Disclaimer: I do not own Over the Garden Wall. I also don't own Wirt and Greg's mother or respective fathers. Or their surnames, I guess. I'm borrowing (okay, slightly stealing) them from skimmingthesurface on AO3.

The moment the light goes out, he knows.

The forest is the heart of the world, Beast is the spirit of the forest, and the Dark Lantern is the soul of the Beast. They are all bound up together, all necessary, all eternal. One cannot destroy the Beast, not truly—

-except that he has, and so the young Beast-to-be takes a moment to memorize the feeling of his soul inside his self, then breathes in deep and prepares—

"You did it!"

The bluebird's cry startles the Beast-to-be out of his trance, back into Wirt. He'd forgotten for a moment that he wasn't alone, that Beatrice and the Woodsman and the frog (Jason Funderberker, right) were all there. That Greg was there, branches digging into his skin.

It only takes a thought to recall the edelwood from his brother, twisting it away. Wirt runs forward to catch him, lowers him gently to the ground. His brother coughs weakly. He is alive, though cold, and without the Beast's influence, he will recover.

The Beast. The Beast had done that. The Beast, who preyed on the souls of lost children and was dead and would never come back, not if he had anything to say about it.

Wirt flings {his Lantern} the lantern as far as he can.

The winter air is cold, but the sweat beading on his brow is colder still. If Beatrice hadn't spoken, he would have….

But she had spoken, she had saved him, so he snips away her wings as the grieving Woodsman holds Greg close. Her smile is brighter than the moon and stars together, and she laughs with pure joy as she embraces him.

They say goodbye then, Greg waking enough to hug Beatrice goodbye and tell her she's really pretty, and that's a rock fact. Wirt gives her directions to the bluebirds' tree as the Woodsman departs for his own long-abandoned home, and soon Wirt is carrying his exhausted brother and their frog back to the other world.

In their excitement and sorrow and exhaustion, no one asks how Wirt suddenly knows the way home.

Wirt does not faint after he carries Greg and the frog out of the water. He deflects the doctors and nurses with protests that I'm fine, really, focus on my brother and paces the waiting room with Jason Funderberker in his arms. The kids from school try to talk with him, but he is distracted by his fear for Greg, {not to mention the way his soul twists and turns inside of him as it seeks its proper vessel}.

When Greg is safe, the nurses offer to look him over. He lowers his voice so that Mom and Jonathan won't overhear when he turns them down, but she overhears anyways and insists on having him checked for broken bones. He has none, only bruises that are rapidly darkening {to the color of edelwood oil}.

If his eyes feel {wrong} odd and there is a pressing pushing ache in his temples, he is the only one who needs to know.

Things are different after they get back from the Unknown. He and Greg are close now, closer than their mother ever dared dream they would be. He spends less time cooped up in his room, more with his brother or his new friends. He dates Sara for couple weeks, but that doesn't work out and they agree to be friends instead. It hurts less than he expected. He makes little comments about one day signing up for marching band.

Greg recovers from his near-death experience (from the Beast, from what {his predecessor} the Beast had done to him) quickly and easily, with only a couple nightmares. He draws pumpkins and bluebirds and dapper frogs, cloud people and witches. He plays with his brother and their frog. He makes up songs and sings them, and sometimes Wirt plays accompaniment on his clarinet.

(Wirt has only sung once since he left his forest got home. His singing voice is different now, rich and deep and lovely {and far too familiar}. He hears himself and collapses and trembles beneath the hot water of the shower until it becomes cold. If Jonathan hadn't knocked on the bathroom door, he would have been late for school.

Greg tries, sometimes, to make him sing, but he smiles fake smiles and makes his excuses. No one suspects.)

Jason Funderberker coughs up a bell shaped like a girl. Sometimes Greg will use the bell in his songs, ringing it with more enthusiasm than rhythm. Wirt doesn't like it when he does. It makes his soul ache even worse for {its rightful place} something it will never have.

Despite their closeness, their mother and Greg's father cannot help but worry. After all, their boys had both nearly died on Halloween night. They sign the entire family up for sessions with a therapist.

