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Yu left the room. He fled.

He walked staring at the floor, watching his talons stutter across the stone; one, two, three, one more, and more, and more, and seven, and he was out of the sickbay, through the first door, then through the second, and then the corridor spilled him into the common room. His body folded into the first chair within reach. There he sat, unmoving, staring at the table before him. Freezing and appeasing and ceasing to be present altogether.

Yu did not consciously go for the common room. None of this was conscious. None of this was choice. It was not escape but displacement. His body was hauled forward by command as much as compulsion. His storm-torn mind was in shreds. Impulses fought in him like beasts in a cage. One pushed him toward the kitchen, because that was where duty waited. Another clawed to drag him upstairs, to the bathroom or his room, to the false safety of locks and private places. The rawest screamed to throw him out of the guild, onto the platform and down the stairs, threatening to chase him through the Albweiss night until his body broke, so that he would run as fast and far as he could get. But his body obeyed none. Instead, his limbs gave in to a more ancient instinct. It was the greatest of primordial terror that claimed him; the fear of being alone. -

Survival presents many faces. All beings carry instincts to hunt or to fight, to flee and to hide, or to freeze when all other is denied. All who live are shaped by these patterns, and follow them to varying degrees. Some learn, through strength of mind and discipline of body, to resist. Others exist only through their expression.

Beneath these instincts lies something else. Go further back than that part of the mind that marks a singular consciousness as an individual, and further than the reflexes imprinted upon such an existence at birth, and further still than the marrow-deep changes that, for generations, shaped what would become the habits of a species, and you will find more. There is a layer beyond lineage. Beneath the generational shaping of flesh and mind that is instinct, there lies something deeper still. Another stratum, far older, far darker: an inheritance shared by all beings.

Every singular existence, however distinct, however different it may be from all others around it, and from all that were before and will be after, carries this one same core within its essence. It is the residue of first creation, the scar left at the first terror, when lesser beings faced not merely something greater, but what is absolute.

Everything that lives carries this primordial echo. Against danger, some may fight and some may flee. In the face of death, some may hide and some may plea. But in the presence of a God, all instincts resolve into one. When one existence is so vast that it leaves no room for another, when the self is driven into nothingness, when we are reduced to a fading voice, when we feel ourselves diminished into darkness and suffocated into silence, then the need is no longer survival. It is no longer resistance. It is recognition. We need to feel that there is still something to us. If we can no longer feel ourselves, we need to be felt through another. We need to be acknowledged in our unmaking. We need to feel that we are not alone. -

To Yu, the <img alt="image" height="29" src="https://glasswizardchronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/018.8-The-Glass-WIzard-Webstory_Psychological-Fantasy-Magic-Webseries_The-Duckman_Chapter-Part-2_Queen_small.jpg" width="58"/> had been that annihilating vastness. She was still. The boundless voice of PRIDE and POWER and PURPOSE reverberated through him, all-consuming and absolute. Her touch lingered in him; the invasive sensation of her claws sliding between his feathers, pressing into the hollow above his collarbone. One part of him pressed back into it, while the other strained to pull free. She had divided him into two desperate, disparate halves: one that would cower at her feet, and the other that wanted nothing but to flee her. And so, though his mind was torn and flooded and broken and devoured and screaming, his body had carried him here; not to duty, or to locks, or to flight, but into the common room. What he sought was that oldest of instincts, the core impulse of consciousness; not safety, not even survival, but the sense of self.

He could not be alone. Because alone he could not be.

And so he sat, rigid and torn, staring at his talons and staring at the stone around them with all intensity and tension, while seeing none of it.

"Yes?" someone said.

Yu heard. Then, he noticed. He noticed just so. That he was watched. That he was spoken to. That someone sat with him. That there were about eight empty tables in this room, and Yu had sat down at the one that was taken. He struggled to pull his consciousness into the common room with his body, into the here and now. It would not hold. It was like trying to reattach a torn-out feather; no matter how hard he pressed and burrowed the shaft into the skin, it would not stick on its own. Still, as long as he held it with his beak, as long as he refused to release and just kept pushing it into that shredded, bleeding flesh of mind, at least one trembling feather of thought stayed in place. On that fragile barb of focus, Yu recognised the krynn.

