Chapter Text
0 Days Until Hallownest Is Doomed
Blue Lake is as beautiful as ever, Quirrel thinks as he sinks to the bottom.
He had a good run. He adventured to his heart’s content, studied each and every thing he came across, and found his way back home to help Hallownest heal its incurable wound. Whatever came next was not his problem, and frankly he could not care less. He did his part. His mission was over. Monomon was gone, and he had literally nothing else to live for besides her presence.
Which was no longer here, obviously.
And so, as Quirrel continues his watery descent into Blue Lake, he thinks of all that he loves in life and how he will hardly miss it once he is dead, mostly because there is nothing left in his life to even love. His memories— gone. His research— demolished. Every single bug he had ever known and his home, in its entirety— just absolutely destroyed. What point was there to keep on keeping on if instead he could just enjoy this last bit of serenity, this final inhale, of perfect, serene beauty?
Trick question. There was none. Hence, this.
A death by his own claw seemed much more appealing than simply waiting out his aging body’s gradual death. With the disappearance of Monomon’s mask, he’s since felt the slow ache of time lapping over his body— and, by the gods, he does not want to deal with creaky knees and a pained back. This is definitely the better choice, he lies to himself.
He closes his eyes.
3 Days Until Hallownest Is Doomed
Quirrel opens his eyes.
He’s not really sure what he expected when death finally caught up to him in Blue Lake, but it definitely wasn’t the sight of the Howling Cliffs. Whenever bugs spoke about death— even fleeting remembrances of it— they would mention a sensation of coming home, like being wrapped in a warm blanket and carried through the door to their old bedroom. The smells, the surroundings, it was all a homecoming that was long-awaited and long-desired after an arduous life.
This definitely isn’t that. He’s pretty sure that his homecoming was supposed to be a little closer to Fog Canyon, joined by Monomon’s presence; he was also certainly meant to be at his desk with all his books, and a full inkwell. Currently, all he has is her mask and his nail at his side. The cold wind yowls around him, and he longs for the warmth of Blue Lake’s temperate waters again.
Well, no matter. He’s dead, so whatever is happening right now has no real consequences. His non-existent mind must be playing tricks on him, and so he simply follows the path back to Hallownest. Maybe this is meant to be some sort of see-your-life-flash-before-your-eyes thing before he officially passes on from this mortal plane. If it is, it is an exceedingly long flash. Quirrel thought they were only supposed to last a second or two, at most.
The road winds. Quirrel walks. It is all very boring, and he doesn’t care to repeat any of the details he’s seen already. The Howling Cliffs, in general, are grey and drab— cold, even with some kind of coat— and so it hardly bears mentioning even once, the appearance and atmosphere of this far-flung place.
He reaches the bottom, the mouth right before King’s Pass, when he hears a familiar voice ring out through the canyon. The rocky walls surround him and it echoes violently against the stone. It’s hard not to recognize that voice, as pitchy as it is.
“So, you’d seek sacred Hallownest?”
Quirrel looks up to see Hornet. She looks just as he last saw her, dressed in that blood-red cloak of hers and bearing a shining needle of Hivesteel quality.
He says, “I did not think that you would be my guide to the land of the dead.” Because it’s true. Why, of all bugs, did his mind conjure Hornet? They have only spoken once, as far as he knows. She is just some stranger from a land that should be just as so. Her initial accosting of him aside, of course.
She cocks her head, clearly confused. Undeterred, she continues, “Turn back, simple bug. This place is a corpse. It will grant only death. As will I, to those who seek to desecrate it.”
It takes Quirrel approximately five seconds to realize that she’s said this to him before. Odds are, it’s his stubborn brain conjuring up their past conversation. Since they’ve had little to no contact with one another, it only makes sense that his mind would spit out whatever he’s heard from her already; it’s probably too busy losing oxygen to accurately represent Hornet outside of what he’s previously experienced.
Jokingly, Quirrel quips, “And if I have already been within its borders? What then, good hunter?”