Wirt does not like these sessions. Greg is still young enough that his tales of the Unknown can be dismissed as childish imagination, but Wirt is too old to get away with that. He cannot tell the therapist with the piercing eyes about his experiences in the woods {or about how he is becoming a monster}. Instead, she forces him to talk about his anxieties and makes recommendations for prescriptions. The only thing he likes about their sessions is how her office is filled with healthy, happy houseplants.

Those plants are always just a little bit greener when Wirt stands up to leave.

Time passes, and soon their little family goes out to get a Christmas tree. Wirt expects a fun day out with his mother and brother and stepfather and Jason Funderberker the frog. He does not expect the jolt of visceral horror at the sight of all those uprooted starving fading dying trees.

"Are you okay?" his mother asks.

"Yeah," he lies, but his smile is too forced for Amy Whalen to be fooled.

"Do you need to go back to the car and sit down?"

It's a tempting enough offer that Wirt almost takes her up on it, but Greg is so excited about their outing that he declines. His mother tells him to tell her if he needs anything, and they spend the next several minutes searching for the perfect pine. Then they load it onto the top of the car and bring it home, where it will grace their living room for the next three weeks.

Wirt tries very hard to ignore it, but he can't help but be aware of it when he's in the house {just like he can't help but feel the Beast-shaped hole in another world}. He somehow manages to hold out until just a few days before Christmas, when Amy and Jonathan go out caroling with some of his coworkers. They're staying out late, so they leave Greg behind with Wirt to babysit.

"You want to make the Christmas tree even better?" Wirt asks his brother.

"Yeah!" Greg exclaims. Jason Funderberker croaks his agreement.

Greg strips the tree's decorations while Wirt digs the hole, and the two of them (mostly Wirt, with Greg helping guide the tip) haul the tree into the backyard. Greg fills in the hole as Wirt keeps the tree steady.

Jason Funderberker 'supervises.'

When the tree is steady, Wirt sends Greg in for the first of the decorations. He leans behind, his bare hands pressing against the tree's branches.

(He does not feel the cold. Not anymore.)

Following an instinct he doesn't quite understand, an instinct that he usually avoids like the plague, Wirt begins to sing. "Oh Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree…." His voice is deep and rich and low, and he sings until Greg gets back and reminds him that he needs to help carry the decorations too.

When his mother and stepfather come home, they are not impressed to discover what their boys have done. "It'll just rot and fall down without roots," Jonathan points out. But it's too late at night to do anything about it—Greg has been in bed for almost an hour, and the sky is black as only a winter's night can be—so he resolves to retrieve it in the morning.

Wirt spends half the night in the backyard, singing softly to the tree. {For the first time, he feels more like a goodly forest spirit than a monster in the making.}

When Jonathan goes outside the next day to bring it back inside, he finds that the tree won't budge. It has grown roots, thick and strong and impossible, but… there.

He and Amy don't know what to make of that, but they decide to leave the tree where it is.

His body is changing, Wirt knows. Slowly, surely, steadily, it is warping into something different. He is taller now, his voice slightly deeper when he speaks. He tries to pretend that these things are nothing more than growing up. He knows better.

But there are other things that are harder to explain. His fingers stretch longer and slenderer than before. His skin gradually acquires a strange texture, harder and thicker and rougher than it should be. Whenever people notice, he makes a joke about always forgetting to use moisturizer. They smile and drop the subject.

(Wirt is using three different kinds of lotion, applying them multiple times a day. It isn't working. He hadn't expected it to work.)

The bruises he took tumbling down the hill fade, but the other pains do not. If anything, the ache in his temples and the wrongness of his eyes only intensify.

One night in early January, the wrongness of his eyes spikes and twists and vanishes. Wirt gasps, daring for a moment to hope—but then he notices that his room is not quite so dark. Shaking and afraid, he goes to the mirror. Sure enough, his eyes are luminous and bright, blue yellow pink blurring into white. He spends the rest of the night teaching himself the rudiments of shapeshifting, forcing his eyes back into their {former} usual shade of dark brown. They hurt if he keeps them shifted too long, so after a couple days of steadily increasing agony, he lets them change back to unearthly white whenever he's alone.

