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Enoch’s barn is located in the backwoods far past the black stump, guarded far more effectively by acres and acres of corn than any army. Unmarked on most maps, only occasionally do they get a wayward stranger staggering into town in the early morning, citing automobile trouble several miles back.
“Old country roads,” Enoch says sagely. “They tear up the undercarriage. Nothing to be done for it, I’m afraid.”
It always earns him a commiserating laugh that smooths the way over to reel the wayward stranger in for a meal, and maybe a night’s stay, before they see about contacting someone.
Enoch has only ever seen broken-down automobiles, but he’s assured by his younger flock they’re quite impressive when they’re in motion. He doesn’t believe them, really, but when he pokes through their oil-slick engines, the air flavors faintly with despair, and he supposes that anything his neighbor had had a hand in must be impressive.
Not that they’re much of neighbors anymore.
Enoch hasn’t seen the woods in seventy years.
Gradually, its borders had been cut back, and slowly, silently, the Beast had receded with them.
He still visited more frequently than he had in the days when their domains were practically on top of each other, but the world is emptier now. Without the forest, all Enoch ever sees when he dares venture to the tops of shingled roofs is miles and miles of pumpkin fields. It leaves him feeling lonely, the constant presence, the potential for companionship hidden in the trees stripped away down to sky and horizon.
Enoch keeps his paws on the ground these days.
He hasn’t used the maypole in at least three decades.
Pottsfield doesn’t get many out-of-towners. A census man here and there, a putout mechanic, come to retrieve an automobile Enoch has already put to better use as plowshares and hoes, and occasionally teenagers.
Enoch isn’t sure where they come from, exactly, only that they steal through in the night and leave traces of themselves behind. Strange shapes in the crops, huge coordinated designs, still-smoldering remnants of tobacco, and sometimes, on nights that they are particularly bold, or Enoch particularly indulgent, paint.
Most of it is gone within the week, scrubbed off by helpful hands, obscuring obscenities and erasing names the same way Enoch polishes the names off of tombstones.
And yet, in bright red lettering on the back of Enoch’s barn, a huge scrawl reads The Tomb Of Theseus .
It’s a bit of an unfair comparison.
Theseus’ ship was replaced board by board, Enoch’s barn had come down in a terrible heap one cold year, and he hadn’t been able to persuade it to stay up afterward. Even so, it was a misnomer of a title, though its author couldn’t have known, but Enoch prided himself on the fact the loft was entirely original.
Enoch had watched those saplings spring up on the other side of the fence, he had overseen their clearing, and he had been there to see them raised into a shelter. Enoch had pressed himself into them, spackled over the woodgrain with contentment until they were so smooth they slid like silk at a touch. He'd be damned to give up the only piece of his barn nearly as old as he was. It was the only part that made the rest bearable while he reacquainted himself with new knotholes and the splinters.
He used to be better at this, keeping up with the times. Maybe he was a generation behind here or there, but it had always been easy, natural, a turn, like a hoe through soil, turning old dirt to cover it in new.
Somewhere though, he had slipped, fallen behind, and never really picked himself up enough to get going again. Enoch suspects it was around the same time his neighbor started racing to keep up.
The year electric lights had started cropping up had been an especially bad year, one that had bookended a terrible string of decades for his neighbor.
Forests were getting smaller, disappearing under miles and miles of farmland and mortal houses. His neighbor had gotten sparer, shorter too, as if he could no longer sustain his impressive height, or maybe it was just that his forests were no longer quite as old, and he could no longer maneuver them with the same ease at the height he once wore.
Electric light had been the worst of it, a twisting of the knife already bleeding his neighbor out by the neck.
“They don’t believe in monsters anymore.” The Beast had said, sitting on one of the cross beams of Enoch’s barn. There was a bone saw in his hand, and Enoch had watched, with a twisting sense of nausea, as his neighbor set it against his one vanity, his one pride. He had asked Enoch to do it, but when the time came to put blade to bark, Enoch could not do it, could not stomach the thought of cutting through wood any more than smashing a stained glass window, less, really. The Beast talks through it, his voice unflinching, and Enoch isn’t sure whose benefit it’s for. “But they believe in men, and they believe that men are as capable as monsters.”
