Gerhardt
Gerhardt slumped against a tree and wiped the sweat from his brow. His nice white uniform was now dirty, drenched, and torn so that now it was hanging on his green, stitched, filthy form in tatters. He sank to his knees and buried his face in his hands. Victor was the only one who ever believed in him, and now he was gone, claimed by the Blackness. He sensed its evil in his core, and he knew this land had nothing like it. It claimed his brother but left everything else, and it left him a prisoner in an abandoned castle, craving human contact but finding only pitchforks and torches upon his escape, so it was no wonder he chose to name it the Blackness.
It was also no wonder that he fled into the forest and talked only to himself and what animals that wouldn't look at him crossways, though he learned very quickly that that meant they thought he was a meal. He'd gotten lost running from them so many times he gave up on keeping track of where he was. Now he wandered aimlessly, without home, family, prospects, or fortune, with only most of his former command of speech, and constantly haunted by the fact that he was a monster who killed his own father, regardless of his reasons. But he just wanted to protect his brother, whom he had supported when their father did not. Victor brought him back because of his work, his work that no one else believed in.
Now Gerhardt was alone in the world.
OUAT
Victor used to visit him nightly, and nightly Gerhardt would try to form sentences for him, or perform some other small feat to prove himself. Victor was encouraging, but Gerhardt sensed a blend of guilt and disappointment emanating from him. He was most likely asking himself how he could have made such a terrible mistake. So Gerhardt threw himself into his exercises in an effort to convince Victor that he wasn't a mistake, that he could still be good, human.
Then one day Gerhardt felt something utterly foreign and evil. It woke him from sleep, actually, and he knew at once he had to get to his brother. Quickly he burst out of his cell, and he took the stairs two, sometimes three, at a time. He threw open the door to the foyer, and the windows shattered. He had just enough time to see Victor on the other side of the room before he had to shield his face with his arm. Victor screamed his name over the howling of the wind. "Victor! Victor!" Gerhardt yelled.
"Get back inside," Victor replied. Gerhardt could have sworn he heard something else, but the words were lost, and even if they weren't, he disobeyed his brother anyway and began working on a way to get closer to him.
The door with its massive wrought-iron hinges was torn out of the wall and sent flying, striking Gerhardt in the shoulder and sending him sliding, unconscious, into the wall. "Gerhardt," Victor screamed, noting by the scratchiness he heard that he was starting to lose his voice. The wind had started to stir in rocks the size of his fingernails and bigger, which he admittedly minded more than the dust and sand, but he stumbled over to his unconscious brother nonetheless. He shoved the door aside to the best of his ability and rolled Gerhardt over to examine him, knowing full well he couldn't, let alone shouldn't, do so in this weather. Gerhardt groaned and shifted, and his eyes fluttered open. "Listen to me, listen to me. You have to go back to the cell. You'll be safe there."
"No," Gerhardt whispered. He chanted the same word over and over, increasing in volume, as he stood, until finally he was screaming at his brother and pushing him back. He took a deep breath and said shortly, "No. Not leaving."
Victor lay his hands on Gerhardt's shoulders. "Please, Gerhardt. Please." Gerhardt shook his head.
The wind kicked up again, and Gerhardt pulled Victor to the floor as pieces of the facade broke off and swirled with the rest of the debris as they sailed into the foyer.
Then came what Gerhardt would dub the Blackness. It rode the wind into the castle as the latter was being reduced to a ruin, and when Gerhardt looked up, what he saw was a great storm cloud, thundering within itself as it rolled toward them. He turned away and huddled closer to his brother as the cloud swept over them.
Normally, Gerhardt hardly felt anything-that was his new normal, at least-but when the Blackness touched him, his flesh crawled over his bones. He wanted desperately to get away from it, but he couldn't leave his brother, and it surrounded them both. He was trapped. They were trapped.
Finally the Blackness rolled away, and Gerhardt sank to the floor. He instantly pushed himself up and felt the stones beneath him, convinced his eyes were lying through their teeth. But he felt nothing just as plainly as he saw nothing. The Blackness and the storm it rode in on stole Victor right out from under him.
He, as a brother, had failed.
He got to his feet and staggered over to the gaping hole the storm left in Victor's castle, and he screamed himself hoarse.
OUAT
That night, he woke the wrong village's mayor. As a consequence, he was run out with pitchforks and torches, and from that night to this, his wandering has never ended.
OUAT
Robin pushed Bae forward. "Keep going west," he ordered. "You'll know the cave when you feel it."
"Are you out of your mind?" Bae asked.
"You're out of yours," Morraine shot back, grabbing Bae by the sleeve and pulling him back. Robin drew an arrow and took a deep breath before firing into the cloud. It opened a hole just long enough to allow the arrow to sail right through it before closing up again.
"We're all mad here, it seems," said the wizard.