Meat makes him sick now, lying heavy in his stomach and bringing queasiness to his limbs. Animal products are little better. He announces that he's becoming a vegan shortly after the few forkfuls of ham he forced himself to eat at Christmas dinner leave him retching and heaving all night. Somehow, he manages to keep anyone from learning about the real reason for his change in diet. If they know about his sickness—about any of the stranger physical changes he can feel subtly warping his every cell—he'll no doubt be dragged off to the doctor's office for a checkup, and that is the last thing he wants.

It's easier to eat fruits and vegetables. He enjoys it {even if he doesn't actually need to eat}.

His senses sharpen. He learns to identify people by their scent and the sound of their footfalls. His sight improves the most, though, and his night vision most of all. He can read books by starlight and the soft illumination of his own eyes as he listens to his family's breathing through the walls.

Sleeping becomes difficult, though he is never tired no matter how little slumber he gets. He just feels more alive at night, stronger, more graceful. But sleeping makes him feel more {human} normal, so he tries every night. He cracks open the window (because he cannot sleep at all without fresh air) and closes his eyes and hopes for the best.

When Wirt does manage to sleep, he dreams. Most of the time, he is in the Unknown, walking through a forest that is deader and duller than it should be. There is a wound in the world, a great gaping gash shaped like a tall slender being with antlers on his head and a Lantern in his hand. Trees die in droves without him, and the winter is long and harsh and cruel. Even the moon and stars are dimmer than they should be.

But these are not the only dreams that Wirt dreams.

Sometimes, the forest—the world—is healthy and strong. The moon and stars shine bright above him, and their light is joined by the flames of his soul and the shining of his eyes. He walks the woods at night with a comfortable weight at each temple instead of constant pain and his Lantern in his hand and he sings in a beautiful voice. The melodies are from the Beast, but the words are his own.

When he wakes, he doesn't know which dreams frighten him more.

His poems are different now. Before, they were about the minutiae of his life: his loneliness and anxiety, his grief when Dad walked out, his bitterness over Mom's remarriage. His crush on Sara featured prominently, but for the most part, it was just a lot of teenage angst.

Now, though, his poems full of dread, and homesickness, and the still quiet beauty of the woods at night.

In mid-February, one of Wirt's teachers decides that the best way to teach her students about the wonders of the cellular biology is to have them examine their own blood under the microscope. The class is split into groups of three and given a worksheet.

One of Wirt's partners provides the blood sample for the microscope. Wirt pleads a fear of needles to avoid donating, and the girl simply shrugs and volunteers (the other boy also looks relieved, but not as much as Wirt felt). He adjusts knobs and identifies organelles and fills out the worksheet with shaking hands.

After school, when nobody is around, he sneaks into the science lab and examines his blood under the microscope. It's hard to force the little needle through his too-thick skin, and when he finally does acquire a blood sample, he can tell right away that it isn't normal. Human blood is not supposed to be that dark, that oily. It's not supposed to smell like the sap of an edelwood tree.

Under the microscope, it is even worse.

Tears rise unbidden to his inhuman white eyes when he sees the cell walls in his black blood, tears as dark and thick as oil.

He wishes upon a star that night, begging the indifferent heavens for a way out as dark tears slide down his cheeks. "I don't want to be a monster," he says to it. "I don't want to kill kids like Greg to survive. I don't want to become the Beast."

Hours later, when he finally succumbs to slumber, he has the first new dream he's had in months: a city in the clouds, and a lady with birds flying 'round her crown.

"I cannot grant your wish, sweet child," she tells him, and Wirt's hopes go plummeting down.

"Then why did you bring me here?" he cries.

"To beg you to come home."

"I am home," Wirt {lies} says, his fists clenching.

Her eyes are full of pity. "The Unknown will die without you," she says, and Wirt wishes that he could disbelieve her. He has suspected as much for a long time, but the woman's words wash away the last of his denial.

"So basically I have to leave my family, leave my brother, and start turning people into trees to survive," he moans, hiding his face in his hands. His fingers brush against the bases of his antlers—he has antlers here—but he is too distressed to notice.

A soft hand rests upon his shoulder. "No," the woman assures him gently. "You need edelwood oil to keep your Lantern lit, but you need not acquire fuel the way he did. You are the Horned Lord now, so you decide what it means to bear the Dark Lantern and have dominion over the forest. You can find another way."

