...you creep across my skull.

The world had a funny way of working. It had a way of surprising you, shocking you, scaring the ever living hell out of you. And then, after all of that, after all the nightmares, the bad dreams, the stories we tell ourselves to make sure we know we're not crazy?

It pleases us. It writes us a story, gives us a present, a gift, a something that just falls in your lap and lets you know you're all right.

Maybe you're not different. Maybe the world isn't as bad, as terrible, as cruel as we'd all like to think.

He'd looked this way for a long time. He'd had these scars, these horrible marrs on his face for longer than he could remembeer.

And in a way, it had made him fascinated. The forest was a place of lies, falsifications, because everyone here seemed to have something to hide. He could hide the worst of his horrors behind a mask that seemed to suit his features, hiding that which was his visage from the world.

That suited him just fine.

And there was one around here that he'd always wondered about. He'd always wondered what hid behind that mask, what could possible be beneath it, to make it look the way it did.

It was not easy asking. It wasn't some simple task. Because one didn't just march into Mordor, as the saying somewhere went. You didn't just strut right up to a throne like that, and you certainly didn't pitch perfectly innocent questions that way.

But he did it anyway.

It took him days. Days of working up the courage, summoning up his guts. Not to mention turning them to iron: that particular patch of the forest just smelled wrong. It was a wet, rotten, fetid smell, too many corpses collected in a pile.

The last stretch of it had been done on his belly, eyes watering and the bile trying to creep up his throat. By that point, it was a matter of pride that drove him.

But soon enough, he was mere feet from the bright ray of sun, and that which perpetually seemed to ooccupy it. Morning, noon, and night, the Beast burned the ground, perpetually present with a song of bottle flies, maggots, roaches.

The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out.

He knew that if he didn't ask all at once, without stopping, he'd sit and stutter there until the day he died.

"What's behind it? What's behind that skull? What are you hiding, that makes the smoke pour out? Who are you? What are you?"

For several moments, the Beast didn't so much as budge - and Isac thought that maybe, just maybe, the Beast wasn't real at all - maybe he had just imagined the huge edifice that sat there, some statue that was horribly real.

But finally, as slow as the trees grow, that horrible mouth opened. Behind shark's serrated sharp teeth, three tongues started to turn and churn, words falling out, followed by smoke and maggots, Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade from Hell.

"Nothing," he rasped, quietly. "This is not a mask. This is mine face. There is no soft, simple, human facade hiding behind the bone. This is what I am."

Slowly, he turned his head towards Isac, the stars in his tines giggling and glimmering, children chasing soap bubbles, not yet realizing how fleeting life could be.

"Why would I hide what I am?"

And as the fires in those yawning eyesockets guttered and flickered, he asked perhaps what Isac needed to hear - had come to hear all along, but had not yet realized it.

"What do I have to be ashamed of?"