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'Thou shalt not carve any graven image.' (Ten Commandments)

Clients would come to Mandrake for help - he wouldn't seek them out. People would hear about the fact that he'd been someone who'd listened to people, so when they'd had problems that they'd wanted to talk to someone about that they hadn't known who else they could have talked to about, they had tracked down Mandrake to ask for his help themselves. After his upbringing, it'd been important to Mandrake to know for sure that his clients hadn't been pushed to him by people who had thought that they were crazy, but that they had decided to come to see him of their own volition, because they had actually wanted his help themselves.

He only ever made one exception to that rule.

One of his clients had been a lifelong shut-in. Literally, he had been born in one room, and had never stepped out of it, for his entire life. In this case, Mandrake had believed that it could have been important for him to have taken the first steps in offering this client his help, since it had been basically impossible for this client to seek Mandrake's help himself, because he would have had to have been able to set foot outside of the room he'd lived in to do it in the first place. How could anyone have opened a closed box that had been locked by a key if the key that could unlock it had been located inside the box?

Someone made of water could have, perhaps.

When Mandrake first entered the room where Diaz lived, it was the strange, old beauty of the place that struck him. Finely sculpted Greco-Roman columns went all the way up to the ceiling, gold-lined red carpet covered the floor, gorgeous paintings hung on the walls between dark blue curtains, and precisely chiseled sculptures stood on pedestals between columns at various intervals. It smelled of paint, plaster and wax, like an artist's studio might've.

When Diaz saw Mandrake, the first thing he did was scream. Mandrake had seen him.

Diaz had lived all his life believing that he had been the most horrifying-looking creature that had ever existed. When Mandrake saw him, with his marble upper body, the marble snake tail that he had instead of legs, and the rubies that his eyes were, Diaz was certain that the only reaction that the otter could possibly have to his appearance had to have been one of shock and disgust. Panicking at the thought of being forced to live with the thought of having left such a hateful impression on someone's memory, he desperately tried to hide, even though he knew it was in a sense too late because Mandrake had already seen him.

In his state of panic, Diaz used his snake tail to slither his way all the way up one of the columns. When he saw that Mandrake was still looking up to the top of the column that he had climbed to reach in the hopes of escaping the otter's notice, Diaz's anxiety scrambled his usually better reflexes. Under normal circumstances, he would sometimes climb some of the columns with his snake tail in just such a fashion and even jump from one to the other, alternating between grabbing columns with his arms and tail like an acrobat. When Diaz's coordination was short-circuited by panic, he was not quite so dexterous, so he lost his grip, and fell back down.

Right on top of Mandrake.

When the otter splashed into an expanding puddle under the golem's fall on him, Diaz looked around himself in dismay, trying to find whatever could be left of Mandrake while his heart sank at the inevitable conclusion that he had killed his first visitor in longer than he could remember. This was so horrible. This was why no one should ever have tried to go anywhere near him, why he wished that he had never existed in the first place, Diaz thought, grief-stricken.

Diaz gasped when he saw the puddle of water that had formed around him after he had fallen rapidly evaporate in order to coalesce back into a cloud near the ceiling of his lair. As low thunder rumbled from the cloud, rain started to pour down from it. The raindrops assembled to reform Mandrake's feet, legs, torso, arms and head successively as they fell, continuing until all of the otter was back to just the way he'd looked when he'd first walked in.

"You mean I can't hurt you?" Diaz gasped.

"You could hurt my feelings, if you really tried," Mandrake shrugged. Diaz was already strangely feeling himself calm down. He hadn't imagined that he would ever have been able to calm down like this when he would panic this badly, but there he was. Mandrake noticed that the golem already seemed less tense, and was glad. He'd known that there was a risk of temporarily intensifying some of Diaz's anxiety if Mandrake tried to offer him some of his help, but he certainly hadn't wanted it to have been permanent, and he was hoping that he could help Diaz reduce some of his fear reaction when he would go out to meet other people as well someday.

"What a relief! I thought I'd killed you."

It was strange to Mandrake in some ways, knowing he would be trying to help someone out of being a shut-in. In his boyfriend Soma's case, 'staying at home' was just something that he would always have to do no matter what. As a dryad, Soma couldn't venture out into the world, had to stay in his grove simply to continue to live. There was no narrative where Soma would ever have to leave his grove to 'get better' from something. It was just part of the way he was. People came to Soma, so many that Soma complained to Mandrake about it sometimes. Diaz refused to go out because he believed that people hated him, and it made him miserable.

