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Some restaurants recommend particular wines to go with their dishes; I am going to recommend this, this or this as music to go with this fanfic. Maybe a dash of this, too, on more of a vibes level.
But you can also just go with the little stripped-back melody that plays when you sit on the throne. Some guy on youtube made an extended version
(Refuse and Regret)
Sire, we
look upon you
as one would look upon a peacock.
With a look that borders on
anticipation, adoration,
and something
akin to neverending terror.
-Kubo Tite
…
You sincerely doubt that this Palace looked anything like this back when it still physically stood in the Ancient Basin.
However it got here, it must have lingered in this dream-scape long enough to become subject to its laws;
It looks to you like a dream indeed, faint and translucent at the edges, not quite there, fading in and out, continuing on into some vaguely defined nowhere, as if the world just suddenly ends around it in trails of mist, not quite making sense if it were to be examined with a wakeful mind. By now, you had gotten used enough to poking around in peoples’ dreams that you can intuit some of the principles at work, even if you don’t really know the exact logical rules of how it works, if such a thing exists at all.
You don’t see how they could have held a functioning court here, with the palace layout being as it is; Though you don’t necessarily share the Hunter’s harsh assessment of them, you do not think all these scurrying little royal retainers would have been capable of going about their daily duties in a maze of thorns and spikes and spinning blades.
What you’re see before you is something that is fraying at the edges, the disintegration of a memory in its process of coming apart into discordant, incoherent fragments.
Some parts of it seem more real, more defined, compared to others, as if they represent more distinct impressions that were more strongly imprinted onto whatever mind once sustained this dream, but other sections of this place just plainly don’t make sense – there are complicated arrangements of saw-blades dancing around what ought to have been large and central, representative rooms in lulling, hypnotic patterns. There are bits of stone and walkways simply suspended in the sky, entire stretches of space where there is simply nowhere to stand, senseless, pointless platforms hanging in the air all on their lonesome, like bridges that do not connect to anything, as if they’d been forgotten halfway through the process of their creation.
Yet at the same time, your thorough explorations fail to come across many relevant things that one would expect to find in a well-used, functioning palace, though they might only have been relevant to a few of the dwellers in here.
You must have climbed on every wall and squeezed through every single crevice, yet you see no trace of kitchens, no servants’ quarters, not even ballrooms in which you might picture the shambling remains of the nobles from the city of tears spinning around in silly dances, wrapped in ostentatious get-ups.
Was the bizarre architecture then added retroactively as a means to deter intruders or test would-be seekers, you wonder?
Or does this rather simply reflect the mind that envisioned this dream?
If so, it’s certainly not a welcoming one.
Some part of you is tempted to joke that they must not have been a sociable one, but before the thought is finished, you understand that it must be something deeper than that.
Something like spikes and thorns and spinning blades, a heart that saw only few intimate visitors.
The environment around you likely reflects a shuffling of repeated elements, the more concrete and tangible of which must once truly have existed – the hanging garlands, the silver leaves, the high and narrow faceted windows adorned with the kingdom’s seal, standing sharp and tall.
You pass ornate walls, globe-like lamps, the smooth-moving mechanisms of elevators and the filigree turns of elegant balconies – gleaming it all is, but it is a stark, cold light, like a gleam of metal or the arc-light of artificial illumination, wholly lacking the warmth of day, the same hard serrated lines you had seen in the many depictions of the monarch’s likeness.
Sharp lines and austere grays predominate, sometimes shining, sometimes dipped in some melancholy twilight – they might be different memories taken from different times of day.
Much of the furniture you see is covered in long, white drapes, the kind meant to keep precious things from getting dusty – there can’t have been much demand, in the last days of the kingdom, for fancy get-togethers or displays of wealth, not while the populace was suffering.
By the end, it is quite possible that much of the would-be staff had perished, as had the possible guests.
Two of the King’s foremost advisors would have been spent as the Dreamers; Other notables, you have found scattered over the land in warrior graves.
At other times, it seems like you have walked even deeper into time, into bright halls in the fullness of their silver splendor, populated by the steps and whispers of numerous attendants, or at least some indistinct, lingering reminders of them, imprints of their unwavering devotion toward their sovereign, their gratitude and their longing, their despairing need barely masked behind a professed willingness to wait.
You’ve found the corpses of many like them scattered about the lower parts of the kingdom, along with their regrets. Their last thoughts, calling piteously, wondering where he might have gone, or when he might be coming back, hoping, and most likely calling out, reaching for the vanished light in the last of their agony, clutching their little idols, whimpers and sobs forming calls pleas and prayers that would never be answered.
