When humans tucked their young in for the night, they'd assure them that there are no monsters under their beds or in their closets. They'd assure their children that monsters don't exist.
Well, the drifter never was a child. Perhaps he could recall a time where his mind was infantile and innocent, back when he was new to the world, but he was never a child. Even if he was ever a child, that childhood was stripped away from him the moment he stepped out of the forest and met with the cruelty of humankind.
They called him a demon. They called him a beast. They called him anything but human.
They called him a monster.
For as long as he could remember, he was alone in the world. A beast that couldn't even properly pretend to be human. Then, when he asked the man who inflicted this horrendous existence upon him to give him a name, what was he told?
"No," he was told as his creator looked upon him with incredulous disgust. As though he'd asked for the moon, stars, and sky. Apparently, it was enough that he'd given him life, never mind that he was immediately discarded afterwards. To give him a name would be to make his existence appropriate, and saintly Victor Frankenstein couldn't have that on his hands.
At the time, he was naïve to believe that describing to Victor the misery he'd endured would garner enough sympathy to grant that singular request. Victor had gladly given him many nicknames. "Demon", "fiend", "beast of my creation", "monster". If he could come up with so many ways to call him his abominable creation, surely he could conjure up a name. He was so desperate that even a cruel name would have sufficed.
Though he understood it useless to seek out the company of humans, he still pretended to be part of their world from time to time. He'd sit on the outskirts and listen to them speak. And one day, he overheard a rumor that ignited a spark of hope he thought he'd never find. Rumors of a mountain where humans walked, and never came back. A place where monsters lived.
Perhaps, the drifter thought as he packed what few belongings he had, perhaps there was a place for him after all. If he was a monster, and if there was a place monsters dwelled, then there was one thing to do: Climb to the summit of Mount Ebott. Besides. Even if the rumors weren't true, humans don't come back, right? So whether he could come back or not should determine once and for all his humanity.
Scaling the mountain was the easy part. He started the ascent at dawn, and it was still early morning by the time he reached the summit. Part of him wondered how long the average human would take to make the climb. Couldn't be long though. In fact, it was such an easy climb that a child could do it unassisted if they set their mind to it.
The hard part was having second thoughts. However, he ultimately waited until the next day to follow through. He wanted to see the stars one last time. A good farewell to the surface world before he was to leave and never return.
At dawn, he took a breath and fell down. Human or monster, he wasn't coming back.