The noise had been terrible.
A grating hiss as fibers splintered.
Enoch's ears are plastered against his skull.
“Hope will always have its place, hunger, and despair will endure, but the story is changing, and if I do not, it will be forced upon me, and I am not sure if I will still be myself at the end.” The first antler comes off with a terrible wet sound, and one edge is a jagged spear, dripping oil down the silver teeth of the saw. He sets it down gingerly on the cross beam beside him.
Enoch is not beside him.
He cannot bear to be.
The Beast grasps his remaining antler in one hand, steadying it, as he sets the bone saw close to his temple.
His eyes close briefly, and Enoch can feel the breath he takes, the sip of Enoch, agonizing and alcoholic, he takes for courage. His monologue does not so much as waver, continuing as the dreadful sound of wood splintering cuts into Enoch’s soul.
“I do not intend to let it come to that. I will shape their belief before it can shape me.” Enoch has nothing to say to that. His words had abandoned him when the Beast had appeared on his doorstep in the black cloak that Enoch vaguely recognized as the fashion of that century. And it seems that the Beast has no more to say. They had lingered in that terrible moment, wood rending filling the space between them.
Enoch did not have to change.
Death was the same. Death endured. Death did not take on new forms, no matter how clever humans got at killing.
Hunger, in its way, was similar. It was old, ancient, older than Enoch.
But despair was another thing, younger than hunger, younger than death. It took on new shapes as its counter hope grew to suit the times it dwelt in. There was an oldness to it, a pattern that came from the time before patterns, but on its old bones, new structures were built, new trees grew up, and the Beast had to suit himself to grow edelwoods in new forests.
Enoch has seen mountains spring up and be whittled down into dust. He's watched rivers turn lands into oceans. He's watched man rise up above the oceans of their birth, stand above the forests that fed them and the lands that nurtured them. Enoch has seen change in the cyclic turn of life, emerging in the spring to die in the autumn. He knows the patterns of change. Enoch has seen change both predictable and unforetold, cyclical and irreversible.
He can usually tell the distinction between the two at their start.
He wonders if he's watching his neighbor become a stranger.
He worries.
The sawing stopped, and Enoch watched the terrible moment that the Beast lingered, still holding his antler against his temple, clutching onto the fleeting wholeness.
And then he set it down, and plucked a thick set of goggles from beneath his cloak.
They settled over his eyes, his beautiful eyes, that Enoch didn’t see for a whole decade following, and then the Beast is sweeping up the wide-brimmed black hat and settling it over his head, scarf drawn up to brush at glass, and suddenly, his neighbor is a terrible famicile of human, something Enoch never expected to live to see him be.
There are no words.
Nothing on Enoch’s tongue but an introduction he refuses to offer.
An acknowledgment of unfamiliarity Enoch will not utter.
The Beast leaps down and does not look back up over his shoulder at Enoch.
Enoch can remember him, wearing a stranger’s silhouette framed at the barn doors, speaking into the night, but addressing Enoch.
“Keep my antlers, Harvest Lord,” The night had been horribly clear, and moonlight had been bold enough to settle on the brim of his hat, to touch a creature it had never dared to touch before. It did not recognize him any more than Enoch did. “I will need them again.”
Then he had been gone, disappeared into the night to sow new stories, insidious stories, that would last beneath the touch of electric light.
It had been a comfort, a bitter one, a small assurance that the Beast that Enoch had grown familiar with would return, the future was fast coming upon them, and the Beast was racing to meet it, but one day, the race would end, right back where it started, in Enoch’s barn.
That moment when the Beast changed, Enoch stopped.
Maybe it was stubbornness, maybe it was shock, but some part of Enoch remained in that clear night, and he had never been quite able to bring it up to speed with the future, rapidly turning into present around him.
