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This is the cruelest winter that has ever wracked the Unknown. Snowstorms pelt the land, burying fields and roads and homes in swaths of blinding white; icicles drip and glitter from branches and rooftops, sharp as teeth; clouds suffocate the sun and plunge the world into an eerie, everlasting twilight, their dark-grey underbellies rolling portentously over the forest. It is so cold it seems the air itself will crack.
Wirt feels the chill down to his bones. But the frost doesn’t bother him the way that it should, and it isn’t the frigid blizzard gales that make him shiver.
He wants his lantern back. He wants it more than he’s ever wanted anything in the world.
Wirt distracts himself from the pull void need by tirelessly patrolling the woods. Bogs, stagnant swamps, and winter-crystallized meadows are slowly committed to his memory—not that Wirt would ever forget a part of the Unknown he’s visited. And even if he did, all he has to do is reach, and slumbering trees dream their surroundings to him. He can observe things without ever being there.
It doesn’t always work. Sometimes Wirt accidentally capsizes into the vastness of nature and loses himself again. He’ll have to shred himself from bark or briars gasping for air, plant life around him rattling with the throes of his panic, until The Beast is fully in command of his solid body once more.
Occasionally, Wirt crosses sights only possible in the Unknown. They are: a ring of dancing foxes. A massive, hollow tree that moaned like a ghost but was really inhabited by a city of owls. An upside-down cottage, abandoned and stuffed with cobwebs. A forest path lined by windchimes—crafted from wood, metal, glass, or bones—that tinkled their music despite the deathly stillness. He should be marveled by these hidden secrets. Instead, he thinks about how much Greg would love to foxtrot or play with the chimes and his chest constricts but there’s nothing there it’s in the lantern and he’s back to gnashing his teeth, broadcasting his heartache, scaring away the wildlife and swooping back into the dark.
He has chased after the Woodsman more times than he can count. Almost always, the visceral memory of the axe splintering his antler keeps Wirt at a distance, hands clenching into white-knuckled fists as the old man obliviously travels on his way—Wirt’s lantern in hand. He feels the weary guttering of his soul-flame trapped in someone else’s care and swoons on his feet.
Confronting the Woodsman directly earns him reviled warnings and a blade cutting toward his face. It doesn’t matter if Wirt charges at the old man snarling or if he’s weeping (“Please, please, I’m so cold, please”) from where he’s fallen against a twisting trunk, too weak to hold himself upright. The Woodsman doesn’t care. Wirt isn’t his child. Wirt is a greedy Beast who desires more than he needs, more than he deserves, and each time Wirt fails to reclaim his soul he’s left to claw at his hollowed-out chest and howl into the ceaseless winter winds.
🙞 ------------------------- 🙜
Wirt rediscovers Pottsfield on accident, after yet another pointless run at the Woodsman.
He drags his leaden limbs down the packed-dirt road, familiarity coaxing him forward though he mostly just wants to curl up in the roots and never move again. Ahead, he sees snowy roofs and tiny houses, little fences and farm equipment parked against a barn or two. A flattened field spans one horizon. He waits at the village’s entrance, blinking sluggishly.
No smell of people. No sound of bustling conversation, of crackling hearthfires, or general activity. The place is deserted. Yet Wirt remembers a festival happening here… so where has everyone gone?
If nobody lives in the town, then nobody can stop Wirt from exploring. In the grey dawn light the faint shadows of his antlers scrape the sides of the cottages like claws.
He begins humming a tune in the unnaturally smooth cadence of his changing voice—a song whose words float out of his grasp. “Where timeless spirits meet… round the heart of…” Wirt becomes so engrossed in remembering the lyrics that when a large black cat leaps at him from a turned-over wagon he lets out an undignified holler and trips backward over his own feet, landing right on his ass in the snow.
The cat pounces on his stomach and shoves its nose in his face.
“Why—look who came to visit Pottsfield!” The cat grins slyly at him, it’s sulfuric eyes thinning to slits. “The Beast himself.”
Wirt is horrified by the existence of a talking cat for about ten seconds before the bizarre reality of the Unknown catches up to him. He exhales gloomily. Honestly—he’s too exhausted for this nonsense. At least he knows where he is, though. Silently he ponders why there are no skeletons walking around.
“Don’t call me that. Please.” Pale hands firmly grip the enormous cat just behind its forelimbs and lift it off his abdomen; undaunted, the feline hops back up to perch on his knee.