That may have been the wrong answer. Hornet narrows her eyes and lowers her stance, just like she did back when they first met. Quirrel is suddenly not quite sure if this is what is meant to be happening to him right before he dies— or is already dead. A fight, really?
“Hallownest has already suffered enough like you,” she hisses.
The fight unravels just like it did the first time. Hornet strikes, and Quirrel parries. He sees every hit coming and yet he cannot stop her onslaught of attacks, precise and quick as they are. His neck bends when her needle clangs against Monomon’s mask. Why, oh why, would his mind conjure such a thing attached to his head once more? Should he not be free of any worldly possessions as he crosses that border onto the dreamless path of death?
The mask sparks and Hornet rallies back. Realization settles in her eyes when she sees it alight with Monomon’s protection. Something in Quirrel’s chest cracks just as Hornet hefts her needle against her.
“Something else calls you here, simple bug,” she says before bending at the knee. She’s poised to jump and leap away. “Seek your wonders. But know you may find someone waiting.”
And then she leaves on a strand of silk. She flies high through the Howling Cliffs, wind whipping around her in a cyclone of speed. Quirrel lifts the mask up from where it was pushed against his forehead and watches as she disappears into a fine blur of red and white and black.
“Yes,” he says, perhaps to her, perhaps to himself. “I know.”
Quirrel isn’t quite sure what to make of the encounter. For one, it’s quite clear that she had no idea that he had died recently. And another, she had repeated the exact same things she had said not long ago during his returnal to Hallownest. That, and her fighting was the same— so exact that Quirrel could predict her next move, even though he was too busy reeling at the entire situation to react accordingly.
It was like he was reliving the entire moment, second by second.
Quirrel wants to brush it off. Dismiss it as a quirk of death, of the mind’s last breaths as it attempts to make sense of the dizzying dregs of water filling one’s system and pulling them completely under. But Quirrel is nothing if not a researcher— a wonderer— and he cannot help but wonder why this is all happening.
It could be as simple as death playing his life’s best moments before his eyes, as he previously thought. But he truly doubts that a walk through the Howling Cliffs and a one-off fight with Hornet constitutes as such.
In spite of a roiling gut feeling— a gut feeling that tells him that this is wrong, this is incorrect, and that he’s missing some vital piece of a puzzle that won’t ever be complete without it, he continues his trek forward. He ignores the signs that something is amiss and finds his way to King’s Pass, enters Dirtmouth, and hops down the well.
But once he gets down there, he realizes that he doesn’t know where to go next. The Howling Cliffs and King’s Pass and Dirtmouth were easy enough to figure out— these paths were straight shots that led him into the well’s hole. And yet now that he’s down here, these roads that he’s crossed many a time, he’s unsure of what his next direction should be.
The Forgotten Crossroads stretch. Lean. Reach forward and back, up and down.
Death has been awfully late on providing him with some kind of guide. Not that that has ever been confirmed from any kind of brush-with-death report, and not that it was ever easily confirmed (mostly because the dead can’t speak, although you don’t need to hear that from a scholar to know such a fact), but most usually suspected that there would be a kind of entrance to the afterlife which provided some form of, “Hey, here’s where you go next.”
Quirrel included.
He ultimately decides to go to the Black Egg Temple, if just to study it for a moment more. He was not there to ever witness its opening, even after his dissolved memories slowly regained their shapes in his mind. He was there for Monomon’s seal to break, and that was good enough for him. It had to be.
And so here he stands, pondering her elegant visage once more. Her empty eyes bore holes through him as he stares into her. Quirrel can’t shake the feeling that they’re tracking him as he steps around the temple. He tries taking a step to the side and swears to all the gods that they’ve moving.
Or maybe he’s just losing it. It’s probably that. Wait— can dead bugs, quote unquote, ‘lose it’?
He doesn’t get to finish that thought when the sound of clinking feet against the cold stone ground awake him from his mulling. Turning, he sees the small knight he had formed a quiet friendship with during his time alive. They do not have a name. Quirrel has taken to simply calling them the knight.