There’s a new kind of forest, the Beast tells him when he stops to visit, leaning on Enoch’s fence like old times as if he isn’t standing in the middle of something like a hundred square miles of Pottsfield. Concrete and glass, nothing like the forests they had once known, the concrete jungle, the Beast has heard it called. Rife with people, run through by lights, and yet the shadows there are deeper, despair more potent, more concentrated, easy hunting grounds. When people go missing, no one goes looking for them. Ironic, isn’t it? That it’s easier now that they’re clustered to slip through unnoticed.
The Beast laughs, and Enoch can find the humor through his neighbors, can laugh a sound that brings the corn up burnished gold, because his neighbor’s eyes are blue, and even Enoch can see it through the nearly opaque glass he hides behind.
Things are changing.
Things are remaining the same.
“The woods still stand.” The Beast tells him one day when the sunset is scarlet. Pollution , not a storm, Enoch has been told.
“Prove it to me,” Enoch says, and it’s not a challenge so much as it is a plea.
It takes a year, but Enoch has not seen the trees at his borders since the advent of the tractor.
(He doesn’t have one, even though he has more farmland than any of his neighbors, his true ones, humans who own the farms that have sprung up in the space around Pottsfield, not the only one that matters, who never scoffs, even though the endearment has lost its moorings.)
Enoch is still using the maypole then, when the Beast returns, with a jaunty smile, squeezed into an ill-fitting skin Enoch had let him steal off one of his citizens.
“A favor,” Enoch calls it when the Beast does.
“A gift,” The Beast insists as he presses the bundle of seeds into Enoch’s ribbons.
They’re from all over the world, places Enoch was once familiar with, that are now separated by seas, (The land is still now, held rigidly to one shape by mortal maps. The old passages are not closed, though, not to those who remember. Not to his neighbor whose memory is longer than Enoch's), some sharp and some smooth, small and heavy, they’re ancient, carrying with them memories of a Beast who tended their forebearers up from saplings, and each and every one of them is brimming with new life.
Enoch throws them all out into the orchard, and every one of them springs up, a strange disruption amidst neatly tended rows. They should not grow, not here, in this climate, they know it, coded deeply into their twisting wood grain, but they haven’t the heart to tell Enoch they cannot, and so they do.
Pottsfield stops tending the orchard after that, and Enoch carves a little wilderness back into the world that had carved cities into it.
Enoch gets electric lights installed after that.
Not in his barn and not in any of Pottsfield’s historic sector (it was all historic, from an academic’s point of view, but not to Enoch, who had been here when the land had been dust.), but slowly, he had become acquainted with the scourge of his neighbor.
It was not so very bad, actually.
His citizens were much pleased by the ease it brought them. The time of splitting firewood was better put in leisure and fieldwork.
The Beast doesn't think so, either.
“It’s brilliant,” He says as he trails his fingers against the top of Enoch’s head. Enoch fancies himself if he pushes his head up hard enough, he can feel the texture of bark through the skin. “They venture so much further with it, content in the safety of the light, the shadows seem so much darker when it's put out, the despair comes so much more quickly.”
“Overreliant,” Enoch purrs, and the Beast hums an affirmative.
It’s been a successful century for the Beast.
Nowadays, the Beast hardly ever grows trees. He still grows edelwoods, but they’ve taken on a new look. Monsters of metal scaffolding that don’t grow so much as they pull up oil. Sometimes hundreds of them in huge empty wastelands. Enoch has seen a photograph of the Beast, arms thrown wide with delight as oil comes down like rain from one of them.
Humans have started using his oil, the Beast says with a clever little sneer he is so rarely without these days. They’ve started pulling it up out of the ground, from places where trees have been covered over by the ground, old stores that were older than Enoch and the Beast’s friendships, burning it, flavoring the very air they breathe with despair.
“They think it’s what’s left of dinosaurs,” The Beast says and Enoch knows that dinosaur is the new name of the creatures Enoch had known as dragons, but he does not understand how humans could think them the originators of the oil.
