Chapter 3: The Disaster Strikes
Disclaimer : The first paragraph contains graphic and bloody scenes which may not be suitable for some readers , read at your own risk.
Just inside the house ,in the main hall Marie is lying ,bleeding from her forehead and passed out. Near the open door of the bedroom door , Ethan's uncle is lying in a pool of blood with multiple bruises and sword cuts on his body and a deep cut on his neck which seemed to have bled a lot. Further inside the room his aunt is lying in a pool of blood as well with a huge stabbing wound on her stomach.
Ethan is terrified watching this scene in front his eyes but tries take deep breaths and calm himself down and hurriedly gets down to checking their breaths. Marie is still breathing albeit very shallowly but Ethan's uncle and aunt are completely breathless. Stephen to walked in briskly and helped Marie up to a sleeping position on the sofa and started dressing her wounds with bandages. Ethan tried to cover the wounds of his uncle and aunt to stop the bleeding and administer them CPR but it is completely useless , Ethan knew in his heart , what this much bleeding accompanying the fatal wounds and breathless body meant for them but he tried not to focus on this and is desperately trying to revive them.
A few minutes later Stephen joins him and after trying a few more minutes he holds Ethan back to stop him from continuing. Ethan is in tears by now and is feeling completely devastated, after covering their bodies with bed sheets , he helps Stephen in shifting Marie to the bed in the guest room and helps apply the medicine to Marie's wounds. After sometime her breath stabilizes and she is in a deep sleep , so Stephen and Ethan don't make any sound and move out of the house and start collecting woods from the orchard surrounding the back hills.
They set up a huge wooden pyre by the sea and after donning both the dead bodies with clean clothes , his uncle and aunt were laid down on the pyre for cremation. This is a ritual for sending off the dead, that his current family has been following for generations. As the fire burned against the backdrop of everchanging and unchanging waves hitting the surface , Ethan thought of all the memories of his uncle , aunt and him living together as a happy family , he remembered their love and support for him after his parent's death, about how happy they all were when they learnt of his aunt's pregnancy.
All the normalcy of his life and happiness and peace accompanying it has come crashing down now and he is still not able to believe his present circumstances, as if it is some very bad dream. After collecting the ashes in an urn with Stephen's help, they returned home and transferred Marie to Stephen's house where Ethan too will be staying for tonight.
Late into the night , Ethan is still thinking about how all this tragedy happened and speculating who was responsible for it. He doesn't believe that any one on the island did it as their family lived in the very sparsely populated west region and have a minimal amount of contact with others except for the Stephen family , and even these are the only people who can be counted as a regular acquaintances of his family , maybe his father and mother knew more people but they had not told anyone about his uncle and aunt so as to not disturb their peaceful farming life on this island and also as a safe refuge here, if anything goes wrong with their buisness , so there isn't even a question of any grudge or something similar being the case here. He is having a hard time suspecting Robbers or Pirates as nothing of value was stolen from the house and their usual modus operandi of the Pirates is to loot and burn everything , moreover they would have heard something about it while returning if there was an attack of Pirates. Submerged in these chaotic thoughts the night slowly passed away.
Early the next morning , Marie regained consciousness and Ethan is eager to know what happped the last day , asked her of all the details of the tragic event. Marie slowly told them that she was at her home taking care of the household chores , when she heard loud noises of shouting and argument , then a horrified screeming sound and wails afterwards from the direction of his uncle and aunt's home. When she ran there to check on the situation she saw two people in suits and ties which a few naval soilders walking out of the house taking something about hurring up as their is too much pressure from the world government , when she saw his uncle lying in a pool of blood just inside the door she was horrified and she screamed and questioned them about their motives. One of the man in suit said that it was such a nuisance and the other one suddenly appeared besides her and casually thew her against the wall , the last thing she heard before losing consciousness was the suited man ordering the naval soilders to hurry up as they have to visit other island too.
Ethan listened to Marie recounting the events that unfolded yesterday with acute attention and as she finished her account of it , there is a sudden jolt going through Ethan's brain as everything fell into place and he understood whats going on. According to the description given by Marie , Ethan can bet that the 2 people in suits must be CP agents and the rest would be the naval soldiers assigned to assist them , coupled with navy's heavy presence in the sea surrounding the archipelago and their sense of urgency , they are obviously searching for Roger's heir and as an year has already passed from his execution with no results in sight the world government has begun getting impatient and must be putting a lot of pressure on the people responsible for the search operation.
The situation has degraded to such a degree that these people would rather kill an innocent than leave any chance for Roger's child to survive. Ethan mused that they must have found out about his aunt being pregnant somehow and came here to investigate , and given their rude nature where they consider themselves to be above all , they must have misbehaved and mistreated his aunt so that his uncle and aunt got into an altercation with them and the agents should have deemed it easier to just finish them off here and move on their next target.
You can then ask that why was Marie left alive? Well its not so much attributed to their kindness as to the plain and simple fact that they don't care. What can an old lady who lives in this rural area with no power amount up to , anyway the world government they work for is an expert in fabricating stories and they can even silently change the regime of a country with no one being any smarter. As for the remaining fact that they will be reprimanded by their superiors , well they can deal with that easily by fabricating some absurd story and the officials would at most give them a slap on the wrist or may be some perfunctory verbal reprimand after all they don't want to irritate these field workers too much , coupled with the fact that the women in question was more than seven months pregnant at this time , which increases her chance of being related to Roger so they themselves may have made a similar decision.
With his peaceful life destroyed and his only family in this world suffering a terrible disaster, Ethan's plans on going to the sea are in shambles. Although his parents had died earlier but due having less contact with them and even the memories before that were almost groggy so even if he was said on their demise it was nearly not as heartbreaking as it is this time. He completely occupied by the sad emotions emerging from the memories of his time here as well as a burning rage at himself for being naïve and on everyone else responsible for destroying his happy family.
This disaster has made him completely awake from his bliss and made him completely realize that this is no longer just a world of wonders , voyages and adventures that he may have thought it to be from his previous life's experience but a very real and hence a very cruel world especially for ordinary people who are completely grinded off in the ever going struggle between the world government and pirates.
He has understood that if he even wants to have a sliver of chance to get his revenge on all those responsible he needs to change his status quo and gain power both personal and social.