The Castle

While the band looks on, Guts inches up the enormous arm with nothing but his dagger for a grip, striving to reach Griffith in the palm. Griffith stares upward at the God Hand perched on the fingers, and Void asks the voiceless man whether he dreads the demons or the destiny awaiting him among them. Ubik dives close and tells Griffith he must first look into his own past to know his true self.

The vision drops Griffith into his boyhood, running through the streets of his home city. Church bells ring, yet no one is anywhere to be seen, so he sets out for the great castle alone. He races on until he realizes he is lost, then asks an old wool spinner the way. She points him along, calling after him that his friends await him there. The alley he takes darkens until he treads on something soft: a towering heap of rotting corpses. He scrambles to escape but falls facedown into them, smeared in their blood. The wool spinner reappears and asks why he weeps. When Griffith rages that she sent him down a road of the dead, she answers that it is the only way to the castle and gestures toward another boy his age standing atop the bodies.

Griffith knows the boy as the young band member who died. The boy and the others invite him onward, but he refuses, telling them they are already dead. Sinking to his knees, he begs forgiveness of his lost comrades while the spinner scolds him for spurning them when he is the cause of their deaths. She points to the far castle and says that had he never fixed his eyes on it, none of them would have needed to die. Griffith protests that he forced no one to follow, and she counters that the road to his dream is laid with their corpses. She shows him a ramp of bodies that barely climbs toward the shining castle and says he needs still more to reach it. If he abandons his dream to spare lives, she warns, he will become a corpse himself, and Griffith notices his own hands and legs beginning to rot. Through the mist he glimpses Guts, who smiles and asks whether the bodies are part of the path to his dream. Deciding regret comes too late and that only forward remains, Griffith lifts the dead child, carries it to the summit of the heap, and admits he always knew people would die yet cannot make amends for the suffering his ambition cost. The vision fades.

Guts continues his climb up the arm toward Griffith. Ubik sends Griffith into a vision of his childhood city, where a wool spinner leads him along a road built from the corpses of his dead comrades. Griffith meets the deceased young band member, confronts his guilt, and ultimately chooses to press on toward the castle, carrying a body up the mounting heap rather than surrender his dream.

This entry in the Golden Age Arc was published in Young Animal issue 8 on April 12, 1996, spanning twenty-four pages. The vision distills Griffith's ambition into a single stark image, the castle reachable only atop the bodies of those who died for it.