"Don't worry, I'm just fine. I'm Mandrake! Who are you?" he smiled.

Diaz looked him up and down as if the fact that anyone would have been talking to him as though he had been a person and not an object had itself been unlikelier than a golem or shapeshifter interacting in any other context that could be imagined. "I'm Diaz," he finally said. "Why did you come here?" Diaz was not where he was because he found it particularly pleasant. He did not know why anyone would have chosen to be there if they had had a choice not to.

"I wanted to see you." Had someone indicated Diaz's existence to Mandrake so that the otter could come here to gawk at him like a freak, the golem asked himself? "Why would anyone want to see someone like me?" he asked Mandrake dejectedly. Diaz meant it almost as a rhetorical question, but Mandrake tried to encourage him to treat it as a legitimate one. "Why wouldn't they?" he tilted his head at the golem. "Do you not want to see them? To see me?"

Diaz shook his head. "Well, no, I mean, yes, but... Other people don't look like me. I certainly don't look like other people," he added sadly. "Other people look like people that people would want to look at." Diaz looked at the sculptures and paintings that represented many other species of people longingly, wishing that he'd been born as any of them instead of as the person he was. "And you don't?" Mandrake asked him.

"I don't look like someone *I* would want to see, if I wasn't stuck like this and had to see myself like this every day, I can tell you that!" Diaz almost snapped. "Why would you say something like that?" Diaz already hated his appearance enough without having to explain why to someone humoring him, the golem thought, frustrated. "How could I not?" Mandrake looked so genuinely sad to see that Diaz hated himself so much that it became more difficult for Diaz to dismiss Mandrake's emotions about his situation as not real. "Can you blame me?" Diaz almost felt guilty for bumming out Mandrake then. It seemed almost like he should apologize for it.

"I'm not here to blame you for anything, I promise," the otter answered him gently, "I'm here to try to help." Diaz scoffed. "You can't help someone out of being a freak," he'd said, "when you're a freak, you're a freak for life, that's all there is to it." Mandrake was glad that his psychological training had helped him build a bit of an emotional distance from that mindset over years of practice. There'd been a time when he'd have internalized this himself, badly.

Mandrake raised his arms over his head, spinning in a circle like a top as his legs fused into a watery snake tail, looking very much like Diaz did except still with an otter's upper body rather than a lion's. He stood on his new snake tail facing his newest client, showing Diaz that he was figuring out how to move with it. It was a little unusual and took a bit of practice but it wasn't so bad, Mandrake decided.

"Do you find me ugly like this?" Mandrake asked Diaz. A look of amazement at the otter's transformation flashed across Diaz's face. "No..." He found Mandrake lovely like this, if he was honest with himself about it, but he felt very uncomfortable admitting it to himself. Beauty was something that, by definition, excluded him, Diaz told himself. It wasn't appropriate for him to think things that implied that he could be included in it somehow. Those thoughts were meant for other people than him, people who actually deserved it. "You can just turn it on and off like a faucet, though... You're not trapped this way the way I am."

It occurred to Mandrake that it may have been inappropriate for him to have temporarily taken on a shape that he did not have to carry through everyday life to make a point. He could have chosen to appear as a watery snake or spider in front of Soma, but no matter how much he could shapeshift, Mandrake would never know what it was really like to be trapped in the same location like a true dryad the way Soma was. He shifted back to his otter legs, embarrassed.

"I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to imply that things are as easy for you as they are for me." Certainly things were often not easy for Mandrake, but about this specific issue, he did have a kind of advantage over Diaz that he felt it wouldn't have been fair to the golem for him to deny. "Can you teach me how to do that?" Diaz asked him. "Or is it something that only you or that certain people who were born with the same powers as you can do?"

Mandrake covered his mouth with his hand in thought, and furrowed his brow. "Well, I wasn't born being able to do it, I can tell you this much... I've never met someone else who could do what I do as such, but I've never met anyone else who tried to go through the same procedure that I did, which was kind of a fluke in the first place anyway. I did meet several people who have things about them that you've probably never seen, things that most people probably wouldn't even believe could be possible, if they weren't faced with having to acknowledge the reality of it by having it put in front of them for them to have to deal with."

