Ripped from the safe and comfortable domicile of Arthur’s body, John was flung back into the Dark World. How uncomfortably big his new body felt, draped over his isolated soul like an oversized robe. It was the smothering loneliness that swallowed him first, crushing him from all sides without space to breathe. Then the grief found him— a blinding devastation like nothing John had ever known. It was a choking grief that wrapped around his throat and John tore at himself to try and loosen its grip. But it was in the midst of helplessness that his fury began to bloom. Slowly, then all at once.
Alone, white hot rage inflamed by the oppressive nature of the Dark World, John transformed into a macabre architect. After every bloodied hunt, John returned to his calcified construction with a new trophy. He dismantled flesh and sinew until he was left with the pale scaffolding buried beneath before transforming them into grand chandeliers, towering pillars, and ornate pews.
John cradled each skull and stared into the void eye sockets he once looked out of whilst narrating to the man who had caused him this agony. With a meticulous precision, John separated the bones in the hand he’d controlled and felt the same suffocating despair when none of these phalanges had been replaced with wood.
With each violent execution John was desperate for some satisfaction, but nothing was enough to satiate the agonising pit of starvation he felt inside. So he kept building.
But wasn’t a simple dwelling that John was forging from the man he so deeply, so proudly, so fiercely adored. Instead, rising from the barren ground of ash and dirt, the manifestation of his devotion became a glowing cathedral in which his idolatry was so devastatingly clear. And indeed, with each act of frenzied brutality upon every iteration of the sacred body, John served only to further canonise Arthur at the very altar he had sculpted from rib and vertebrae.
It was a citadel of isolation, fortified with countless bodies of the soul he so desperately yearned to become entangled with again. When finally, draped over the ghostly throne of manipulated anatomy, John was nestled within Arthur’s body once more, and the resurrection was complete.
Until, unable to stand the overwhelming anguish any longer, John flung himself upon the mercy of a god and wept. There was no place for his dignity when he begged to return to the mortal he so despised but so entirely worshipped.