the knight (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
focusedvoid) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
boxfullofzeroes2022-10-31 05:57 am
focusedvoid) wrote in boxfullofzeroes2022-10-31 05:57 am
voicetest the voiceless
They're not dead.
Less dead than they'd felt, at least. Their shell doesn't normally take so long to reform.
Then again. Their shell doesn't usually break of their own violation as they ascended in a boiling rage, ate at least one realm, a god, and all the Godseekers.
(That last point is debatable, actually. There's some odd sense, deep under their...shell? Void? Wherever they once stored things like Isma's Tear, much deeper now...that the sea-mind is still there, sluggish and held in a stasis. They're already adjusting enough, and they don't seem to be dying or trying to kill them, so that problem is neatly sorted as 'for later'.)
They push their body to stand. Their horn clangs uncomfortably loudly against the grate they've apparently woken up beneath. They're somewhere in the Royal Waterways. A quick check of the map--or, not so quick, as it takes time to locate where it had been--shows they've risen about halfway through, closer to the City of Tears than the White Palace. They'll go to the Stag Station in the City Storerooms next.
So they think. Complications arise on the way.
The Infection is gone, leaving dead Flukes, Pilflips, and Hwurmps in piles enough it takes time to force their way past. Their body seems too small. No, their body is fine--there's something wrong with perception itself. That will take time to adjust to.
Then, they discover the Monarch Wings now stretch and warp when used, twisting around the nearest pipes after landing before the Knight forcibly calls them back. Shade Wings, they decide to call these.
Once they're high enough to hear the rain above, they realize a noise they'd ascribed to water running in the distance is, in fact, something swirling behind their mask. Many somethings. All the fragments of Siblings with enough self left, staring out from their eyes. It's disconcerting.
By the time they actually get out of the Waterways, they're using their Shade Wings to grip ledges and drag themselves up, with those holding onto things better than their own arms are with the Mantis Claw.
The Knight faceplants awkwardly onto the floor of the building Lemm's shop is in. If the City is the same as below, there's little left to try killing them in the area.
They'll just take a moment here, thanks.
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The Knight hops up and lands right next to Seer, holding the paper up and out for her to take. They're not looking.
thank you but
i hopplease dont liepretend to make me feel better.They can't lift their head from staring at the floor.
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"Ah..."
It is a terrible shame she did not recognise what this was much sooner.
Seer lowers unevenly to her knees. She takes the paper, and in a slow motion, replaces it with her other hand in theirs. The note is taken under her wings and held - invisibly - to her heart.
Sometimes there is nothing for grief but to sit with it.
So she waits, still and solid, holding their paw, and stays. This is her answer, until the storm settles and they're ready to hear her put it to words.
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No movement. No breath. Nothing, but feeling her hand in theirs. They want to believe it. Their claws flex, after a long delay, to wrap around a pair of fingers. But she did this before. She held their paw and acted as though she understood and she still--
A few tendrils of Shade Wings are wrapping around her wrist.
The Knight jolts in horror and is gone.
They land, a flash of tendril-laden black, on the platform in front of the Spirits' Glade.
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The Knight is gone. And is not gone far. Yet.
What she has been taught has not worked. Has not worked before and does not work now. To sit with grief, to say the right thing, to be the Seer and the last...
Despite age and ache and a sudden loss of direction, Seer is more hurried than before when she pulls herself forward and up onto her feet again. There, on the platform. She felt them before she saw them. She always does.
She was never a Seer by accident. She became one because she saw that a Seer was needed, and it has been a long time since. But a Seer is not needed here.
Trembling, she comes to the edge, and stuffs down the guilt where it cannot interfere. She is the last. She decides what is needed. She decides - because there is no one else to witness, no one else to see - she decides what happens next.
"I asked you of your future," a Moth invites, a little ragged at the edges, rather lost. "I'd like to see it. Maybe you could tell me. I'd like to see it the way you do."
Last-ditch, as it goes.
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Naturally. Why would they.
They look down. Still small. Still the Knight, mostly in shape, if somewhat less in shadow. Still not the Knight she knew, before, as Wielder.
Still wanting to believe her.
Still panicking.
They don't want Seer to lie to them for past guilt or sins or fear. They stagger in place and turn around, staring across the gap with two Soul-pale eyes. If she's afraid, they want her to just admit it.
Heartache can make us so very selfish, Seer had said, but whose? Is it hers, for asking, or theirs, for refusing, for asking more?
But...but they, of all beings, of all people, can, can't they? Not as a Higher Being or a Wielder, but as someone who cares.