Diaz processed this. "So you know other people who can change their shape?" Mandrake nodded. "I've always wanted to be able to change how I looked like," Diaz said longingly, "but I can't." He looked at a hammer and chisel in the corner of the room. "Believe me..." Mandrake thought he saw a lone wax teardrop roll down from one of Diaz's ruby eyes onto his white marble cheek. "... I've tried," the golem finished bitterly.

Mandrake whimpered, and actually stepped forward to hug Diaz after he'd said that. Diaz was so startled. He never imagined anyone would seem moved by his suffering, especially not a therapist, who were supposed to be so cold and distanced from their clients' emotions. But Diaz hugged him back. It was the first time that Diaz had been hugged by anyone. Ever. He didn't feel like he deserved it, but he decided he liked it. The thought of Diaz taking a hammer and chisel to himself had gotten past his defenses just a little too much maybe, Mandrake told himself. He hoped he hadn't overstepped his bounds. He doubted himself as a therapist sometimes.

"So you... But your body stayed the same?" Mandrake had asked him. "I tried to chisel off the snake tail a couple of times, but... whenever any part of my body comes off, it just comes right back. The chunks of marble and drops of wax just slowly slide across the ground back toward me like they're drawn to me by an invisible force, and go back where they were. So I can't die, as far as I can tell, but it also means I can't grow... I can't change. Anyway, since I can't die anyway, it doesn't really matter whether you help me or not. It's not like I'm going to kill myself. It'll never work. So I'm sorry to have wasted your time."

"No," Mandrake said, "you did no such thing. There's more to helping people than just making sure they won't die." He thought about Soma again. "I mean, that's what a doctor's job is, and it's important, but for me, that's not enough," Mandrake added. "You feel pain, don't you?" Diaz seemed confused. "Well, yeah." Mandrake looked at him very seriously. "Your suffering matters, Diaz. How you feel about yourself matters, for its own reasons, completely. Even and especially if you're going to live forever! I mean, forever is a long time to have to carry suffering with you, isn't it?"

This was a lot for Diaz to take in. No one had ever talked to him like that.

"Do you really think you can help me?" It seemed so unbelievable that anyone could help him, even if they may have wanted to. "That sort of depends on how you mean," Mandrake answered. "How did you get to be the way you are?" Diaz asked him. "I'm a genetic engineer. Well, okay, people like to call me a mad scientist, but they're idiots." Diaz chuckled. He wished he could learn to dismiss other people's negative opinions of him with such seeming ease.

"So do you think you can use your genetic engineering to help me change the way I look somehow?" Mandrake tilted his head at the golem. "What do you want to be different exactly? What part of you don't you like?" Diaz had to take a moment to think about what the question meant. Aesthetic standards had always been presented to him as objective. It had never occurred to him that they could be considered subjective by anyone, not even by himself.

"Well... If I was all lion, that would be really good. Being all snake would be a little better but not as good."

Mandrake groaned inwardly. Why did people always think lions looked better than snakes? He'd always been attracted to snakes and he'd never been attracted to lions. He wasn't dating Soma because he was settling. People who first met Soma were sometimes reminded of the story of the garden of Eden, because he was a snake in a grove who offered people things. To Mandrake, Soma didn't remind him of Satan but of Atlas: he was always stuck in the same location, but he took the responsibility of holding up the weight of the world on his shoulders. At best he'd sometimes wished for a lion's help when evangelical Christians got too pushy at him.

"There are still people who can be accepting of hybrids, if you give them a chance to, you know?" Mandrake tried to encourage Diaz. "Most people?" Mandrake winced. What a complicated question that was. "Well... There are many levels of acceptance and tolerance. It's true that hybrids still face some measure of discrimination even today, but it's still not quite as bad as it used to be in some ways... But they get to exist as part of public life at least! Most of them don't have to live their lives hiding what they look like from most people and can go out and do things," he explained, striving to stay positive while still being honest.

"I understand," Diaz started answering, "well, I think I sort of do, anyway." He sighed. "To me, it's just like... You know how cats are supposed to be these really female-coded animals, and snakes are basically just this big phallic symbol?" Mandrake scoffed. "There are still male cats and female snakes though." Diaz nodded. "That's true, but still... I guess what I mean is that, when people look at me, I feel like they don't know what they're looking at. So they just sort of freak out. No one says people get along 'like cats and snakes,' you know? People say that people get along 'like clams.' No offense, Mandrake."