You’d wondered then how he could possibly leave, what may have possessed him to abandon them all to their fates – you did this even when you thought of him only as some distant legend, before you had pieced together the connection to your own state and being –
Before you had realized that you, too, had been cast away by him, how he turned away from what was born of his creation, literally or figuratively, the many feeble arms reaching out for him, flocking exactly like moths to the light, not choosy again about the particular kind, clambering towards destruction…
He never even knew of you; Never once were you so much as reflected in his eyes, any more so than the common bugs that would have cried to him for release. There may have been an abstract notion in his mind of the possibility of you, if he had instructed his consort to grant one like you a half of a whole. That’s what brings you here at all. You’re in need of power, of options, of help, wherever it can be found…
But even though you never once stepped foot here in the times of the realm’s heyday, the faintly remembered palace staff genuflect to you as you approach, bowing low before you as you pass, as if they somehow knew you.
They most certainly don’t. No one has ever bowed to you. These servants’ equivalent in reality might well have perished long before you ever thought of returning from the wasteland –
And you don’t think that you could be mistaken for a royal either, it is only recently that you found yourself mocked by one of the last few surviving nobles, readily dismissed as filthy and unsophisticated.
Not that you mind it terribly much, it’s rather handy to you, if your small size causes you to be underestimated. It has proven rather nifty for crawling through all manner of crevices, and this might quite likely be the reason for why you lived and escaped.
But it makes all of this feel so unreal, to suddenly find yourself at the receiving end of the deference, if only a dream-like memory of it.
Though you suppose that, knowing what you know now, the concept is not as strange as it seems. If things had been different, you may well have grown up right here, in this very palace, reared and trained as a royal child. You think unbidden of the Dung Beetle Knight from the sewers, and the unshakable faith and admiration he had seemed to have in the king.
He had offered you kindness and shelter, reasoning that this is what the king would have done, stating that he could see a place for you among the knights of ages past – He seemed of course like the type to remember the past in an idealized light, but his statement still meant something to you, you think, not that much because of anything to do with the king, but because you’d always held this vague impression that being a knight was something you were supposed to do, or supposed to be.
You’d always held that notion, ever since you could remember, though you’re pretty sure that you had no idea what a knight even is in the very beginning of it.
At some point you’d gathered that it’s supposed to be some sort of mighty warrior who uses their strength in the pursuit of adventure, and in service of helping others –
Understanding of exact definitions of things like nobility or liege lords followed only rather later – so you would be more like akin to a wandering knight errant, perhaps.
But you’ve certainly fought, persevered and helped out beings in need wherever you could as you trailed through the wastelands.
Even when you came here, it was, in the first, as a response to a distant call for help.
Only then did you learn that the worn old nail you carried was considered a traditional weapon of these lands; You probably didn’t even know what it was, when you first picked it up.
You didn’t know or understand a lot of things, nor did you even think much of it.
There wasn’t anyone around to teach you, seeing as you were cast into a lightless pit, left for dead among a mountain of corpses and forced to fend for yourself in the wilderness.
The lost and dirty little thing you used to be would not have been admitted into any kind of palace.
For a moment, you try to picture your memories beginning here instead, to imagine yourself first coming to awareness and understanding in the process of being taught by illustrious knights and fancy lore-masters, being constantly fussed over by obsequious servants like these, doing all the things that the nobles in the City of Tears must once have been doing.
It seems ridiculous.
The person in that possible world would scarcely even be you. They would not meaningfully share very much in common with you.
What was done to you, created you;
You might be more than just a being of the void, but that one part couldn’t really be subtracted without also altering everything else along with it.
The idle daydream comes apart under the weight of its own contradictions.
How strange it had been then when Hornet confessed your relation; If you had felt an affinity to her before, you would have said that it was because she also seemed to have a touch of the wilderness on her, the markings of a careful, decisive hunter who had been used to fending for themselves for a long, long time. You couldn’t picture her as a dolled-up noble lady, either, but perhaps that is what makes the silly notion of living here grow a bit more solid with her in it.
Perhaps the two of you could have been conspiring to sneak past the watchful gaze of prim and proper attendants to go climb on something. Any pristine white robes they might have forced you into would surely end up stained with grass.
You could picture a certain someone fitting into a palace just fine, however, as skewed as your assessment may be, seeing as all you have to go on is the distant memory of their back and these statues depicting them standing at attention in blinged-out ceremonial armor, every inch the ideal of a holy paladin.
They might well have contrived some way to rat their shorter siblings out to the king, with or without the use of words, and get the palace servants sent after them…
It was not hard to picture Hornet coming in here and promptly being bowed to, however, given the stern and dignified manner in which she carried herself.
Clearly, she had been shouldering the responsibility of being this realm’s protector for a long long time now. Long enough that many of the real, non-imaginary mortals would have stopped recognizing her, which at least spared her from being pried with questions about the king and the odds of his return.
And as you think of it in terms of her, from the point of view of someone you know, it occurs to you for the first time to ponder what it might feel like to be the one who is looked for.
To be besought by many with countless desperate pleas for help, and to be unable to give it to them.
You can see how one could end up becoming reclusive.
…
When you found the hidden path, you first thought that there might be something useful concealed here.
Something that the old king didn’t want to be seen, or that he would keep stashed away for some very special purpose.