"Yes?" the krynn asked again.

"Uhm," explained Yu.

The krynn stared.

Yu stared back.

First at the krynn, then down at the table, where he registered a single sheet of paper. It was a formal document. Yu's eyes stole the words before he meant to read them, and then he really stared.

The krynn's left hand shifted toward the paper, but stopped beside it. "Is there something you wanted?"

Yu tried really hard not to stare any further.

"Do you have word on my companions?" the krynn asked.

Yu searched and found some words. They came slow and diluted, like ink dredged from black water. "I don't know."

Not the right ones.

He tried again, scraping for the guard-mask, forcing it forward as it fought with the split face beneath. "I mean, not about the human. They still … help her."

"And the selder?"

The mask sought smoothness, dutiful cadence. The two jagged parts underneath repelled each other.

"She's ... She's with him …"

The sentence broke at the edges, a throbbing distortion in his own ears. Every word, from himself or the krynn, was distant and raw and painful, as though someone had poured ice water into his earholes and each sound that tried to push through just drove the water in deeper. It was not just words. Yu was almost deaf. All sounds had lost their breath. Most that should be there had been drowned without a trace. Those that still surfaced were stripped of all substance. They showed only grotesque and hollow features.

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"Your shaman?" The krynn leaned back.

Yu leaned back also.

"I mean …" he tried, "I mean, you can … go … and … watch with her, if you like. But I mean, he is your guide, not your companion, so you don't have to. But still, if you want … but maybe you shouldn't. I mean, you can also stay, of course. Here, I mean. In the common room." The mask bent and strained to straighten the sentences into something coherent, but behind it the screaming self surged, spilling noise through every crack in its surface; messy floodwater words not chosen but driven, distorted by pressure. "You should stay here. That would be better. I mean, it's maybe better if you stay, because … You can wait for food. I mean, I will bring food now. In a bit. You must be hungry. Are you? I am, I mean — I was yesterday, when —" His beak locked. The unfinished sentence smashed against it, broke like a wave, and washed back into him as brine. "Sorry. I mean, you want food, right?"

The krynn hesitated. The break in their conversation was a mirror of Yu's own fracture turned outward. But it was not sympathy. It was recoil, a step back from the torrent of broken noise that he had thrown across the table.

"Yes. Please. Thank you," the krynn said at last. "And I will see to the selder before."

"Or maybe after? I mean, eat first?"

"I will go now." The krynn rose.

Yu scrambled upright too quickly, stumbling into the space between the krynn and the kitchen, clutching at the mask. "I can bring you the food right now. It is already ready. Sorry, I mean, all is ready. All the food."

"I will see to the selder first and eat afterwards." The krynn took the paper, folded it and slipped it away, and then stepped around him.

Yu followed, his words pouring over the krynn's back. "You can get the borman and eat together."

"We will."

But the krynn did not climb the stairs. He pushed through the door into the kitchen walkway.

Yu halted, just before the threshold.

The door fell shut in front of him.

For a moment, he only stared at the wood.

In the next, a sudden urge for something, for anything familiar seized him. He realised then that not only his ears but his whole head was underwater. Vision came in patches — not blinks of blindness, but as though the world itself was smudged. Everything was submerged in dirty water; light slowed, edges bled, colours dulled into the muted greys of rotting things. He had to force his eyes to steady, to comb through the haze until a shape would hold. He made out stone walls, the flicker of orblight, coats dripping on the garderobe, but no luggage. His gaze found the reception desk. There were no guards. Yu searched for people. Around the fire sat Harrow, Fallem, and four others. Imbiad and the borman were not with them. The guests looked at him. Some eyes met him openly, some only brushed him from the corner, but all of them saw him, marked him, fixed him, trapped him —

Yu pressed against the door and slipped into the walkway. It was one step, and the walls closed in on him. Another, and they bulged, as if the stone itself inhaled. Everything narrowed. The world became a throat. Yu halted and folded his wings around his chest. The sickbay door stood closed to his left. Ahead, the kitchen door. He tried to listen, but his body remained drowned in ever deeper, darker, colder water. There was nothing but a low hum. It came and went like a tide without direction. Or like something that was with him in the water, circling him just beyond recognition.

