AN: I'm sorry for not being able to reply to your reviews; my grandmother passed away last week, and I just haven't had the time or the ability to sit down and go through them. However, I read every single one, and every single one of them is really appreciated. Thank you.

Soundtrack for this chapter: Hello Alone by Anberlin and Transatlanticism by Death Cab for Cutie.

Chapter Ten

Aubade, Diminished

(doloroso)

Between classes, their research at the library, and his new relationship with Rukia, a month slips by almost before Ichigo is aware of it. He and Rukia keep it private more by habit than conscious decision—it is no one else's business, after all, and they are both private people—though Renji guesses within the first week, and the inscrutable look he gives Ichigo tells him what he can expect if he screws up. Not that Renji would really be needed, Ichigo thinks dryly, since Rukia is more than capable of elucidating those points on her own.

Renji takes to dropping by the library occasionally—Ichigo has to explain to Rukia the concept of "cockblocking"—but after a few days, Ichigo senses real interest in the research on his part, and Renji's assistance actually ends up quite useful. He knows one of the librarians from his days at the Academy and once he explains what they're looking for, she drops by every once in a while to drop off books and papers she thinks could be helpful. And they are making headway; they have uncovered repeated references to the whole idea of soul invasion, but they have yet to find anything with specific, detailed instructions that could give them a decent lead as to the person capable of it.

Halfway through September, Ichigo stops by the Thirteenth's headquarters. Rukia is not there—she's out on vice-captainly duties—but Ukitake is, and when he invites Ichigo in for tea, he can't find a polite way to refuse. Their cups are half-empty before Ukitake genially asks what's troubling him, and almost before he means to, Ichigo finds himself giving the captain a shortened version of his story. He leaves out his lapse of control in Urahara's training grounds, but he tells him of the green threading through his soul, of the cracked windowpanes, of the Hollow's chains eroding into dust. By the time he is finished, the tea is cold in the cups, although neither of them particularly cares. Ukitake's face is grave and worried, but he agrees with Zangetsu's assessment that to attempt another binding while his soul is still not entirely his own is too dangerous; all the same, Ichigo feels a weight lift from his chest—Ukitake's discretion is unquestioned, but more importantly, he knows that the captain is on his side.

Rukia slips in to drop off a stack of reports for her captain to sign and Ichigo stands to follow her from the room. He promises to keep Ukitake updated and, in response to Rukia's elbow, thanks him for the tea, and then the two set off for the heart of Seireitei.

They are meeting Renji at the library, but they are running late thanks to Ichigo's impromptu tête-à-tête, so Rukia insists they buy a half-dozen taiyaki as a peace offering. The cloth they are wrapped in is too thin, though, and Ichigo has to juggle the package from hand to another as they walk or suffer scalded fingers. Rukia is, of course, entirely unsympathetic, and it is only due to her ability to completely ignore Ichigo's discomfort that they manage to smuggle the fish-shaped cakes, hidden in Ichigo's sleeve, past the overworked receptionist and into the library at all.

Renji smells them before he sees them—his head pops around a pile of books heaped chest-high as they approach the table through the stacks. "You're late. I smell taiyaki."

Ichigo rescues the package from his sleeve with a wounded look and hands it over. "Nearly burned my arm off getting it here."

"Perhaps you are too delicate."

"Man, shut up, Rukia. I didn't see you offering to carry it."

Renji pulls the first fish-shaped cake from its paper wrapping and bites into it. "Good, it's still hot."

"No shit," Ichigo grumbles as he and Rukia slide into empty chairs and pull books off the nearby stacks.

"Oh, listen—" Renji says suddenly, spewing crumbs over the open pages in front of him, and Rukia lets out an inarticulate protest that he entirely ignores. "Listen, I think I found something. Get this—I just had it, hang on—" Half the taiyaki still dangling from his mouth, he upends a stack of four books by his elbow and Rukia barely catches the top one as it slides off the table. He thumbs through a thick stack of manuscripts jammed between a six-hundred page volume on zanpakutou manifestation and an inexplicable treatise on metaphysical conceit before he finally yanks the bottom one from the stack. "Of course it was on the fucking—ugh. Anyway, look at this." He spreads the parchment across the table. It is incredibly old, faded and crackling around the edges, yellowed almost to the point of unreadability, but what Ichigo can discern is enough to make his stomach flip.

