Run To Ruin – Chapter 6
On a lantern-lit terrace above a still, black lake a boy who’s had enough. A shooting star that doesn’t fall. One dinner, one old grudge, and a green light in the sky that changes everything.
6. A Late Night Sky
There was a spot beside Sabina. He dropped into it and settled himself at the low table. She glanced at him—took in his face.
“How bad was it?” she asked.
He had hurried to get here and now he wasn’t so sure he wanted to be here anymore. Darius picked up some bread.
“Father was trying. You know how it goes.” He tore at the bread. “They had the same argument.”
Somewhere in the gardens below the terrace, a frog started up. Then another.
Kaarle reached across the table and refilled his glass. Topped up Sabina’s without asking.
“What was the argument about, specifically?” asked Kaarle.
“It’s not ever about one specific thing,” Darius said. “It’s about the records, who is in charge, who knows what… all of it. The usual ending with Grandfather trusting nobody.”
He set the bread down. “And me there. Because I’m always there… that’s what I do. Rot the stars, it’s time it ends!”
“Dari—”
“Don’t.”
She stopped. She knew what the name did. She used it anyway when she wanted to slow him down; that was its only remaining function between them.
Boisterous laughter ran round the table. It was hard to think that there were only eleven of them, all under eighteen, in high spirits. And the twelfth sitting there, morose.
Hass’ voice came clear from the other side. “—and the first mate swore to me, swore on his mother’s grave, that the cargo had been loaded exactly as specified—”
That was Hass. He could do that, pull an audience inward by degrees until they forgot they’d started somewhere else, and make it look like no effort at all.
“It hadn’t been,” said Cora, delighted.
Darius watched Cora reach up and swipe a lock of hair from her face. Her eyes twinkled in the lamplight and her cheeks looked flushed.
“It had not been.” Hass let the pause breathe. He had the gift of knowing exactly when to slow down. “Three crates short on the upper deck, which I discovered at the third hour after midnight in a gale, in the dark, with the captain asking me — very politely, I should add, because the captain was always very polite — why I had signed the manifest.”
“What did you say?” Olavi demanded.
“I said: Captain, I believe there has been a miscommunication at the dock.”
Darius did not have that gift. He had never had that gift. He could not tell the front or back end of a ship’s manifest, or identify a gale; and even if he could, no one would lean in to him telling about it.
The lanterns had been lit along the colonnade, and the light they threw was the deep amber that made everything look warmer than it was. The lake sat beyond the gardens, flat and black, throwing up the lanterns’ reflections clear. Insects. The smell of rose water and sun-baked stone still coming off the paving.
“The lamb’s gone,” he said.
The braised lamb with the dried apricots, the lid resting beside it at a careless angle. Scraped clean.
“There’s still bread,” Sabina said. “And the fish pâté.”
“I don’t want the cold fish.”
Flawia laughed out loud. So did Cora. Darius watched the circle tightening around Hass. On one side the younger girls leaned in. On the other, Cora and Flawia were squeezed together.
“—so naturally,” Hass was saying, and Cora said, “naturally,” and Flawia said, “what does naturally even mean in this situation—”
He tried to listen to Hass, half his attention on the story and half on Cora. He counted which of Hass’ sentences Cora found funny. When Darius got to nine the hollow in his stomach pinched. He looked away from that.
Kaarle said, mildly, “There’s also the pickled vegetables. If you’re really hungry.”
Darius looked at him.
Kaarle gestured at the end of the table. There was indeed a dish of pickled vegetables.
Whoever decided that salty green things would be a good thing for this meal didn’t know what these children were like. Darius snorted through his nose and shook his head.
Behind him he heard Kaarle say, low and easy, “He’ll come around.”
“He always does,” Sabina whispered.
Darius turned and glared at the pair. He picked it up again. “I’m seventeen already. I should not be the one looking after a bitter old man and his dumb bad foot.”
“What would you want to do about it?” Kaarle asked.
“Something,” Darius said. “I don’t know what. But something. Tell Father we need a proper arrangement. Talk to Mother again. Have Grandfather taken—”
“Taken where?” Sabina said.
“I don’t know, Sabina. That’s why I said something rather than a specific plan.”
He had known it before he sat down. She was going to tell him to wait, to be cautious, to hold his position until he had something solid to hold it with.
“It’s not going to change,” he said. “It’s simply how things are. Grandfather is Grandfather. The foot doesn’t get better. He doesn’t change, and the arrangement doesn’t change, and I—” He stopped.
Darius stared across the table. Cora sat across from him. Piers had been leaning against her shoulder for ten minutes.
Sabina sipped from her glass and looked out toward the lake. The scent of the citrus trees along the colonnade drifted in the air.
“I don’t want to do it anymore,” said Darius.