Ah yes. Clams again.

"Plus feral lions throw their cubs down cliffs, and feral snakes eat rats alive, don't they?" Mandrake nodded. "Frankly I don't feel like either of those species are really 'me'... I don't want to be anything cruel like that." Mandrake winced inwardly. It was so insidious the way that ideas like this about what people were like always found a way to propagate themselves most easily by being internalized by the kinds of people who were affected the worst by them.

"Can I tell you something about clams, Diaz?" Diaz nodded. "In the wild, otters eat clams, Diaz." The golem tilted his head at him. "What about you?" Mandrake shook his head. "I've never accepted that I had to be cruel because of which species I am. Neither should you. I can't tell you your species are 'right' for you, but you should know there's nothing inherently wrong with them. You may or may not be able to change what happened to make you the way you are, but whether you can or not, the meaning of what you are is up to you, to no one else. That said... It speaks well of you that you'd refuse cruelty like this. Hold onto that," he smiled.

"... I'll try," Diaz finally said. "I admit I still really wish I could change from how I am, but I'm grateful to you for listening to me. Thank you for caring." Mandrake nodded. "You're welcome." Diaz sighed. "Do you really think there's no way I can ever change from this?" Mandrake tilted his head. "I honestly don't know. I mean, obviously, as a genetic engineer, I've helped people change things about themselves that they didn't like, but never in this exact situation," he explained, "and never people who would regenerate back to how they were before I tried to work on them," he added.

"What you have is kind of unique in a way that makes it tricky to approach. For one thing, if it's magic that made you this way, not science, it might take magic to change you into anything else rather than science too." Diaz tilted his head. "Do you know people who do magic?" Mandrake nodded. "I do. But! Sometimes, magic can't undo what magic did, and it's science that can find a way around it. It sort of depends on the situation." "And for another?" Diaz asked him. "For another, I'm not sure what's even ethical for me to encourage you to do in this situation!" Mandrake admitted.

"As a genetic engineer I've met people who really wanted wings. The dream to fly is a strong one. I try to discourage plastic surgery based on accepting social standards I don't agree with. I don't want to encourage species discrimination. As a therapist I'd rather help a fat client accept themselves than lose weight because I don't think they should feel bad for being fat in the first place, but if they really want to, I also have to support that. Then I have trans clients! I'd never try to tell them not to transition even though there's nothing wrong with the body they were born with in and of itself. And some want to be accepted as valid without transitioning."

Mandrake could tell that Diaz was taking time to think about everything he'd just said. "What a minefield your job must be," Diaz finally said. "You've got that right," Mandrake chuckled knowingly. "I guess when it all comes down to it, I especially don't like the part about being a golem. It makes me feel like I was just created to do work for someone else, but I don't do any work for anyone. I don't even know if I'd want to. I don't like being a statue because statues are supposed to exist to be pretty for other people. I don't think I can ever achieve that, whether or not I should even accept that's what I'm for in the first place either," Diaz reflected.

"A lot of people would kill to be able to regenerate like this, I can tell you that," Mandrake added. "I mean, I know that doesn't help you in any way, but it does have the merit of being ironic," he finished, tongue firmly in cheek. "Ugh, I hate the regeneration thing, though," Diaz shook his head. "It scares the crap out of people. If anything, even if I had to still be a golem, if I could be hurt in a way that people can understand, part of me can't help but think that they'd be a lot nicer to me. They might finally feel sorry for me, instead of resenting me for being what they imagine as 'invincible.'"

"Maybe," Mandrake started thoughtfully, "it's other people who need to get better at understanding that there are kinds of pain that matter that they can't always see with their eyes. People tend to only really believe in what they see," Mandrake lamented. "But you think there's more to life than that?" Diaz asked him. "In some ways, yes," Mandrake answered. "Do you mean, like, God and things like that?" Diaz went on. "Well, I only think it's my job to try to see people's pain if they try to hide it... What they believe in or not is sort of their job to tell me if they want to and not to tell me if they don't, that's how therapy goes, as far as I'm concerned."

