"Bat?"
"You heard the part about drinking the sun, yes?" Camazotz asked.
"I heard it." Grey's voice cracked slightly on the last word. "I just... you're telling me I nearly got trampled by a thousand spirit beasts, ran through an actual war zone, and had my soul almost pressed flat, and it was all for a bat?"
"I am not a bat."
"The sun-drinking, underworld-dwelling bat of the underworld."
"...I am reclaiming the words."
It escaped before Grey could stop it. A short, sharp burst of air through his nose, undignified and completely involuntary. His fear, his exhaustion, the impossible compressed weight of the entire morning finding the only exit available and taking it without asking permission.
Camazotz regarded him in silence.
"You laugh."
"I'm sorry." Grey was not sorry at all.
"It's just, you built the whole entrance. The pressure. The trees falling. Thirty percent of your noble presence. And at the end of all of that, you're a bat."
"I am older than your species."
"A really old bat."
"I have devoured gods."
"A very impressive bat."
"...You are insufferable."
Grey's grin was shaky but genuine. "You're the one who chose me."
A long silence settled between them. Longer than the others. The fog drifted slowly and the trees stood motionless.
Grey waited, still riding the absurd lightness that had replaced his fear, that particular giddiness that comes after something terrifying resolves itself in an unexpected direction and the body doesn't quite know what to do with all the tension it had prepared.
Then the darkness shifted, and Grey could have sworn, against all reasonable probability, that the featureless figure was smiling.
"Yes," said Camazotz quietly. "Yes, I did."
The weight in the air changed. Something that didn't have a clean name yet but felt like the first moment of understanding between two people who have just realised they are going to have to figure each other out.
It might, given enough time and considerably fewer bat jokes, eventually become something close to respect.
"Have you not been taught about the Twelve Titans?" Camazotz asked out of curiosity.
"I never went to class," Grey said. "So no."
"That explains it. You are quite ignorant."
"People keep telling me that today."
"You will address me as Camazotz," the voice continued, with the tone of someone moving past a point they had decided not to dwell on.
"Not bat. Not creepy fog monster. Not whatever inventive name I can already see forming behind your eyes right now."
"Nothing was forming."
"Liar."
Grey cleared his throat. "Camazotz. Understood."
"And stop smiling like that."
"Like what?"
"...We are discussing terms."
"Right." Grey arranged his expression into something that showed seriousness. It held for approximately three seconds. "What are the terms exactly?"
Camazotz turned slightly, his dark form angling northward for a moment before turning back to face Grey fully. When he spoke again the lightness was gone from his voice.
This was a different side entirely, measured and deliberate, each word carrying the weight of something that had been thought about for a very long time.
"Most creatures bond without difficulty when a human enters this realm. The process is designed to work naturally. A human is sent to the region where a beast connected to them dwells, drawn together by affinity and spirit energy. Some higher ranking beasts choose to test their potential masters first, through combat or trial, to determine worthiness before agreeing to bond."
He paused.
"I will not subject you to trials. But I do require something from you. Something that matters."
Grey felt the shift and straightened slightly. The banter had been easy. This was different.
"My spirit was imprisoned here against my will," Camazotz said. The words came out flat and precise, stripped of the grandeur he had used earlier.
"I can only leave if released by an external force. What you see before you is not my true form. It is a conjured projection, something I built from available shadow and spirit energy to make this conversation possible. My actual spirit remains bound in the deep Heartlands, imprisoned in a place called the Heart's Abyss."
"Without my true form, I cannot leave this realm. I cannot bond with anyone. I cannot do anything except wait and watch and speak to children through borrowed fog."
There was something underneath the last sentence. Not bitterness exactly, but the particular weariness of something immensely powerful that has spent a very long time being unable to move.
Grey was quiet for a moment, turning it over.
Something as powerful as Camazotz was contained, held in place by something stronger and more powerful.
It reminded him of what the Chief used to say on the rare evenings he sat with Grey on the cliff and talked about the world beyond Seaside.
A frog in a well knows nothing of the sea. There was always something higher. Always something further beyond the horizon than you had thought to look.