Yu needed to move. Somewhere. Out of the hallway. He could not follow the krynn. Whatever would happen with him and the selder lay beyond his reach. Yu could not stop it. He could not even make sense of what had been done to himself. To his self. Here he stood and stared, just as he had done half an hour ago after the toilet, as though nothing had happened — and yet inside, nothing was the same.

Something tried. Something in him still tried to be the same as before. It tried to be the whole; the Yu who had spoken to the krynn, fumbling for the right words; the Yu who was all nervous and afraid, embarrassed and ashamed and always, somewhere beneath it all, angry; the Yu who desperately tried to pull himself together and hold on to the hope to survive all of this. Until half an hour ago, that something had been all of Yu. -

Now, it was not. Now, it was only the mask. -

The storm had torn through him. It had torn at Yu until all that was to him had ripped into the screaming part that went mad trying to unhear the <img alt="image" height="29" src="https://glasswizardchronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/018.8-The-Glass-WIzard-Webstory_Psychological-Fantasy-Magic-Webseries_The-Duckman_Chapter-Part-2_Queen_small.jpg" width="58"/>, and the listening part that would give anything to hear more of her voice. He was simultaneously the hunted creature so terrified that it thought only of running, and the senseless thing that bent toward her still, craving, begging to be pressed into silence once more. As Yu stood and stared and suffered the push and pull of these competing selves, he sought for something to bind them, to keep himself together. All he had was the faltering echo of his old self. All he had was the mask — the shell of a guard. It was the only thing he had ever tried to make of himself, apart from the faulty, fragile frame of hope that in another life might have developed into an educated wizard. And so he tried, violently, to force the guard-mask down, to pull the screaming and the craving under the same fabric, to smother both into a single, sensible, serviceable self.

He forced. He reasoned. He reconciled. They needed the mask. They needed to be the guard. Both of them.

We are no guards, and we will never be. We cannot stay here. It was true. But at the same time, the screaming self needed to understand that he could not run — not yet, not without a plan. We need the right moment, the right people, and the right chance. For that, we have to uphold our position and play the guard. While biding our time, we can't fall on anyone's bad side. Not on the guards', and not on the <img alt="image" height="25" src="https://glasswizardchronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/019.1-The-Glass-WIzard-Webstory_Psychological-Fantasy-Magic-Webseries_The-Duckman_Chapter-Part-1_Queen_Yu-Mask.jpg" width="57"/>'s. The mask was to hold, to obey, and to pretend until the path to flight opened —

She never said we were.

Despite the overwhelming display of her voice, the <img alt="image" height="29" src="https://glasswizardchronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/018.8-The-Glass-WIzard-Webstory_Psychological-Fantasy-Magic-Webseries_The-Duckman_Chapter-Part-2_Queen_small.jpg" width="58"/> had given him no reason to think that she wanted to harm him. She was … simply … powerful. Her voice and her deflection pulse; they are proof beyond measure. She can protect us from anything. In that, the wanting self was right. But this half, too, needed restraining. Why resist? Did she not say that she was kind to those who are below her? Even then, the <img alt="image" height="25" src="https://glasswizardchronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/019.1-The-Glass-WIzard-Webstory_Psychological-Fantasy-Magic-Webseries_The-Duckman_Chapter-Part-1_Queen_Yu-Mask.jpg" width="57"/> will not tolerate begging. Not unbidden pleas. Not senseless grovelling. She would despise it, surely. If her attention can be earned, it will be through obedience. She has already given us an order. She wants us to prepare dinner. Before she will speak to us again, she wants us to act our role as a guard. So if the wanting self craved her favour, it needed the mask just as much. -

So while one half howled to throw himself from the platform into Albweiss teeth, and the other burned to throw itself at the <img alt="image" height="29" src="https://glasswizardchronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/018.8-The-Glass-WIzard-Webstory_Psychological-Fantasy-Magic-Webseries_The-Duckman_Chapter-Part-2_Queen_small.jpg" width="58"/>'s feet and fall once more into her voice, the mask drove the body forward, into the kitchen.

The door swung close behind the new Yu.

And there he stood, masked and alone amidst the blackened pots and bowls and the horrible paintings leering down from the walls.

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