The rough, spidery sketch of a man, arms outstretched, reaches across the page, and although the ink has bled into the creases and in some places vanished entirely, it is still perfectly clear that the face of the man is covered by a smooth, featureless mask. Even fainter than those lines, so faint it is barely perceptible, lies a network of gossamer threads that scratches across the manuscript, and though they wend their way around the figure's hands and wrists and ankles and eyes in what appears to be aimless scrawls, Ichigo can see that every single thread culminates directly above the man's heart.

This is it.

"It looks like there are instructions that are meant to go with this drawing," Rukia muses, examining the man's chest, and Ichigo sees she is right. There are tiny numbers, apparently references, dotted all over the figure, but there is no key that matches them. The margins are filled with annotations and handwritten notes in a narrow, spidery script that looks familiar to him, obviously added much more recently than the original drawings.

Renji remains silent while he and Rukia perused the parchment, and as they finish he leans back in his chair and folds his arms. "There's more to it," he says, and the somber sound of his voice gives Ichigo a terribly foreboding sensation. "This document was found with Aizen's personal files, Ichigo."

Rukia bites off a choked sound in her throat, and Renji continues mercilessly.

"I had to check. I knew it was a long shot, but my librarian friend told me some stuff had been brought in last year—and I had to try. The old woman who filed it all when it came in tried to give me some crap about it having been destroyed, but I knew there was no damn way they'd throw something like that out so fast. I ended up having to pull rank as a nominated captain to get her to even show me the room where they sealed it."

Ichigo shakes his head sharply. "No way Aizen's so careless. The bastard planned everything out, everything. He wouldn't have left this shit just lying around."

"Then he meant it to be found." Rukia's back is ramrod straight as she stares at the two of them. "He meant for someone to find it, and he meant for someone to use the information against you. Ichigo," she says, and her words trip over themselves in her haste, "even this—he planned even this. He left someone those instructions intentionally for the express purpose of using them—against you, and against your Hollow. And they found it, obviously—look at the notations. This writing can't be more than a year old."

His stomach is boiling with dread. "I knew the war never fucking ended," Ichigo says bitterly, splaying his fingers against the parchment on the table. Rukia and Renji are silent. He can feel them watching him, waiting for his decision—it is him, it is his Hollow threatened here, so they are willing to yield, or at least listen—but he can't think of a damn thing to say, so he looks at his hand against the manuscript instead.

And that is when he sees it.

It is nestled in the corner, just in the curve of the inked figure's left foot. It is a small and simple sketch, easily lost in the spiderweb of lines that criss-cross around it—but that is the point; the lines skirt around it, all but one single thread, born at its center, birthing the thousand more that link to the heart of the man. And Ichigo knows exactly what it is.

It is a globe, clear as glass, a scaled-down version of the ones crafted by Shiba Kuukaku.

And that is when he recognizes the handwriting, the spidery signature of a name pulling to the forefront of his mind. Ichigo pulls his hand back very slowly and very precisely, as if a sudden movement might erase the thing from the flaking parchment. Renji, the books, even Rukia, everything fades entirely from his sight until he can see nothing but the handwriting around that globe, the size of his thumbnail, a simple ink drawing on the paper. His mind is rearranging itself to fit around this new truth—because he knows it is truth as surely as he knows his name. It is as if he has been looking at the surface of a colored glass all this time, trying to make sense of the senseless blurs on its face, and only now, only in this moment have his eyes looked through the glass to see clearly what has been there all along.

"The papers came from the Academy," Ichigo says, and his voice is foreign in his own ears. He knows what Renji's response will be.

"Yeah. Some official found them when they were cleaning out their archives, thought they ought to be moved over to high security. What the hell have you figured out?"

Ichigo is suddenly very tired. "That is Edogawa's handwriting."

It takes Renji a moment, and then he swears, very softly and very violently. "The Academy exam?"

"The Academy exam," Ichigo confirms in a sigh.

"I do not understand," Rukia says, tense and low, and Ichigo tells her of the globe, the sense of wrongness he'd felt during the test, and the way the thing had exploded in his hands. He'd thought it had been simply poor control on his part, and he tells her this too. And then he tells her of the smile Edogawa Rampo had given him as he and Renji had left, and it is in the retelling that he realizes that it had not been the smile of a professor to a student, nor had it been the smile of one soldier to another; it had been the satisfied smile of an archer whose shot had gone home, the smile of a man who knew his prey had stepped blithely into his reach.

