The magic golden bell was biding its time on a bookshelf next to a couple of dusty encyclopedias until late February, creeping closer and closer to the edge late in the night, when only the curious Moon was up to witness its misbehaviour. Then one afternoon the bell toppled over and fell on the floor, its tinkling instantly distracting Wirt and Greg from their dark thoughts and sending a clear message of hope – the first they'd had in months.

The snows were retreating, making way for the first warm, uncertain breaths of the spring, but inside both of the brothers there were dead icy wastelands.

Wirt was growing more and more alienated from the world as the days rolled by. The more he thought about the Unknown, the more ideas he got about its true nature – but, oddly, the realisation only made him more and more fascinated with it. It was a morbid fascination and an impossibly irrational one, but Wirt was unable to let go of that hazy fever dream.

At first it was contested by the obsession with Sara, the euphoria of survival and relief of acceptance that overtook him immediately upon the return, but it didn't take him much time to grow sick of her presence in his life, as a friend or otherwise. Somehow the flame that had once threatened to devour him from inside went out like the lantern of the Beast, and even though Sara was a lot more pleasant company than the Beast, Wirt went on to consider her just as unwelcome.

It wasn't her in particular who suffered because of the unexpected changes in his perception of the world. Wirt lost touch with all the people whom he had already had trouble calling friends, and shied away from the classmates. When the night descended, he spent hours staring into the darkness of the room, and his dreams were full of strange, menacing grey shapes which he had to fight for what seemed like ages before earning a single glimpse at the Unknown – and then he immediately woke up in cold sweat and more tired than the night before. It was hard to avoid being asocial anymore, it was even harder to fight this ridiculous variation of survivor's guilt which manifested even though nobody had died. Eventually, some time around Christmas, Wirt stopped even trying.

Unsurprisingly, the only person whom he needed more than ever in these dark days was his half-brother.

Greg's wilting was why nobody in the family largely paid any attention to Wirt's own state of mind. The latter had already earned a reputation of a sad, disenchanted moaner, which had been attributed to his adolescence, but seeing the ever cheerful, energetic Greg waste away and shrink into his shell got his parents seriously worried. In a couple of weeks after the brothers' return from the Unknown the school called their mother to discuss the drastic changes in her younger son's attitude to homework, classwork, behaviour and, consequently, life. Wirt managed to handle basic school activities despite his longing for the Unknown, but Greg, as usual, submerged all of himself in that yearning, leaving nothing on the surface.

The punishments were about as ineffective a solution as possible, since Greg spent most of the days in silence and gloom anyway. TV or the lack of it mattered little to him. The attempts at conversation were heartbreaking, but only for his parents – he only one he seemed interested in talking to was Jason Funderburker (the frog) and, occasionally, a few words were exchanged with Wirt, but only when they were alone and only on the subject of the Unknown. The attempt at forcefully separating him from the frog resulted in a horrible fit full of screeching and shouting and other noises Wirt hadn't even known his brother was capable of producing. The doctor, whom their parents hadn't hesitated to involve after that particular incident, attributed all of that to the post-traumatic stress disorder and subjected Greg to various sorts of therapy, which didn't seem to help him in the slightest. Jason Funderburker (the frog) still had a better effect on him than all the doctors put together.

The problem with the therapy, Wirt deduced, was that it was grounded in the rational world where the Unknown didn't exist and couldn't exist. The truth, however, was that it very much existed and beckoned the brothers every day and every night in their minds. He tried to help Greg as best as he could, so they spent hours silently slogging through unenthusiastic sessions of boring board games and plodding through fantasy books that didn't seem even remotely interesting anymore, but nobody could really help Wirt himself in the first place.

They visited Eternal Garden often, together and separately, making sure their parents didn't know their kids spent so much time in such a morbid place. At first Wirt's glance used to brush across the Wall with assumed casualness each time he took a stroll around the rime-covered headstones, until one day, some time before Christmas, he dropped his satchel in the far corner of the graveyard and clumsily climbed on top of the Wall using a nearby tree. He stayed there for half an hour, hidden from view, shivering, staring at the dark railway disappearing in the distance and the ghostly greyness of the frozen lake at the bottom of the hill.

That day was the first time Wirt thought about trying to kill himself, only he had no idea if that would work as intended – and upon further consideration, he decided it definitely wouldn't. But the thought was out in the open, and he was shocked to discover how easily it came to him. He made sure to explain to his half-brother why suicide would be a terrible idea: Greg was a bright kid so one could never tell for sure he wouldn't stumble upon it himself, and Wirt was worried about his lack of self-restraint. A contemptuous "That's dumb!" he received after the explanation calmed him down a little.

If there was supposed to be another way back into the Unknown, it wasn't at all obvious to Wirt, but he couldn't let go of the conviction that such a way should exist, and he thought he would never be content again until he found it. He daydreamed about the wonderful forest, about Beatrice shrugging off her vest of feathers, about the mysterious Fishing Fish, about the Woodsman walking alone to his house – to find his daughter waiting or forever abandon the thought of ever seeing her again. He daydreamed about the wonders and mysteries they haven't yet seen. He daydreamed about the Unknown all the time, and the day when the bell fell down on its own accord was no exception.

It was also the day when their Grandfather was to be buried.