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The explosion rocks the world around Parrot, sending him stumbling and swearing, his wings snapping open to keep himself from falling off the staircase. Black smoke pours out of the door he had just exited—sending him coughing and stumbling back—and from the new cracks and pitfalls appearing in the ground around the base of the central prison. The entire structure groans, obsidian screaming as it's forcibly dragged against itself with the force of the building tilting, sliding deeper and deeper into the fresh sinkhole. The stone shakes underfoot. Parrot runs. His boots pound against the cracked staircase, the structure continuing to scream as it's torn apart from the echoing force of the explosion and the heavy pull of gravity, and all Parrot can hear is a high-pitched ringing in his ears.
He runs. Black, acrid smoke burns his throat and lungs. He runs. The staircase crumbles underfoot. He runs. The prison—the obsidian walls, the empty platform Parrot had first seen upon waking up inside, the flat place on the roof where Wifies had taken everything from him (had taken his spyglass from him)—falls into the empty space that the explosion had torn into the earth. Parrot runs, and his boots hit soft dirt, and his wings flap to propel him further away from the expanding sinkhole. He runs. He slips between the trees, his wings folding against his back to resist the urge to launch himself into the sky, and runs towards the last wall standing between himself and freedom. There’s no sign of the guards, and Parrot runs.
He reaches that last obsidian wall, the glassy, jagged stone cool under his touch where he presses his sweaty forehead against it, gasping for breath. There is too much smoke and not enough oxygen in his lungs. There is too much panic and grief and betrayal swirling in his chest for him to take a proper breath of air. He’s crying, Parrot realizes, when he tastes salt in the corners of his mouth, or maybe it's just sweat. He doesn’t care because his wings are too light, the long, heavy flight feathers plucked from his tender skin, exposing grey downy feathers. He doesn’t care because Wifies is dead, both freshly dead of just an hour ago and long dead of over a year ago. Parrot does know how to combine the two vastly different realities.
Parrot shakes the thought from his head and begins to climb. There’s no sign of the guards. There’s no sign of anyone who could stop him. Parrot takes a deep breath, digs his fingers into the deep cracks of the obsidian, and pulls himself up, the tip of his boots finding footholds and further propelling himself upwards. If his wings weren’t clipped, he could simply fly over the wall. If it weren't for Wifies, he wouldn’t be here in the first place. Parrot shakes from the strain and keeps moving, sweat beading on his forehead, dripping down his face and the back of his neck, soaking into his clothes everywhere they touched his skin. It hurts. His fingertips tear and bleed. His nails break. He grits his teeth and tastes blood. It feels like punishment for something… for not realizing who the director was sooner? For failing his friends? For letting himself be caught and trapped? For not killing Wifies sooner? He isn’t exactly sure, but it doesn’t matter. He’s being punished. He’s punishing himself. He keeps climbing.
Parrot pulls himself onto the top of the wall, his boots scrambling for a moment over empty air as he drags himself completely onto the platform. It's only a few blocks wide. It’s frankly underwhelming, but the wall hasn't been the prison’s main defense. Wifies and his knowledge about Parrot had been the thing trapping Parrot inside. Parrot hates him. Misses him. He’s left staring up at the sky, sweat drying uncomfortably on his skin, his wings pinned against the rough obsidian under him. The sun is creeping lower to the horizon, bleeding red and orange across the blue expanse. It reminds Parrot of the red stain that spread rapidly across Wifies’ shirt when Parrot stabbed him in the first few days of being let out into the larger prison. It’s been weeks since then.
He wiggles around to get his wings out from under him. He presses the heel of his palms against his eyes in an effort to chase off the burning tears. He lets his arms fall limp to the ground on either side of his head. He screams. Parrot’s left shaking and in pain and exhausted. The sun is nearly completely set when he pushes himself upright and stares across the prison below him. The sun’s dying rays just barely make it over the top of the opposite wall and frame the very top of the destroyed central prison like the bloody halo of a martyred saint. He doesn’t know what that imagery comes to mind; he’s not religious but Wifies liked to talk about those “what ifs” on long, sleepless nights when they were both running on fumes and no longer aware of their own words.
Parrot could jump down the other side of the walls, relying on his wings to slow his fall enough so he wouldn’t die, and get as far away from the prison as possible. He should do that. But…the space by his side is empty without Wifies. His belt is lighter without his spyglass hanging from it. He can’t leave yet, he tells himself; he has to make sure Wifies is actually dead. So, Parrot stays. He scans the darkness for any sign of movement but he knows he’ll see nothing. There’ll be no movement because Wifies is dead.