--She's talking. She's asking them, and they can't give anything back, even when they try and fail to force their Wings down to pretend they obey gravity, because they're trembling too hard to reach for a quill, and they don't know what to try writing anyway.
They fall to sitting again and, pathetically, hide their eyes under their darkness.
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She has lived her life in service of her tribe, and she has remained for more of the same. It has been such a very long time since she offered anything of herself instead. (Is there anything left?)
It is the shadow of the Knight that looks back at her, and the air is cold and strange and Seer gives a full-body shudder. And yet they curl in on themselves while she watches and she can feel it, dimly: the panic and the distress, clinging. Everything that belongs to the Lord of Shades and the Knight, all of a Higher Being folded inward and held so tightly in the grip of that panic.
They fled from her physically, but whatever is left of her beyond Seer has always been quite stubborn. Her antennae stiffen out a little, and suddenly:
Sitting on the periphery of the Knight's senses is a Moth. They do not need to look to know she is there, and they do not need to take out the Dream Nail to feel what she is thinking. She offers it all freely, brushed deliberately up against their own consciousness from a platform away.
She is cloaked in none of the guiding light of a Seer, like she had been when she led them from the hidden Dream; she is old and tired, and sensibly afraid of Higher Beings. Afraid of the Lord of Shades, still. Such things are difficult to dismiss right away. They should know the truth of her.
"I am tired of their guilt," she admits softly, another taboo broken without the ceremony it allegedly deserves. Her real voice echoes with her thoughts. "That's all, you see. I find myself very tired of it all... I would like something else, now." Something other than the weight of her tribe's history, and the Radiance.
She had been taught and told and had learned to think that to disappear and to take these things with her would be the correct next step. She had only her work, and the Wielder, and her finished duties, and the dead. What would she be without all of that, if she is not to disappear entirely? (But she won't. She can't, any more.)
Something else still, then.
Timidly, this thought is pushed at the Knight: she has forgotten how to picture a future with herself in it, but perhaps she would like to find out what one might look like. This is the best she can do. She doesn't know where to start.
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It's as they wrote. They would miss her. They miss the chances they never got. They regret--their own regret--not considering caring about who they lost as they lost them. It wraps around them, web and whirlpool more than maelstrom.
Despite this, Seer is not ignored. They're incapable of that. Her words spill through the air, and the emotion seeps into them. She could be hiding more, she could be pretending, she's better at this than they are. The fear, at least, is a level of honest they can believe.
Horns shift. They're nodding, hidden behind tendrils. They know. They know. It's hard. And she should be tired of their guilt. Their guilt is not hers.
Seer's better at this than they are, but they try, tentative, to send something back.
As they're now Dream and not only Void and Soul, they believe they can, and so they can. More delicate than passing thoughts between Siblings, murky and wordless, there first comes apology, for fear overpowering them into doing this rather than writing.
And, fully unintentional, the tangled vines of that fear clinging beneath: they trusted her and gave her words that they never give anyone, and she was only saying she believed those words, and they don't want to lose her to death or lie no matter how one would be preferable over the other.
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It is cut off abruptly before she is even done with the thought - she is knee-deep in their fear and the helplessness of it and her head spins with the harm she has done -
Seer fights not to withdraw. With a dizzied noise she steps back, physically, away from the edge. She begins the daunting but necessary task of walking through the tangle with them.
Bared for them: guilt, yes, but hers. So much smaller than the weight of a whole Tribe, but sharp and earnest and no less heavy. She should never have asked. Should never have been so careless as to wish them to be seen without understanding what she herself would see if she had only looked properly. If she hadn't been wrapped in her own troubles and made selfish by them.
Fear too that this would be the end of whatever was between them, if she is not to disappear (and she won't) - fear to have wasted such a chance. That the Knight's memory of her (and it will remain, she understands, they will remember her) - will be painful. That they would part and she would leave them with pain. Sickening, for a healer to do such harm. This is theirs to know, not for her own conscience - but for the Knight, in the hopes they might be able to mend.
And the prickle of something kinder. That she had asked the Knight of their future and - without her realising, foolishly - they had apparently pictured her in it somewhere. It is something like comfort, and like wanting, faintly, to be known. Like wanting to see what place they might assign her in the life they're picturing.
She believes them, she understands - she needs them to know she understands, so that they can believe her.
"I am sorry, Knight," she weakly vows. "Terribly so." She will stay.
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And it does. Her guilt, hers alone. Her fear, that isn't only fear of displeasing a Higher Being and King, but that she--her action did irreparable damage.
In turn, hope rises in faltering bubbles.
They absorb all this and hold it tight.
A fountain overflows. Relief rushes to her, and gratefulness, buoyed on a firm platform of satisfaction: knowing that she knows now, in full, why they were so agonizingly hurt. Not a lie, not pretending. Genuine understanding.