“No one is saying you should be,” Sabina said carefully. “But, you’re good with him.”
“I’m present with him. It’s not the same thing. I want to… I’m done with it, Sabina.”
“Darius, if you go to Father with an unformed complaint about Grandfather two hours after an argument between them, you will make it worse.”
Sabina said it in the same way, the same voice mother would have. “You know that, don’t you?”
Below the terrace a fountain trickled. It sounded like nothing unless you listened. The water falling was persistent in the background.
“I know that doing nothing will make it last another five years.”
Her nose crinkled, half smile, half frown. “Hasty action could make it last another five more. It gives Grandfather a grievance.”
“He already has eight hundred grievances.”
“Don’t add to them.”
“I have my own grievances.”
“Maybe you are just hungry,” said Sabina. “You should eat something.”
“The fish isn’t bad,” Kaarle said. “I had some earlier.”
“I’m being buried alive under someone else’s obligation.”
“Right. But that’s not a position Father can act on. That’s—”
“A feeling. Yes. You’ve both established that.” Darius pushed his plate away. Cold fish pâté sat on the serving platter and looked back at him.
“What Sabina’s saying,” Kaarle offered, “is that you need a position before you can make a move. An argument with a structure. Not just a feeling.”
“I’m aware that I don’t have a plan. I’m aware that I should have a plan. It helps nothing if you point… It’s not fair.”
He was irritated. Irritated at Hass, for the ease of it, for the way a whole terrace full of people could be gathered up in his hand like that without him seeming to notice he was doing it. It wasn’t fair to be irritated by a man for a skill he simply had.
And under that, worse, harder to look at directly: he did not like that it worked on Cora too. He did not like the look on her face while Hass talked. He had no claim on where her attention went.
This was childish. Envying a guy his charm, resenting a gilr for being charmed.
Hass was still going. “—at which point the second mate produces a manifest that is, in fact, a completely different manifest, and I begin to understand that the miscommunication was not at the dock—”
“It was the first mate,” Cora said.
“It was absolutely the first mate.”
It seemed as if Hass was done with his telling. He became captain of a small crew as he pointed young Olavi and Wren back to the house.
“Time for bed,” he said.
Wren protested, but when the other two youngest girls also took their leave she had no more argument. Though Olavi tried begging one last time with Hass for staying longer.
When the boy left it was only the older kids still on the terrace and there was space beside Cora. He could work his way round and get closer to her. Darius stood up to walk round.
Then the frogs stopped. Three counts of absolute quiet before the light came.
He saw it from the corner of his eye, a flash on the south-eastern horizon that turned his head. It moved across the full span of the sky — slowly, not the instant streak of a falling star. Slower than it should have been. Just a white light, no, a green so pale it was almost not a colour at all. It was bright enough to reflect from everything beneath. The treetops, stone of the balustrade, the gardens dropping away below, and the lake was brilliant. All that black water suddenly and completely lit.
Darius looked down at the others seated around him. All looking up, their faces bathed in the pale green light. Kaarle and Sabina holding hands tight, Cora with her mouth slightly open, holding her breath.
The light held for four, five, six full seconds, and the tail stretched wide and luminous behind it. It did not fall. It crossed and then—at the far edge of the estate, past the wild trees, past the dark hills—it flickered out.
Darius kept his eyes on the last of the tail, the hint of green already gone, the light going.
Every small, grinding thought he’d been having about Oswin, and Hass, and Cora went out of his head at once, cleanly, as if a hand had swept the table.
Hass got to his feet from the far end and it was the only movement on the terrace and it broke the silence just enough for everyone to exhale.
Darius let his eyes drop from the sky, and found, without quite meaning to look for it, that Cora was watching the others the same as him.
Her gaze drifted across and her eyes caught his. Briefly only looking at him—caught in the same moment he was. Then he remembered himself and looked away, back up at the ordinary dark instead.
The frogs started again. One first, then two, then the full chorus of them rising back up from the lake. The fountain was still going. The night came back together around them, piece by piece.
The conversation picked up haltingly.
“Did you all see that?” asked Hass. “I’ve never seen a shooting star do that.”
“It was a comet, I think,” tried Flawia.
Darius still looked up at the sky. That was not a comet’s motion. He knew what a comet’s motion was; he had read enough while being bored waiting for Oswin to draw a star chart. Didn’t the old man have about every book on celestial events there was?
This had not behaved like a falling star either. It had crossed evenly, low and across the sky right above them, as though it didn’t care for the rules.
And if it was a comet it would have been catalogued. This was… something completely new. Something even his grandfather with all his records didn’t know about. It would…
His grandfather had spent a month already on the charts to predict the odds for this conclave. The old man would want to redraw all of them, and Darius would be stuck at his side.
It has to end.
© 2026 Gerhi Janse van Vuuren