The raindrops make his covering cloth wet and the stench of the bodies fills his nose, it’s the smell of rotting, pain and helplessness. He takes off the cloth to be able to breathe easier through mouth and stop the stench from entering his nose and finding its way down to his guts and make him want to vomit. The upper two lines of the bodies are the ones familiar to him. Tirad puts one foot between Pejhan’s head and Ashid’s shoulder and his other foot by Armina’s arm and Lealy’s leg and climes up to the deck. He pulls up the bodies onto the deck and looks at them. Armina had been stroked by a knife many times in his heart and stomach. There’s a gunshot wound on Ashid’s heart whose eyes are taken out by the seagulls. Pejhan’s body had been torn and eaten by the birds that he can’t say which cut is from a knife wound and which from a seagull’s beak. But Lealy’s body is just livid; there are no signs of gunshots or knife wounds on her. Even the seagulls had spared her. Tirad throws out the first three bodies into the sea and sits by Lealy’s side. Maybe she prefers him to sing the Departing Hymns for her. But if she had stayed true to the Saviour ways, what was she doing in Parsana? Tirad moves his fingers on her lifeless skins and caresses her burn marks.

He looks at his own arm. His burn mark has nearly vanished. She must have gone through a great agony, or maybe she had passed out like he did, with the first burning pains. But her healing time must have been long and difficult. How long did it take for all this vast skin to be redressed again? He wants to kiss her lips, for the first and the last time, just to say goodbye. He had this chance many times before, but had stopped, contenting himself to her sisterly arm and then spending the whole night with the image of her lips, and then burning away the faulty thought in the next morning’s Spawn-Scorching ceremony. Lealy wanted to leave the Saviour Ship with him and he had insisted to stay and become a remarkable disciple. But his place was never there although he regrets having left his ignorant, peaceful servant life on the Ship. It was easier not to know and to be happy with what little he had. He regrets the life he could have with Lealy if they had long escaped the Saviour Ship together. Maybe it would have been an easier, love-filled life without all the problems that Mart had created for them. He regrets the warmth of Lealy’s lustre lips that he has lost forever. Tirad lowers his face to hers for the departing kiss, asking her to forgive him for abandoning her in Oxan, for not having returned to find her and for choosing Dalia over her, even though he is not sure if he had truly chosen Dalia or fate had brought them together, making them man and wife. Dalia is still not well; she is burning with fever and waiting for him to find some medicine to cool down her temperature. Tirad backs off his face. Kissing Lealy won’t put things right, it would only upset Dalia. Lealy was used to his reserved ways, wanting to go on with her and resisting his desires at the last moment. He will stay the same towards her even this last time. Tirad takes her body to the edge of the deck and throws her down into the sea, under the crimson sky of the dawn. He sets off to the cabins and hopes Dalia would turn off the flashlight on the boat as the sun is coming up.