Wirt swallows hard, and brushes away his tears, and begins to think. Soon he has enough thoughts to form into words, sentences, and the Horned Lord (he likes that better than Beast) and the Queen of the Clouds begin to talk in earnest.

When he finally notices that his dream-self has antlers, he is only a little bit frightened and not at all surprised.

Wirt spends the next few days preparing. He researches how people tap maple trees for sap to turn into syrup. He collects tubing and buckets and mason jars. Buys dark, old-fashioned clothing several sizes too big for his current form. He goes through his possessions one by one, carefully choosing which to take. He forgoes sleeping to write letters for his loved ones to read after his disappearance.

But most importantly, he spends time with those he loves, as much time as he possibly can. Everyone accepts his sudden clinginess with a raised brow, but they don't question him out loud. Perhaps they have their own theories. The only trouble Wirt has is with his father, whose secretary screens all his phone calls and tells him that Mr. Palmer is busy now, please wait for your regularly scheduled twice-monthly talks.

Sometimes, he can hear his father's voice in the background when he hisses at her to turn his son away, he has more important things to do than talk with a needy teenager.

The part of Wirt that is a bitter abandoned son hopes that Dad regrets this once he's gone. The rest of him mourns the lost opportunity and focuses on those around him, Mom and Greg and their frog and his friends and even Jonathan, who at least has never abandoned him.

The day of his departure comes all too soon. He goes to a movie with his family, the last movie he will ever see, and plays card games with them as evening falls. Greg stays up too late, but he still insists on a bedtime story before giving in to sleep.

Wirt volunteers to put his brother to bed. He weaves a tale about two siblings lost in the woods, two siblings who love each other very much… two siblings who had to separate, for the forest had claimed the elder as its own and she could never leave it, not truly. Not forever.

"That's a sad story," Greg mumbles, cuddling Jason Funderberker in his arms. "You need to tell me a happier one tomorrow, kay?"

"Yeah." Wirt swallows against the lump in his throat. "Okay."

He has never been one for physical affection, but he kisses the boy's forehead before he leaves. He says his goodnights to his mother and stepfather and retreats to his bedroom, listening until the pace of their breathing tells him that they have all fallen asleep.

Most of Wirt's bulkier provisions—the jars and buckets and thicker books of poetry that he could not bear to leave behind—are already hidden by the river. He gathers up the rest of his possessions—his clarinet, a couple more books, dark clothing he will grow into once his transformation is complete. He's reasonably certain that he can learn to shapeshift his antlers away occasionally, at least for long enough to barter for other supplies. Then he forces himself out of his bedroom, out of his house.

He does not look back. If he looks back, he won't be able to keep going.

His eyes are bright and white as he darts through the streets. The shadows cling to him, cleave to him like a second skin, but he does not shoo them away. Not tonight.

Through the cemetery, over the wall, across the river, into the Unknown, and he is home. His entire being sighs with relief. The constant pain in his temples is not so bad here.

He is in the clearing where he blew out the Dark Lantern all those months ago. There is an edelwood here, tall and hideous, its main face frozen forever in an expression of shock and horror. Antler-branches spring from a head-shaped knob.

Wirt pays his old enemy no more than a passing glance. His soul is writhing within him, eager to flame on in the Dark Lantern. He kneels in the snow-covered ground, reaches. He does not have to search, not for this.

He picks up his Lantern gently, brings it to his mouth, and softly exhales his soul.

There is light.

His soul is gone now. His limbs are longer, and a pair of magnificent antlers branch from his temples. If he speaks, his voice will be deep and dark.

It feels right. The hole in the world is finally filled, and he is himself at peace.

Wirt smiles, then stands, lifts his antlered head to sing. His song is hesitant at first, for he is not used to a voice so low and lovely, but he sings nonetheless. Soon his voice strengthens, soars, and the forest listens to its new master's song. The melody is familiar, for it once belonged to the Beast who sang before him… but the words are Wirt's alone.

Currently no plans to continue in this verse. Maybe one day, if inspiration strikes, but don't hold your horses.

-Antares