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He does not know how many masks lay behind the one he had, he does not know how many corpses and bodies and souls. He could not count. He does not know how many twisted reflections he has, does not want to think that he is but a reflection too– one of someone he will never live to be.
Someone who he looks the most like.
It’s easy to forget, in hard times, that people are not kind by nature. They need reason, inspiration, some noble cause to go out and die for if you want them to go out and die. They won’t take pity, they won’t be empathetic, if they do not see some gain in the end.
And isn’t unity such a wonderful goal? The word, simple, speaking of unison, of understanding, in a sense. Of togetherness, community, the whole of the Isles joining together under one, in unison through their sigils, and finally there is paradise.
But unity is collision and crashing-together and the feeling of seeing the void for the first time, seeing what death is, feeling the grasp of no-escape no-escape no-escape for what was not the first time in his life.
Unity drags you down into a pit of familiarity and will never let you leave unless you fight it with fire and light. Unless you scream and shout and run as fast as you can away from it.
And isn’t that a wonderful view. Oh, what a wonderful view, a wonderful view. All of the cracking and dying and explosions– disguised, in pretty little frames. What a wonderful view.
There is a feeling after seeing what death is that can only be described as life. Because you have seen what death is, you have seen its definition and its occupants, and you have seen yourself a thousand times. And then you have gotten away.
And what is the feeling there if not the basics of life? The not-death. That’s what living is. If it’s not, it's the only life he's ever known, and that itself is a truth and fact and an ideology.
But now that he is alive. The only thing left to do before dying is to… well, live.
And isn’t that the hardest thing of it all?
Especially if you have nowhere to go, no foundation to sit and build on, you have to create and construct and make your own unity with yourself before you take one step into life. You have to decide to live and thrive before you stop surviving.
And that is what he’s done. That’s what he tries to tell himself, that he has decided to live and live on, not be stagnant and therefore rot, not be still and therefore break, he is going to move and live, and be strong in the face of what can only be described as an ongoing tragedy, one that he is only the latest player in.
He does not know how it started, he does not know how it will end, if it ever does, he does not know who he is or what he is or who he would have become. (In another thought, what would he have become? Not himself. Something else)
The Boiling Sea is not something that you trifle with. Oh, you can joke about it, joke for hours and ages, but only after you have dangled people across it and laughed that you realize that there is something taking hold of you day by day, that you are only letting live itself.
And that thing is loyalty.
Unwavering loyalty, the deepest kind. It’s also called denial. The type that overtakes you much the same, except it has quite different terms, and is much easier to shake off.
And you shake it off by confronting someone, something, really which is exactly what he did, somewhat unwittingly. But not entirely unwittingly. He knew– he knew something was up, he knew that something was wrong and something was off and there should not be cobwebs and there should not be scratch marks on every other painting, and there should not be two inner selves.
But he ignored it. He ignored it because they were going through the Emperor's mind and for all he knew, this was some elaborate illusion made to punish him. Er- them. Mainly him, though, as he had activated the spell, he had sent him and Luz there in the first place, he was so careless as to accidentally step on the vial.
But he did what he could. He did, really, he walked and walked and as always, his best was simply not enough.
His boots sank fast, dirt pulling him down at first and then there were hands, and then it became so much faster, as if they wanted him down there, they wanted one more grave to be made of the same face, one more Golden Guard to die by the same hands as all the others.
There’s a way that tragedy continues, and this is it.
The pulling got him under, because he failed, the millions of masks that laid behind him were too strong against one human, but he felt the fluttering of paper around him, glyphs settling all around this void.
He reached out, feeling somewhat in peace, somehow, the feeling of pressure around him decreasing until he felt as if he was simply floating. He touched one, and as the space lit up he was surrounded by masks, all staring at him unwaveringly.
They did not move, so he did not either. He was– he was an outcast. He was different, he did not have his mask here, it had been broken and shattered and used to fuel a flame that never should have been lit. So while he couldn’t see the expressions of all the other Guards, they could see his.
He grasped a glyph in his hands, crumpled it, and threw whatever came out of it at a Guard. It was fire, and it did
nothing
. The swirling circle of masks simply shifted and smoothed out and still he was left in the middle, outside of it, and so he attacked the above.
Vines, huge ones, reached up from the paper he had touched, and started digging into the void above him, raising him up, slowly, and for the first time he thought something might have gone right.
Then a hand grasped his boot and started pulling him in the opposite direction, back down into death and silence and watching and void. He casted another glyph, and another one, stacking them on his hand, hoping that they would be stronger than every corpse that Belos had laid to a fitful rest.
They were not.
He was.
He was the one who leapt, and was able to fully use the glyphs, casting a humongous plant wall, the rest of the glyphs scattering from his pocket, each glowing as he briefly touched them before they fell.
