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When Lurien sits at his telescope, he does not record what he sees on the spot. He does not take a pad of paper or a tablet with him. If that’s what the Pale King wanted of him, Lurien does not do it—not until the Pale King comes up here Himself and says so clearly. If the Pale King will give Lurien free reign to use his best judgment, then Lurien will watch like he always has: eye wide open, unmoving, silent, still, soaking in the visage of the City of Tears for hours upon hours on end.
But he knows, in the back of his mind: what he sees will go to the Pale King.
This woman here, who dropped her handback into the gutter—her shape, her rickety carapace, her ensuing fury and stomping feet will go the Pale King. This child here, straggling last in line of a series of students on their way to school—to the Pale King. This couple, holding hands, newly in love, admiring the empty city square—to the Pale King.
Lurien is not Lurien. He is the King’s eye, some bloody, beating piece of Him; with no mind or will of his own, he only watches, speaks aloud what it is he sees. Lurien is some moving shell full to the brim of the Pale King; Lurien’s hands are not his own; Lurien’s mouth is not his own; Lurien’s sight is not his own; the sights that Lurien sees are not his own. A window pane, clear through, unblemished, unwavering, pure.
To become a Dreamer is nothing. He leaves nothing behind. He was nothing from the start. There is only his King, inside, outside, all around them.
*
Lurien has nothing. Lurien is nothing. That is to say: Lurien's father, upon his death, left Lurien with a sum of money that couldn't possibly be described as "large."
Exorbitant, perhaps. Or ungodly. Monstrous. Unconscionable. Prohibitive.
Dysfunctional, even.
With no father and Lurien's mother long dead, it was at this point in Lurien's life story that he, as the son of the richest merchant-mogul of the City of Tears, should have come out of his house, taken up his position in good society, and fulfill his father's legacy. There was, in fact, one hundred and eighty-nine pages worth of his father's will and legacy, all of which are detailed instructions on how to run his company, treat his assets, fire and hire new employees, right down to how to polish his champagne glasses. Lurien supposed that his father assumed that, even if his father never managed see his son in person, never managed to reach Lurien by post or mail or messenger, that Lurien wouldn't dare to refuse reading his will.
Lurien not only didn’t read it, but Lurien would be hard-pressed to even locate where it went.
The day Lurien's father died, Lurien spent the day like he does much of the others: poring over his telescope, single eye wide, watching passerbys on the street. A woman with her newly-hatched grub, arms full of shopping bags. Two children running rings around the empty plaza. A set of construction workers, holding up measuring lines and hammers. Lurien knows they're planning on building something in the middle of the City of Tears' main plaza, although he didn’t know what, and didn’t know why. Understanding what and why is beyond the domain of observation.
On the day of Lurien's father's funeral, he watched that too, high up in his spire, in the room his father built for him with the telescope his father commissioned for him, and watched people grieve dressed in their finest blacks, parading down the streets. There were speakers who gave eulogies. Lurien was supposed to be one of them; Lurien hadn’t written a formal speech in ten years, and probably (at conservative estimate) hadn’t spoken a word aloud in a week. (Who would he speak to? The servants? What sort of conversation could the help possibly be?)
If he was going to guess, he supposed most of the bugs attending the funeral are mourning a creature who'd built most of their homes. Construction is a lucrative business in a city like the City of Tears, and Lurien's father nearly had a monopoly on it. There was always something that needed repairs or replacements. Everything wearing away slowly under the constant water. Lurien saw this in his tower, but when he saw pavement begin to crack or buildings begin to sag, he did not replace or repair like his father, and did not examine or measure like his mother. Lurien was no spymaster, no gossip, no courtly noble, no scientist. He didn’t write down what he sees, didn’t even speak, most days. He only watched, and let what will happen, happen. If Lurien remembered what he watched at all, it was an unfortunate side-effect.
On the day of his father’s funeral, Lurien fiddled with his telescope, wiped the lens clean. He thought to himself: When I die, I'll leave behind nothing whatsoever. Not money, not fame, not reputation, not glory, not even a memorial or building to his name. Nothing less than erasure--complete and absolute. He'll take himself and everything he saw to his own grave. Then he puts his eye back to the telescope, sitting patiently through his family's funeral from half a mile away.
*
Lurien is nothing. The Pale King is everything. Even infamously introverted, he is everywhere, and nobody has ever seen His physical form. The people of Hallownest know, in theory, what He looks like, but to have seen the Pale King in person? Certainly not.
The Pale King remains where everyone knows Him to be: in the White Palace, sequestered in the company of the beautiful White Lady, a gilded and guarded estate from which He does not emerge. Correspondence is sent to the White Palace every day by those who dare, and none are returned. (They are likely not even read.) Kingsmoulds pace the palace grounds, but if they’ve ever seen the King, they have no voice to speak of it, and many suspect the Kingsmould have no mind, either. Royal retainers enter the Palace and often do not re-emerge. Those who do re-emerge from this vaunted service upon the grounds of the Pale King’s abode itself report that they have never seen Him, not once, not even at a distance. The White Lady is a charming, vacant creature, and her roots spread all throughout the palace, and she responds readily, if slowly, to calls upon her person; by contrast, the effects of the Pale King’s influence spread all throughout Hallownest itself, but He remains unseen and unheard—an empty center around which the world revolves.
Still. His presence is measured by His effects upon all around Him, not the physical matter of the wyrm. He is just as effective in His absence as He ever could be in the flesh.
Lurien, high in his spire, has never seen the White Palace. He is an urbanite through and through. The visage of the City of Tears’ skyline may be actually imprinted upon his eye. But he watches the small passageway that leads to the Ancient Basin sometimes, watching the traffic of people dressed in their best and purest whites on their way to conduct business at the White Palace itself. Lurien wonders what it would look like if he could stand before it and watch it like he watches the City of Tears.
