“I can tell you each and every part of the journey from memory. I could tell you where the tracks wind and bend, where the wind blows due to a break in the trees, the first corner you turn when you see it; miles away and covered in fog, but unmistakable, the tower. I felt like I didn’t have any agency, just being forced back and forth along that hellish track to damnantion.

The worst part wasn’t the scream, but the silence… Because in that silence I only had myself for company, me and my thoughts left to bask in an eternity while we contemplated my place in hell. Each and every day I told myself I’d do something; that I’d quit, leave, never look back. I never did… I kept getting paid and I kept going home. And that’s what the worst part is— living with yourself; it’s not the knowledge that you’re having a hand in the murder of so many people, it’s the fact that you can still sleep at night. I close my eyes and all I can see is that tower of ash, floating skyward against a red sky, then the raining down of a thousand souls, dancing in the wind.

I’ll never forget the way it burns your throat. As you try and breathe, a taste of the hellish sulfur that’s about to come… the way it forces tears in your eyes. There comes a point where the faces of the people you’ve wrong become too many to recognize in a dream; they merge and they change and they become all consuming. No longer recognizable individuals, but an entire consciousness in your thoughts.

I was once on the path when it began to snow, and from behind me I heard the laughter of a child as she reached her hand out and let a snowflake fall onto her hand, melting into nothing within a few seconds. Amidst all the screams, the curses, the cries… the sound of that laughter was the most haunting thing I have ever known.

I won’t beg for forgiveness. I don’t want it. I don’t deserve it. Whatever is coming for me after I die, I embrace as inevitable and just."

- Thomas the Tank Engine, 1945