You may have felt a private special spite in laying eyes on something he didn’t want you to see.
But it did not turn out to be that kind of place at all.
More so than in another other part of this flickering afterglow, there was practically nowhere to stand, no safe spot to find rest, no footholds to gain purchase, as if everything around were trying its hardest to twist itself into the most impassable terrain.
Only that it’s not quite enough to deter you.
Defiance pulls you forward.
You come to feel upon your body, an experience carved in space.
A space in mind and heart, made manifest.
It was something never meant to be traversed, like the empty spaces in natural caverns.
The image of lacunae of the heart that would seem to go with that empty, pulling sensation when one feels like they are about to cave in on themselves, because their life has become something they can no longer bear.
The sensation of forcing oneself to do something, no matter how distasteful, how revolting, even as everything in oneself turns and runs, even as a body becomes disgusted with its own soul, even as one has to pull oneself every step of the way along a thorny, light-less path.
You really should not have been surprised with what you would find at the end.
Of course it would turn out to be something like this.
The totems along the way were all carved in a very particular likeness, and there is a sense of presence pervades all this place like a music, swelling ever more thickly to an unbearable crescendo.
Of course the great shame he would long to conceal wouldn’t be some trinket or invention, as one as one might think so if they were only ever familiar with the legend of the Wyrm-King.
You walk up to what, at last, seems to be a perfectly ordinary balcony that must have stood here just the same in the waking world, probably at the end of what used to a perfectly ordinary corridor in the beginning.
You purpose to step closer, to where they both are standing, but you somehow cannot get there.
It is a memory that you are not a part of, from which you were excluded, just as you would have been back then -
once again, all you can catch a glimpse of are their backs, ever turned to you –
The most defining trait of the past you cannot ever go back there and still be part of it;
The past is inaccessible to you.
It is inaccessible even to both of the ones in that memory, who must both have known that they could never return there.
Why else would the scene burn thus in the king’s memory?
…
You cannot return, either.
You wake up outside, and when you try to pass through that false wall again, it’s solid as rock.
It’s no longer there, as if it never was.
There is no empty space.
There is no balcony.
The memory was so brief that you struggle to recall it in hindsight, other than the sight of it disintegrating into sparkles of essence, like the memory of a dream slipping away in the morning.
All you are left with is a fleeting glimpse of their backs.
Again.
Just like last time,
in some blurry memory that you’re not quite ready to confront or acknowledge yet,
when you were yourself following the call, seeking the light, reaching for purpose,
only to come to find that the grand voice of destiny beckoning you forward was already talking to somebody else.
In the case of the king, you are fairly certain that you must not have been reflected in his eyes, so desperate was the mighty one, not to look upon his own works and despair;
But the other one… they must have seen-
There were times when you had wondered what might have happened to you, if you had been the first to make it to the top.
If that would have meant that you would have been found worthy, somehow.
Now that you have found out what became of the winner, envy is the furthest thing from your mind.
If anything, you rather wish that you’d had the power to prevent them from being taken to the surface by the king; Or, since you were already indulging in thoughts of impossible things, why not contrive some means to compel his majesty to gather up all the survivors and cease all he had in mind?
But of course, at that time, even holding onto that ledge would have been beyond your power.
Even so, you no longer really wish that you could have held on.
Having seen something more of the world, you have since come to realize that dubious competitions often hand out dubious prizes. You’re practically an expert in stupid games, after having been through the Trial of the Fool at the colloseum and had your fill of stupid games to your heart's content.
You didn’t miss out on anything.
Instead you found yourself suddenly glad, fiercely glad, that you simply got to exist out there in the world, just like the trees and stones do, with no need to justify themselves, free to just be whatever they are, whatever they will be – inevitably shaped by their nature, yes, but not pressed into a mold like one of his constructs, free to be out there and to meet people who just saw you as you, whatever that may be or not be.
You’re glad that you knew what it was to exist as yourself, not as what you were not, or as what you could have been.
You always knew that you were not like others, but then again, no one is exactly like another, and nobody ever really gets an answer for why they are as they are, not their bodies, not their soul.
Being gets to precede meaning, gets to precede purpose, rather than the other way around.
Even in so far as you retained an imprint of his words, you were free to decide for yourself what it was going to mean to you.
You are not the Hollow Knight. And you are not your father’s failsafe trump card. You are you. You are going to find your own path.
You hadn’t quite decided what to do yet, but the decision would be yours.
And even if you did end up deciding that you would make your way to the Black Egg and take your sibling’s place, you wouldn’t be doing it because that’s what your father intended for you, or because the White Lady thought you were without blemishes, or even to catch up with your sibling at last -
No, you would be doing it for Myla, for Quirrel, for Cloth, and all the other innocents who got caught up in this mess.
You would be doing it for the Elderbug and the Old Stag, for Hornet, for the Nailmasters, for the Mantisses and the Hunter and everybody else still alive in this place, worn-down and fallen as it may be.