He had spent his whole life in a well. A small, familiar, occasionally cruel well where everyone knew he was an orphan and the older kids used that knowledge like a tool they kept sharpened. He had made peace with the well, or told himself he had, which was not quite the same thing.
Now something ancient and powerful was telling him the well was not the world.
"So what exactly do you need me to do?" he asked.
"Travel north," Camazotz said. "Deep into the heart of the Heartlands, past the territories where the weaker spirits dwell, into the regions that most humans entering this realm would never be able to reach. There you will find the Heart's Abyss. And there you will find me."
"And then?"
"And then you free me." A pause. "After which, our bond will form. And you will have a Titan."
Grey looked north through the trees. The forest stretched away in that direction without any obvious end, dark and vast and very silent.
He thought about how much of his week he had already burned through.
He thought about Lysa, somewhere else in this realm right now, probably already bonded with something extraordinary, and how she would look at him when they both came back out through the root node.
He thought about the Chief's promise.
He thought about the faces of the village children. The particular expression they wore when they wanted to remind him of something he already knew and couldn't change.
He had been looking at that expression for as long as he could remember and he was, he realised standing here in the quiet of this impossible forest, genuinely and thoroughly tired of it.
Camazotz had used the word potential. Grey didn't fully know what that meant yet, didn't have the knowledge or context to measure it against anything real. But he understood the feeling underneath the word. That persistent, uncomfortable sense that the container was too small for what it was holding and had been for a long time.
If there was even a chance that was true, then walking out of here with something small and safe would be a choice and possibly regret he'd carry for the rest of his life.
He had spent twelve years making himself manageable. Keeping the lid on. Wearing the smile. He was tired of that too.
He looked into the darkness where Camazotz's eyes should have been.
"I'll free you," he said.
A beat of silence.
"...Cama."
Camazotz was confused. "Excuse me?"
"Actually, no. Wait." Grey scrunched his face, reconsidering. "Kaz. That's the one. Kaz."
"Kaz," Camazotz repeated, in the tone of someone tasting something unexpected and trying to determine whether it was offensive.
"Your name. What I'll be calling you from now on."
"I dislike it."
"You don't really have a choice." Grey shrugged. "Besides, Camazotz is a mouthful"
"It is a sacred appellation bestowed upon me by civilisations that no longer—"
"It's long."
Several seconds passed. The fog drifted. Somewhere above them in the canopy something shifted, though there was no wind.
"...Have it your way," Camazotz said finally, with the dignity of someone who has chosen their battles carefully.
Grey nodded, satisfied.
The figure's edges began to soften then, the darkness losing density, flickering at the margins the way a flame flickers when whatever fuels it is running low.
When Camazotz spoke again the voice was already quieter, carrying the quality of something being said from further away than it appeared.
"I cannot maintain this projection much longer. The energy required is considerable. You must continue alone from here."
"Wait." Grey stepped forward. "How do I find the Heart's Abyss? The forest all looks the same."
"North," came the reply, barely above a whisper now. "Keep north. You only have one hurdle ahead of you"
"A hurdle? So something will try to kill me?"
The figure was almost entirely gone, the edges of it dissolving into the white fog strand by strand.
Then, very close to his ear, the voice returned one final time.
Quiet and warm, in the particular way that warmth sounds when it comes from something that has not had much practice with it.
"Nothing will kill you on your path. I will see to it. Now go, child. You are already closer than you think."
The presence faded.
Not gradually. All at once.
One moment Camazotz was there and the next moment, he wasn't. The forest was simply a forest, enormous and silent and belonging entirely to Grey.
He stood still for a moment and let the quiet settle around him.
Then he looked north.
The trees in that direction seemed different. The gaps between the trunks a little wider. The path through them a little clearer, as though the forest had made a small and quiet adjustment while he wasn't looking.
He took a slow breath.
"Kaz," he said quietly, testing the weight of it one final time.
Yeah. That was the one.
He took a step forward. Then another. The trees parted before him and the path opened up, long and dark and patient, stretching north into the deep heart of the Heartlands.