The ritual consumed him.
Days one, two, and three, followed by a gauntlet of hour after hour of complete and utter solitude beneath a red sky and a sun that would never rise. Then, he'd play a threnody, and the clocks turned back to the beginning to start the days over again.
He found that he liked the control. He knew this place, and he knew these people, even if where they came from in the great span of time before the three days, and where they were going once the impossible after came to pass was a mystery. He could fit in wearing the face of anyone at all, and nobody would disbelieve it. He could be anyone he wanted to be, and with no questions asked.
It was so different than living in a wood where he was an outcast no matter what face he wore, or stumbling through a country he belonged to by blood but occupied only as a perpetual stranger.
Termina was so different.
"Granny," he asked an old woman, once, "why do you wear masks?" The question seemed so important at the time, back before he realized that it would always be his own face beneath the mask no matter how often he covered it.
He would never actually be anyone else but himself, and Termina would still take him. It was incredible.
It consumed him.
Granny closed her book and squinted at him. Her beady eyes caught the light of the fireplace and glimmered like she was remembering lifetimes from before Clock Town even existed. She was small, but her hunched-over body cast a long shadow from her place in her wheelchair.
"We wear masks to show parts of ourselves that you cannot see otherwise, Tortus. We wear masks so that we can fill the roles we need to and act as vessels for what's important."
He wasn't Tortus, and he never had been, but he nodded anyways.
Granny smiled and settled back in her chair. "Do the masks scare you, Tortus?"
"No," he said.
She smiled wider. "Well, that's good. You're a brave boy. They always scare poor Dotour."
"Thank you, Granny," he said.
She opened her book again, expectant. "Do you want to hear another story? I have the one about the great general Keeta and his army right here. It was always your favorite."
"Yes, Granny," he said, with one eye on the clock in the corner even as his eyelids grew heavier and heavier. He had been awake for three days straight, and the three days before that, too. "I would like that very much, thank you."
Author's Note: Thank you very much for reading this experimental piece. I have a lot of fun writing them, but I hope they are understandable to you as well and make some kind of sense. Thank you again for reading and reviewing!