You would be doing it because it was needed, and because you were able to do something, because being here, and being you, and no one else, made you capable of doing something where others were not.
And yes, you’d be doing it for your sibling, too, at least to put an end their suffering, if they were beyond saving.
Because they had remembered you, at long last, in the fire of their agony.
But yeesh.
For so long you had wandered this world, often feeling the solitude in the knowledge that you’d never seen or found anything else like you.
And now you’d found them, and you knew where they were, and you were going to have to cut them down.
It was bad enough with that other long-lost sibling who got revived by the lightseeds, but at least they were already gone, lost long before you got here… and even so, you think they recognized you as they faded.
…
He better not be alive, you think, in whatever small gaps of your consciousness that are not completely consumed by your struggle to hang onto the walls.
If he’s alive somewhere in here…
If he went and saved his own skin while spending all others like tools to be worked until they break…
If he is out there somewhere, having waited out all those who prayed and yearned for his return, who looked for him in their desperation…
(You ready yourself to bounce off a series of spikes with your nail, turning over all attention completely to your instincts until you reach another floating bit of orphaned path.)
If he has the gall to be alive, then…
You don’t know what you’re going to do.
You focus on crystal-dashing past the spinning blades for now. You’re grateful for the moments in which the obstacles leave you little else to think of.
You really don’t know what you’ll do, if you see him.
You suppose that for most people, the obvious answer would be to ask questions, but that is going to be somewhat difficult for you, also because of him.
And yet you are here, looking for him.
Looking for the rest of whatever he left for you, some hint of what he may have meant for you to do. It is not as if you have any great faith in his plans, for obvious reasons, but you want at least to know of it, to take a look at it so you can consider for yourself…
In a way, it would rather be ironic, if you find him.
You, to whom he is nothing. Worse than nothing, even.
You, instead of all of those who sought for him, who cried to him for deliverance with their trembling voices.
He did seem to inspire great loyalty, didn’t he?
All those idols. All those prayers and words of praise.
His Queen still spoke of him with obvious tenderness though she should have had ample reason to resent him. Ogrim still held him up to you as an example he sought to follow, even without agreeing with all his choices.
His closest advisers, who has been willing to consign themselves to sleep eternal;
Hornet, who had lost her mother, who had kept watch over this ruined kingdom for ages untold, years that must have weighed on her on account of her mortal blood, even though they had barely touched you, still guarding his legacy and his secrets after all this time, even though there was nothing stopping her from simply walking away and forgetting everything about this place forever.
And the one who should have had the most reason to resent him, who must be feeling the cumulation of his greatest sins upon their own body in this very moment, the sacrificial lamb upon his altar…
Of course, loyalty and love is often given undeserved, as is spite and hate such as he received from his enemies; It often says more about the lover or the hater than it truly speaks to its object.
For obvious reasons, you cannot have much faith or loyalty for a father whose face you’ve never seen.
You’ve seen what came of his actions; The charnel-house he made of the abyss and the ruin that remained of his kingdom.
You don’t like the thought of dancing to his pipe;
But to go beyond him, you must first see as far as he got.
...
Clearly, this room can’t have been walled off in the actual, proper palace.
You can think of no reason why it would be.
It makes sense that he would hide his workshop, containing his actual secrets and hidden inquiries among other proud products of his much-vaunted mind, as well as whatever plots he still meant to hatch against the infection, if that was still something he had been meaning to do by the time that he fled.
Is the workshop as he left it?
Or was his interest in ‘putting a harness on the void’ something dating back to before the Radiance even resurfaced, when he started working on those automated sentries you’ve been fighting your way through?
You’ve sifted through it as best as you can, but you simply aren’t a scholar or an artisan, and even few of those might have understood what they’re looking at if there stood here in your place.
It irks you that you may have had some clue as to what he was up to may have been right in front of your eyes, and yet soundly beyond your reach.
You could figure that this is where he must have made the Kingsmoulds and the Wingsmoulds, including perhaps the one that was acting as a host to this dream-realm, however he may have managed to get the Palace in there. He must have his means; The same means by which he managed to trap the Radiance inside the seal, even if defeating her or even holding her for any length of time was beyond him.
Whichever it may be, it made sense to hide such arcane pursuits, to keep his enemies in the dark, maybe, or simply to hoard all the knowledge for himself.
But what is this?
This place seems as real and as solid as the image of the workshop did, a detailed, complete impression of a place where even the least of details would have been distinct in his mind, enough to keep its distinct identity even in a dream, a place that, for those familiar with it, may have triggered an instantaneous, intuitive level of recognition, the type of memory that was truly a picture, and maybe smell, sound and touch as well, not just a rough description or a smattering of features.
It was a simple, ordinary room, though.
Really nothing more than just a room, scarcely different from any other room.
Big. Well-lit. Decorated with fresh leaves, hanging vines and some touches of tall, narrow furniture, all of it kept in hues of silver – but that should have gone without saying; The room was in a palace.
It wouldn’t look like the humble hut of a hermit sage.
Carefully, you step further inside.
