Twenty-Three: Of the Island of the Dead

Recovering from the river fight, Thomas and Guillaume row while bantering with Père Matthieu and Delphine about sin and guilt. Their uneasy camaraderie is cut short at dusk on the third day when they meet a dam of corpses—animals and humans—blocking the Rhône.

Drawn in by unseen force, they discover jellyfish-like creatures pulsing beneath, each encasing a severed head. Tentacles snare the raft while two specimens flop aboard. Delphine is stung repeatedly; Thomas’s sword is useless.

Remembering the cargo, Père Matthieu and Thomas deploy salt, which desiccates and kills the monsters, exposing the heads within—including the murdered captain’s, which babbles obscenely at Delphine. Larger tentacles wrench the raft, dumping supplies and all four travelers into the shallow river.

In the water, a massive central abomination anchored in midstream lashes out with long strands, while smaller swimmers sting relentlessly. Thomas’s armor blunts the venom; Père Matthieu shields Delphine, who loses consciousness. Guillaume, exhausted and heavily stung in legs and groin, falters and is surrounded.

Guillaume’s heart stops; the great creature webs him, tears off his head to make a new swimmer, and absorbs his body into the corpse-island. Unaware of Guillaume’s end, Thomas forces through the shallows, grabs the failing priest by the belt, and drags him and Delphine to a fallow lavender field beyond the river road.

Onshore, the tentacles thrash vainly as submerged mouths moan. Denied the girl it sought, the abomination hauls the island south toward the sea. The survivors—Thomas, Delphine, and the envenomed Père Matthieu—are battered, bereft of Guillaume, and nearly in Provence.