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For 9 whole years, nothing happened. Every search attempt lead to a dead end, and it seemed like Eren had truly vanished without a trace. But one day, it all happened at once.
It had begun subtly, almost imperceptibly, but Armin had always noticed too much, and especially things he recognized from before. A voice on the wind whispering his name as he walked to campus - just like the one that had spoken to him after going to the cabin 9 years ago, just like when he walked through the tall grasses in the clammy summer heat towards the house where his closest friend had been keeping all his filthy secrets.
The sky was overcast and heavy - a thick late autumn morning up in the northern borderlands, and the memory coming at him made him stop in his tracks, looking toward the copse of trees beside the path to his workplace, looking for a tall stooped figure among them, but nothing appeared. The echo from a decade ago didn’t complete.
The rest of the day was spent in trepidation, walking through the halls of dark grey stone that made up most of the university, lecturing half-interested students about the inner workings of the orca whale, listening during the quiet moments, taking longer pauses than necessary in search of another sign. At the end of the workday, it finally appeared: Looking out of his paneled office window, the fog twirling between the oaks, the condensation on the glass formed the pattern he had last seen drawn in walls on the dusty walls of the run-down house on that dire and terrible day. It faded after a minute, but there was no doubt. Armin often tried to see the connections between things - ever since the childhood summers at his grandfather’s house where he’d tried to figure out why there were only whirlpools in that part of the stream that ran past the brick home and not in the other part - so he suspected that he was only seeing something that wasn’t there. As an experiment, he asked himself whether or not his friend Annie or anyone else he knew would think the same after seeing what he saw and came to the conclusion that they would, whereupon the shaking of his hands and the anxious, sinking feeling in his chest died down just a little.
The day had been sunny. In his memory they usually were, but he thought they really couldn’t all have been. No matter how good they actually were, they had undoubtedly been Heaven compared to what came after.
The narrow streets of their hometown winded their way around them as they ran. Alleyways of wooden and brick buildings, cobblestone streets with, at times, the masts of ships and sails appearing in their line of sight - through the alley, above the buildings. The harbor, coming closer. They rounded a corner and the panorama of the dock area spread out before them. The comings and goings of men and women carrying heavy boxes, merchants selling their wares, groups of sailors on the prawl. The rest of the world concentrated into one spot. Eren and him were both 15. They were really too old to play tag, but they did it anyway. It was one of the many things that were odd about them. They knew that most other boys didn’t spend quite so much time around each other as they did, nor did they make long-lasting plans with each other or hug each other so often and so closely. They still didn’t really know what to make of that.
Eren caught Armin, as always. They didn’t do it for the competition, not anymore. Underneath Eren’s nose was a spot of blood from where he’d bumped into something on the way - he was getting clumsy from all the growing he'd done the last few years. They were both tired from the chase, and sat down on the first bench they found. Most of the crowd didn’t notice them, but one of the merchants who came there every day did. He often saw them when they came passing through - he knew the type, uneasy youths who wanted nothing more than to escape that small port town, resentful of the place that fed them, blithely ignorant of the world outside. Without thinking, they assumed it would be better than what they already had. The poor children.
It had just been another day, one of many that they had spent that way, but for whatever reason this was the one that Armin remembered.
He had spent so much time trying to understand. Going through his memories, thinking if he could maybe find some clue in the way Eren was looking out at the sea that day or in the things he hadn’t dared to say to him after his father’s death. He still hadn’t found anything, and by the day the sign in the window appeared he had long since given up.
There had been endless hours spent in libraries, trying to find out what he’d done and how - nevermind the why. In the nights when his classmates were hitting the pubs, he had descended into the bowels of the university, trying to find a picture or a text that could make the pieces fit. He would sit at a desk in the basement, illuminated only by the lantern he’d brought, a big stack of books on his side, paging through each one looking for something that he recognized from the day he’d found Eren missing from his home and going to look for him in the only other place he could think of.