Once again you feel as if you were trespassing on something that isn’t yours, though you have never been known to fret much about such things.
It’s really just a room.
There is a large chest in the corner. Another of those grand, globe-like lamps hangs doen on a large cord from the ceiling. You’ve seen some of these with good old lumaflies inside, but you think this light might be artificial.
There’s a chair.
There is what might be a table, or so you take it to be, until you step closer and realize that that’s not what it was.
Until you notice the subtle imprints of a silhouette on the chair.
You could not really call it a familiar one, even after a good handful of encounters, but neither was it any longer something whose import you didn’t realize.
In hindsight, the entire room bears the White Lady’s signature. It’s spacious enough to accommodate her, the decorations resemble her gardens, though much less overgrown than you would have known them in the time of your return, and there is ample greenery all around, there are even blades of grass sprouting up from the ground floor here and there, an inevitable consequence, perhaps, of the lingering ambient holyness that her presence would have left behind –
But now, the beings that would lament her had only her absence left to them, from the slightest blade of grass to the mighty Wyrm himself.
You don’t the imprint was likely to be as pronounced in reality, unless it were in the very last days if the kingdom. The royals could have afforded to have it fixed, even more so a king who was also a god and a master artificer.
Though perhaps it was the craftsman’s gaze that made the slight curve stand out to him quite a bit, if he ever ran his appendages over the material.
The Queen still speaks of him with tenderness, but you can imagine that there are things, that, once they’ve happened, make it impossible to go back to what was before, when it’s laced and tainted with all sorts of memories.
You don’t want to think about what they had to do to… procure something for them to throw in the abyss.
Beyond just the usual reasons why nobody wants to picture their parents in such activities – honestly, you never lived with them, so they barely felt enough like your parents to trigger that more ordinary sort of discomfort. Nor would there be much need to wonder after the disparity in their forms.
They are gods; They probably had the means to make it work somehow. The king was a resourceful bug, by all accounts, and that form of his was a courtesy chosen at his convenience to begin with.
He probably could have found the means to pollinate his Lady Root just as easily as he might fertilize the eggs of Deepnest’s queen. Perhaps she had produced the eggs like fruit upon her branches.
But what an abject, abysmally depressing affair it must have been.
To picture him coming to her bedchambers every night with such purpose, time after time after every failed attempt, should he have have ran out of reagents for his alchemy – profaning thus what must once have been a cherished rite of union between the two of them.
She did not seem to blame him, knowing that while he may have been the one to pick up the apple of sin, she had taken it from his hand of her own free will and bitten into it as well.
But it should not come as a surprise to anyone if she could never bear his touch again after that, once the deed was accomplished.
The well was poisoned; The dream forever discarded, tainted with too rancid a taste –
Leaving her only with this empty cradle for compensation.
Certainly it couldn’t have been Hornet’s, as much as the White Lady may profess a fondness for her. Surely her own mother would have had every reason to make the most of what limited time they would have together, and only left her in the palace for the occasional visit.
You could very much imagine that the bassinet had seen some use, and by whom, but that would not have filled it in any way that would have mattered to the Lady, and not for long…
All things considered, she had been perfectly helpful and polite to you, supplying you with aid, information and such. As helpful as someone can be to the salt in her wounds. As politely as one can dress up a plea that you walk to your doom, for the greater good and such, and you better not dally, because the last one to attempt the deed is likely rotting into mush from the consequences of it right this very instant...
And you will do what is needed, alright. Your resolve should have been proven many times over now, and you were ready to face as many further trials as it takes. It’s why you came here to begin with. You walked here on your own two feet.
It’s not as if you were unwilling to make sacrifices, or as if you were looking to be thanked or praised.
But still you thought…
Obviously, she wouldn’t have known that you had lived until you turned up at her hideaway.
Maybe, if you gave it time…
You came to see her several times, just to sit with her and show her the spoils of your latest exploits.
Your newest charms, the latest upgrade on your nail, new passages and crevices discovered that you’d marked upon your map… that last one may have been doomed to failure to start with, after you realized that she couldn’t really see you very well, she probably couldn’t make out your little pins and markings.
She always greeted you, and sometimes she would comment on your ‘treasures’ though it was usually in the vein of telling you something about the background of what you were showing to her or pertaining the history of the kingdom. Sometimes she’d get lost in reminiscence of better times, and this would be the closest she would seem to get to being stirred to feeling; At other times, she might express some hopeful sentiment about your capabilities and how they did, of course, bode well for the ‘walking to your doom’ operation ahead of you.
And yes, you would need strength for that and that would be, in part, the reason why you would have been honing your skills, but something about how she spoke to you was…
It was hard to put your finger on.
Again: You were not afraid of making sacrifices and willing to do what is needed.
But that was because you were volunteering to help, not because of- whatever it was that she thought. You had tried looking, but she noticed. She did not even lose her composure for an instant, so whatever she truly thought in the unobserved privacy of her mind would forever be closed to you.
