Bend thee forth, firmly profess - such hands, not too humble t'hold. Truest art thou love, confess! Makest thou intentions bold.

The forest had woken up. A low, excited murmur continued throughout the trees, buzzed from person to plant. The heat of the earth had grown considerably in its intensity. If one could close their eyes and stop for a moment, the weight would have pulled them straight through the soft dirt and moss. Iyan wished very much for such a fate. What a mercy, to be killed before the culmination of this wretched week finally ended. Was it even worth the wait? Iyan tried to remember what he wanted, what he had promised himself in the last three days, but the damned heat. He was useless. After he had been pulled into the sexual festivities, he'd found himself drained of all energy. Were the climaxes and kisses all a ploy, a piece to a part he didn't understand? Even as he thought of the betrayal the twins and Tehn had committed, he could not help but recall the first time Tehn had kissed him, had shared their chilled breaths in one mouth. You've betrayed everything you believe, Iyan had to remind himself. You may not lead people into the woods and drug them senseless, but you are no more a saint.

While not motivating at all, his self-conversing was at least sobering, and he took care to pay closer attention. Kairie's red hair was always on the fringe of his vision, and he followed the wisps of it through the crowd of rejuvenated villagers. Blue-eyes, blue-eyes he heard, everywhere he walked. Blue-eyes, believe, and you will see with new eyes! Each time he heard it, his heart swelled and trembled. Every breath was painful as the unsettling sensation of being cursed followed Iyan.

Gradually, the talking turned to incomprehensible whispering, and then that turned to almost a giggle, and endless chuckling that seemed to mock his walking. As he looked around, Iyan could see a flutter of sweat-covered bodies, humming collectively as they drew closer to the heart of the woods. He wondered again why they knew where to go. Possession seemed unlikely, but between the trees shifting and the water moving against any physical laws he knew of, Iyan wasn't sure what he believed anymore. Possession or well-studied routine, it was still unnerving to see. The closest Iyan could come to having experienced such mass oddities was in Tottenham Cross for various funerals and weddings and the like, but they were more of a drunken mess. Any excuse to play an instrument at a cacophonous volume, to shout and laugh with friends as you spilled your drink over you and the ground - that was Tottenham Cross in a sum. It hadn't come close to anything like this. If life existed in Saint Ivry with the twisted sexual proclivities so broadly shared, or with the strange obsession with testing one's limits below the surface of water, Iyan was not sure he would have lived past a very abrupt childhood.

A scream cut into the thick air. As though the treble of the cry affected the lights, everything flickered and shuddered at the sound. Where were they, Iyan wondered desperately, looking for anybody he recognised. He may not have been pleased with their conduct, or approving of their continued abuse of him, but Iyan needed a familiar place. Was he really to in n this final step alone?

"Kairie! Tehn!" His cries did nothing. The shriek of the stranger in the crowd had somehow increased the frenzy to continue, and the bodies around him moved faster, more frantic than ever before. His voice would never reach anyone, and if it had, how would he be found? Trampled, if you don't move.

Iyan resolved to push himself to the side of the rush of skin, but as he made to move out of the way, he was swept up by the arms and carried with the rush. How strange a sensation! He was on his feet, upright and all, but had no control over where he went. If he hadn't been so eager to get away, this accidental transportation would have been just another part of his strange experience.

Just as quickly as the crowd moved him, it deposited him on the ground, a sudden break in the bodies leaving Iyan exposed to the air at last. He lay on the floor a moment, sucking in great mouthfuls of air and feeling his vision flicker as a wave of dizziness passed.

How he hated this!

By the time he could recover, Iyan discovered he had been left mostly alone, only the weaker villagers straggling on desperate feet to catch up with their fellow revelers. The absence of the cheering and shouting was peculiar, though Iyan could still hear them, faint now.

He stood up, wiped his hands on his chest, noticing with a shock that his shirt was gone. The darker of his arms' hairs seemed especially stark in the throbbing glow of the forest lights. He wondered what he looked like now, should he see a reflection. Resolving to find some reflective surface once this night was over, Iyan shook his head, wiped the dirt from his flesh, and followed the withering remnants of lights in the distance. He was not going to remain one of the casualties of the walk, not like the coughing and fainting dregs that had fallen behind with him!

He should have known something was wrong when the hollering and shouting cut out, when the night swooped back over the forest with a violent quickness. Iyan could have sworn he heard a scream, but the night had been playing tricks with him, and he'd rather not recognise the sound, not when he'd resolved himself to continue on yet again. A look to the left and the right meant nothing. It was a shame he always had to be left alone - for a group of people supposedly protecting him from the darkness and the unseen forces, the Fellings and their friends were remarkably good at leaving him to wander on his own!

He began talking aloud to himself as he walked. There was something decidedly unsettling about the various skeletons and bones he stepped on, and somehow, talking to himself like the ghosts of his aunt's failed pregnancies eased this his misgivings.

"Only a few hundred more feet, surely?"

"Oh, there has to be more. These madmen couldn't be that quiet, that close."

"Everything is quiet."

"You know it isn't, though. There's something out there waiting for you to join. Go!"

"I am going, but I don't know where."

"Don't think about it. You've made it this far without using an ounce of your head."

"What do you mean by that? All the self-revelations and conf - "

"That's not the same! If you'd been using your wits, you never would have stepped foot on that train. There's a reason we're separated from these people by quite a lot of ocean."

"What am I to do, stay in my isolated house at home for the rest of my life?"

"Preferable. At the very least, the other cities at home are safe. We don't know the slightest thing about these cultish freaks. Do you even know what they plan of you?"