He wonders what sort of person the Pale King must be, to disappear Himself into His own home, even as His hands shape the world in His aftermath. He wonders which servant brought Lurien’s letter to Him, what He looked like as he read it. He wonders if the Pale King has a small study, like Lurien’s, at which He pens his work with careful claws and quills, and sends missives to Lurien’s Spire, requesting to know what Lurien’s single eye has seen.
He wonders what sort of creature asks someone else, someone renowned for taking no correspondence and never emerging from his spire, to be His eye upon His own kingdom.
*
Lurien is nothing, and owns nothing. The two dozen identical brothers who served his mother as her knights, and then Lurien’s father as his knights, belonged to him after their deaths. Lurien also inherited a butler, a small rich bug who wasn’t anywhere near as rich as Lurien, who had served Lurien’s family nearly since the bug was born. Lurien was, perhaps, supposed to say something to him, or give him directions, or ask something of him. Indeed, on the first day that the butler moves into the spire, Lurien watched him introduce himself to Lurien and ask for orders, and continued to watch, minutes ticking by, as the butler grew uncomfortable, then confused, and then despairing, to know that Lurien will never ask anything of a bug whose purpose was to be asked of.
Quietly, without fanfare, Lurien gave the entirety of his father’s business to his father’s secretary. He squirreled away more money than he could spend in a dozen lifetimes. He’d have to build a kingdom to burn through it in two. And then he shut the door to the Watcher’s Spire, definitively.
When he’d done it, he had not—and still does not—intend to come out. The butler brought him letters that Lurien does not open. He did not answer the door, certainly; if the butler answered the door, Lurien neither knows nor cares. He imagined that if his servants desert him (as they perhaps should), one day they’ll find Lurien’s rotting corpse some three months after he’s died, and only because he didn’t answer the door for the mail-delivered groceries the servants usually get.
You couldn’t pay Lurien to receive a guest--with Lurien’s inheritance, you couldn’t pay him to do anything, now. And just as he did in his childhood, the one and only thing he wants to do is to stay, alone, silent, unseen, in his spire.
*
Lurien was a nervous child. Quiet. Silent. Small. (He’s still small.) He often went days without speaking. Often went hours where he couldn’t speak. His parents built most of the City of Tears under the Pale King’s orders, and with the city came noise, and maybe his parents thought they were building a wonderful playground world for their son. Endless towers to explore. Thousands of roads to travel. Streets measured and pavement laid. Schools constructed for Lurien to learn the art of science, like his mother, knee deep in research. Apprenticeship economy booming for Lurien to learn the science of art, like his father, hammering away at the masonry.
The only thing Lurien studied, measured, cut, and built was the sound-proofing for his room. Blocked out the static. Let the silence grow from the ground up, until it hung from his bedroom ceilings, draping him in its layers.
To this day, servants are forbidden from speaking in the Watcher’s Spire.
Lurien knows the servants grow hungry for words. For conversation, for a voice, for even noise or sound. It hits the new servants worst of all. The new butler, predictably, grows wan and strung-out some time over the course of several months, desperate for instruction, desperate for Lurien to tell him what to do, desperate for some way to serve. (Lurien supposes the butler probably has a name.) If the other servants, more accustomed to Lurien’s ways, attempt to explain or console the situation in the Watcher’s Spire, Lurien doesn’t know, and it appears to have no effect on the new butler.
Either way, Lurien hears nothing of it from the new acquisition. He learns to walk as quietly as the other servants, learns to sign in Lurien’s presence, loses his color, wakes at odd hours, sleeps through the day, has other servants cover his shifts. The butler still does not complain. Everyone knows that hierarchy is simply a natural working of the world. It is normal—even required, for the world to work as well as it does—for the weakest, lesser bugs to seek those bugs who are of higher rank and being than they, so that these lesser bugs might find purpose and fulfillment in their empty lives by serving those who are better than they.
Lurien is supposed to be telling this poor butler what to do, and he knows it, and the butler knows it, and all the servants know it, and still Lurien remains silent.
Not everyone is born for silence in the same way that Lurien is. The Watcher Knights were bred for it. Either the butler learns to live in the absence of noise like the rest of his peers, or he dies. Either way, Lurien will watch it happen. He’s not looking forward to it. He just knows what he’ll see.
Over the weeks, the butler begins to wilt, and Lurien watches. He grows pale and colorless, and Lurien watches. He begins to shake, begins to grasp desperately at his peers for guidance, for some conversation, only for them all to turn him away, and Lurien watches. The other servants watch as the butler hollows out with his despair, Lurien watches.
*
Of course he will be the King’s Dreamer. He is nothing. He has always has been. Just a conduit for His will, his willing servant from the start to the end.
Some nights, Lurien has dreams of his one eye opening wide, wider, wider, until the eyelids peel back and tear at the soft skin edges and stretch over and around the rest of his face, consuming him whole from the front of his face down around to the back of his head, the outermost of his eyelids stifling his mouth, the bristly feather-fine hairs of his eyelashes brushing at the sensitive bits of his throat as the eyelids swallow him down. Let him see it all, let him see everything, everywhere, at last, at last, let him see. All life seeping through his huge hollow pupil to the exposed canvas of his self, unfiltered, raw; let him see without judgment or reservation or fear. The eye of his face naked and overexposed, single, vast, everything he is, brainless, mindless, as the outer eyelid covers his body whole and consumes itself until he is only a floating eyeball, made empty, split open, naked, watching.
Now he can see.
At last.
At last.