It is as if there was always a chasm remaining between you, one that wouldn’t seem to narrow.
Once, you thought of giving her a flower, but she declined it.
You ended up giving it to the Elderbug back in Dirtmouth instead, mostly because he had been looking gloomy when you happened to pass by, and he had been deeply touched.
What a relief it was, to see someone honestly glad of your presence, something to lift that dreary impression that the problem might be with you.
Master Mato had never once met you before you knocked on his door looking to learn his nail art, and yet it was not long before he was ready to count you among his kin.
Even Oro and that strange, haughty bug from the sarcophagus in the waterways had seemed to appreciate the gift, even if they were both incredibly rude about it at first.
So why…?
At this point you thought you may have gotten more resembling a sense of fellowship out of the Hunter than you might hope to find in her.
Would it not make sense to make the most of your time together, knowing that the future was uncertain and that the days may be numbered?
Maybe this is all just her way of showing you mercy – or to show mercy upon herself, at least, as much as she has any left to give. Getting attached doesn’t seem to have done anybody favors the last time; Maybe it gets easier to see someone to their doom, once you’ve done it before. Keeping a distance might be easier. Safer, perhaps, to her mind, since she seems to think your sibling’s inability to keep doing the impossible forever is owed to ‘making a mess of its programming’, as it were, or to an error of judgment in their choosing.
You didn’t get know them well enough to really learn what they’re like, so you can’t gauge in how far the two of you differed, or which, if any of you, would have been closer to the grand design, but it is strange that she does not seem to wonder whether she is misjudging you.
Perhaps she can’t afford to, seeing as doing so would leave her fresh out of options.
You have only ever been yourself; You have only ever been as you are. You only ever known yourself as you are. You have only ever experienced this kind of existence.
So how would you even know if there’s anything ‘missing’, compared to what others experience?
It’s not like you can open yourself up and compare the contents with those of others.
Except… that’s not really true anymore, now is it? You’ve been making a habit of poking around in the ‘contents’ of others for quite some time now. You’ve actually got a pretty good idea now of what a typical mind tends to contain. You might know more about this than almost anyone else. It had certainly come in handy when you can’t easily ask follow-up questions.
You had tried out of curiosity once, to try hitting your own shade with your dream nail just to see what might happen. It turns out that it vanished at once, like every other imprint of lingering memory.
You thought it a rather nifty, practical discovery at first, but once you were safely back in one piece and got finished with giving a piece of your mind to whatever had gotten the better of you before, it occurred to you that there wasn’t really anything stopping you from taking the dream nail and attempting to slide the tip of it into your own arm, for example.
The most likely outcome still seemed to be that it simply wouldn’t work, or that you would just see the exact same things that you could already see through your physical eyes at that moment. Maybe you’d experience some sort of feedback reaction that might get overwhelming or confusing, though you think that Seer would have warned you if there was such an obvious stupid thing that one must absolutely avoid doing.
You’re not one for apprehension, most of the time. Usually, if something catches you attention, you go and investigate it. If you’re wondering about something, you try it, fiddling around by trial and error until you perhaps discover some sweet new trick…
But then, just this once, you hesitated.
What outcomes are there from this, if it works?
Possibility one: The plan might be off. At most, you might be able to buy time, as your sibling had, but you would be in agony, just as they are now.
That would just be kicking the can further down the road – which is part of why you had listened when Hornet implored you to consider looking for a different, more permanent solution.
Possibility two: ...well then. There wouldn’t really be a reason to fear knowing, now would there?
If the prospect filled you with unease, did that not collapse the notion under the weight of its own contradiction?
What is already dead should not be able to fear death any longer.
Yet you recall the mages from the Soul Sanctum, some of them raving about how they thought they could hear the voices of those whose souls they’d taken.
You thought of the animated husks shambling through the city above, and all the times you had been easily mistaken for one. You thought of the advanced machinery you’d seen at crystal peak, and the artificial sentries you’d fought on the way here. You contemplate the possibility that all those who seemed to have seen something else in you might just have been seeing what they were expecting to see, mistaking a reflection in running water for the presence of another.
Clearly, you were meant to follow instructions. To copy or imitate, at least, if you were to learn any kind of skill.
And you yourself had been on the loose for much, much longer than your father had ever intended for any of you to be.
You had thought of echoes, of mirror images and imitations, and so your hand ceased in what would otherwise have been a quick, decisive movement…. And decided, in the next instance, to leave that particular idea for later and pack up so that you could be on your way.
The White Lady can’t see you here, now, in the empty room she left behind, ages upon ages ago.
She can’t see you looking through the things, though you know well you’ll find no grand trump cards here, sifting with your grubby little fingers through embroidered blankets with floral motifs, carven toys and silver music boxes, wondering, for each item, who might have made it and if it ever had seen use.
You take some time there, just flipping the lid of the music box up and down.
Did your sibling ever hold this in their hands, long ago, back when the two of you would have been more similar in size?
Or was it thought that they would not have any use for it?
