Close your eyes and look around; the heavens beckon, hear their sound. The stars are life, the sea a soul; their godly love will make you whole.

Iyan had been abandoned not long after expelling his strange stone. Nobody bothered to explain why they held him under water, or what had made its way inside of him, and he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to know. Every inch of his being felt diseased and broken. How horrid the darkness had been! The cold touch of weeds and unseen tendrils; the floating dirt that pricked at his arms; and how dark. He couldn't contain the convulsions of disgust that erupted from his core at the memory of the death that floated around him. The more the images reappeared, the more Iyan suffered, until he was on the ground and throwing up once again. Only after the fifth retch did he calm down, but he had been reduced to shivering on his knees as a result.

"Not enjoying the festivities, are you?" He screamed and lurched backwards. Standing behind the nearest tree was someone who appeared like a ghostlier version of Tehn and, without any warning to her presence, the effect was nearly as terrifying as the experience at the pond.

"W-what?"

"The festivities." The ghost sighed and approached, ignoring the terrified scuttling of Iyan. "Come now, they've done you awfully, darling."

"Who are you?" asked Iyan, when the trees blocked his escape and forced him to face this odd-looking individual. A vaguely feminine face paused over him, dropping to a crouch.

"Wendolyn. Those idiots you were caught up with call me Wendy." She stuck a hand out and hoisted him to his feet. "Look where that's got you now." Though she resembled Tehn, there was something more... alien about her features. Her teeth drew Iyan's eyes in at once, so oddly sharp were they. A slight crookedness twisted them slightly out of normality, and the effect was like looking at a vampire. Even as she spoke, Iyan couldn't help but stare, transfixed at those supernatural, ivory fangs.

"Those idiots..." Iyan blinked in surprise - was this who had been missing from the initial grouping Kairie gathered? How very long ago that seemed now. What he would have given, to go back, to turn the train around, or simply avoid downing the foul drink he was offered! "I... I'm sorry, I'm Iyan."

"Yes, I know. I've been watching for a while, now. I only wish I could have intervened sooner. Forgive me," she said, but there was a low look in her eyes that Iyan at once pitied. She was a small person, possessing none of the size or weight her supposed friends did. In fact, the more Iyan looked at her from his renewed height, the more he saw a sort of defeat in her figure. Her hair had been tied up, but it fell down in grey, messy lengths over her shoulders. If Iyan didn't know a festival losing its inhabitants in the woods was taking place, he would have assumed she was perhaps homeless.

"You've been - "

"Watching, yes." Her utterly colourless eyes looked up and blinked slowly. "Come along; I'll lead you back and explain." As she turned and moved along the trees, her small clothes fluttering weakly behind her, Iyan couldn't help but think on all the reasons this Wendy would have hidden her presence until now. Had she spied upon his first day with Kairie and her family? Had she borne witness to his drowning? What made him burn with embarrassment was the possibility that this wondering waif had seen his private conversation with Tehn. He made to question her, but she had turned her head and thus revealed a thoroughly miserable expression. His heart fell. How could he confront somebody who looked as terrible as he felt?

After some time of silent walking, Wendolyn drew to a stop, the familiar sound of screaming from the excitable crowd in the near distance. She sagged against a tree and sighed, a thin hand running through her hair. Iyan noticed a distinct lack of a crown on her brow. His own itched at his skin, and he pulled it off at once.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you." Wendy looked darkly on the black and green crown.

"Oh? Where's yours, then?"

"Don't need one." Wendolyn sank to the ground, sighing as though she carried the weight of the endless forest on her back. "You're a stranger here - it's not as safe as those children would have you believe." Iyan joined her on the ground. That invisible weight seemed to descend on him the longer he stayed, the longer he was left to his own devices.

"You don't like them. Why?" He raised his dull blue eyes to her void ones, hoping to find an answer to anything that was happening to him. The question appeared to anger Wendolyn, who snorted and furrowed her white eyebrows.

"They're liars, all of them. They pretend..." She paused, took a breath. "I shouldn't. Not yet."

"Shouldn't?" Iyan threw himself to the ground, his crown falling to his side as he stared at the sky. "I've been deceived by a group of people I don't know. I've come to a country for a woman I am barely acquainted with, and I haven't seen her in what feels like days. I was almost killed by people dressed in robes, painted like maniacs. What, tell me, shouldn't I know?" He hadn't meant to sound so angry himself, but from the moment he stepped off the train, there had been a sense of abandonment welling up in his chest. No, not the train. Aunt Myra, he thought, the image of her cold and lifeless on the ground. Tears began to prick at his eyes. Oh, don't cry, you spineless bastard. Don't fucking cry, not anymore.