“Because of their fire?” Enoch enquires, and really, the idea doesn’t seem quite so absurd. Certainly, why wouldn’t a creature that breathed flame host within it a store of something flammable?
The Beast laughs and presses the shape of his smile into the space between Enoch’s pointed ears. Enoch wishes he wouldn’t because the Beast’s laughter is the only time Enoch can see blue flickering in the darkness of his pupils.
“Oh, Harvest Lord.” The Beast says, and there’s no condescension in his tone, only a wispy nostalgia. “If only mortals were as rational as you, they’d never be foolish enough to burn it at all.”
In a way, the Beast tells him later, when Enoch manages to peel him out of his skin and curl up against his bark. They’re right. The oil is made out of corpses.
Enoch laughs.
The Dark Lantern is at the heart of a lighthouse, or so Enoch learns from one of his new citizens, pulled shakily up into the light.
Enoch can taste the salt on his neighbor’s hands when he returns from tending it.
“The undying light,” He muses, to Enoch, while Enoch makes ribbons of the skin he wears. By morning, the Beast will have hidden the twisted bark Enoch reveals with every careless slash of his claws through brittle flesh, will wrap up the cuts with streamers stolen off of Enoch’s maypole. Enoch used to tie its ribbons up into his antlers, now he has no use for it, no purpose except to let his neighbor rip off pieces of it to tie up wounds that do not bleed, mummifying himself in relics of their mutual past, and Enoch knows that he cannot put the maypole back on, or he will tie off the Beast’s wounds himself, and neither of them will ever be able to work the knots free. “A beacon of hope for the hopeless, a guide in the darkness, a light for the lost and the meek.”
And his neighbor laughs and throws his head back like the wild thing he pretends he isn’t because nothing's changed, even when everything has.
Enoch sinks his teeth into his neighbor’s arm, feels them puncture skin, and slice through hay, and embed themselves in wood.
The Beast draws him away by the scruff.
He licks bitter satisfaction off his muzzle with an expression that flirts with being a sneer, lets the oil beneath his neighbor’s bark drip down and stain greying fur iridescent black.
“That was unnecessary.” The Beast says, inspecting the neat ring of punctures in his skin.
“On the contrary,” Enoch says, and he does not blink as he watches the Beast neatly hide the mark beneath a length of fabric, a mark of its own. “It was very necessary.”
The night that heaven shatters, Enoch finds the Beast sitting in a cornfield, perched crosslegged on a section of fence only ten feet long, with an edelwood growing up before him.
It's the edelwood that stops him, pale bark and twisted scream, its leaves a sickly orange Enoch has never been able to paint onto leaves when his season comes. The Beast twists his neck at an angle that says he’s still accommodating for antlers that aren’t there when he addresses Enoch.
“Something is coming, Enoch,” He says.
The walkingstick in his lap is topped with a carved hare.
Enoch cannot look the Beast in the eyes, not like this, not black ringed with brown, where red should be ringed in yellow ringed in blue. Enoch cannot have this conversation with a stranger.
“Something usually is,” Enoch says.
The hare’s eyes are painted a glossy black, and they catch the image of the stars high above.
Enoch wants to ask about the edelwood. Wants to ask how far the Beast chased the poor soul. If he didn’t chase them at all. If he led them here intentionally.
“They’ve sent something up there.” The Beast gestures widely toward the banner above their heads. He’s not looking at Enoch, not any more than Enoch is looking at him. “A silver comet. Can you taste it, Enoch, their hope?” He can’t. Actually, all Enoch can taste is rather a lot of fear boiling on the horizon, but his neighbor has always been better at parsing the nuances of it. “They’re going to follow the path it blazes for them.”
“To the stars?” Enoch asks and wishes he hadn’t.
“Further,” His neighbor responds and the stars in the hare’s eyes twinkle with silent laughter.
And you will go with them . Enoch doesn’t say. And I will remain here.
Half a decade later, the Beast shows up in a wagon.
