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It has been ten long months without a Golden Guard.
O, how Philip has suffered without his right hand, without his beloved Caleb standing at his side.
“There’s a season for everything and a time for every matter under the heavens,” he tells himself that day, beginning Ecclesiastes 3:1. It is a Saturday - he always brings them to life on a Saturday, as God had done when he created Adam.
It is much like that too, creating a life from the dust. Forming a man from nothing and breathing life into him so that he may spend his life in worship and adoration.
Belos rolls up his sleeves above the elbow, coming to kneel at the edge of the planter. Long ago he’d upgraded to receptacles made of stone, so that he could use them over and over, and its edge is cool against his hands as he leans forward onto it.
He takes his time with each of these moments, at the birth of his next holy servant. He breathes in the smell of dirt and damp, the mixture of which has become symbolic to him of new beginnings, and wonders what this one will be like.
“A time for giving birth and a time for dying,” he continues, passing a hand across the loose soil atop the cradle, feeling it shift beneath his palm. It is time, finally. He’d given this one extra weeks in the garden, just to make sure it was fully formed. A perfectly complete Grimwalker, one that may be his last, the one that may come with him back to the human world and finish the life there from which Caleb had walked away.
“A time for planting and a time for uprooting what was planted,” he digs his fingers into the dirt, searching, searching to touch a piece of his newest creation. He doesn’t think of himself as a father, no, but of course as a creator. One cannot believe that a doll is a child, after all. It’s something he couldn’t explain to another person, this feeling he has for each of his Grimwalkers, the feeling of affection and loathing that mixes together as he looks down upon their faces - each a variation of the person he’d loved most in the world. The person he’d killed.
“A time for killing and a time for healing,” indeed, he hadn’t planned to kill the former Golden Guard so soon. He’d thought he might last until the Day of Unity, in fact, the straight-backed serious incarnation a welcome stability in Belos’ life. He’d been dedicated to the cause, in teaching others around him the marvels of coven magic. He’d mentored the current second-in-command of the abomination coven. But Belos supposes that hoping for another six years of loyalty was too much to ask.
His searching fingers find something - skin on bone. It’s an elbow.
Suddenly invigorated, he sits up on his knees and works to pull the forearm and hand from the soil. This Grimwalker had been so good, remaining beneath the earth for all of its time growing. Some of them reach up too soon, trying to pull themselves from their pitch black coffins, forcing Belos to rebury them and push them back down until they are fully formed.
But this one had not.
Its hand, when it emerges, is perfect. Belos places it flat on his own palm and gazes at it with admiration for his work. The skin of it is so pale it’s nearly translucent, the veins and tendons beneath standing out in clear relief. There are no scars, nor calluses. It is the hand and the skin of someone new to this world, who has not once been touched by wind nor sun nor any other thing of rough hew. Belos pulls the elbow out, and then up to the shoulder, where he plunges a hand deep, deep down until he can cradle the back of its head and pull it up towards the surface. Breathlessly, he watches as the earth bulges and shifts, and he cannot resist reaching out trembling fingers to brush the dirt from the walker’s face.
A nose, first of all, and Belos traces it, its familiar hook and the sharp tip. Then the chin. The mouth. He pauses. The lips part and it takes a breath, its first breath. Belos breathes with it. For a moment he just sits there and waits to see what it will do, but it does nothing, lying obediently in his hands.
It sends a thrill through him, that this doll waits halfway through its birth for him to continue, else bury it again.
It offers no objection to any course of action. It is simply compliant.
He brushes the soil from its cheeks, the eyelids and forehead. Belos pulls again, until its entire head is above ground, dark eyelashes against pale cheeks. Its hair is ash blonde, as they always are, scraggly and unkempt from the way it had grown underground. The Grimwalker huffs some air out through its nose, clearing its airways. Like a doting mother, Belos helps wipe its face clean, smoothing a draping sleeve over its eyes and tapping its long ears to help dislodge the dirt in them. It blinks its eyes halfway open; a dazzling magenta as they always are.
But the rest of it is not as they always are.
“Caleb,” gasps Belos, unable to hold the word inside himself. It stares up at him in non-comprehension, but that matters not. Carefully, heart pounding in his head, Belos cups his hands over its ears, hiding the pointed tips, and stares down.