"Goddammit," Ichigo breathes, and that is the moment that his Hollow chooses to wake up.

Yo, King.

It is only a brief flash of consciousness in the back of his mind, an oily pressure that pushes on his eyes with its familiar and mocking undercurrent—that in itself would normally be cause enough for alarm, but then Ichigo feels a sudden jerk on his breastbone as if it is trying to leap from his chest, and an entirely new wash of panic spreads over him—he doesn't know if it's his or the Hollow's, but it floods his mind all the same—Edogawa's hands are dipping into his soul—and he has forgotten his surroundings entirely until Rukia turns his head, her eyes cutting into his own. Her fingers are like ice against his face, but Ichigo can't tell if it is because he is sweating or because she has gone cold enough to burn; he focuses on the sensation all the same, anchoring himself in her steady hands, allowing her strength to frost through his feverish senses until he can breathe again. He wants to close his eyes and just rest here like this forever, his sanity cupped in her palms, but his fear is still pulsing through him, and so he pulls her hands from his face and hopes she can feel his gratitude in the movement. She acquiesces and slips back into the chair she'd half-risen from; Renji is staring at him from across the table, and Ichigo opens his mouth to speak—

—and a blinding agony blossoms from his chest, a circle of fire that doubles him over the table with a gasp, the heel of his hand slamming against his sternum as if the pressure alone could dissipate the pain. He must have knocked over some books; they thud to the ground one-two-three by his feet and the pages stare up at him blankly—he hears Renji swear above him, hears Rukia's chair topple over with a clatter, but he can't think, can barely string two words together through the green-tinted haze, but he manages to grit out "Edogawa" and "puppet" and "Hollow," and as if the last had been the magic word to break the spell, a sudden relief almost painful itself in its abruptness sweeps over Ichigo and his Hollow.

There is no time to waste. "The Hollow's awake," he pants without preamble, sitting up with his hand pressed to his chest. He still can't breathe properly. "Listen, the thread, everything—everything, it's all Edogawa, all of it—he's trying to turn the Hollow into a puppet—agh—" And the second's reprieve ends as the pain springs up again, and to his utter dread he finds himself rising to his feet not of his own volition. He tries to lift a hand, a finger—he can barely blink, and that gives him a perfect view of Rukia and Renji staring up at him in naked horror. This is his worst nightmare brought to life, and if his breathing stops it is from fear alone.

King—

His Hollow's voice surges in him and is gone just as unexpectedly, but there had been an alien shock in it that fingers terror down his spine. His Hollow is as helpless as he is.

And that leaves only one person in control.

"Edogawa's holding the strings," he breathes, and then his feet jerk themselves into shunpo, and the world blurs out of sight.

There is a swirl of reiatsu that bloodies the air in front of her, and when she blinks, Ichigo is gone.

And then he bursts against their senses, outside now, and at a distance, but no less bloody, and even through the sheen of fear that lays over it, Rukia can sense his intent. This is the trail he is leaving them. She spares a single second for a glance at Renji—the understanding that blooms between them is one that is born from more than shared history—and without waiting an instant longer, they spring from the table.

A pinch-faced librarian tries to stop them, her reedy voice raised in protest at the chaos they've left in their wake; Renji nearly knocks her over as they barrel past. Ichigo's reiatsu flares again, this time fainter, and as the two of them crash through the library's doors into the afternoon's overcast skies, they simultaneously step into shunpo. To lose Ichigo's trail now is to lose him entirely.

"That bastard," Renji snarls between steps, and his rage boils over in his reiatsu before he can contain it.

"Not now, Renji," she reprimands him—their priority now is tracking Ichigo—but she cannot deny that her own heart blazes in answer.

They fall silent. There is nothing but the wind whistling in their ears, the swift pops as they fall in and out of shunpo in an easy loping cadence that belies the urgency eating at their bellies. They have been traveling for maybe thirty seconds, but they have covered more than a quarter of the distance across Seireitei, and when Ichigo flares against the gate to West Rukongai, Rukia realizes where Ichigo is being pulled.

