I cast a glance at Soren, nearly fooled by the stoic expression on his face, until I noticed a muscle in his jaw twitching. This close, our bond ran deep, and his discomfort and distress at the horrifying sights might’ve been easier for him to hide, but it was there like a building storm.

“Does it make me odd if I say that Lydian was a terrible person, but nobody deserves this?” I asked him.

“No,” he said. “It makes you compassionate and a better person than I am. If I could watch vultures pick out Lydian’s liver, I’d enjoy every second of it. But you’re far kinder than I. But this sight does unnerve me.”

His eyes showed nothing as another shriek pierced through the air and another person was swallowed by the massive snake creature, blood pooling around where the person once was chained. I winced at the crunching and crushing of bones; the sound sending chills up my spine and I feared I was gripping Soren’s hand so tight that I was cutting off his circulation.

Then the tortured body that had been swallowed whole and crushed was back upon the rocks, waiting for the tide once more.

Maybe it was my own experience with torment but there was a pulling in my gut that told me no living creature, no matter how evil, deserved something as brutal as this. I tried to picture Lydian, bound to the rocks, regenerating whenever birds picked out his eyeballs or other animals took out chunks of his flesh. I imagined being swallowed and crushed by the Nidhogg’s powerful muscles. Even then, my stomach could barely handle the imagery, and the deep sense of this is wrong still lingered inside of me.

“I hope we find him and get out quick,” I muttered, eyes darting around. The longer I spent on this shore, the more my own sanity slipped.

“We should’ve asked Diaval to do a spell,” Soren replied. “Locating him or something. She could’ve probably done it.” He shook his head in disgust. “Doesn’t matter now. Let’s keep looking.”

Staring at bloated body after bloated body, I knew that for a long time after today, I would be having nightmares. “This doesn’t bother you?” I asked.

Soren shook his head. “Not that way. I mean, it’s disgusting and that bothers me, but emotionally? Not really. It could, I guess, if I wanted it to. It’d bother me if it were you or someone else I cared about. But I don’t know these people, so I don’t really care about them. It’s horrific in an objective sense but subjectively…” He shrugged. “I feel emotions, we’ve crossed that bridge before, but I still process them differently. And I guess I process this in a way that it doesn’t bother me.”