The outstretched hand of one of his mangled victims jutting straight upwards, palm contorted as if clutching something, desperate not to lose its grip. The blood-drawn symbol on the wall - the circle with interlocking lines inside. The words IN RIMAS, INTER MUNDOS, drawn not in blood but in tar. Him outside, hunched over in the tall grass, his stomach clenching and vomiting at the sight of it, the pain and disgust offering only one relief: distraction from thinking about what any of it meant.
The clues never led anywhere. He never found whatever it was that Eren had based his doings on, only scant, minimal references to it or to barely related acts. Despite the sleepless nights and how his brain felt stuffed to the limit, he could never stitch that wound.
He did find something, though. A ceremony that would suit his purposes, one which was described as a calling - one that would allow the seeking wanderer to contact entities of their wish. After the long fruitless search he decided it was his best bet and performed it, but the results were far from what he desired.
Even though he’d done everything exactly according to instruction, even though he’d drawn the circle of tar upon the wooden floor and placed the hand-slaughtered calf in its center, even though he’d bowed his head upon the ground and uttered the right words, he didn’t even receive a hint about where his former friend could be, what he’d done and why. The one he made contact with was the exact opposite of what he had wanted - a fat and sluggish thing of thick meat whose many drowsy eyes regarded him without reaction. An orifice opened to speak and the words winded their way through and between his ears:
ah what have we here how lovely to see you i get so few visitors these days they don’t come to see me anymore that beast you killed is so sweet oh how i love its fur against my flesh...
And on and on it went until the calf was consumed, only its bones left undevoured, Armin nearly passing out from the exertion of it all.
After, he decided to give up the search. He had done all he could and none of it had led anywhere. Instead he’d concentrate on moving on, on forgetting and reconciling. He’d continue as if Eren was dead, dead of something normal and not something he wanted for himself. A sudden illness, a crazed murderer, an act of God.
His mind would never let him forget what he had seen on the night of the ritual, however, no matter how hard he tried to block it out or how many signs he cut into the wall above his bed and stuffed with strands of his own hair. The filthy lair of the thing, the cave wall lined with holes where a thick liquid oozed through and all those worms, wriggling.
He had been doing better, truly. He aced his biology degree after giving up his occult research, having never had any problems with retaining and analyzing pieces of information. He had been lecturing for a year when the signs appeared, and he was appreciated by his students as a precise, motivated and knowledgeable teacher, even if he’d never really felt at his best in the spotlight. He was moving on and had stopped spending all those nights among the bookshelves searching for breadcrumbs, even if part of him still wanted to know more, even if it felt like there was still a part of him down there among the books that spoke of secrets and hidden connections.
Armin’s cramped apartment was in the town outskirts - that dusty grey college town up near where the flatland ended and the hills gave way to mountains. Built mostly out of stone in varying shades of grey and black on a flat area, the city wasn’t big and could easily be traversed on foot. The mist often covered it, and on that chilly autumn evening it extinguished the border between earth and sky, turning it all into one grey curtain. The apartment block hadn’t been renovated in decades and it often seemed like the whole building was water-damaged, but he had lived there since his undergraduate days and was reluctant to let go of it. For good or ill, it was home.
The signs had indeed appeared, but he still didn’t know how to read them. He only went home on a hunch, thinking it was all aimed at him - wishful thinking, most likely. But there, on the floor of his bedroom with the big beige splotch in the ceiling that he’d never managed to scrub out, a circle had been burned into the floor. A human skeleton lay down inside it, its arms and knees drawn up into itseld, and the rest of the body seemed to be growing out of the skeleton. Nerves and muscles, blood vessels and organs growing out of the hollow spaces between bones. Slowly, slowly.
Armin lit the kerosene lamp on his nightstand, sat on his bed with his knees pushed up against his chest and looked at the forming body on the floor. No matter what came after, he didn’t want to miss this.
Grisha the unknowable. Grisha the secretive. Grisha the man on the run from himself. All those old friends of his that he didn’t talk to anymore. No real family to speak of. How he tensed up when he’d slipped and talked about something he realized he shouldn’t. Armin always thought that he seemed to conceal his real thoughts whenever they met, and he wondered how he acted when only his wife and children were near.