"Mount Koifushi," she understands—and she understands, because Edogawa has chosen a place meant to unsettle more than Ichigo, and this means he knows them—and Renji bites off a curse. Still, it is to their advantage that they know their destination, and Renji, who has always been weaker than her at shunpo, springs off at an angle to alert the nearest division. They have no time to catch a hell butterfly or craft a message in kidou, so they must do this the old-fashioned way—and before long, she can feel Renji leap forward again, and she slows only for a moment until he catches up.

"No good," he shouts to her over the wind whipping by. "Eighth's deserted, must be on a mission."

Or Edogawa had them cleared out, Rukia thinks, but aloud she shouts, "Then find Captain Ukitake!"

"No fucking way you're going in without backup!"

Damn the man for being right. "I'll send a message when we arrive, then," she returns, perhaps louder than she needs to be, and she draws her sword between steps.

Rukia sees Renji slant his eyes at her, but she has the better understanding of the danger they face if Ichigo can no longer control himself. "Dance, Sode no Shirayuki," she murmurs, and neither her voice nor her hands waver as the blade bleaches white.

She has pointed her sword at Ichigo before.

There is a cloud in Ichigo's head. It is grey and damp and heavy, and it's making it very hard to think. He sees the great gate to West Rukongai rise up in front of him as he steps under it, and something, something—but he can't seem to string two thoughts together in his head. Why is he running, anyway? But it's not so bad; it's been a while since he's really let loose like this, running at full shunpo, and if his feet seem to have a mind of their own, for the moment he simply enjoys the winds speeding through his hair as the houses and huts begin to give way to trees. There is a tiny thing niggling at the back of his mind—something he's supposed to be doing, maybe? But as he reaches for it, it slips away through the cloud in his head, and he subsides, allowing himself to be wrapped snugly in the fog. It'll come back if it's important, anyway, he thinks lazily, and before he realizes it, his feet take their first step up the path that winds up Mt. Koifushi.

And then a bitter ice strikes his mind, right where the niggling little thought is, and the shock of the coldness sweeps through the fog without resistance, and Ichigo wakes up. Rukia's shikai, he realizes, his mind shaking off the lethargy like water, and when the insistent wildness of Renji's follows immediately afterwards, burning away the last vestiges of the damp greyness, he feels the iron band of Edogawa's grip slacken.

Ichigo plants his feet mid-step and stops. It is a battle—he can feel Edogawa trying to tighten the strings again, and he strains against it, calves quivering with the effort it takes to resist the pull. "I will not be your puppet," he snarls at the air, and unbelievably, his feet stay still. He stands there, shaking, sweat beading on his forehead, but for a trembling moment, he is his own master. But he can feel the rush of shunpo building in his legs again and he bends almost double, pressing his hands against his knees as if that could persuade them to be still. He cannot do this alone. Zangetsu, he calls, and then because he is that desperate: Hollow? But his voice falls dead and flat and still, and there is no answering response. He doesn't know if it's a side effect of the cloud in his head or if Edogawa is manipulating the strings, but his soul is mute. He is on his own.

A bead of sweat drips onto the dirt under his feet. Don't move, he commands his legs silently, bending his entire will against Edogawa's. Don't move! The unrelenting push in his legs suddenly drains away, and Ichigo is seized by a breathless hope.

And then he feels a yank so strong he hears his sternum crack. Pain radiates from his chest over his ribs and in the face of it his concentration shatters. His feet step forward again, two brief bursts of shunpo rocketing him halfway up the mountain, and he wants to scream—and then something does scream in his soul, and in the instant before it is cut off he recognizes the voice of the Hollow. Edogawa must have sacrificed the enforced silence of his soul in favor of forcing him to move, because shortly after, he hears Zangetsu snap out not enough, Ichigo! in a contagious urgency that bleeds into him—but he can do nothing, move nothing—the trees are whipping by in increased numbers until they become a solid green blur; his feet leap off the path and pound through the wild grasses until he suddenly bursts through a final ring of trees into a clearing at the edge of the mountain, and at last he stops, his muscles trembling in pain and exhaustion, almost sobbing for breath—

And across the clearing, bumbling and bald and peering at him through ridiculous round glasses, Edogawa Rampo's smile is almost warm.