Wifies is dead twice over. The director is dead. The director was his friend and killed his friends. The director and Wifies are the same person. Aren’t the same person. The director killed Wifies. The director wore Wifies’ face. They’re the same person. They have to be. They’re not the same person; they can’t be because Wifies would never have hurt him like this.
Wifies, his friend, his best friend, is the man he stepped onto a pressure plate willingly with; gave him his first spyglass as a promise of his safety; explored the world with; fled the mafia with; discovered the Farlands civilization with; and built a cabin on the sheltered side of a snowy peak with. The cabin—his home—with its weirdly shaped roof, creaking floorboards, and white and yellow windows that reflected the beacon colors Wifies loved so much. Wifies whose brown hair looked black against the white snow, whose nose turned red in the cold, who watched him with warm, dark eyes and groveled for his forgiveness after burning the compass, and who held him when Parrot cried over Dean and Luigi. Wifies. Whom Parrot trusted enough to turn his back on him, to teach the other to preen his wings. Whom had turned himself over to the mafia just so Parrot could run. Whom had hugged Parrot and promised everything would be OK and then drank the invis potion as he turned away so Parrot wouldn’t have to watch his partner’s face fade from view. Who had put on the mafia’s uniform and squeezed his hand so gently and then walked away and put himself in danger just to give Parrot a chance.
The director, the man who took away everything that Parrot cares about, is the cruel ghost who hunted him and haunted his every decision; the monster who stalked and taunted him; the boogeyman; and the person who killed Wifies and Nufuli. Did he have a hand in Dean’s death as well? When did the director become the director? Parrot had no good memories of the director, first hearing the name spat out by Itz and later seeing the director for the first time in the monster’s white-trimmed netherite armor and heavy black coat, hearing the rough grate of the director’s voice through his mask and voice changer, and seeing the glint of bright eyes not quite hidden by the hood of his coat and the effects of the invisibility potion. The director spoke sharply and held himself like he expected the world to just listen to him. His touch was cruel and rough. He threatened Parrot’s friends. Wifies wouldn’t have done that. The director kidnapped him. Trapped him. Clipped his wings.
The director and Wifies can’t be the same person. Parrot doesn’t want it to be true.
He pulls his knees to his chest and stares out across the dark prison and waits for the sun to rise. Exhaustion tugs heavily at his body but he has to stay awake. He has to make sure Wifies—the director—the person standing across from him in that horrible white room—is dead. Whoever it is can’t be allowed to torment more people. The director brought him to the prison and Parrot will make sure he is the only person who is ever trapped in its walls. He will make sure the director can’t hurt anyone else. He wants to return to the snowy cabin with its stained glass windows that Wifies loved. He wants it so badly that his stomach hurts. He wants to turn back time to when he and Wifies first stepped onto the pressure plates to start Spoke’s scavenger hunt. He wants to go back to when he and Wifies blocked off caves to get a peaceful night's sleep or hid in a hole in the wall to avoid monsters or built any of their safe little burrowing places. He wants to go home, which is both the cabin that is still standing and a person who died so long ago.
He’s so tired of running. He wants to go home. Parrot wants so much, but he’s left alone, cold, and friendless, sitting on top of prison walls, staring towards a prison that was run by a monster wearing his friend’s face. It couldn't have been Wifies. Wifies is dead. Wifies was dead before the director died in that explosion.
Parrot twists his fingers together and tugs at his hair and fiddles with his feathers. He's anxious and jumpy. The night air is cold, but he doesn’t move. He can’t move. He can’t leave the sentry position he chose for himself. He just needs to confirm that the director is dead.
Against his better judgment, his gaze finds the two stars that shine so close together that they appear to be touching. He wants to cry. He wants to go home. He wants Nufuli back, and Dean, and Luigi, and Wifies. He wants his friends. He wants his home back.
Eventually the sky starts to lighten and he loses track of the two stars. The sun rises slowly, the world waking up as golden rays spread across the land. Parrot uncurls, stretches, and rubs at his eyes, his gaze drifting to the broken central prison. It's still leaking smoke. He pushes himself to his feet, muscles screaming in protest. His chest aches. He wants to curl up and cry but he can’t. He needs to make sure the director is dead. Parrot leaps from the wall and opens his wings, letting them slow his fall and send him gliding towards the ruined building. He soars over the lake with the burnt husk of Wifies’ first house and the deteriorating shack of the house he built in an effort to gain the monster’s trust.