In a manner of speaking, he did manage to get away from whatever it was that haunted him so. On a business trip visiting a new hospital in the regional capital, the horses pulling his carriage had gotten spooked while going through a stretch of unpopulated countryside and careened off the dirt road. His corpse was discovered by a passerby the day after, floating face down in an irrigation ditch beside the road, his glasses broken on the muddy ground beside.
The process took nearly an hour. The figure, whose height and size were already familiar, gradually resembled more and more who Armin had suspected from the very start it would.
Eren, as a teenager, had always complained of his inability to gain weight - despite his best efforts he never lost that pale, scrawny, hunched-over aspect that made people who didn’t know him (and some who did) nervous. He didn’t have that problem anymore. He was both bigger, broader and thicker than he had been when they were young. He was naked bar a loincloth around his midsection, and an elaborate, heavy necklace made out of black iron, chains carrying ringlets and ironwork depicting occult symbols - some familiar to Armin from his research, some new to him. A long tail ending at a sharp-looking arrowhead-like point winded its way down from his lower back. From the top of his head curved two long, thin, sharp horns. His hair had been growing long and stringy when they lost sight of each other, but it was even longer now. He opened his eyes and began to lift himself off from the floor, showing no sign of weakness from having materialized out of thin air moments before. The air smelled of sulfur and brine, like in the volcanic fields on the island that Armin had once visited. He took one laborious step out of the circle, finally shaking Armin out of his paralysis. He stretched his hand out in front of him.
“Stop it! Don’t come any closer!” he said, suspecting it would be in vain. It wasn’t - he stopped.
“Armin... Don’t you recognize me? It’s me.”
“Of course I do, it’s just... It’s been 9 years. And the circumstances aren’t normal, exactly...”
“9 years... Has it really been that long?”
“Yeah, it has.”
“Time passes differently for me. And I had to spend a long time at the start just learning the ropes. It’s easy to lose track...” That unreadable expression of his, so familiar whenever he was thinking about something.
“I gathered. How did you find me, anyway?”
Eren snorted.
“Finding you and getting here was the easy part. I can go wherever I want.”
Armin looked out the window at the dark yellow lights from the other buildings. He quickly realized that anyone who looked inside would be greeted with a bizarre sight, stood up and closed the blinds. The only light source was the small kerosene light and it didn’t light up the room as much as he wanted, but he didn’t dare go past Eren to light up the room further. No matter what, he couldn’t let him see how deeply uncomfortable he was. He crossed his arms and turned around toward him.
“I really only have one thing I want to say to you. Why did you do it? Why did you go to such lengths in the first place...?”
Eren’s arms relaxed, his shoulders un-tensed. He sighed.
“I couldn’t not do it. As soon as I heard that there was a way to get out, I had to do it. I couldn't see how I could do anything different.”
“And are you happy with your choice?”
“Hah. I’m happier than I’ve ever been, Armin.”
For the first time, Armin caught sight of the shadow which loomed behind Eren in the weak glow of the kerosene lantern, darkening the bookshelves lined with books about their country’s history or the life of plants, birds and fish.
The shadow had two large, outstretched wings.
Armin stood alone on the harborside. It was a holiday and the normally bustling port was quiet - only a handful of other people were in sight. The sky was heavy and grey, the waters a dark grey-green. Eren had been caught up in all the goings-on after the death of his father, who would inherit what, how the property would be split up between him, his mother and his brother.
They hadn’t been seeing each other as much lately. Armin was going off to college in the north - one of the country’s most prestigious - while Eren had never been the studious type and flunked out right at the end of secondary school. Armin thought not even he himself knew what he would do next. Maybe they wouldn’t see each other so much after the carriage arrived to take him and his suitcases away from the town they had both gotten bored of before they even met. Maybe that would be for the best, or maybe it was a sign of the world's fallen state.