The knight looks up at the temple. They did this before, too, not long after Quirrel’s initial arrival into the Forgotten Crossroads all that time ago. A sneaking dread is beginning to climb his shell, a whisper that tells him that this is no mere coincidence. He lets the feeling roll off of him like water droplets.
“Hello!” he greets.
The knight nods.
Silence. The knight turns to look up at the temple once again and Quirrel feels like maybe, just maybe, he’s mucked something up. The first time they met, he said something else… something guiding, perhaps. A greeting that had more to it than just a simple hello.
But, should the knight not remember him? Then again, Hornet did not, and she does not seem like the type to forget anything. Perhaps the afterlife is telling him to go through the motions again, to solidify whatever he did while living. It is not a very good hypothesis, but there is minuscule evidence to consider anything else as a potential conclusion.
Monomon would flay him for such a paltry study. Well, no. She wouldn’t flay him per se, but she would definitely be extremely disappointed, which Quirrel once considered a fate worse than death. Now that he’s dead, he can confidently say that he’d rather be that way as opposed to facing his Teacher’s sad, downturned expression.
In the end, he tries to repeat as best he can the things he first said to the knight. The knight nods along to everything Quirrel spills from his mouth, from his name to his reason to being in Hallownest to the mystery of the Black Egg Temple. For some reason, he’s unable to tell the little knight about how Monomon’s seal can be broken, his mouth twisting in on itself as if it fears its own betrayal.
Is it some invisible force stopping him? Or is it his own cowardice?
That will remain as much as a mystery as this entire situation because the knight just nods again when Quirrel finally manages to stop himself from talking his throat dry. After the knight gets their fill of information, they stride out of the Black Egg Temple’s entrance as they swing their nail wildly at nothing. Quirrel remembers them doing that, too. He thought it was strange yet terribly memorable at the time. He thinks that again.
This— no. He stops his mind from spiralling further forward. Whatever he imagines is happening can be easily explained by the illogicalness of the afterlife, of death, of whatever in the gods’ names happens when one finally perishes. The funny thing about dying is that you don’t actually know what’s going to happen afterward.
Thus, this could all just be normal. Regular. Completely logical within the realm of un-life.
Riiiiiiiight.
2 Days Until Hallownest Is Doomed
Quirrel has spent this entire day doing nothing. Oh, sure, he pops up in places that he suspects the knight will be and dispenses that ever-needed wisdom to the strange fellow, but he otherwise twiddles his thumbs when not needed. He feels a bit like a set-piece, waiting for his cue to walk on stage.
It isn’t until he runs into the knight while in the hot springs that Quirrel thinks what a terrible afterlife this is. Is he truly doomed to play the guide to the knight while he awaits his own guide? Or maybe this is what the afterlife is meant to be— just a drab series of repeated events until one drives themselves to jump back into the lake they once threw themselves into, if just to feel something other than complete apathy?
He ends up spending the entire day sitting in the springs.
This, at least, isn’t so bad.
1 Day Until Hallownest Is Doomed
Quirrel is bored. He spends most of the hours sleeping and whiles his time awake by testing out his nail on random stones. He’s pretty sure he chips the blade fairly badly after an ill-timed strike, but he doesn’t care.
The afterlife is quite boring, he realizes.
0 Days Until Hallownest Is Doomed
Nearly three days have passed since Quirrel died and he’s getting fed up with doing nothing. His claws itch to do something— anything— and it’s only then that he finally picks himself up and hauls his pathetic self to the Archives.
He’s been avoiding it like the damn Infection itself, he’ll admit. He’s steered clear of Fog Canyon entirely in order to not let old, burning memories bubble back up in his mind when he specifically came to the afterlife to be rid of them. And yet here he is again, walking through Hallownest while his jaw can’t stop clattering out of nervousness, fear, anticipation, and some fourth unnameable emotion that probably doesn’t exist yet. Quirrel is creating it as he strides forth on trembling legs, nail shaking in his tenuous grip.