“The truck broke down at the edge of your field.” He tells Enoch, and Enoch makes a note to send a team out to drag it in, if for nothing else, then for a look at what his neighbor considers drivable. “I come bearing gifts.”
“Oh?”
The gifts turn out to be a very nice bottle of wine that’s older than Enoch’s catskin and a mechanical box.
Enoch is relatively sure that his neighbor only brings the wine to make him more receptive to letting the Beast set up the box- a television, apparently- in his loft.
“They’ve made a declaration, Harvest Lord,” The Beast says. He hasn’t taken a drink. Enoch isn’t sure he can when he’s wearing a skin, but his neighbor is still holding the glass close, possessively, the glass pressed up against borrowed lips, sipping the scent out of the air.
Enoch is tipsy, tipsy enough that the contents of his own glass no longer hold any appeal, and he’s more occupied with trying to take sips out of his neighbors.
There’s a hand playing across his flank, tracing patterns old enough Enoch is familiar with them. The Beast hums when a swat of Enoch’s paw shreds his skin down the junction of jaw and neck, flaying open the terrible secret his neighbor hides beneath. Flesh hangs open, and straw tumbles out. The shape of his neighbor’s face before it disappears beneath untouched flesh is still hidden by shadow, but it’s a veil Enoch is far more amenable to than skin.
“They’re going to put a man on the moon.”
And suddenly, Enoch is not nearly drunk enough nor sober enough for this.
“The moon ?” His voice snaps on the sharp edge of the, like firewood cracking into embers in a hearth, splintering, throwing up flame. The Beast grunts under the force of it, surging up with the rest of Enoch to settle heavily in the air and pin his neighbor back.
“Within the decade,” His voice is emotionless.
Enoch bristles, fur standing on end.
“The moon is not some hunk of rock for mortal feet to sully- they dare to tread- the moon-” The rest of the sentence dissolves into a wordless snarl, the catskin’s head thrown back lips curling up over fangs.
Pottsfield quakes.
A subsonic sound rips its way through the night. It rips up the corn and sets graves churning. It echoes up into the boundless darkness and resonates in the crystal facets of stars.
The tinny voice of a news broadcast interrupts it.
The noise dies in Enoch’s lungs.
The Beast’s hand rests on the dial of the television.
Warped across its bowed screen, a woman chatters on.
“A man on the moon,” Enoch echoes her in a whisper that deafens.
“I can’t watch it alone, Harvest Lord.” The Beast says over the thrum of the television.
And this is at least familiar, older than televisions or humans with ideas too big for their hands, the wordless give and take, the silent begging, the pair of them trying to express in this mutual language that belonged to neither of them what they need, grasping around in the darkness for each other. An exchange of favors and debts older than the land beneath them that gives them the excuse to give each other what they need.
Enoch collapses, and the catskin goes limp in the Beast’s lap.
Enoch can't even tell if he's still in it.
Everything has gone the sort of numb feeling that accompanies the level of drunk he wishes he was.
“A favor.” The Beast asks, and runs a placating hand along Enoch’s spine.
“A gift,” Enoch replies.
The Beast doesn’t turn the television off when he leaves, and Enoch makes himself ill listening to mortal speeches and gazing out the loft window.
A long time ago, on an evening bleak and cold, Enoch had adjusted his ribbons just so, through the branches of his orchard. The sun had begun to set, a bleeding crimson spilling across the ground, a disk of furious red skimming across the horizon, balanced on the far-off points of evergreens, and Enoch had let the cradle snap closed around her and pulled her right out of the sky.
He had enough of summer in him not to melt at her touch and enough winter in him to cool her down enough to handle.
He bargained her favor.
He was still paying the debt back.
There’s a part of him that wants to do that now, reach up and catch the moon right out of the sky, cradle it in black fur so that it doesn’t even realize it's been pulled out of the night, to hold it protectively where mortal hands cannot reach.
In the end, he doesn’t.
Just gets terribly drunk on the rest of the wine, and wishes he had the nerve to go through with it. Enoch shuts the television off with a heavy heart and curls up in the remnants of the skin he once wore.