Fire and light and ice and more vines, snaked out of the air, wrapping and tangling and freezing and burning and blinding and somehow, amidst everything, they got away. They got away. Away from everything, away from the wreckage and away from the void and away from Belos– and he knew he was in there, didn’t he, he knew that there was someone in his mind and there was a sense of reasoning that he used so he knew that Belos would’ve known it was him that went in there.
Which meant he wasn’t safe. Never again. There was no going back now, there was no apologies, nothing could ever save him now, all he could do was run and run and hope that he was not worth that much to Belos. There had been a million other Grimwalkers, what’s one more dead?
Or, he’s not dead. He’s not dead, he’s not dead, he has escaped death and he is flying over the Boiling Sea and he has nowhere to go and nowhere to hide and has no idea how to live if all he has is himself and a palisman he has no idea how to care for.
But he’ll do it, y’know? He’ll persevere. He’ll live and live on and somehow survive. He’ll die, when he dies, in peace. Because every other guard, when they died, it was nothing if not in turmoil. In agony. In fear and bravery and the sense of being right that would never, ever be rewarded.
He needs to find a place to stay, he reminds himself, he needs to find a place to hide that isn’t the Owl House, because he had just run away from there and he would not be returning. He didn’t think he could face Luz.
Because she should not have been there, in every sense. She should not have been there because they should not have gone into a mind, she should not have been there because it was the Emperor's mind, and she should not have been there because she stood and watched and explored, trying to prove that Belos was evil, that he was wrong, not knowing that she was standing and arguing upon a million corpses who asked the same question and followed the same paths as she did, and they were killed.
And she wasn’t, because she was not supposed to be there.
And he was. He should’ve been dead a long time ago, the second he ever saw a red and black bird that told him their name was Flapjack and that he should say his name was Caleb. The second that the bird became a staff and he kept him, that was when he should’ve died.
It really was only a long time coming. Thank the Titan that Flapjack stayed behind. If Belos knew he had a palismen, if he had seen him and was able to hurt him in any way- he had seen the palisman monster, the closest thing to guilt Belos had, and now that was gone.
It had been destroyed. There was nothing holding Belos back, and that was scary beyond everything that has ever existed. There’s a feeling you get thinking about how things could’ve gone so, so much worse that makes you think, but why didn’t they? Why wasn’t Flapjack teleported too? He was in the range of the spell.
It’s something that hurts almost as much as what would’ve happened had that thing been true, had Belos seen Flapjack and seen him and known, because he knew he would’ve known, there would be no excuses for him on this part, or on any part.
It’s a feeling that makes you grip tighter onto your staff, hear your palisman chirp once, twice, a third time before taking a deep breath and flying on through the air. If it started raining, he didn’t know what he would do, there was nothing he could do to stop it, he had thrown away his cloak, he would never wear his mask again, even if it hadn’t been cast into the snap-crack-burn of the fire.
If it rained, he would sit through it. He would feel acid pour down his back, and burn his hair, and he would do his best to die slowly, and at peace, and hopefully not die at all because it wasn’t raining, he wasn’t in pain, he was flying and flying and he had nowhere to go, and too, too many questions.
And no answers whatsoever. Nothing to prove, nothing to show, nothing for Luz, either, because in the end it has always, and will aways, be her word against the emperor, and he knows that the emperor will always win.
But maybe that too had to change, some shift in the balance of what used to be the scales on which everything sat upon. Maybe it was time for those same scales to be demolished. Maybe it was time for him or Luz or anyone to decide to get off and shift the tides.
And aren’t the two of them so separate in how they’d do that? He’s doing it right now, he is running and he hasn’t and never will look back. He will keep his head forward, back turned, and will leave for once in his life. Luz would… Do what she’s always done, he thinks. Persist. While she might not want to accept that the person she adored (he adored the same person, he just didn’t know it) was the person she had sworn to destroy– it was a bit hard to ever come to terms with. But she was… convinced of some greater sense in the world, in Belos, that he had some guilt left, some remorse, some sense of empathy.
And simply, he disagreed.
He had watched Beloss’s empathy be burned and disintegrate right in front of his eyes. That was decades worth of palisman, and it would never form again. That was gone. It was irreplaceable, and such, Belos had nothing holding him back anymore.
No screaming palisman, not… him, not even Luz. She would want to stay away from Belos, he knew, work from the shadows. She and the Owl Lady and Lilith would probably go and hide somewhere else– somewhere secluded, and maybe–
No. He couldn’t go back. There was a sense of abrasion, not so much a physical barrier between him and Luz. More, it was mental. They both had seen the same things, except he had lived them, in every sense, and that was so much worse.
