Moonlight Boy

The Moonlight Boy takes the form of a small, black-haired child who turns up unclothed on nights when the moon hangs full and slips away before morning comes. Mute in every appearance, he communicates only through his expressions and small gestures. Those sensitive to unseen forces, first Schierke and later the elf queen Danan, notice that the energy pouring off him, his Od, resembles nothing found in an ordinary person and lies far closer to that of the elves. Within Guts' own mind he sometimes surfaces in a different guise altogether, as a small body made of shining light.

Because he never utters a word, most of who the Moonlight Boy is remains hidden. What can be seen is the immediate, close attachment he forms with Casca, a rapport that reads as that of a son with his mother. He shows flashes of curiosity and mischief alongside stretches of quiet gravity. On first locking eyes with Guts he looks away, only to sneak onto the swordsman's back once the man is distracted. Aboard the Seahorse he clambers eagerly through the rigging until a worried Casca hauls him down, and he even nibbles on the newly grown tail of the merrow Isma. More often, though, he simply observes people and events with a solemn, watchful intensity.

The luminous figure that appears inside Guts' consciousness carries that same serious weight. It speaks calmly to loosen the Berserker Armor's hold and to remind the swordsman which of the shapes around him are friends, yet it refuses every time to reveal its own name. During their earliest meeting, Schierke also detects a strange hostility within the child, an emotion she can no longer sense when they cross paths a second time.

Casca, having drifted away from Farnese, is the first to encounter the naked child along the shoreline near Vritannis. The rest of Guts' traveling party discovers her gazing out to sea while cradling him, her own clothes wrapped around the boy to shield him from the cold. As they draw near, Schierke picks up on the odd Od radiating from him, and the group carries him back to their beach cabin. Casca begins caring for and feeding the boy. He clings to her in fear of Guts before startling the swordsman by climbing onto his back; the ensuing scuffle nearly drops him onto Guts' throwing knives until both adults catch him together. Watching the three, Isidro and Puck remark that they look like a family, though a flustered Casca pulls away. That night she sleeps beside the child like a mother, and the sight stirs Guts' memory of her bond with the malformed Demon Child.

When crocodile familiars assault the cabin, the boy fixes his gaze on one forcing its way inside, and the creature simply halts and withdraws. Soon after, Guts unleashes the power of the Berserker Armor to slay a makara and loses the ability to tell ally from enemy. As he turns on his companions, the shining childlike figure manifests in his mind, cries out for him to stop, and touches the helm, letting Guts recover himself long enough for Schierke to reach his mind. By the time the fight ends the boy has vanished, and Guts begins to suspect a link between the child and the light that saved him. From a distance, the moon at his back, the Moonlight Boy silently watches the party depart.

He returns during the battle against the Sea God on the Solitary Island, where Casca again rushes to shield him. As the armor's Od threatens to consume Guts, a voice urges him to fix his attention on Casca; he sees a brilliant glow in her arms, the luminous figure touches his helm once more, and its influence breaks. The child then points out the crag from which the Sea God's heart bursts, and later, when Guts lies lost inside the dying beast, the shining figure guides him toward the heart chamber's lining so that the merrow can break through and rescue him. The next morning the boy is gone again, leaving Casca distraught and Schierke unable to sense his Od. She reasons that beings of the Astral World roam freely under the full moon and wonders whether he is an envoy of Skellig or even an aspect of the Flower Storm Monarch. That night the boy stands upon a branch of the World Tree stretched across the moon, then passes into it and streaks off like a shooting star.

He finally appears before Guts in Elfhelm itself, where Danan observes that his Od matches her own elven kind and that he can tread on Skellig only because he bears no evil in him. Spending time with the child, Casca feels a deep familiarity and recalls him as the presence that stayed near her throughout her ordeal in Albion. At dawn the boy suddenly grows into the shape of Griffith, stunning everyone present and confirming that he is the unborn child of Guts and Casca, briefly reclaiming the body Griffith took at his incarnation.