The machine remains off for seven years.
The Beast appears between strokes of lightning, and Enoch knows he didn’t bother to enter Pottsfield through the usual means.
“Harvest Lord,” He croons, low and throaty, the skin he wears sloughing off at the shoulders, hanging off him seductively.
“Sugar,” Enoch murmurs and lets himself be plucked up by cold fingers that numb away the reminders of the catskin’s age.
“Tonight,” The Beast says, and Enoch can feel his inhale against fur.
“So soon?” Enoch asks, and the Beast hums.
“They’re already on their way, Cat.”
“When did decades get so short?” Enoch asks the junction of the Beast’s jaw and neck, one paw settled on the tenuous space between an eyesocket and a mouth on the Beast’s chest. The Beast climbs into the loft one-handed, his other curled around Enoch, abandoning the draperies of humanity on the ground.
“When mortals started numbering them.” The Beast says as he adjusts the metal prongs atop the television. He flicks the dial.
Fuzzily, the picture comes into motion. The noise comes next.
The Beast grumbles an irritated sound and turns the sound down to a whisper.
Their conversation flows between them, a low steady rumble that drowns out the mutter of the television. Enoch talks until he is rambling, and the words are scrambling to get out on top of each other, the catskin unwilling to breathe for even a moment to allow the sounds of the television to filter through. Because if he pauses, if he quiets, then he will be subjugated to mortal speculations thinly paraded about as science, will be forced to witness the taming of a concept older than man.
There is a small, terrible part of him that reminds him, whispering louder than he can talk over, that he is a concept older than man.
An amalgam of concepts, tenuously held together into a being as a force of will with no clear origin but simply innate to itself.
They both are.
And so Enoch talks, very fast, halfway over his neighbor, anticipating and answering before the question is even halfway out of his neighbor’s mouth and resolutely does not think about what it meant for the abstract to be recorded, measured, no longer an abstract at all.
The Beast is talking, not nearly as fast, but far more frequently than he usually does, plucking up a question or a retort whenever it seems Enoch might be running out of steam.
They speak through the moment that the footage on the television cuts and fizzes to show the side of a landing pod.
“Eagle,” Comes the snatch of its name between one sentence and the next, and Enoch narrows his eyes.
“Hardly fitting.” The Beast remarks as if he knows exactly what Enoch is thinking.
Enoch plays the advocate.
“It’s a symbol,”
“Almost everything is,” The Beast says, and Enoch hums his agreement before launching into an anecdote from Mr. Dow that he suspects the Beast will find funnier than Enoch does, having the relevant worldly context from the decade Mr. Dow died and all.
They talk.
Relentlessly.
Through the emergence of the human in mirrored helm, that was a symbol waiting to happen, Enoch could taste it. Ascendance, or maybe placelessness. Reflection of the divine. It would be a powerful icon, given time enough to ferment.
They speak over the astronaut, to each other, in unspoken agreement to unknow whatever it is humans insist on knowing. They are older than mankind. They do not need to know, to understand, it is as intrinsic to them as it is to moths and deer.
And yet, the barn is deathly silent enough for them to hear the tinny voice whispering deafeningly, damningly.
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
The Beast’s head knocks back against the wall, and the thud of wood against wood drowns out anything else.
“It’s gone.” The Beast says and throws out a hand blindly, turning off the television.
The rain beats down outside.
“What is?”
“Magic,” The Beast says with a sneer, wiggling a claw-tipped hand in an ephemeral gesture. “They’ve killed it.”
Enoch’s nose twitches.
He rather thinks he would have felt it if magic itself was gone.
Reluctantly he reaches for it.
A strange sensation reaches back.
“Belief,” The Beast scoffs. “They believe in mundanity with such force they impose it upon reality, they believe there must be an explanation, so they find one, and suddenly the possible has bounds, edges it must conform to.”
Enoch lifts his head and scents the air.