What if they weren’t interested in it? Had their parents been sad about that?
You don’t know about your sibling, but you’re pretty sure that you like music, at least to such an extent as you can. (You think wistfully of Marissa, and of Myla)
You don’t like this. You never used to wonder if your enjoyment of melodies ‘counted’. You just did. Of course, it wouldn’t be surprising if you never ever thought before about something important, in all the years you had lived through, through all the things you had seen, until someone prompted you to, if you weren’t really -
You wish you could shake off the idea as if it were a swarm of wind-blown seeds.
…
The next room is so suffused with dark that you are tempted to take out your lantern. This part of the palace is littered with fallen kingsmoulds that bleed a subtle darkness which seems to have had all the time in the world to fill out all the room.
This is, you think, the furthest state of disrepair and advanced time that you’ve seen in any of the rooms, and that distracts you long enough that you don’t immediately recognize what you’re approaching, why the sentries are so many, until you realize that the path is leading up to a large hall containing a raised dais, marked, like many things here, with a motif of sharp long spikes, that was present here in a superlative, as large, representative carvings, all of it centered on a high and narrow chair, itself covered in ornate carvings of sharp, hard shapes.
You’ve found the throne room.
And there, upon it is…
Honestly, you realize at once.
You’ve been a warrior long enough.
You notice that the long strings of his robe are in tatters, and that, though he still seems to be sitting up, his head is hanging off to the side at an odd angle.
And what of that luminosity that everybody spoke of, each time he was mentioned?
None of that is to be seen.
This room is dark.
Even so, you’ve been a warrior long enough, and that has taught you caution.
Your means for announcing yourself are limited, even your steps don’t make a sound, you remember being told. You don’t even breathe, nor do you have any warmth, or smell of anything.
It’s handy for passing unnoticed when this is what you desire, but right now the last thing you want is for some wrathful god to smite you into oblivion because he got it into his head that you’re trying to sneak up on him.
You could never honor Myla’s request to join in with her singing, but a few times, before… what happened, you managed a participation of sorts by tapping your nail onto the rocks below.
What you do now is a far cry from such a playful gesture, more of a pointed, rough sound, like rapping on a door or the firing of a parting shot.
It’s all the same, in the end, because no response ever comes.
Cautiously you wait, for a few utterly soundless moments.
Then you approach, nail held out before you.
No reaction.
It’s probably just as you thought.
For another moment you wait, keeping your weapon pointed to him at all times.
Then, you dare touch him, with your arm held out as far as you can.
He comes crumpling to the ground immediately, small bits and pieces flying, with a resounding dry cracking noise. Something glittering clatters across the floor beside him.
What used to be the shell of his face fractures and starts caving in on itself, shedding brittle fragments.
He’s been dead a long, long time.
You can’t help but note that he is much, much shorter than you imagined him, especially now that he lies in a sorry heap, the long strands of his robe spilled around him, covering only the curve of a rather small body. Whatever spark of divinity upheld his crown of sharp horns against the laws of physics is long gone, so now they lie where they stopped rolling, much too heavy for his neck and head. It always felt unreal to be compared to him, as if you were being likened to some long-lost figure of legend, or failing that, to a stranger you had much reason to resent.
But now that he lies before you in the dim, extinguished carapace whose inside is likely long bereft of flesh, it is simply an unspectacular statement of fact:
You actually do happen to resemble him very much in face and build, in fact, remarkably so, except that the lines of your face and horns all have a little something rounder to them, something just a little more like the bleached branches of a dead tree.
You must conclude that your elder sibling must get their imposing stature and fine, angular features all from the White Lady’s side of the equation, with only their severe countenance smacking distinctly of the king; They must have towered over him; that is, if they truly did look anything like the statues.
Though it occurs to you that what you share with your father might be clearer now in his death than it would have been if he alone were warm and breathing, as you had never been.
When you brandish your dream nail to probe for his last thought, it turns out to be exactly what you’d expect it to be, identical to the very first words you would have heard from him:
‘...no cost too great’.
Though his demise itself is obvious, it’s not too awfully clear what killed him – did he perish along with the construct that contains this dream? Did he keep experimenting with increasing desperation for some countermeasure against the Radiance until some reckless mishap dealt him a blow he could not recover from?
You don’t think it was a quick death. After all, he had the time to shuffle back to his throne, as if to cling to a familiar place. He may have been shuffling around here as the lone survivor for some time before he perished, all alone, surrounded only by the clanking of his automatons, the buzzing of his mechanism and the hard, sharp angles of his palace, before he finally expired with no one here to comfort him.
Most everybody who once loved him – most everybody whom he loved, had long since been spent like pawns upon a chessboard, or else, he could not bear to show himself for shame, utterly remote from all the world, knowing he could do nothing to succor the voices that cried out for him.
Wholly and utterly defeated, bested and humbled in every way, knowing his life’s work had crumbled all around him.
