When he emerged from Solitary, it was as if the two months in darkness had grasped some part of him and refused to let it follow him into the light. Maybe it still lingered in the cell, calling out with a mouth full of shadow, hands reaching for the door before it closed.

Whatever phenomenon had taken place left the young soldier bereft of his once mercurial nature. If his name was called he would merely glance over coolly, expression calm. If a peer wronged him, he did not lash out, only looked before him as if he expected it, mouth hinting a smile.

And when he noticed the sun sinking below a horizon pierced by the spires of home, he would blink slowly, and return to his room, not alone, but inviting anyone with him with a beckoning stare, sometimes with a click of his tongue, as if the Belfast house of the armada was already his long before he was appointed Admiral.

On the rare occasion he was alone, in the dark, he was reacquainted with the side of himself supposedly left in his cell. He could feel those weak hands somehow pry into his flesh. Those voices, those hoarse whispers, exhaling husky secrets about himself.

In the thickets of his mind where wolves made themselves at home, emerging only at night when there was no one else to witness their triocular prowls, a figure curled amidst the thorns. Someone whom Chimera had long forgotten beneath his poise, his buttoned shirts and combed hair, the still waters he waded through with ease now.

The wolves slipped in and out of view but their breath fogged up this nightmarish vignette. Someone was lying helpless in the brambles, unable to move away from the omnipresent pack of monsters. Slick with blood and sweat, they clutched themselves, too scared to cry. Whatever words they managed to scream were alien to Chimera in a tongue he did not recognise.

A certain sort of trepidation would come over him as if brought by the night itself, though he knew this was impossible. He would clutch the sheets of his bed in shameful fright, and as if he thought it would help in any way, he would try hard as he could to remember who the figure was, skulking there at the back of his mind. They looked so familiar, so despicable and so achingly pathetic.

But when he awoke to grey-gold mornings, there was no recollection of such trivial things, and he would wonder why his hands hurt so bad or why he was soaked through to his blankets or why his throat was so scratchy and dry. He would shrug it off, until the next night he was alone, whenever that would be.

It simply seemed as if these forgotten terrors had been dragged off before sunrise by some careful predator, whose skills surpassed even those of the admiral himself.