Mt. Koifushi rises up before them, and without hesitating, Rukia darts for the path, Renji on her heels. They are both tired; while they are by no means powerless, they have stepped into shunpo more than sixty times between them, and that is no easy thing to shrug off. Still, Rukia can feel they are close. Ichigo has stopped at last somewhere above them and it is now only a matter of catching up to him—them, she reminds herself—but she cannot quell the pinpricks of anxious fear that Edogawa has pressed more than Ichigo's body under his thumb.

She throws a glance at Renji. His jaw is set and she can see the tendons tensing in his neck as he swallows, but his steps do not falter, and his eyes are steady as they meet hers.

"We're going to save him," she says then, unsure whether she tells Renji or herself.

"We'll do what we have to," Renji replies between steps, and there is a steel in his voice that braces her again.

She nods firmly and faces ahead once more, entirely missing the look, weighted and measured, that Renji gives her.

There is only the space for half a breath before Zangetsu is in his hands. "Edogawa," Ichigo spits, trying to hide his unrelenting shudders.

"Kurosaki Ichigo—and Hollow, I presume," he says pleasantly, and Ichigo lunges.

His feet have not even left the ground before he is leveled. He doesn't fall to his knees so much as they simply stop obeying him, as if Edogawa has simply severed their nerves and left him a paralytic. The agony is suffocating him, centered in his chest, and somewhere behind the green haze of pain he can again hear the Hollow scream.

Edogawa's clenched hands lower in front of him. "None of that, Kurosaki-san," he says politely. "We have to wait for your friends to arrive first."

Ichigo can't breathe properly through the pain pressing on his heart. "What—what do you—" but his chest seizes, and he can't finish.

Crouching in front of him, Edogawa allows his smile to drop, and Ichigo can suddenly see the man behind the professor, the one who is capable of this torture. He fists his left hand and then picks over the air above it with the fingers of his right, as if sorting through invisible threads, and eventually pinches a nothingness that he wraps around his palm. The pain abates and Ichigo sucks in a breath through clenched teeth, but his limbs are paralyzed and he cannot do anything more than seethe impotently. Edogawa reaches out, then, and places a friendly hand on Ichigo's shoulder, and for a crazed moment Ichigo thinks the man means to topple him over. But instead, he simply rests his hand there as if he is trying to convince himself of something, and then, coming to a decision, he drops it back to his side and stands up.

He reaches into a small bag at his waist and pulls out a syringe and a tiny vial. "I regret that it was you, Kurosaki-san," he says, looking down at him as he smoothly slides the needle into the vial's cap, and there is sincerity in his voice. "You were one of the most promising students I ever had."

There is a flare in Ichigo's reiatsu and the edge of fear in it bites at her. They are close, so close, it's only a matter of seconds, but Rukia worries—

"But that Hollow inside you, my dear boy, is a threat to this world, and to the world of the living, and I cannot allow you to survive and menace them both." The syringe fills with a clear liquid that glows green at the edges, and Ichigo recognizes the slick sickness that is wrapped in long and iron threads around his Hollow as Edogawa gently rests the tip of the needle just above Ichigo's heart—

"There!" Renji shouts, and Rukia can see the bright orange of Ichigo's hair through the trees. Her heart is racing—she pours on a final burst of speed—

Edogawa jams the needle through his skin and depresses the plunger—it burns like fire in his chest—

And the world goes silent as Renji and Rukia finally break into the clearing at Ichigo's back, as Edogawa with his empty syringe dangling from his fingers takes two smooth steps back from Ichigo still sitting on his heels, as the trees themselves go still in the breathless hush.

And then Ichigo's reiatsu explodes.

It billows over all three of them in a flooding, reeking swell of Hollow that nearly knocks Rukia over; she stumbles back a step until Renji braces her with the hand that holds Zabimaru, and a sapling to her right explodes under the pressure. There is a thunderous rumble growing underneath the waves rolling off Ichigo, but she can't tell if it's him or Edogawa or the mountain itself revolting against the atrocity that has been born on its face. She closes her eyes against the burning acidity, and the familiar and bitter tang of the trees and the Hollow mixes against her nose, and for a split-second, Rukia can't remember whose back she has been chasing. Then she hears Renji swear brutally as Zabimaru's hilt digs into her back, and she opens eyes that immediately water to see Ichigo convulse.