"These cultish freaks have treated me like - "

"Friends? Lovers? They're using you, you idiot. You've got so many more scars and bruises than you did before you left, and the Gods alive and dead both know it won't get any prettier."

Iyan's self-ramblings were cut short by the crackling of something beneath his feet. His breath halted for a moment as a spike of uncertainty filled him. Were those roots moving? Hardly waiting for him to process what happened, the roots did indeed move, and they swept his ankles up and threw him to the ground. There was nothing to grasp onto that wasn't trying to already move him. The roots slithered across the ground and dragged a screaming, wide-eyed Iyan through the darkness with a sickening speed. How was this happening? He was as sober as he could be, considering the circumstances. Yes, he'd seen mere men move trees and water, but there were no men here.

Iyan was, of course, very wrong, as he discovered shortly, when the roots stilled and he found himself looking up at far too many leering faces and bared teeth. Somehow, the villagers had grown tired of him waiting and had chosen to speed his collapse into the void. Yes, the realisation he had been pulled along by something normal and easily explained was comforting (albeit marginally), but the fact of the matter remained - Iyan's demise was approaching.

"I don't know where you're taking me," he shouted, as he was lifted to his feet and pushed forward into the suffocating gloom, only the whites of teeth and eyes blinking against the blackness, "but I was going willingly! There is no reason to do this!" This was apparently quite amusing, for the Catrodeans had begun to laugh, a low and vibrating sound that only increased the rate Iyan inhaled. How very dizzying!

He continued to shout rather uselessly, until the scar over his brown began to throb. Where was that stupid crown now, when he needed that secrecy and shadow concealing him? He bit his tongue and cursed Tehn in his head, vowing never to engage with another albino or cousin or man ever again. Kairie hadn't been albino or a man, but it was also her fault Iyan was being hurtled into his doom, and so he cursed her name a little bit, as well.

"Blessed be!" he heard, shrieked into the night like a falling star so close to the ground. "Blessed be, for we have in our midst the fawn of the Fellings!" Iyan began his struggling anew. This was horrible, and not at all what he had envisioned. He was going to die! He began hyperventilating as his arms were bound tightly to his sides by uncaring hands.

"Blessed be," the unseen crowd shouted back, a cheer erupting in various places.

"My sweet children," the man from before called, and Iyan saw his robes flicker, so bright were they, above the group somehow. What was he on? Iyan kicked his feet and began to sob despite himself, dry sobs that only filled his head with more empty air. "We who wish to gaze upon the honour of the gods! What are we willing to sacrifice for this honour?"

"Our eyes, our eyes!" How often had they done this, Iyan wailed, that they were so well practised? Had Kairie been lying about the one hundred year gap between this endlessly horrific event?

"And what colour are our eyes?" The leader raised his arms and clapped them together, and in the very same instant, the lights rushed back in, the clearing they were gathered in flooded with a green and gold light unlike anything Iyan had ever seen. It was a fantastic light, the source unknown, but filling every shadow.

Oh, how he wished it had remained dark, for the sight revealed was a nightmare worse than the water, a hellscape far more undesirable than the paltry rivers and pools of his past.

Spread across the clearing were more bones than Iyan could ever hope to count. Animal skeletons were stacked high to form seats, chairs or tables of some sort, and at their feet were the carpets of moss and human remains, long ago destroyed by the madmen holding him back. In the centre of it all was a platform covered in dried blood and knives, the maniacal grin of the leader of the Catrodeans center stage as he stood over the instruments.

"What colour are our eyes!" he screamed, and everybody closing Iyan in screamed "Blue-eyes, Blue-eyes!"

"Unhand me," he shrieked, trying desperately to untie himself, to loosen one of the holds on his ankle, his wrist, anything at all. "Let me go, you fucking insane - " He was cut off by a smack in the mouth, a blow from a figure to his left or his right. Directions didn't seem to matter, not anymore, and he didn't quite care. All he felt for a moment was the throbbing, consuming pain of having his jaw loosened slightly.

"You heard the people," the leader crooned, and he nearly floated down from his perch to approach the restrained Iyan. "You heard what we need - we need those beautiful blue eyes!" As Iyan opened his mouth to scream once more, the leader grasped him by the neck and dragged him howling across the earth, released ironically by the crowd, only to be taken somewhere worse.

He was sat down in a chair of what appeared to be constructed from the carcass of a bear, and adorned with the horns of a stag on the top. Hands by the hundreds, it seemed, held him down and tied him to the chair, binding ivy and rope and roots into his skin until he began to bleed. No longer was the throne of bones clean!

"What... what do you want of me," he whimpered, when he was sufficiently attached to the chair. The leader walked a little closer, bent down to stare into Iyan's sparkling blue eyes.

"How they've changed!" A finger reached out and pressed Iyan's lids open. "How bright you've become!" Moving to bite the hand, Iyan was smacked once more, this time with a power hard enough to send pain straight down his spine. He sat still once he could breathe.

At the snap of his fingers, the leader was given a knife from the table of instruments by a clutch of eager, half-naked bodies. Turning his horrific grin on Iyan, he lifted the knife and licked clean the blade.

"What do we want of you, little fawn? Why, we want your vision, don't we? We want the visions and the voices, the wisdom and the music you've been blessed with your entire, ungrateful life!" He grinned a little wider and tapped Iyan's tear-stained cheeks with the flat of the blade.

"Now, sit still!" Iyan's screams were drowned out by the thundering cries of Blue-Eyes from all around, screamed out by those who cared nothing for the knife that dug its point into his sockets and worked at removing those blue eyes at last.