It is Caleb. After hundreds of years, Belos is looking into the face of his brother, a near perfect replica. Never before has he created one that looks so much like its ortet, such a faithful adaptation of the original but for its eye colour and ears. It stares back up at him, with such innocence in its face, as Caleb had been before that creature Evelyn had tempted him from the righteous path and into the darkness. Into this realm.
“Oh,” Belos cries, and leans down further, dragging the walker up a little roughly into his embrace. It makes a noise, not of any particular emotion, but rather, he imagines, a simply physical sound as it is pulled up into a seated position for the first time. It is, however, sighed directly into his ear, and he shudders to once again hear the voice of his beloved brother.
He sits there for a long time holding it, running his hand up and down its naked spine, feeling the knobs of the vertebrae beneath his fingers.It shifts in his grasp but does not try to pull away. Rather, it lets him hold it for as long as he wants to, before he sits back once again to look at it. The expression on its face is dreamy; it’s a baby bird who has just hatched. It looks back at him simply because he is talking, but he knows how important it is - these first few moments and the first few days - where they must ensure that it imprints upon him. He’s learned over dozens of attempts. He must make sure it knows who its master is from the very first moment.
They don’t really ever remember these times, the beginning moments, just like a real child. It’s vague impressions that colour its future personality and impressions of the world, but it won’t form into actual memories. It’s as though they’re in a fever dream, like nothing is completely real.
“Come, little one,” he says, and helps to pull its knees and then feet from the dirt. “It is time to enter the world.”
“Mm,” says the Grimwalker. Belos picks it up and brings it to the slab to the side of the room. The structure is made of stone, but he has laid out a blanket atop it. He wonders at himself, sometimes, at the softness he can’t help but feel in the first few days of a walker’s life. Later, he will demand it endure great hardship for him, but for today - today it is soft and precious, a barely ripened peach that he does not wish to bruise.
It sits on the slab, and stares at its own arm, seemingly transfixed by the way it can bend and unbend it. Belos chuckles at it.
First he checks it all over, to make sure it is fully developed. The beginning had been fraught with disasters, with walkers that looked as though they were ready, only to fall apart days later because some integral part had not been complete. But he is an old hand at it now, at checking all the reflexes, and feeling for the inner organs, and shining lights in its eyes.
It doesn’t like some of it, especially the light, flinching away whenever it gets too close to its face. “Now, now,” Belos says to it, and strokes its hair, “Be good.”
It stares at him with those big eyes, open all the way now, and he chuckles.
“Be good,” he repeats, “do you understand?”
It apparently does because it tries not to move again when he comes close to it with the ball of light contained in his hand. Belos murmurs as it flinches nevertheless, “I can endure all these things through the power of the one who gives me strength. For me, that is God, for you…” He can’t help but smile a little. “Well, it’s a different god.”
“Ah,” says the walker. Having caught a glimpse, Belos presses a thumb under its upper lip and pushes it up, revealing its top teeth. Oh. A disappointment. There’s a gap between the two front teeth that did not exist in Caleb. Belos sighs.
The walker tilts its head curiously.
“Close,” says Belos, “You’re so close.”
Small hands grip weakly at the front of his robes. He looks down to see that it’s rubbing the fabric between its fingers, obviously fascinated by the texture of it. It’s so sweet and innocent in these first few moments. It always is. He yearns to keep it this way as long as possible.
“You will never betray me, will you, Hunter?” he asks it.
“Hmm,” says Hunter, the newest Hunter. He tugs again at Belos’ robe and pushes his face into Belos’ shoulder. The tip of his nose is a little cold against Belos’ throat.
Endeared, Belos wraps his arms around Hunter’s shoulders and pulls him close. Hunter snuggles into the embrace. It’s probably time to give him clothes; it is cold in here, in the head. But Belos selfishly enjoys the desperation of it, the need of his new little toy, seeking the warmth of the first person he’s ever known.
“A time for tearing down and a time for building up,” Belos says, to finish his verse, and strokes a hand through Hunter’s hair. “A time for loving and a time for hating.”
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. One might wonder why Belos creates them, these Grimwalkers of his. But they’re not really witches, he reasons. They’re not human either. They’re simply a shell that Philip fills with the hopes and dreams he has for a new world. “ A time for war and a time for peace.”
This is the scripture which has guided Belos through his long life. After all, there will be peace when he is done.