Their body fades until recognizably theirs again, Shade Wings clinging to their sides, the link still cautiously held open as they slowly stand again.
They're still hurt. They set that forward, matter-of-factly. They will stay hurt. It's not easy to heal that. But hurts don't necessarily stay forever, and she is not the first to do so, even if this struck a weak point they didn't know they had.
And Seer understands. That's enough, now, for their fear of repeating this blow to lessen considerably.
Realizing a future can be had is difficult. (Put forth for examination, mostly intentionally: wandering the Wastes with nothing but a Nail to their name, no hope, no goal, nothing but existing, dully, and no expectation for this to change.) They don't have a place for her. She is not theirs to put where they please, but they'd help. They will. She isn't the only of Hallownest to be building something new.
(Images, feelings, accidental: the Nailsmith's back to them, full of awe and waiting for their suddenly-heavy blade; Lemm, admitting he never expected himself to be anything but witness to other stories he could never be in; the Nailsmith, warm and pleased and learning at Sheo's side; Lemm, earnestly explaining things they don't understand at all, but listen anyway. Myla, alive. Myla, alive. Dirtmouth growing from nothing to something again. Realizing that they're a part of it too when honest affection and appreciation is aimed at them, stunning and terrifying and joyful.)
No matter how the residual hurt stays, they're grateful, they make a point to impress upon her. Grateful she's listening now. So, so grateful she's still here, and her apology is accepted.
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Yes. Yes, they are still hurt. She expects so. She accepts this with ease and some measure of grace. This she expected. They did not have to tell her so.
Nothing but existing - she does not share hers, by choice. No need to re-tell what they already know of her. But their will to build something with her, anything - it kindles, again, the faint-because-it-is-new feeling that she would like to try. That she shares with them.
The rest -
- the rest is not hers to know, it's other people's stories and perhaps the Knight should not have shared, but she cannot look away from them, cannot bear to close herself off to be polite to their lives when there is so much that comes along with it.
It brings hope, mostly, strange and alien as that is. And the Knight's feelings on all of it, in a rush that leaves her lightheaded. Their hope too. It is intoxicating.
Seer's antennae start to flag. She is exhausted suddenly, after channeling such depth and intensity after so long without practice. She dimly keeps her presence open, just long enough for them to run out of steam. (Grateful. Huh. And oh, she hadn't expected her apology to be accepted, they hadn't had to...)
She wants them to know that whatever future they build will be kind. With the bonds they shared she is confident in this much.
...And then she sags further, antennae allowed to settle properly, and the essence of her dims from the Knight's sense.
She's quiet a time.
"Forgive me," she murmurs, dazed and swaying slightly, "but I believe I should go and sit down."
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The hope is responded in kind, and with soft, cautious happiness. They're glad they could give her this. They're glad that kindness is not an idea that will hold a sting as benevolence will continue for a time.
But suddenly her presence is fading, confusion-concern-alarm lancing through the rest, and the last bit of the lingering connection is swiftly cut.
(As far as they know. There's something left, now, Lord of Shades as they don't care to be, but at their desire, it goes dormant.)
No time to dither when it seems Seer might tip over. They flutter and Dash back across the gap to offer their support, holding up both arms--dropping them--raising them again, for better stability to lean onto. If she chooses.
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...Though now it is what comes after, the dull, deep tired that floods in. And it is never such a bad thing.
Seer has already turned to walk the short distance back inside, but she makes it only a couple of steps before dizziness catches at her and makes her veer unpleasantly to one side. Her hand snaps out, pushing her wing out with it, and what results is that her hand grasps unsteadily at a very small paw, unwittingly leaning most of her (light) weight on that for a second as her wing is carried around the Knight's back like a curtain with the motion.
"Aah..." She draws herself steady again, though she does not let go, just loosens her grip a bit. Her hand trembles, still. "Thank you! I am not the Moth I was..."
(A thought occurs, small though it is. She will sit on it a while.) She keeps moving.
"Will you sit with me for a moment? I won't keep you..."
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They hastily nod at her request. There seems to be no particular fear in her, but now they're worried, again, that they've done something dangerous to make her feel like this. They'd rather stay to make sure.
Carefully, they help her settle down, and bow to the presences they sense nearby before sitting down as well. Across from her. Somewhat closer than the last time, with a blank paper whisked out and dropped onto the floor, claws pressing down into their knees.
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When she is settled in her usual place, wing falling away from the Knight as they come away, the larger guest checks through the curtain and receives a polite dismissal and a wave-off (and the Knight's bow) for their trouble. And Seer gives a weary, cleansing sigh.