Looking down the hall, at all the masks carelessly tossed around and portraits laying crookedly on the walls, for a brief moment he knew and felt what every guard had gone through. And the only thing that had been clear enough for him to think over the cacophony of the Guards was that there were more guards than masks in this hallway.
And Luz had seen everything, and yet she did not, could not ever understand the idea of endless agony and a repeated cycle you do not believe will ever end. A cycle that you have continued to uphold, setting the wheel up to spin.
He knew Belos needed the Selkidomos scales for something, he knew in some deep sense, a sense that came with decades of knowledge deep inside his bones, that that was not good in the slightest. So, while annoyed and scared because this was a failure of the highest sense, there was a sense of relief in him that there would be no scales or hide in his arms as he went back to the castle.
He needed to know who he was. Before– everything. Before mask after mask and Guard after Guard, who was he, in the beginning? Who was he to make Belos so… enraptured that he kept creating Guard after Guard, and Grimwalker after Grimwalker, so many they could not fit in any one catacomb, they were embedded in memory and frozen in the void, and still, he knew there were bones out there somewhere, DNA trapped within them, matching his.
A different pit, with masks and masks and bones and bones and there is something that crawls among them all, who is not a failure in any sense– he needs to stop thinking about this. He needs to keep thinking about this. He does not know what else to think about, and so he keeps thinking.
All he had ever wanted to do was get rid of Belos’s curse, even if it meant studying wild magic and going against his orders, he had done everything to help him. And everything was, simply put, a lie. A blue eyed, mottled hair, deformed face, lie. And he had believed it for far too long.
And it was easy to believe, that wild magic had killed their family and then it was a noble cause to get rid of it, something that people, him, even, would’ve gone out and died for a thousand times. He probably did. He probably did die a thousand times, and that’s what makes this so awful, that he is the only one in fifty years to stand up to Belos, to Philip, as a brother, or a friend, or simply a Guard, not even head of a coven, and live.
It makes him want to curl up into a ball and cry, because he knows that part of his own reality has been shattered like a mirror, and in every shard he can see one more Guard, dead, masks and bones discarded like a broken toy, and the face behind the mirror is the one and only Emperor.
It’s a sense of turmoil within him, a type of scripture in and of itself, that tells him he should be dead, and he was difficult to replace, not impossible, and him leaving does nothing and he shouldn’t be living anyways. But even the devil can quote scripture, even if it is his own.
He knows what he needs to do, in a sense. He knows the things that he would like to do before he dies, which is the only reasonable goal and period of time that his brain can connect to, his lifeline the only measure of time that will suffice.
He needs to know what a Grimwalker is. Because he, frankly, is scared of what’ll happen if Belos tries to make one while he is still alive. He needs to know how to make one, he needs to block the sources or something, anything, to keep Belos from making one more Guard to die in flames or be petrified or simply be erased.
He would not like to face himself when he knows he would not win. Because he had already faced himself, he has faced himself a thousand times and still did not win, he won because they let him. They knew, somehow, that it wasn’t his time to die, some sense of good and justice and things he still doesn’t believe truly exist pervading in their mind, scripture of the highest order, overriding decades of isolation, and as he leapt they let go. They pushed him up further.
It is not his time to die, never is his time to die, not in a mindscape and not over the sea, and not one more piece of an ever horrifying picture, one that was a type of jigsaw puzzle, because you kept putting pieces together and every new part was more and more awful.
It’s a tragedy. It’s a tragedy and yet he has escaped its grasp, escaped the hold of the narrative forced on him through decades, and yet he still feels that it is still his fate, his destiny still written, somewhere, unchanging, in a way that truly and fully is, unchanging.
Not unchanging in the sense that he was. And he will call it what it is, he is sick of denial and memory after memory tearing him apart, it was brainwashing. He was brainwashed. He was led to believe with care and attentivity that wild magic was the scum of all scum, the destructive force that carried people away from their families and ravaged cities and towns.
In truth? In truth, really? It was him. Or not him, him, but copies and reflections of him thousands of times, setting off bombs and hurting people for the exact purpose of to hurt. There was no ulterior motive, sigil magic was perfect as it was because it was made to hurt people, and hurt people it did. There was no perfecting that needed to be done for a product which was made to kill on impact.
And when he spoke of wild magic, he used to speak of it with care, because he had felt that it was a ‘sensitive subject’, that it was something people were truly affected by, he thought people were really hurt by wild magic, that it had torn the entire world apart. He still, somewhat believed it, that there were giant rips and cracks and tears through the entire world, it was just that they all seemed to form the second he entered Belos’s mind.
He used to think that Belos cared, and that is probably one of the worst parts of all. Because Belos didn’t care for him, he cared for what he was meant to be, a copy, Belos cared for a reflection of the first person to ever stand against him. The first Guard to perish by his hands. He hoped that he wouldn’t be the next one.
