Chapter Text
Time. Dream. Past reached after future. The linear an arch, a sphere, an empty space.
Dream. Memory. Time.
It carried along this paradoxical mixture.
Words. Thoughts. Nothing.
What is death for that ancient being?
But more
transfor..
ma…
He tried to breathe the moment he understood he was awake.
It was a long desperate thing that was sharp in his chest and kept on cutting until he finally felt the air in his throat.
His body flailed about and he could not sense what it was crashing against, whether stone or flooring or blankets. There were noises that grew louder now, voices, but he could not understand them. The noise just hurt. Every sensation hurt.
There was pain.
The edge of his vision blurred into black, then the majority, then the last, middle piece of sight. The noise blurred into this blindness and it all hurt, it all hurt.
Then nothing.
Then red and pink that he could recognize.
Grimm.
The nightmare realm.
He tried to push up from a plush red sofa, but he made it no further than propping his head a little more straight against the back of the couch. He looked around as if he would never have the chance to see through eyes again.
Dim tapestries. Blank balconies. Charred vines where flowers once hung. No heartbeat. No heartbeat.
He found Grimm near. The god was standing by the railing of an empty balcony. His eyes turned to meet the wyrm’s when his struggle to rise gave away his consciousness. They were a pale red. Faded embers. Cold and nearly without flame. But preserved. Preserved.
Was he preserved?
Grimm looked back out over the balcony. He made a sound at whatever he saw there, before walking nearer.
“So you live. I cannot say I knew what end to expect. You must be so very pleased to dance on.”
With a flare of wings, the Nightmare King stopped at the other end of the sofa. The proximity once would have been frightening.
“How?” he asked. It did not sound like his voice. He did not know what he sounded like.
Grimm lifted his shoulders, let them drop. He lay one hand out and the flames that danced there nearly looked like tiny figures, crowded about something. Black fingers curled over the play, cut it short. The god brought his fist back to himself and continued to pace around the couch. He folded the skeletal hands there, atop the back of it, very near the pale one’s head.
“Rebirth, if you believe it. Not as your previous, however. I don’t think those bodies have long to last,” the Nightmare King said. “Not relative to the agelessness your kin is used to.”
It ought to be upsetting.
Terrifying.
To be immortal once, but no longer. It should have been cause for despair.
And he did despair, but it was for so much. It was too much to bear.
He spoke in a strangled rasp.
“I do not deserve eternity.”
Grimm hummed and then leaned forward on his folded hands. It seemed a dangerous posture.
“To be honest with you, wyrm? I don’t think even those I might despise the most deserve eternity.”
There was a silence after that. The nightmare realm seemed more hazy than it ought to be.
“But this is not death?” he finally asked, as weak a tone as before. His throat ached. Everything did.
The Nightmare King did not lift his head from his hands. He was very close, this way. His eyes shut. Their weak light went hidden behind dark paint.
“You are little more than a caterpillar out there now. Ah. A silly little thing. So easily hurt, if one is not careful.”
The closest eye to him peeked open and his head tilted to look down at him.
“I do not know how much you will remember when you do wake as yourself,” Grimm started anew and the light lilt of his voice was gone. His tone was flat. His words, a terrible thing. “It may be very little indeed.”
That form of loss was the kind to live in his nightmares. Memories made individuals. So when he was out of his last dream, he would be gone? Perhaps he could simply never wake. Perhaps that would be better.
“But whether you remember this or me or any bit of yourself at all, you’ll be safe, it seems,” Grimm said. There was an edge to his tone now. “You’ve enough influence to guarantee care.”
It was a prompt. It did not even need to be. He was lost enough that he would have been desperate for elaboration regardless.
“What?” he heard himself asking.
The other eye peeked open as well.
“There was an argument. You should be unsurprised of that. But it was short. The one you sacrificed was insistent.” Grimm stared and he did not know what the focused scrutiny meant. He did not know that he had ever read any being but himself correctly.
“Does it rankle you to hear that?” the Nightmare King asked, now light, the lightness a lie. “The one who you hurt the most is the one least likely to let you fall into harm.”
Yes.
He did not need to answer aloud.
Again, he tried to push from the cushions. The one he had hurt. The vessels. The Dreamers. His palace. Hallownest. He needed- he had to- he needed-
It did not need him.
Still, he found himself panicked.
“Your sister-.”
“I don’t know that I wish to tell you,” Grimm interrupted.
And after all that the wyrm’s entry into Hallownest had caused, how could he protest that? What grounds did he have? Grimm did not seem to love her or regret reaping her lost dreams, but could the pale one claim to know that? He did not know Grimm.
Yet…
He felt his mind was clearer in the realm of denial and fear and decay than in his own domain, in these final years. He did not know Grimm but he was known by him.
Soon, he may not know himself.
Grimm was still staring. Careful. Constant. So close to death, in his own appearance. Yet perhaps the only god that would maintain his self forever, until the end of all.
“She won’t kill more,” he finally said and it let him relax into the heavy cushions again.
Grimm spoke as if uninterested. Unconcerned. He lay a cheek against the couch and lifted one freed hand to investigate its fingers needlessly.
“Metamorphosis has been taken very hard by her. I plan to drop her off as she is. Just another loveless larva moth. She left enough alive that she won’t be alone up there, though it was by no planning of her own. I will not be surprised if they cast what remains of her out to die in the elements.”
