He could hear her sloshing through the water behind him, but that was the only indication she was still there. To say that the stress of the day was just beginning to weigh on him was a lie, as it had started from the moment the boat crashed and left him trapped in his room; but now the weight was becoming too heavy and he was desperate to escape it.

Finally they came to the other side of the tunnel and he pushed open the door with two hands. It... wasn’t a dining room, he realized, but he had been inside before. “I guess anything looks like a dining hall when you’re had enough to drink,“ he admitted, a bit dumbfounded by his own misremembering. She probably thought he was an idiot—a recurring theme in their interactions, he realized, and was immediately annoyed by.

“Doesn’t matter anyways,” he insisted, stepping around the various tables and counters in search of the door. He turned another corner, stepping out of her immediate view, and only then let out a gasp loud enough for her to hear.

“There’s a... body here,“ he called to her, too shocked to move forward or to back away. One thing was certain: it was a dead body. It was lying face-down in the nearly five inches of water, and what he could see of the neck and hands were grayish and devoid of life. Merlin.

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