It is not a coordinated motion; it is as if the motor units are firing randomly in his arms and legs, sending them twitching in all directions in a grotesque parody of a marionette held by an inexpert puppeteer. Rukia takes a half-step forward, but she is stopped both by Renji's hand like iron on her arm and Edogawa putting up his own hand to stop her from the other side of Ichigo's body.

"Not yet, please," he says, maddeningly courteous, and he clenches both hands in front of him, one on top of the other. Ichigo's body freezes, the major seizures halted, but Rukia can still see the muscles tensing one after another, rippling across the back of his neck and down his forearms. "I will kill him right now if you insist on intervening."

Rukia watches the third finger on Ichigo's left hand bend itself backwards until it looks like it must break, and Edogawa correctly interprets her silence as acquiescence.

"I am sorry for the both of you as well," he continues as he lowers his hands, as if his student was not writhing mindlessly in the grass between them, and Rukia longs to put her sword through his throat. "But sacrifices are necessary when they are for the elimination of a thing that poses such a danger to us all."

Rukia knows it is idiotic to respond, knows her words will fall on deaf ears, knows that nothing she says could convince this man to free Ichigo and simply walk away. She snaps anyway. "Ichigo is hardly a threat."

Edogawa looks at her in a mixture of pity and condescension. "My dear girl," he says, and Ichigo lets out a muted, sustained groan that makes Rukia shudder. "You of all people know the thing that lives in him."

Rukia is barely paying any attention to the man. Ichigo has fallen forward to his elbows in an unconscious attempt to balance himself, and she is aching from the Hollow's stench and her utter inability to help him. His reiatsu buffets the three of them violently. Even Edogawa is not unfazed; Rukia can see sweat shining on his forehead, and she viciously hopes the man is suffering more than he lets on.

But when he continues speaking, he gives no sign of discomfort. "You of all people should agree with me, Kuchiki-san," he says, and an entirely new jolt trembles through her. "When the ones we care about are invaded by Hollow, is it not our duty to relieve them of their suffering?"

How dare he—how dare he? Her rage and grief twin themselves in their sudden surging, and Renji releases her arm as if he's been scalded. How dare he, in this place? Rukia takes one step forward, livid and hurting—her skin is tingling in disbelieving fury. "You will be silent," she snaps. She is so angry that she nearly loses herself to it, and only Shirayuki's hilt in her palm cools her swelling wrath into something controllable.

"I merely make a point." He holds up his hands placatingly, and Rukia clenches her sword so tightly her knuckles pop. "Whether or not you wish to admit it, Kurosaki-san is a danger to this world and all those in it. Were he simply human or simply shinigami, his power would be dangerous enough, but at least then he would have the mind to control it." His brows draw together in the first real emotion either of them has seen from him, and the muted fervor boiling beneath his words is that of a fanatic. "But that boy," Edogawa continues, jabbing a finger in Ichigo's direction, "has a Hollow inside of him. His sanity is no longer his own—I have studied that Hollow, I have felt its power—do you know that if he lost control, that thing could reduce Soul Society to ash?"

"His Hollow had been sealed by the captains!" Renji barks over her shoulder, and Edogawa snorts.

"The captains are a joke," he retorts, pacing a short distance towards them. "They, every one of them, were fooled by one of my students. I taught Aizen Sousuke everything he knew about reiatsu and its manipulation, me, and every single one of them fell for his illusions. They are incompetent—by the time I looked in that boy's soul, their bindings were already eroding away. Do you think they'd have held on the strength of your wishes and prayers? No," he says, and he slashes his arm in a motion that bows Ichigo's back nearly in half before he falls to his elbows again. Rukia still can't see his face.

"If I sped the erosion of the chains that bound the Hollow," Edogawa says, voice level again, his mask of composure slipping smoothly back into place, "it was because it meant that I could control when and where the last bindings would be broken."

Impossible. He honestly thought Aizen learned his skill from him—and to loose the bindings intentionally—

"You are insane," Rukia breathes.

"I am protecting Soul Society from everything he is!"

"You will kill him!"

"No," says Edogawa, and he smiles.

Suddenly, in an instant, every iota of reiatsu that Ichigo had exuded seems to suck itself back into his body in a screaming hiss that feels like sandpaper against Rukia's teeth. The sudden absence is worse than its presence.

There is a moment of terrible silence. Ichigo has gone completely still.

Rukia cannot breathe.

"He will kill you."

Ichigo stands up, and he turns, and his face is masked in bone.