"I'm Gnostic," Diaz said. "Oh!" Mandrake seemed surprised. "That's interesting." It would certainly be a challenge for Mandrake to separate his own doubts about his spirituality from the beliefs of one of his clients who believed that Mandrake's God was in fact the Demiurge, whose cruelty explained the suffering in all our lives. Be that as it may, it was still his duty as a therapist to show respect for his client's beliefs for what they were, and not to try to change them based on his own interests. "I know it seems a little bleak," Diaz almost apologized, "but there you have it, make of that what you will."

"No, I sort of get it." Mandrake was complex enough for that to have been a true answer from him, that much was for certain. "We live in a cruel world." Diaz nodded. "Yeah..." "But," Mandrake continued, "there's more to Gnosticism than simple bleakness, isn't there?" Diaz smiled. "Well, yeah!" He was glad that Mandrake could also see this. "Even in this cruel world, there's secret knowledge you can find that can help you reduce some of your suffering, some of the suffering of the people you care about, if only you look for it hard enough," Mandrake went on, "there are real, underlying things to believe in, hidden in our dystopia. There's still hope."

"I think," Diaz thought out loud, "that on some level it just helps make me feel a little less singled out." Mandrake tilted his head at him. "How so?" "Well, think of it this way," Diaz started, "if we were *all* created by someone cruel who wants us to suffer for his own interests, then... that means that everyone is sort of in the same situation I'm in, in some ways. After all, *I* was created by someone cruel, who didn't care about how I'd feel about it as long as I played my role, so if everyone else also has been, if that's the very nature of existence that we all fight against day after day, then... it means I'm not alone," he explained meaningfully. "I like that."

"There's nothing wrong with rebelling against your creator if they're unjust," Mandrake assured him. "Who *did* create you, now that you mention it...?"

***

One day, a while after Mandrake going to see Diaz so that Diaz could confide in him had become a regular thing, when Diaz heard that someone was at his door, his first reaction was actually to be excited about it. He rushed to the door to welcome in Mandrake, who was even supposed to see him that day. After all, Mandrake was the only person who came to see him. Who else could it possibly have been?

It was Boko.

"YOU...!"

Boko had always had a thing with sculptures. They seemed to exist right on the threshold between people and objects, a similar threshold to the one on which Boko had imagined that Klein and himself had existed. There had been a time during which Boko became driven so crazy by the fact that he couldn't be everywhere at once to protect every object from every person who might somehow damage it that he decided that he needed to think outside the box to solve the problem once and for all. He had no magic of his own, but he could always borrow some. He'd certainly been gifted with being good at borrowing things, if anything.

Wouldn't it have been much easier for objects to be protected if they could protect themselves from the tyranny of the animate all on their own, without needing Boko's help for it at all? It seemed to Boko that it would have been. Therefore, he'd thought, if he could create an object that could move after all, that could kill people who tried to damage it if it chose to do so, better yet, an object that could never be permanently broken in the first place, then, then he would no longer have had to run around all over the place trying to protect them at such a breakneck pace, every moment of his life. He'd no longer have to fear leaving objects behind.

He'd no longer have to fear death. He'd finally know peace for the first time in his life.

He raised Diaz to fear the animate, and what they could do to objects, to keep him 'safe.'

"YOU BASTARD, I'LL KILL YOU!"

Diaz slithered across the floor to his lair at top speed, lion head roaring and snake tail rattling behind him as he went. Boko just laughed uproariously. He knew that he'd created Diaz so that he'd be able to defeat regular people, but Boko didn't think of himself as a regular person. To see Diaz coming at him as though the golem had a chance to really hurt him was almost cute to Boko, in an 'aww he thinks he's people' kind of way.

Diaz picked up Boko right over his head and threw him against the wall. Boko repeatedly back-flipped in midair to easily land sideways on the wall with his feet, just as when he pushed a wrecking crane over a cliff. Pushing with his feet against the wall, Boko propelled himself right back at Diaz from it in the exact opposite direction that he'd been thrown in, repeatedly flipping forward as he went.

Boko's tail and tongue both struck Diaz's head on their way down as the chameleon landed in front of the golem, hard enough to make chunks of marble fly off from his head. There were martial artists who could break boards, bricks, even ice or cement, but most people couldn't have seen someone they were up against break marble with their tongue without having a chill go down their spine. Diaz was not so easily impressed, the golem reminded himself, gritting his teeth as the chunks of marble returned to his head to make it retake its shape from before, just as they always did.