“The Lantern-Bearer,” it suggests in a languid drawl that Wirt knows he’s heard before. “The Lord of the Forest. The Antler-Crowned Prince of the Unknown.”
Each title stacks itself on Wirt’s chest like a stone. “My name is Wirt,” he grinds out, sneering at the feline. He displaces the cat a second time so he can sway upright, fighting the blackout that threatens to knock him back down. “I’m not…”
The cat is staring significantly at the branches growing out of his head, and Wirt groans in exasperation.
“You can call yourself what you like, Pilgrim. All your subjects will call you what you are. There were a few other good ones I’ve heard before… what were they? The Horned Demon, that’s one. The King of Darkness. The Nightmare of the Wood. I could go on…”
Wirt has started walking again, in any direction the cat isn’t. This is difficult, as the cat is now weaving in and out of his shuffling legs. “Please don’t.”
“You’re right. ‘The Beast’ is rather pithy, isn’t it?” The feline blinks up at him in a cunning cat-smile, whiskers lifting. “What’s wrong, Pilgrim? Are you not enjoying your new crown?”
Wirt knows this little black creep is laughing at him, and it makes him hot with ridiculous, childish embarrassment. He grits his teeth hard and makes to march back into the trees...
“You made a choice, didn’t you?”
The question catches him between the ribs. Wirt inhales around the sudden jab, anger tightening his jaw.
“Of course not! Why would I—who would ever choose this?!” Wirt’s retaliation booms ominously across the hushed expanse of Pottsfield. “I didn’t choose to get lost here, or for things to go the way they did… I sure as hell didn’t want to—want to become—”
Shadows gather so thickly around Wirt it’s as if evening has fallen. His lungs heave with the urge to bellow out the rage curdling his guts. He hears the whine souring his voice, the old habitual pessimism and self-doubt and martyrdom that made him miserable even before his soul had been shackled inside of a lantern, and he thinks that as much as he’s warped into a different creature all through this season he should at least have become a different person, and that frustrates him so much he pushes his face into the crook of his arm and roars.
Trees shudder and quake behind him. The distant sound of many panicked wings taking to the sky and hooves sprinting to cover makes both Wirt and the cat glance toward the direction of the dusky woods.
Whiskers twitch. “Feel better, Pilgrim?”
Wirt deflates, refusing to look straight at the smug furry jerk. He’s made it to a fence surrounding a fallow field and uses the wood to prop himself upright. His vocal cords strain. “Stop calling me that.”
“Very well, Beast.”
Another snarl boils up Wirt’s chest, but when he lifts his smoldering violet-white gaze to scorch the cat he’s startled to find that it’s sidling boldly into his space, having jumped up onto the very section of fence Wirt’s reclined on. The slightly malicious mirth has evaporated from its yellow eyes. Wirt worries it’s going to bite him or scratch him with how intently this cat is studying him and recoils when a sooty paw reaches for his face.
No claws come. The cat just rests its dry little beans on his forehead as if it’s attempting to comfort him. “Are you going to regret saving your brother forever?”
Stillness. Not even a twig creaks. Wirt’s voice is steel when he responds. “No. Never. I love… I loved my brother.”
A low murr sound rumbles from the feline. “Then maybe you need to stop playing the victim. Are you the Pilgrim, or are you The Beast? What are you going to do with this crown you wear?” It lifts the paw on his forehead to bat at one of his antlers. Wirt glowers ominously. “That’s a choice for you. I wonder what you’ll do… are you Undertaker, or Guardian?” With a final light swat the cat turns around to continue marching along the fenceline, sailing tail shaped like a question mark. “It’s none of my business,” it tosses over its shoulder, “so long as you stay out of my town from now on.”
That last part lodges itself in Wirt’s brain, stuck against a memory. “Your town?”
The cat doesn’t even slow its stride. Wirt thinks it didn’t hear him—or is more likely ignoring him—before it addresses him one last time. “How rude… I know all of your names, but you’ve forgotten mine. Alas. Stay out of Pottsfield, Beast. I can do worse than that Woodsman can.”
One wink of a yellow eye and flick of a black tail. Then the cat darts across the field back into the lifeless village.
As he cuts through the dirt back to the woods, Wirt abruptly relives the terror of a towering pumpkin-headed despot sentencing him and Greg to manual labor. He practically dives into the forest with adrenalin fueling his pace.