The Sorcerer tore himself off the horse, as fast as he was able.

Setty immediately stopped and came up beside –

The youth was on the floor in some kind of catatonic state. Eyes open but rolled back in his head. Mumbling to himself, incoherent; foam – there was a foam of perfectly white bubbles gathering at the corners of his mouth, and then – pouring from his mouth – and he hit shaking himself; violently tearing his body. The Sorcerer ripped his cape off and positioned it under the youth's head, moved the rocks nearby from his limbs, and... hovering over him he could do nothing. He was merely watching the boy – the young man – shake himself into an interminable frenzy that was terrifying, shocking; the finality of something deeply, deeply, strange and unreal.

This moment was the culmination of everything in this landscape – it was the culmination of something terrible that had been building in both of them, he felt – no conception in his mind that this was an incident that was merely personal to the Youth; to the Golden Bow – this was both of them – it was happening to both of them, and he could do nothing.

He was paralysed, too, himself, in direct response to this thing now, standing over him, watching; being forced to watch the violence of the fit tear and thrash his body from side to side on the side of the road/half on the grass; limbs still on the dirt/rock road itself.

Thrashing wildly, foaming endlessly, the youth spat chunks of viscous matter the whole time shaking, shaking himself... apart.

The Sorcerer couldn't watch this – he had to; he couldn't but he had to, he couldn't keep this up but he had to. He was fitting-up – him too, but entirely inside. In a manner terrified in response to this; the mania at – whatever it was that was in him.

It had been transferred to the youth and he was shaking himself apart in it. The thing; that had been pressing on both of them – it had pushed him to – it wasn't/it was him – this was his fighting that doom that clung to him.

It was tearing him apart in this mad thrashing suicide – the only option – or kill the innocent creature who had taken them through all this – it was that; it was this that he was watching; and he continued to.

Seeing the terror in his own eyes, in his own face, reflected in those – something like them on the horizon – the same time unconscious and farther away than anything on that fake horizon – his eyes – inside himself – his eyes rolled all the way back inside himself.

On his knees the Sorcerer rammed a stick in his mouth, sitting there – and he should have done this earlier, but he couldn't. – Anyway he couldn't get his mouth open, prize his jaws apart – paralysed in this – throwing himself with him, holding him, but not holding him – thrown in the wake of the unceasing violence of the self-destruction that racked the youth.

The Sorcerer just held him, and kept holding him, until he – noted that they were both crying and that the fit had stopped.

Gradually, no idea how much time had passed, if any, he began to interpret that the youth was awake, or wakening, and that he no longer held the catatonic body of someone deeply internal. Someone in fact so far inside themselves that they could never be reached by – words, thoughts – by anything. Any form of communication at all. Except perhaps from the words of the thing that apparently had been whispering at him.

“– Are you there?”

“Sorcerer?” He wiped the foam off his throat with the cape still under his head. After he'd cleaned all the foam away, he told him, “Just rest. We'll sleep here. And. Just rest. Don't even think. We'll figure all this... tomorrow.”

“Sorcerer?” a million miles off.

“You're okay, don't even try, I'll figure something – we're going to sleep.”

“Sorcerer –”

His voice. Under his body. He held –

“...Yes?”

“Sorcerer –”

“Don't –”

Filtered past the croak in his throat, “Sorce -” the same time in his hand the rock hit his face.