You’ll take that boy, and you’ll eat him up.

It doesn’t matter if you do it today in this sodden ruin you’ve created, or you wait forty years until he’s old and quaking and calls it a blessing to have your servants crawling out from behind his eyes to seek new light - you’ll take all that was good and all that was rotten and every ounce of potential in him and you’ll eat every part of him up.

And you’ll keep on whispering to him that he’s right on the verge of realising something, gaining something real and true, and he’ll keep walking his way towards your baited fucking lure as it skitters away at every turn until you’re ready to bite.

Doesn’t that make you ashamed? To scavenge off our lives, when they’re all we have?

What is the point of you?

We get out, and we walk onwards, through the rain. Gradually, the landscape obscures.

There comes a time when you can no longer see beyond the next hedgerow, the next stile, the next creeping outgrowth of stray forest overwhelming the burnt-out ruins. High above in the distance, the shapes of rusted military saints on their towering long legs or rolling tracks are just barely visible.

And as we enter deeper into the trailing mists, a familiar, wet scent enters the air. A cool, sticky damp lingers on our skin, making us drip. It’s river mist, I think. Somewhere out here, in the heart of the barren land, the waters have staked a claim for themselves.

And presently, we come to something strange. An endless line of warning tape, stretching out across the fields before us. Neon orange, once bright and now hopelessly muddied, staked into the ground at intervals, here and there flapping free. Old tyre tracks lie in the earth before it, pooling with water.

Someone has built a makeshift shrine to the Riddlespike, God of Boundaries; three crows, impaled upon iron railing-posts that have been driven into the ground. It looks somehow desperate.

The police were here. Clearly. And whatever they found beyond the tape, they didn’t feel the need to stick around.

They abandoned this place, almost as soon as they found it.

CARPENTER: Oh, don’t even try it. That’s is my rage to carry. It’s my hurt, it’s my sorrow. You don’t get to share it with me. You’re a convert, Faulkner. Stop pretending, stop performing. None of this belongs to you. You want to play messiah and we’re just the most convenient vessel.

A great sunken park, stretching out on all sides before us. The grass and flowerbeds have been blessed by the flood, growing tall and wild and strange above the water’s surface. Grey polyp trees sway back and forth like weeping willows in the morning breeze, as the rain falls, their tendrils reaching to the sky.

We’re surrounded by people here, I realise. They stand in mid-motion, walking their dogs or pushing their prams, calcified and reshaped and eroded by a dozen tides, as the water washes up around their waists.

A forest of people, strands of white river-coral extending from their heads and their outstretched arms.

We walk amongst them, silently and cautiously; they, too, are swaying, teeming, with life, and might wake at any moment. The mists part.

And in the very centre of the park, painted in great strokes across the ruined wall of some clubhouse or public toilet, its purpose no longer clear...at last, we come to it. The source of all this.

The Wither Mark.

The black and seething water rises to our ankles, then to our waists.

The concrete has sunk into ruin. The clinging mud is everywhere. Neon signs and shrines flash faintly from underneath the crawling black limpets and barnacles that coat every surface.

The river mist fills the corners of your vision, so thick and so chokingthat you can’t see further than a few feet ahead.

As we walk, Faulkner slips, almost toppling into the torrent - I catch hold of him and steer him back upright. He’s glassy-eyed, grinning at me as he regains his balance. Close to delirious.