The Radiance didn’t even need to lay a hand on his family, or even on his closest friends; He had done all the work for her, and destroyed these with his very own claws. And he must have known it, too.
Whatever cause of death a healer, scholar or coroner may have attested here, within the heart of hearts that he never meant for you to have, it seems plain to you that this man has chiefly died of regret.
You still don’t know what he was trying to do here. With the King dead, you may never find out. He never got to finish it; Maybe it was a vain hope to begin with. But seeing as it destroyed him, it seems that even his own life was not a ‘cost’ that he would consider ‘too great’ in some doomed last-ditch attempt to find a way to save his kingdom.
At least, he wasn’t a hypocrite.
You have to grant him that one saving grace at last.
In a way, it would have been much easier it he had been.
Then you might have known what to think.
As it stands, the distant sight of his back is all you’ll ever have.
He’s long gone, so you cannot make him answer for his crimes, or press him for his reasons, nor will it do any good to wave any pointy sticks at him.
He cannot excuse himself, and he cannot apologize. He cannot be punished, nor can he redeem himself; He cannot humble himself before you, nor can he prove himself a villain with callous remarks or self-serving justifications.
He is just gone, simply no longer here.
His story is over with, concluded, left behind in the past, removed from his authorship as it is left for others to write.
You’ll never get to form your own opinion of him;
All you’ll ever have are discordant second-hand accounts.
Always you’ll be left wondering if he was a fool and a tyrant no different than the enemies he clashed with, or if he used to be worth the admiration of those who loved him.
Maybe it would have been neither, exactly, but simply just… somewhat like Hornet was, for example. Stern and serious and dutiful, and certainly some degree of ruthless, but also resourceful and resolute. Your certainly would have clashed and had your share of differences and contests of will, but not to an extent that you couldn’t have moved past it, and then maybe, in the end of it, he would have learned from you as well, and you might eventually have reason to possibly feel something good toward him.
But because he was gone, that was never going to happen.
He would always, always just be this distant glimpse of his back off in the distance –
And then, everything is silent.
The dream is empty.
The story is over.
There is nothing left but silence and vacancy, nothing left to do.
You can’t mourn him, for you never knew him, but you can’t really summon much spite either, having seen his pitiful end.
Acting on the first whim that comes to stir you from the dull emptiness that fills you, half-defiant, you jump on the throne.
You, of the wasteland, you of the wilds, you whom he had left for dead.
Bah! It’s your chair now.
It’s all, all yours.
He had his turn. He messed it all up.
But it hits you then, at once, inevitably, how sad that would actually be, to be the king of the ruins. The king of the ashes. The king of nothing but the endless falling rain.
There’s very little left to be King of.
And so you can’t quite bring yourself to relax, like you usually do on the benches.
Something compells you to sit up straight.
It’s a very important chair.
On a whim, you try to channel some of your magic to the faint glow of your mask; Not enough to expend significant amounts of soul, just enough to see if you can.
A faint halo of shine is exuded.
You don’t quite light up the room like he probably used to.
You’re a small droplet on a very long chair, and your feet don’t reach the floor.
Floating motes of darkness are mixed in with the light as you call it forth.
But you glimmer distinctly, within the darkness, like a little oasis.
He is gone, so he can’t tell you what he thinks.
You tire of this eventually, and jump off the throne altogether when you remember the shining thing on the ground. You reach for it, and your fingers touch a smooth surface.
What you are looking at might be the same as many other charms: A congealed, solidified dying wish, brought forth in final agony. Except it is not like all the others, because you were told to come looking for it. Its creation would need to have been somewhat more deliberate.
Did he resort to ripping out his own soul, in the end, when all else had failed?
You cannot say.
Despite all the reasons against it, it still perfectly fits the White Lady’s fragment, and both unite with a satisfying ‘click’, just before this entire fleeting dream disappears into brightness.
…
You reckon that whatever fail-safe master-plan your father was preparing when he met his end, if it even existed, there would have been one more ingredient required, if that charm of his is meant to be something that you would attune to yourself, that you would make your own so that you might do what was beyond him.
So you return to the lightless pit into which he cast you, back to the charnel-house that he made of it.
To the bottom of the world… and to the bottom of yourself.
This eggshell must be the one – you know it right away.
All the others you had seen along your way here still retained some hints of their natural pale color, tarnished though they may have been.
This thing, however, is completely black as pitch, absorbing all most all light, allowing nothing to penetrate or refract except for the very faintest glimmer of a vestigial mirror image.
This one is the most thoroughly tainted of all, barring a few that must have fallen to mush without ever being broken open from the inside. There are pulsing tendrils of shadow still attached to it, and yet it shows clear signs of having been opened, so that it must have contained at least one viable occupant.
At least two, once nestled together in the dark, before everything.
Banishing the last of your reluctance, you take your dream nail in hand, allowing its ethereal blade to spring to life.
Your reflection faces you with its dark, gaping eyes, ever so slightly distorted on the roundness of the surface.
A moment of silence elapses.
Then, you poke it.