The waves clucked as they lapped at the docks, audible now without the constant murmur of people.
“I’m certain that those people who had to pay the price of your wish would’ve been happier had you refrained.”
This seemed to perturb Eren.
“I knew you’d have a problem with that. What can I say... Everything has a price.”
“Sometimes the things we pay for aren’t worth it.” He wanted Eren to just go away. Get away from his home before he could break things even more than he already had.
“That’s a matter of opinion. There are no completely objective measurements, as you used to say.”
“I think some things are easier to measure than others.”
There was a shift in the sulfur-and-brine smell, as if a wind from nowhere had blown through the room.
“...So why did you come back? I’m certain that you’re very busy otherwise...” Armin said. Eren took one step closer and, this time, Armin didn’t stop him.
“Armin, I want you perform the sacrament, to become like me. We have the power to do that, and to be honest, I think you’d thrive if you did it. There’s nothing more to it than that. And regardless, I just wanted to see you again.” Besides the obvious, he looked exactly like the Eren he used to know.
“Hah, me as something like you? I’m really not sure if I’d like that, to be honest...”
“I promise that it’s not like you think. And there are options besides becoming exactly like me - so, so many options.”
“I... really don’t know what to say, I’m... I don’t want to have to decide something like that.” The pit of anxiety in his stomach was growing deeper. Eren, seeming to sense his trepidation, took another step closer and held out his hand, as if wishing to grab something.
“It’s easier if I show you, not so easy to say. You were always the one who was good with words, anyway.”
Armin looked up at his old friend for what might have been the last time. That so familiar sharp face, but with something new behind its eyes. A certain lining near the eyelids, as if the whites and the irises where only painted on a blackness underneath.
Armin came to accept the fact that, despite all his protestations, he didn’t actually regret anything.
“...Are you sure that I’m not accepting anything that I wouldn’t want to by letting you show it to me?”
“Oh no, of course not. I can’t force anyone into doing anything he doesn’t actually want to do. It’s very democratic that way. More democratic than how you humans do things, in a way...”
“So do it then. Show me.”
Eren gave him a sly smile, and he gently took Armin’s head in his hands and pushed his forehead to his. His heavy necklace jangled and the touch of his skin was smoother than Armin had thought. The sulfur-and-brine smell got even stronger - there really was a wind blowing through the room.
Armin was standing in his office by the window that looked out over the park. The sun was shining - a cold bright day, autumn edging into winter. He saw his reflection in the glass, transparent with the trees of the park showing through, the sunlight glowing golden on the side of his face, making the tips of his short blonde hair shine. That night, Eren would come back and Armin would have to have made a decision.
Time sprawled out ahead of him, its many forking paths as unforeseeable as ever. He thought back to the time before any of this, back when he was just a lonely boy walking through the streets looking for something that interested him. He thought of the woods behind his grandfather’s house where he’d once stared at a pile of ant eggs he found gathered underneath a rock.
He closed his eyes against Eren’s, and opened them standing by a riverside.
The sky was crimson red above a dark, restless sea. Silhouetted against the sky was a city of black spires that stretched into the sky. Winged humanoids were flying through it, soaring through the air with their tails trailing behind them. Two of them were ripping into another one, pushing it down into the ocean. The solid black city wall jutted straight down into the water that surrounded it on three sides. The landscape around it barren and empty but for some twisted, starved-looking trees.
They stood on the other side of the river - the waters speckled with the red of the sky, the shore lined with rocks. Armin looked over at Eren beside him and saw how pleased he looked. This was his domain. He belonged here, not among the human race with its masses of drudgery and boredom. Finally, he could see that.
They didn’t have to say anything, and Eren stretched out his hand towards Armin.
No matter what happened, he’d always be himself. With his pitiful weakness that made him so often feel undeserving of even taking up space, of eating, breathing and talking. That was why he always took the time to look at it, since he knew that it could be taken away from him at any moment and given to someone who deserved it more. He would always be the boy who turned over the rock that day.