He lands with a stumble in front of the central prison. The air stinks like gunpowder. The prison, with its obsidian walls and blackstone decoration, looks like the corpse of some fallen god, left to slowly decay and let its rot seep into and infect the surrounding land. It's ugly. Mutilated. The walls have cracked open to reveal a rabbit warren of dark tunnels and pipes. The roof has crumbled in on the lava lake and platform that Parrot had first woken up on. It looks like a hungry, gapping maw, jaws ready to close on Parrot. A cage for stupid little birds. A hunter’s trap where an animal can chew its own leg off in an attempt to escape. Despite all of that, Parrot steps into the ruins even as his stomach twists itself into nauseating, painful knots. He hates this. He hates every part of this but he needs to make sure the director is dead.
The wind whistles as it blows through the broken husk of the prison. The stone around him is cold and jagged. So much of the lava that made up of the first room had drained away deeper into the earth. Parrot doesn’t even know if that room with its arched ceiling and white walls is accessible. Maybe it's completely buried in the rubble. It was at the very epicenter of the explosion. Maybe Parrot can just leave. He still doesn’t. He continues to make his way slowly deeper into the ruins. There is a crack in the obsidian, long, thin, and jagged, exposing a sliver of white. Parrot peers through it and gets a glimpse of a room torn apart and covered in black soot.
There is no sign of Wifies nor of the director nor of the person who stood on the other side of the room just the day before and wore Wifies’ face yet spoke like the director. There is no sign that anything alive was ever down there except for Parrot’s own memories. Still Parrot kicks at the crack, targeting the weak places where the explosion already tore through the obsidian until it crumbles under the force. The hole is large enough for Parrot to crawl through and so he does it, folding his wings in close, decidedly not thinking about the possibility of getting trapped in the room. He half climbs, half slides down the wall, the stone and quartz rough against his already torn hands. It hurts. He doesn’t have another choice. He has to make sure the director is dead. He can’t leave without making sure the director—the man who wore his best friend’s face—is dead. There is no future for Parrot otherwise.
He’s left at the bottom of a crater maybe half the size of the original room. There’s no sign of the staircase near him and the opposite wall is nothing but a mess of fallen stone and obsidian. It’s cold in the room, so far from the sun. It’s a mausoleum. Parrot pushes himself to his feet and walks further into the room as he carefully picks his way through the shards of obsidian and chunks of white quartz. Everything is covered in a layer of black soot. He pauses where he thinks the low stage used to be, a deeper hole torn into the earth just a foot in front of him. It smells like blood. He kind of wants to throw up as he spins in a slow circle and scans the room for the source of the stench.
There.
There in the shadowy corner.
It is slumped over against the wall. It’s small. It’s black from soot.
Parrot kneels down in front of it and stares down at it. He sees it but he doesn’t really preserve it. It’s Wifies. It’s the director. It’s dead. It’s his friend and the monster who killed his friends. It’s so tiny in death. It’s—Wifies—the director’s body is broken, torn apart by the explosion. There is black blood everywhere. Still, the cheek that Parrot cups in his hand is mostly unmarred. It’s a familiar enough motion when it comes to Wifies, less so for the director. But Parrot doesn’t really know if he’s looking at the director or Wifies. He doesn’t think it really matters in the end because both of them are dead.
He wants to bury Wifies even if that's a kinder fate than what the director deserves. But, as Parrot glances up at the crack he slid through, he already knows that he’ll be lucky if he makes it out of the cold, broken mausoleum himself. He can’t carry what is left of the body out.
“I’m sorry,” Parrot says and his voice cracks painfully. He thinks he might cry. “Wifies…” It’s wrong to say his friend’s name outloud when he’s been dead for so long and then died again just the day before. “I’m sorry.”
There is nothing on the body he can take and bury in some symbolic gesture. He only has his memories of Wifies and those are too precious to throw away. Parrot has nothing else to say and so he pushes himself to his feet. He leaves because he doesn’t know what to do. He scrambles his way up the wall, his fingertips tearing and bleeding, and wiggles through the crack, leaving brightly colored feathers behind as the only proof that he had ever been in that horrible room and seen the destruction of the director’s death. The painful weight in his chest doesn’t disappear when he walks out of the ruined husk of the central prison.
And once again Parrot is free. And once again Wifies and the director are dead yet still haunting him. And now he runs.