“Is it dead?” He inquires. Beneath the ground, he unfurls, reaches through root and bone to feel the ley lines of the land, to trace them, and follow them further than he’s ventured in centuries, searching for absence, for a great and sudden change. He ventures into lands made foreign with time, and finds that the roots are the same ancient powers they’ve always been. The bones of the earth are still there. “Or is it changing?”
His mouth is slick with the taste of hope.
It’s not his own. He doesn’t think so, at least.
His neighbor opens one eye to glare at him, monologue interrupted.
Enoch continues, emboldened, by the flavor thick on his tongue.
“Because it rather seems to me, and I will defer to your judgment here, neighbor, your nose has always been sharper than mine, that they don’t believe in anything neighboring mundanity at this moment.” Both eyes are open now, staring unabashedly at Enoch as if he’s gone mad. Enoch feels a bit mad. Now he can taste his own hope, bitter at the back of his tongue, but he catches it between his teeth and continues. “If I am not mistaken, right now, here, tonight, they believe anything is possible.”
The Beast’s eyes flash with colors Enoch cannot name before they’re gone in fields of empty white.
And then he’s laughing, a thunderous sound that shakes the barn by its timbers, a sound nearly as big as Enoch is.
He’s standing, lifting Enoch with him, and Enoch swears he’s taller than he’s been in decades. A moment of weightlessness steals across the heavy weight on the catskin’s shoulders as the Beast tosses him and twirls.
Enoch lands with his claws sunk deep in the wood of his neighbor’s arms, but the Beast is undaunted in delight.
“Do you still have my antlers, Field Cat?” The Beast asks, and his voice quakes in the catskin’s bones.
Enoch blinks.
What kind of a question is that?
“Of course,” He replies as the Beast gingerly returns him to his own four paws.
“Would you fetch them for me?” The Beast requests, his volume a little more reasonable. “I believe they’ve just come back into fashion.”
Enoch’s hiding place for the Beast’s antlers had been neither clever nor subtle, and it had remained as such in the ensuing decades, but his neighbor makes no comment when Enoch drags the pair out from within the maypole’s head.
Instead, he kneels in the wreck of ripped-up ribbons and touches with such gentle reverence Enoch steps away, circles around so that he can only see his neighbor’s back as he returns his crown to its rightful place.
“The impossible has been shattered. Their belief is boundless. What is the presence of a mere monster to the moon landing?” His neighbor says, laughs, really, and Enoch is overcome suddenly, with something he doesn’t dare call emotion.
He’s sick with sensation, seeing double, two Beasts superimposed atop each other.
He can see his neighbor on his knees, holding his antlers, lifting them to his head, but at the same time, nursing his lantern, eyes dull as the spark within, the proud face of the wild, the indomitable hunger, the Scourge of Hope laid low, a gutter wretch, humanity rising on a precipice around him, transcending beyond hunger’s shackles, without need for hope or despair, having laid aside such things for a perfect contentment.
But there, another image, coming into clarity atop the other, his neighbor standing proud and tall, hands thrown wide like a strange and terrible conductor, standing in ruins, concrete and glass grown over with vines, fire so white it blinds filling the air with black smoke.
And then his neighbor turns, standing, he rises above the first, but does not reach the second, and Enoch sways dangerously at the tripled image.
At the center of the vision, blurring the edges of each, is the clarity of the present, his neighbor with crown restored, grafted on with green bows, thrifted from Enoch’s own abandoned pride, standing flanked by possibility.
Enoch closes his eyes against the picture, unwilling to allow either to come into focus over the image of his neighbor, here now.
The cold brush of claws against the shape of his ears startles him into awareness again.
"Anything, Harvest Lord," The Beast says, like it's an offer, and tips his head, relishing the weight of antlers he never really lost.
The future hangs in his voice, echoing with the past.
They linger upon a precipice, and Enoch chews on hope.
“Help me into the maypole,” He says finally, and the Beast’s eyes go a shade of blue that hasn’t changed a bit in a hundred years. “I feel a bit of anything coming on, myself.”