An odd sort of whistle came from Wendy, and Iyan raised his head to see what caused it. To his great surprise, he saw that she was crying as well, in heavy, angry tears. She wiped at her nose and eyes, but the tears kept falling.

"You're from Saint Ivry, yes?"

"I am. What does that - "

"Then you've heard of a sculptor? A foreign sculptor?" The first thing Iyan thought of was the Abbey, all of the frozen guests who'd proven themselves better drinkers than the dead owner. The man must have died twenty years earlier, only a year or so before Iyan had been born, but his death was one of the few highlights of life in Tottenham Cross. How often was one of those rare elites killed with little consequence?

"One of our Lords - well, not quite. He was something lesser, but still more important than anybody else in town - his office, if you will, was covered in the things." Wendy sniffled and looked up.

"What was the man's name, the one who owned the statues?" Iyan closed his eyes. It was a name everybody knew, but nobody remembered.

"Adair," he said at last, sitting up a little. "Sir... oh, I can't remember his first name. Kevin, I believe it was?" Wendy smiled past the tears in her eyes.

"Yes, Kevin. My uncle, you see, was that sculptor. He did more, for other people, other countries and wherever he went, he would write and tell me what he saw, how they acted."

"Wendy, what does this have to do with me, or your terrible friends?"

"Let me finish." She dragged herself on her hands and knees, until her ashen face peered into his with a fearful desperation. The white shirt everybody wore hung from her skinny arms and thin chest. It did not surprise Iyan, that she was related to the madman who'd constructed such grotesque statues. Drunkenness was a strange feat to be immortalised, and the resulting images, forever carved on marble and white stone, had not shied away from the grotesque excess one might expect from a full night of alchoholism.

"What I'm trying to say is this - my people are a vile and cruel people. They have no true sense of godliness, just the perverted and torturous creation they worship. Sacrifice is their nature." She took a mad breath and continued. "My uncle told me everything he knew of your country, of your traditions and worships. As bleak and silly as it may be, at least your gods give you purpose. Ours have nothing but lies."

"Why am I here, then?" he cried out, grasping her by the shoulders. "Am I to die amongst those whose higher power gives them nothing but a cruel sadism?"

"It was always their plan, you poor fool."

They sat and gazed hopelessly at one another. His lips burned with the memory of kissing Kairie and her cousin, kisses that were nothing more than bait, the honey that trapped unwitting flies. With the knowledge now that he was doomed, a stern sense of calm overcame Iyan. His tears had all dried, and his breathing slowed. No longer did his abandonment reach him.

"What is the crown for?" he asked, holding the bundle of sticks and feathers between them.

"Exactly as they said. You're safe, with it. Until you're not."

"It's a marker? A signal to show them who's to die?" Wendolyn shook her head.

"Not exactly. More... so the others know. They can't kill our marks, you see. The gods answer our signs, the etchings you see there, and they stop us from being bothered much." Iyan wanted to ask about the others again, but Wendy had said something far more curious than that.

"The gods respond?"

"And yours do not." She stood once more and clenched her fists. "You do not understand how lucky your people are. The intervention of divine beings is hardly an enviable affair."

Wendy had refused to answer anymore questions. Her gaze was pulled away by a sound only she could hear, a revelation she declined to share. "I can't tell you, Mr. Lutton. Only, it's the last day of this cursed affair, and you'd best keep that crown on if you want to survive it." As he was pulled further into the woods, closer to the growing sound of hollering and howling, Iyan wondered how this albino creature of the trees had known his name if they had never actually been introduced. It could have been the spying she'd admitted to, but he suspected even Kairie's interest in him went far deeper than chance admiration. He didn't know how these people had learned of him, but Iyan was now convinced that he'd been chosen, for whatever macabre reason, to die here.

He was certain what Wendy had told him was true, but he didn't trust her, regardless. If he had been slated for sacrifice, Iyan wasn't going to die without some trouble. Aunt Myra's words came back to him, then, as he trailed behind the ghost of someone manipulated by her captors (as much as she wanted to set him up for death or warn him against it, Iyan didn't really believe Wendy was in control of herself).

"There's something more in your eyes, Iyan. There's a drive to do something better with yourself, better than any of us could do," She'd said more, but that was it, wasn't it? Myra had been right, years before her death, before his inadvertent capture. He may have been destined to be killed here, but Iyan felt in that moment that perhaps he had also been meant to escape.

Only time would tell, but of that, there was precious little left. It was the last day of the festival. The feast of sheep, he supposed. Oh, to be a wolf then! He picked his crown up, inspected the scratched paint, before replacing it on his head. Better to die bleating, then.