Look!” he said, pointing perpendicularly to where they were headed, in the direction of Cape Grindstone.

“What now?” Noah thought out loud.

Even kilometers away from the town, they could see a bright, continuous beam of light coming from the ground. It went up to the sky, flashing in this disturbing and sickening dark-green hue.

“The fuck?” Isaac said.

After a moment, the color changed to a dark red before it filled the entire sky almost immediately accompanied by a high-pitched metallic shriek, a scream from the deepest depths of the abyss itself. It was not natural. It was wrong.

“The fuck?” Isaac repeated, yelling.

Their souls filled with dread and despair. The scene made them fall on their knees, quivering, their stomach churning…

But only for a moment. Fortunately, the noise and the light went as quickly as they came and, after a half-minute, everything went back to a relative normality.

“What was that?” Jacob asked after they got their composure back.

“The world is going to shit!” Isaac exclaimed.

Noah agreed. He had been fighting against the thought but, the more he dwelled on it, the more everything seemed out of place. The way the Jester was able to move them from place to place, to mess with their minds; the monster they had encountered; the dreams he had and now this, whatever it was.

“Do you think this is the apocalypse?” Jacob quietly asked. He was smirking, perhaps because of how silly the question sounded.

“Well, obvious-fucking-ly," Isaac retorted.

Noah called on his rationality any conjecture before they learned more. Everything had an explanation. Everything.

Or so he hoped.