"Just a little off the top," Boko had smirked. He'd shifted the color of his skin to descending, diagonal stripes of red, white and blue to make himself look like the insignia to a barbershop, to emphasize how what he had removed would always return, and that Diaz would never be able to do anything about it. It made Diaz want to strangle the chameleon, and that's exactly what he tried to do.

Boko tail bounced over Diaz as the hybrid charged at him, dodging the golem's grab. Diaz tried to tail slap Boko behind him as the golem turned around to face the chameleon, but Boko ducked under his snake tail. Diaz brought back his snake tail in the opposite direction, trying to wrap it around Boko's legs from behind, but the chameleon back-flipped over his snake tail, hitting Diaz with an upward tail strike himself while he did.

Just as Boko landed, Diaz grabbed him to turn the chameleon's body upside-down. Holding an inverted Boko in front of him, Diaz brought him down to try to slam the chameleon's head into the ground. Boko only managed to dampen the impact of the throw by putting his hands on the ground on his way down somewhat. Making the most of his newfound headstand, Boko started an advancing head-spin toward Diaz, alternating between hitting the golem high and low with his crisscrossing tongue and tail as Boko's spinning head kept sliding toward him.

Diaz tried to sweep Boko's head out from under him, but Boko wrapped his tail around Diaz's body upside-down and, using it to hold himself up over the tail sweep, turned himself right-side-up while also turning Diaz upside-down, to hold the inverted golem up in front of his face with his tail. Boko slapped the upside-down Diaz back and forth with his tongue a few times, making more chunks of marble fly off from the golem as he did.

Still upside-down, Diaz wrapped his snake tail around Boko's neck, taking the chameleon off-guard and making him lose his grip as Diaz moved in the air to force Boko to support his whole weight in a way he couldn't. As Boko fell to the ground with Diaz also falling back down to Earth mostly on top of the chameleon himself, the golem wrapped more of his tail around Boko's body, trapping him in a full-body hold the likes of which killed multiple feral snakes' prey when they hunted every day. The likes of which it seemed that even Boko couldn't do anything about when he was trapped in one himself.

In all of his abnormally long life, Boko had never been defeated by anyone.

This time, Diaz had him in such a tight grip that Boko knew with grim certainty that there was no way that he would ever be able to wriggle out of it. When he realized that he was starting to run out of air he started to panic, to be more scared than he'd ever been scared of anything in his life. In his moment of clarify, Boko put his pride completely aside and started tapping on the ground for release, begging Diaz for mercy and putting his life in his creation's hands for once.

Diaz didn't let go.

His features distorted by limitless fury, Diaz squeezed Boko with a squeeze powered by the rage of having had to spend his whole life alone because of him. Was he just trying to scare the chameleon, or was he really going to kill him this time? Boko had never seen him as a subject and had always seen him as an object. Why shouldn't he have paid for what he'd done to him, Diaz asked himself? Should Diaz have let him live because Boko could be the only person who knew how to break Diaz's curse for all he knew? Or would have it been worth it to give up the chance to break his curse if only to stop Boko from hurting someone else?

Boko's life flashed before his eyes. At lightning speed, he started rethinking every single decision he'd ever made in his life, especially the ones that seemed like they'd led him up to being trapped in this situation in which he was now going to die. He pictured everything he'd done and everything he'd been going to do gone, annihilated, wiped from history like a bad dream forgotten upon waking up. What should he have done differently to avoid ending up in a situation like this? Was there anything he could've done, or was this something that had been going to happen anyway, regardless of what he did? But it was too late for him to ever find out.

Who would take care of his objects when he'd be gone?

Then Diaz saw Mandrake walk in.

'It speaks well of you... that you'd refuse cruelty like this,' he couldn't help remembering. 'Hold onto that...' Diaz gasped, and loosened the coils of his tail around Boko's neck as he did. Boko gulped in the most eager breath he'd ever breathed and, finally wriggling out of Diaz's grip at lightning speed, shifted his body coloration to make himself invisible, and vanished from Diaz's lair for good. Diaz would never see him again.

"Am... Am I a monster, Man... Mandrake...?" Diaz asked his therapist, his whole body shaking uncontrollably as he spoke. "You're not," Mandrake told Diaz, hugging him again, just as he had when the two of them had first met. "You did good," he added as the golem sobbed and sobbed his tears of wax on the otter's shoulder without stopping as if he needed to empty his heart of all the tears it could cry before he could stop to breathe again.

"You showed him good."