It did not settle with him.
“You wanted her to die,” he said. It was not an anger at her survival so much as it was a frustration in simply being wrong about his reading of the strange counterpart to dream.
He thought he had gathered that much. Grimm wanted her death.
He wanted Hallownest’s, so he may feed on its last dreams. He wanted the death of the Pale King, most likely, too, even though a god’s death did not feed him.
Those were his desires. He had never hidden them. He had never hidden them, had he?
Grimm hummed.
“I wanted her to accept her death, so that the natural process may move on. This process. Life, death, life, death, the elder dead to feed the young.” His eyes closed as if annoyed or exhausted. “That has been restored.”
“But we live,” he repeated, as if a protest. He thought he sounded like a fool.
Grimm’s mouth peeled open just enough for a line of his many teeth to show.
“It would be hypocritical for me to say that the father burned and child fed cannot be the same being.”
He did not know what it meant.
He would not learn.
It would not affect him, very soon.
“As for why, do not bother asking,” Grimm started anew, bringing his head up a little higher off his hands and opening both eyes to stare down at him. “An accident. Some outside influence preventing complete consumption. Its nature all along. Perhaps a favor. A favor to you, a favor to a child grieving enough, a favor of kin, a favor to the people that gave them the means to succeed in dreams. You could guess it was a favor to me, even, and you would be no closer to having the truth confirmed.”
It was easy to listen to the nightmare being. For he wished to delay waking, delay his end. He loved himself as much as he hated himself. He could not bear life and he did not want to die. Death’s representative kept waking delayed.
“Still, I wonder if they got the idea from us,” that being said, the word very clearly not referring to the two of them here. “How tickling a thought.”
Did he mean the being- the heart or mind or unified will of a living maelstrom?
That may not have been a being at all.
But there were certainly individuals influencing both.
Was it-…were they dead? The shell broke apart. Only in dream. He had not wanted them dead. They were not supposed to chase the animals and be ripped apart while he did nothing. He was meant to save them. To save the other through saving them.
He turned until he could better face the Nightmare King.
“You act fond. You act close. You are neither with them,” he said. That vessel had met this being to converse twice, perhaps. Not often enough to have been endeared. Dying flames were hardly endearing. Though pale light was little more appealing, when it was cold and distant and loveless. “They are a force beyond our comprehension. And you are a pretender.”
“You project,” Grimm said with ease.
It did silence him. Briefly.
He lay back into the sofa. Sleep called. He was awake, but not forever. A lasting dream awaited. Its memories no longer linear.
“Perhaps,” he whispered. “It is better they are inspired by those other than the likes of us, regardless. Higher beings…We are distant to our own reality.”
The concept of a god meant all to him once. Eternal. Immortal. All powerful. To envy and to surpass. Unique. As he.
“Then you shall like your life ahead. It will not be one of a higher being,” Grimm said.
Still easy. So easy. He hid much.
Sleep tugged. Waking pulled, heavy.
He shook once.
His limbs curled in upon his chest. His eyes found those of dying fire. They did not care. They had not come for his sake. They held no lost love. They were constant, no matter if they flickered from bright to dark and back forever.
“Remember me,” he pleaded.
If he was to lose that… Others may say who the Pale King was. They would know the lies. What was ugly and hidden and not meant to be unburied would truly be buried, then. And he found…
When the moment came for it, he found he did not want it so. Refuse and regret could not be hidden. They would repeat again, if they went unseen. The unavoidable had been a tragedy, but surely later tragedy could be avoided?
He wanted to fight to rise, but his form was so heavy.
The Nightmare King aided, pulling his sagging head up with a single finger under the chin. It dragged him out of the daze that came before dream. Sleep still waited. There was no kindness there. Fear was a feeling, and so was welcome. Before all became numb. Before senses were void.
“Ashes cool and embers fade, but what is dreamed will not decay.” Red horns tilted. Fire flickered. Always weak. Never dying. “I always do.”
For many. For all.
For dead and dying. For those that were lost completely to existence, except for the one who held their lingering memories long past their deaths.
Grimm flicked his chin as he pulled his hand back. He moved to stand at the foot of the sofa and stared down. Despite his wings and shell of red here in the realm where he could not age or burn, he hardly seemed fiery. The haze of dream left him a smoky figure, if anything.
“I think I’ve grown fond of these meetings,” Grimm said there. On anyone else, it may have sounded wistful. It did not. It sounded like very little at all.
A prompt? He made to answer. But the gaze was not one that could be swayed or convinced and all sound died in his throat.
Bony fingers trailed the fabric of the sofa. This too might have been wistful on another.
“But I’ve never kept around,” he continued. His fingers paused and drew away. “Not for her, not for you.”
And the specter began to step further away from the seat, from the room, from the story of the kingdom he had abandoned long ago.
The pale wyrm fought haze pointlessly. It could not be delayed forever.
He thought to speak after the wandering god.
To say what?
Grimm had said all there was to be said.
We all destroy ourselves in some way.
Let it be.
Let him sleep. It was nightfall. A new day awaited after darkness fell.
The former must attend its curtain call.
To ashes. To dust.
Where life may spring anew.