Darlington began to laugh.
The sound echoed through the void sharp, genuine, triumphant. His shoulders shook. His chest heaved. His eyes watered with the sheer intensity of his joy. He continued to laugh, his voice rising and falling like waves on a shore.
"HAHAHA! HAHAHAHA! HAHAHAHAHA!"
It filled his ego to the brim, overflowing, spilling into every corner of his being. He had done it. He had manipulated events, guided his pawn, and watched the pieces fall into place exactly as he had planned. The satisfaction was intoxicating.
After he laughed, he calmed down.
He took a breath unnecessary, but grounding and looked at everything that was going on. His eyes swept across the battlefield, cataloging the destruction, the death, the chaos. He saw the bodies floating in the water, the ships sinking into the depths, the monsters lying still and silent.
"Truly," he said, his voice quiet, almost reverent. "In this world, saying that one could survive alone is foolishness."
He paused.
"Humans have never survived alone." He touched his chest over his heart. "We must depend on each other."
He thought of the writers, the philosophers, the storytellers who had shaped his understanding of the world.
"Those writers they will say, what was it they said again?" He smiled. "Iron sharpens iron."
He looked at the battlefield below.
"The stronger opponents my pawn meets, the stronger he grows." He paused. "The more people I observe, the more I have that knowledge to impart on my own pawn."
He spread his arms.
"Such is exciting." His voice dropped. "I truly cherish it. I love it to the smallest detail. I love it."
On the sea, the war was over.
The man with the X marked on his face got up from Davina Jones's body. He was stunned his eyes wide, his mouth open, his mind reeling from the sheer scale of the destruction that had just occurred.
"Well," he said, his voice light, almost conversational. "I guess we're kind of lucky, you know?"
He looked at the crater, at the shattered ships, at the silence that had fallen over the sea.
"Think of it what if you died in that attack?" He laughed a short, sharp, relieved sound. "Damn. Well, that's good."
He turned to Davina Jones.
"Errrer... errer..."
She was crying.
Dark veins formed around her face and her body, spreading across her skin like cracks in porcelain. Her eyes turned completely dark pitch black, like they took in everything that was within the world into them. The veins pulsed, throbbed, seemed to breathe with a life of their own.
He stepped back.
"Davina?" His voice was cautious, uncertain. "Hey, princess are you okay?"
She did not answer.
Her body convulsed, her back arching, her mouth opening in a silent scream. The darkness spread further covering her arms, her legs, her chest. She was transforming, changing, becoming something else.
He watched, his hand on his gun, his heart pounding.
in the space between the silence and the transformation, between the end of the war and the beginning of something new.
Davina's eyes burned with darkness.
The banished one stood ready.
And the sea waited.