But Belos never cared for any Guard except the first one, he didn’t care no matter how he tried to help him, and be useful, and do something, anything, but it never worked. And it never would work, because he is sure, so completely sure, that everything that Belos is in pain for is self-inflicted and he could not heal it and would not ever want to try again.
Belos was cheery about the whole thing– and he was right, he was right for once about Belos, some slight look into his mind while in his mind that was clouded by manipulation and still managed to be right. Belos had no sense of guilt. None at all. (Maybe he did, once, maybe he had felt guilty and maybe he had felt sad but he had distracted it and now it was gone and now there was no guilt for anything and there never would be again-)
Belos was mocking. Belos mocked his own manipulation, and how he had fallen for it without question. He had fallen for it because it somehow made sense. He couldn't explain it now, but if you had asked him before he could have told you that sad tale of the Boiling Isles and the Savage Ages, none of which was fully true. Every destroyed city, every soul ‘taken’ by wild magic, they died by bombs and the beginnings of the coven system. They didn’t die by their peaceful spells or helping nature. They didn’t die by curiosity, they died by him. By someone who sounded exactly like him and wore the same mask and acted the same way and–
There was no forgiving Belos. Not even Luz is that nice. Luz wouldn’t even try to reason with Belos, she would scream and try to crash his plans once again, with more fire or some other plan, but there would be no forgiveness, for Belos was never one to forgive anyways.
He should’ve looked around more, he should have seen the other paintings, because he was too busy thinking to see the portraits on the wall. Luz was jumping into them like she had experience with this type of thing, and he was panicking and hoping to dear Titan that everything was a lie.
Everything was, a lie. Just not in the way he hoped. The fragile foundation his life had been built on had crumbled, and he had somehow survived the wreckage that had crushed everyone else. So he had made his way out, hoping that what had collapsed the foundation wouldn’t come back to collapse him.
But he knew it would. He knew that Belos was relentless and would not accept failure or a job incomplete. There was nowhere he could hide from Belos that he could also learn what he needed to, and have a stable source of food and water, as well as a place where a kid (because he was a kid, wasn’t he? He was a kid, and he should be going to school, but instead he was forced to learn and then be useful since before he could remember) would appear innocuous.
There was no library cafeteria combo… except there was. Except there was and he had overlooked it and had probably flown past everything that he could’ve had. He turned his staff around. There was Hexide. There had always been Hexide, he always could have run and hid there, and he knew that he was able to pretend to be a kid there once before, he could do it again, he could do it for as long as he wanted, and no one would notice and—
But the team knew he was the Golden Guard, and he knew, surely, they wouldn’t welcome him back. They wouldn’t accept that he wasn’t the Golden Guard anymore, he didn’t really either, to be honest, because the Golden Guard is not some separate person that he can get rid of one day, it is an aspect of personality defined by a uniform he is still half-wearing. And him throwing away his cloak and getting his mask shattered in fire does not change anything about that fact. He is still the Golden Guard. He is still the Golden Guard and he has stood up to Belos and he is still alive and somewhere in there, sometime in there, he decided to run away.
So he couldn’t be a kid, he would have to hide once more, and steal books and food, because Willow and Gus would know, and they would tell Luz that he was here, or Luz would tell them, and then they’d try and– he would hide. He would do that. There had to be some area of the school that was off-limits, it was a school for children, anyways, something has to have been destroyed recently.
The Isles approached him once more, returning to the only true home he had known, because dear Titan the castle was never a home, it was a fortress and a barrier and something that was made to isolate, whether it be him or Belos, or the people he knew were locked in its dungeons. The Isles itself was his home, not one specific building.
He saw the school from above, and swooped down, legs collapsing as he made it to solid ground. He didn’t know how long he had been flying for, he didn’t know if this was just because of the sheer magnitude of everything that had happened, all he knew was that he needed to catch his breath, stay out of sight, and then collapse somewhere.
He crawled through a window, Flapjack detaching from the staff and fluttering around him, leading him down hallways and trying to keep him alert. It was almost impossible. He felt like he was dying, he felt like there was nothing more to keep him upright, no sense of place, or a sense of structure. While he was free, he was alone. Flapjack was just a palisman, and while he knew that alone was worse in every sense, he couldn't very well be with other people.
Flapjack led him to an abandoned wing of the school, and he settled in a larger storage closet. He sank to the floor, staff clutched in his hand, bird on his knee, and as he curled up into a ball on the ground he knew that something had changed drastically with the way he viewed the world, but still he wouldn't look up and see it. Flapjack settled on his head, as he stayed curled up for hours, until he finally relaxed as he fell asleep.
A million masks laid behind him, but he was free.