Work Text:
“And then I said to this guy- I said to him, "That's not me! That's a cactus!" And then he stepped on it and got a splinter in his toe-” The demon boy trails off his own words, laughing a bit too hysterically at himself. He has forgotten his own name and face, and he has nobody to talk to but himself and the inanimate objects around him. The Badlands stretches far and wide, once a thriving kingdom with no king and governed by kindness, but now it's nothing more than a wasteland of orange and red canyons spanning thousands of miles.
The demon boy's sanity has dried out like the water in these drought-plagued lands, and he has forgotten hundreds of memories. Memories of the place he used to guard, of the people he protected from the heavens' wrath, of the kids he used to make laugh with joy in a world devoid of such emotion—all chiselled away in his loneliness until he recognized nothing, not even his own voice.