The man pointed the Shade to the surface, and tried to communicate the concept of the Dragon. When he thought he understood, the man saw the thing off with a heavy heart. It was an odd sense of companionship. Although their shape was not the same, and they perhaps did not really understand their communication beyond vague emotion, they stood together in a time of need.

It didn’t need to be more complicated than that, the man thought. As long as the Shade and he both understood the slight tether that bonded them, would anything else really matter?

He did not know if the Shade thought the same, but he decided then that he would rather die than forget his comrade in arms. Temporary as it may be, it was another profound experience on his journey. He held it dearly.

And the man at that point had a decision again. And as he looked at the fading figure of the shade, he realized the floating light had returned to him once more.

He understood, and went back to confront the Spirits, and the Coward if he could. And, to obtain his knife again. And to obtain a path deeper. The man had come with greed in his heart, a steadfast determination that had replaced that somber apathy he had grown so used to.

And when the Spirits saw him come back to their paradise, they screeched as a banshee. The coward took form, pointing at the man and returning to the crowd.

“Look! The man who pretends to be a king! He returns from hell, prepared to burn our home.”

With this, the Coward returns to the amalgamation of faces.

And the Spirits rushed forwards, hoping to stampede the man with their bodies. But the man simply stared, and they could go no further forward. A forward figure in the crowd had been forced to take shape, and it was the form of the Coward. A fear came over him, an intense one.

“He’s blessed by the devil, with a cursed art! He’s going to damn me forever!” He screamed, such a frightful scream. The crowd did not react, simply huddled as a unity. For some reason they had felt the pond’s current change next to them. The ever setting calm of the pond was threatened to be replaced by a forceful wave, one necessary to upend the dirt accumulated and make room for discovery. Something that threatened to wipe away the peaceful covering that the creatures that danced in the depths had grown so accustomed to.

The man for the first time, tilted his head up, in a slight form of arrogance. “You speak, but you don’t understand. You claim to know all, but you were dead when I took your knife. You all praised me on my journey, to no end, but then turned so quickly on what you already knew. You were watching, were you not? Why had you waited for the Coward to take the knife out? Have you not witnessed my journey?”

To this, the spirits stayed silent.

“I am not a king. But you saw the crown and judged me as such, do you not feel yourself a fool, Coward?”

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The Coward clenched his teeth and threatened to bark back, before the man’s voice once again bounded out.

“And to you Spirits without a face, to you who praised me with no thought of my struggle or my failure, or you who dared to feign that you understood my steps without taking them. I dispute you, you temptrants.”

The Coward looked scared now, the words the man spoke filled him with a sort of fear. The same kind of fear when his neck sliced clean off, and he watched his body slump over from his head in the sands. He remembered the imminence of death.

“You spoke not of my carless steps in the Sands. Of my time unaware, of my time ignorant. You hadn’t thought of speaking of my despair that still remains, even through this eternity of forgetting. You claimed I carried the Fairies' will for him, but I had no will until I heard his words. He gave me a part of himself, of the world he saw. And you saw you saw my journey, but you speak of only where I know I stepped. You speak nothing of before. ”

A spirit faded from existence, to the shock of those surrounding it.

“I don’t believe I have the dignity to claim that I stand above you. I may too, be a vague thing with no real understanding. And certainly, I don’t have the arrogance to claim that I can deny you your belief. But I walked through the stands, and I say I am no king. I am not a hero, either. I’m a wanderer, plain as that.”

“The Coward, I took the knife as a token of your life. Your body belonged to the sands, who was I to deny you the right of peace for an indulgent act of burial? And truthfully I believe you would have done the same were I to die, taking my cloak and crown. But to you instead of blame or what could have been, I offer an apology. May I ask your name?”

The Coward felt a shutter jolt through his body, and for a moment he felt a power greater than any he ever had before. He could strike the man dead, and reject him of any and all future chance of opportunity. A rejection of empathy, of chance.

“I was Grand Minister Erml.” The Coward’s voice spoke with an unbelievable tenderness. And he vanished. As did the other Spirits, their words no longer affected the man and his belief in his journey.

He took a moment to ponder the pond, to look at his reflection again in the water. He listened to the sounds of the life still sustained in the cave, and he scanned with his eyes, taking everything he could see in and appreciating it.

He had no ill will for the Spirits, it comforted him there were those who wished him well on his journey. But they twisted his journey to meet their sense of reverence, he couldn’t allow it to continue.

Still, he had wronged the Coward. And so he found the knife again, and slid it to his side. Brandishing it openly now,

The man scanned the distance again, and he found his object of desire. A slope further down into the cave laid in the distance, and so off he went.

And as the man thought of the Spirits in the cave and their words, he thought quite a grim thought. One day, he may be the same way. He may claim a man is not good enough, and that his suffering was not to par. And to this, the man pondered where his rationality was. Not an absolute optimism, but not a dire pessimism. In that gradient of possibility, he was unsure if an answer really remained.

He finally answered, a smile cracking at his ever emotionless face.

“I think I’ll ask them myself if I ever am like the Spirits. I won’t trust my eyes, but my ears and listen to the hero’s deepest secrets as he too finds himself in the cave.” He said it to nobody, but the man’s words were important nonetheless.

Deeper still, the man found himself no longer caring about how far away the surface was.