go in the dark.

[baelfyr]

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[baelfyr]

Pale life spirals up every wall and every corner, budding and tangling, hanging from overhead, pushing up from the gaps, choking out the outside. Private, as all walled gardens should be.

"Late is your invitation," says the White Lady, all around and yet politely still withheld. Even this, the form she takes in her dreams, is not the extent of herself.

"Any kingdomfall takes patience," says Grimm, and takes a bow. A light breeze ruffles the flare of his cloak. It is pleasantly lonely here, and the strange space echoes with the shifting of the wind. "Time and I are old friends. It is a flattery the Lady would invite us at all."

"Mistake not my invitation for a welcome," the White Lady warns. Her tone is impersonal. "Beneath the cracks in this kingdom a darkness has grown."

"A funeral flame often casts a long shadow."

Grimm is not surprised by this revelation, and it seems the White Lady did not expect him to be.

Slowly, Grimm turns to face her. "This invitation comes with a caveat," he guesses. A pause, and his flame-red eyes narrow. "You wish for our interference?"

The air tastes of grit and smells of burning. Not befitting of a dream of the White Lady, he begins to realise, but the realisation is unhurried. No: sluggish, the Nightmare whispers to him.

He cannot make out her face, bright as it is with her Essence only barely withheld.

"A wish, no. Your benefaction I will require nonetheless."

The sound of the wind is subtly wrong. Not shifting wind at all: the shifting of roots nearby and around, whispering softly with pale light. Grimm takes a step back, and his foot hits something cool.

"I bound myself in penance and prevention. Perhaps it is too for these virtues I act now."

The breeze in his cloak, then, was no breeze either. The Root tangles, a snare pulling tight around his limbs. At once Grimm sobers and with a twinge of dread realises his mistake: this is not the dream of the White Lady. The scarce scenery not yet choked by plant life is tinged red and cloaked in fabric. He looks up.

The Heart hangs overhead, disappearing into an impossible knot of glowing white Roots, pulsing in rage.

How did he not realise?

Grimm flickers out like a candle flame and ignites to the side -

- no, he does no such thing. Icy Root coils tighter about him, burning-cold, branded (now he realises) with patterns he could not make out amid the glow of her. Grimm goes nowhere. The Heart seizes. He cannot move, cannot breathe, cannot think, sluggish, because her Essence breathes in like a sopor, because she was here long before you knew - when did she get here? Think! - demands the Ringmaster.

Not here. Bound like him, but deeper, bound like the Heart...

There is no way of telling when the White Lady invited herself to his dreams, because she has made him forget.

"What have you done?" he asks sharply, before there is a sharpness in his mind where she is reaching in.

"The embers will not mourn their reaper," the White Lady reassures him. "The purpose to which you are turned is that of the future. A purpose you value, even: Burn the father. Inside and amid the rest of you I see that much very clearly." She is rummaging, looking for something. This is not her domain, and she is clumsy with inaction.

"Let me go!" he demands, voice hoarser than ever, agonised and straining against her entrapment. "You have no understanding -"

"Still yourself and I will have enough." Hunting, splitting his mind apart - there. The knowledge of his disappearing act, excised and held to her pale glow and examined, plucked at like the string of some instrument until fire reflexively licks back. "A gift to pacify, given for Hallownest to scion grafted. You will doubtless be pleased with such a fate."

The flame is tested again, and finally the White Lady lances even that with ice - reflex tears him from Dream, tears a gate, and pours the Essence of him down. Into the dark.

"Goodbye, Nightmare. Your gift marks a courtesy I will not forget."

Grimm bursts from a teleport he did not willingly initiate, and falls to the cold metal floor in a putter of burnt-out fire. The bindings around him are yet burning-cold, but now severed from their Lady they dim into dead, ashen grey, the blinding white markings searing themselves dark.

Grimm lies limp and cold and still in a place far from the Troupe and the Nightmare stage.

Most strangely, he does not Dream.