She gathers her thoughts from wherever they've drifted. It takes her a moment.
"You have many titles... There is the one you prefer, would that be right?"
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Yes. The Knight. But I hold no objections to Wielder, or other names, so long as it's understood that is not all I am.
Or not too insulting. (-Teasing.)
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The little addition of levity is met with a curious head-tilt, and then: "Aah. Nothing so brash." Amusement toys with her tone for a moment. Yes, very good.
But:
"You are the Knight," she concludes, careful and slow, and watches them for signs of displeasure. "To me, you have been the Wielder. I have grown used to it, through no input of yours. Except now."
Seer slips their letter from her wings, and sets it between them. Your Wielder, it says.
"The title I gave you was given by my Tribe... Ah, but it is only us, now. The Dream Nail is yours, and I am proud to have passed it to you. I would like that the title became ours, as well. Perhaps a shift..."
Not Wielder as foretold by anyone else, but Wielder as what they have shared? History and guilt need not account.
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Your Wielder. Hers. What she called them before any Higher Being's title. It was written on impulse alone. Hindsight clarifies their own thoughts: another request to see them.
I believe I would like that. If you continue to be comfortable with it yourself. They hadn't felt the connection it was meant to have. Perhaps that's thoughtless of them, but it's still the truth. It was always a gift from Seer. A gift and a guide.
For a single moment, they glance at their letter again.
To Seer:
To Seer. The Seer? They are the Knight, and they are the Wielder, and they are the Ghost and more. Titles, chosen and not. The ones unchosen rarely hurt them. They know what they are. They decided who and what they were long before they knew the whole of it.
They recall wondering after her. And the Nailsmith; he can't just be named the Nailsmith. They were going to ask his, next time they visited. And Seer is a title, isn't it...?
Do you havDo you lIs Seer what you wish to be called?no subject
Yours, as the signing of a letter. Hers because they are the one she knows. Pleasant, and friendly.
"I would like that very much."
Despite how exhausted she feels, a wisp of happiness curls in her chest. Things can be put right. It will take time, as with all hurt, but they can.
At the Knight's question, Seer gives a small, pleased hum.
"It is what I am," she points out. "It is certainly more convenient than Belladonna Beneath The Mountain." There is a pinch of good humour there at the length of it. "You may take your pick, though..."
To have it known. That is perhaps a step in... some direction. Forwards.
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That...is a long name. It could be frustrating to write often. 'Frustrating' is hardly impossible, and they have plenty of ink and paper.
Their quill drifts over a new line for a moment before they return to the previous words, underlining the you. Her desire is important. More than what she thinks the Knight might want.
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She thinks about it.
And. Thinks about it. She may have avoided specifying on purpose.
"...Mm." Troubling - because she doesn't know.
It's been a long time since she even heard that name. Whether it will sound - will read familiar any more, or whether she will prefer it to Seer, is up in the air.
"We shall see if that old cloak still fits!" she decides eventually. "But," and her eyes glitter conspiratorially here, "perhaps I'll leave the particulars to your imagination, Wielder. There is no hurry to settle."
A compromise. She chooses her name over Seer, at least between them, and at least for now. The Knight can play with it until something clicks. It is, after all, quite a handful.
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Belladonna Beneath The Mountain.
Belladonna is an elegant plant with fitting purple flowers. I believe. If I'm recalling correctly.
It is also incredibly toxic, and they abort their habitual fact-listing before they can say as much. Although that's why they know what it is, and to never cook with it. They don't think that's quite as fitting.
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"Ah, elegant and fitting, how generous of you to say. It's also related to tomatoes," Seer - Belladonna Beneath The Mountain - meaningfully tacks on the end. She knows where that was really going, and she's amused they cut off.
"None grows here that I've seen, of course. Another thing passed down from who knows how long ago. I don't mind it."
She sticks out a hand expectantly.
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Hallownest has unique plant life.
Seer--Belladonna's hand gets a blank look, before they slowly lift their paw to settle against it. Handshake? Are they overstaying their welcome?
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"That it does. If only it would grow less on the monuments and more where it belonged."
She does go in for a handshake, and her weariness is evident by the shakiness of it. But when one would normally pull away, she adjusts her grip to wrap the Knight's paw in her hand and gently hold it up between them.
"I am sorry that I led it to happen quite this way." A light squeeze. "But it is a pleasure to properly meet you, Knight, and Lord of Shades."
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Ah.
The sentiment is shared. They bow their head further and squeeze back.
I wasn't expecting giving my letter to turn out so well, they admit after pulling away. I am glad it did.
But you seem tired. I'll visit again later. if you like.
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