Book Four: The Trap — 17.

Colin gazes into Wolf Messing’s water-filled helmet and sees not himself but Corporal Elwood Hondo, whose leering image signals an intrusion from the Long Dark. Around him, the house hums with ordinary motion—Allison at the piano, the twins playing cards, Arthur stalking a dark figure in the snowy night—while fate presses in.

The helmet becomes a cracked silver hand mirror from a murdered princess, its Y-shaped fracture showing split futures. On one side, Donovan flings himself into darkness; on the other, Arthur is skewered by a blade. The visions shift: Donna crushed in rubble, Allison buried beneath falling stone, and Gwen Underfoot bleeding as a serpent’s tongue tastes her life. Colin, horrified, looks away and back again to see himself lauded on Forbes and honored with a Nobel-like medal, hinting at grand destinies bought at staggering costs.

The conch from his grandfather’s collection rings like a phone, and Hondo speaks, urging Colin to accept that everyone dies but that some deaths are beautiful—sacrifices for a greater good. Hondo flatters Colin’s pain and ambition, promising protection, justice, and power beside King Sorrow if Colin will only lead Sorrow to him. Colin recognizes the rot in talk of stopping the “undeserving,” yet he is drunk, high, and shaken by the image of Arthur impaled.

Pressed for a sign, Hondo instructs him to send “smoke signals” so Sorrow can find him. Inside, Allison hammers “Puff the Magic Dragon,” Gwen strips pins from dead butterflies, and Arthur keeps hunting the distant silhouette. Outside in the bitter air, Colin packs his bong, lights it, and exhales rings toward the dark sky.

By choosing to smoke, Colin opens a path for King Sorrow, edging himself from fear and doubt toward complicity, even as his friends’ foreshadowed deaths hang over the night.