Skull Knight

Camped by himself in the woods, Guts is jolted by rustling in the dark and lunges with his blade, only to find a wolf. He realizes that years of sleeping surrounded by an army have left him jumpy on his own, and he begins questioning whether walking away was the right choice. Then a vast presence presses against his back. He whirls and slashes twice at empty air, his thoughts leaping to Nosferatu Zodd, before a rider on horseback simply takes shape out of the gloom.

The newcomer wears eerie bone-patterned armor and speaks in a hollow tone, radiating menace yet making no move to attack. The Skull Knight names Guts the Struggler and foretells an event one year away called the Eclipse. He reveals uncanny knowledge of Guts' origins, that a man born from a corpse and raised entirely amid death has thereby been granted a way to slip free of it, and he warns that Guts and those close to him are bound for terrible suffering. He then rides off and melts back into the night.

That same rainy evening in Wyndham, Princess Charlotte gazes out her window, her attendants blaming her low spirits on the recent deaths of Julius, Adonis, and the queen. Once they withdraw, a knock startles her: Griffith waits in a nearby tree, silently asking to enter. She lets him in, and though he is drenched she embraces him, confessing her constant fear for his safety and her grief that her stepmother died the very night he came home. As she weeps against his chest, a dark, possessed expression overtakes him, and he holds her close and kisses her.