The knight shows up not long after Quirrel finds himself standing before the Archives’ entrance. He puts on a brave, curious face for them before they both walk into its open mouth. It swallows them whole, but Quirrel guesses that only one of them is feeling a wrenching existential dread inside the stomach of the Archives.
They fight Uumuu, put down the jellies and avoid the explosions along the way. The knight finishes the fight quickly enough and then patters off deeper into the steel building. They don’t seem to care that Quirrel is still catching his breath— not from exertion, but because he’s trying his best not to freak out inside the one place that he had felt like a real, living being. A place of belonging, now left destitute in a dead kingdom.
He manages to calm himself down enough to follow the knight to where Monomon rests in her tank. Her water is a pale green, tinted just so in the dim light. Quirrel takes a knee and removes the mask from his head. He feels bare, almost naked, without it.
“To save Hallownest, the Teacher willingly became a seal, but upon herself she enacted an additional protection,” Quirrel says. The mask in his claws pulses with light. It is as if it is begging to be returned to its original owner, that graceful Madam who strove always to be kind. So kind that she would seal herself into an eternal sleep. So kind that she did not consider all the foolish downsides to her plan, all crumbling to folly not of her own making.
That was the thing about experiments. At some point, there was no turning back when things went wrong, no matter if the mistake was yours or someone else’s. And Monomon had begun one that would detonate not only in her own heart, but Quirrel’s, too.
The knight holds a strange weapon in their clutches. Quirrel has seen it once before, back when they did this whole song and dance for the first time. Above the hilt sits a circular, decorative piece with symmetrical lines fanning out from its centre. It is hard to forget such a weapon, especially considering that it has no blade protruding from it. Nonetheless, Quirrel knows it is some kind of tool or implement— most likely used to unlock the secrets of dreams. He’s seen it in action before, and he will see it again.
He continues, jaw grinding, “Do not hesitate. The choice to reform was hers, not mine.”
And so the knight does not hesitate any longer. Quirrel allows for the mask to fizzle out in his claws and the knight slashes with all their might at Monomon’s tank.
Nothing happens.
Until something happens.
Monomon is gone but for the whisper of her in the air, the knight looking mighty satisfied with themselves before they catch a glimpse of Quirrel’s quietly cracking facade. For a moment, it looks like they are trying to say something, before they begin jumping up-and-down.
Despite the weighing sadness, Quirrel laughs. He laughs because his little friend knows that they have done a deed that Quirrel would never wish to see done, and they are trying to cheer him up. Their cloak flutters and flies with each small leap.
Quirrel smiles and tells them, “Be on your journey then, and allow me rest for a time. With the deed complete, I begin to feel my age.”
The knight leaves, and the Archives are empty but for Quirrel.
He makes his way to Blue Lake in a daze. How he gets there, he has not a single whit. Odds are that he stumbled his way through Hallownest and to the lake out of instinct, not truly thinking of where he was going except for the fact that he was putting one foot in front of the other. That he managed to get there without tripping was a miracle, honestly.
He sits at the lakeside for an indeterminable amount of time. Part of him wants to wonder why all of this is happening, but the ennui has set in and there’s not much he can (or wants) to do about that. Instead, he sighs and lets his chin sit on his knees, balled up to his chest. His head feels awfully light without the pressure of Monomon’s mask.
Later, after the knight visits and Quirrel gives them his spiel, they leave. It’s not as gut-wrenching as the first time it happened when Quirrel had decided that he was going to meet Monomon again, but it still hurts to see them go with that small wave of their claw.
This isn’t real, Quirrel reminds himself. He’s dead. This is the afterlife. Nothing here is as it was in the waking world— it’s all just made-up, compartmentalized in his head.
He may as well complete the story. Planting his nail into the hard gravel, he wades into Blue Lake and lets the lapping waves take him under, under, and under.
When he surfaces, still living in this stupid afterlife, he’ll be sure to have a good laugh and a cry and scream until he can’t breathe any longer.
He closes his eyes.
3 Days Until Hallownest Is Doomed
Quirrel opens his eyes.