Consequences || Chapter 01: When I Meet Death
Title: 01 - When I Meet Death Rating: M Characters: Grimm, The Pale King Warnings: Disturbing Content, Horror, Gore, Unreliable Narrator, Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Read On Ao3: Beginning || Current Chapter
Summary:
Nothing consumed by the void truly dies. Not even the fallen king of Hallownest.
Author’s Notes: This fic has a LOT of warnings that it needs, but in truth, a lot of them are also spoilers. I don't want to spoil it so I will just warn you that it has some of the most graphic things I've ever written, on top of which it is best classified as a horror hurt-no-comfort. If you're squeamish, don't read. Please.
Also, this fic is only 10 chapters long. So if you're someone who is scared of committing to one of my longfics, lmao, surprise, this one's multipart but not terribly long.
CHAPTER 01: WHEN I MEET DEATH
For some, the endless night came with a kind of peace. A people once revered it as the still calm of death: a sea that stretched on unto eternity, where the beginning and the end could be found. That ancient civilization had regarded the ancient force they shared space with as an inevitable, but welcome friend, and they’d gone into its sweet embrace at the end of their days with no hesitation at all.
But the Pale King’s heart was heavy, and he was not so blessed. For him, that infinite black was not still at all. It was tumultuous, a storm threatening to devour all, and he’d known – he’d always known – that what awaited him was anything but peace.
When the shadows rose from the abyss, creeping through the dream of the White Palace, staining marble with shifting void, he’d accepted his fate with as much dignity and grace as someone in his position could be expected to.
He’d screamed, cried, and tried to beg, and it was all for naught.
The void claimed what it was owed: his heart, his mind, his life.
And demanded so much more.
What should have been still, should have been a vast reservoir of empty nothing, was instead full of souls and they cried out for retribution.
The void did not offer him death, for death would have been a mercy.
The void did not offer him peace, for he had not yet earned it.
And within that maelstrom of power, of hunger and rage, of glowing white eyes filled with disappointment and betrayal, with pain that he’d put there, he learned the cost of regret. The anchor of his mistakes pulled him down, crushed him beneath their fury. Words echoed, cacophonous, everyone and no one at once, and he could say and do nothing to stop it.
Nothing within the swirling tempest was dead. Nor was it alive. They existed instead in a state somewhere between, locked in the moment of a memory that replayed itself over and over again, whispers of ‘Father?...’ like a mantra between screams. Horrible, resonant screams and the void made sure that he heard every single one.
In that place of darkness, what need had anyone for a light? He was without worth.
As he’d always been, really.
A king whose resolution had been to sacrifice everything on a hope and a dream – against hope and against dreams. What folly.
He saw their eyes. Hundreds of white, burning eyes that stared through him with a luminescence that rivaled his own, starlight winking in the shadows and full, so full, of promise, of demands.
What good to scream?
What good to plead, to beg?
Had it ever done anyone any good?
Hallownest would live on and so would he.
Nothing the void claimed had ever truly died. It might have changed hands. It might have changed forms. But memory was an eternal thing, and the void would never forget that which it touched, that which it birthed, that which it had claimed before any other false idols had wandered into its lands.
And compared to that primordial force, he was a false idol. So was she. They both were.
He fell and the distance was endless. There was no ground to break himself upon, no surface for his wings to catch. There was only the expanse, fathomless.
If a black hole existed, it was surely this: memories replaying around him, his voice and others, scenes like a vision most terrible, and the screams. Always the screams.
Those haunting starlight eyes were a beacon by which to guide himself, but he controlled not where he went. He could turn. He could flip himself upside down, as if he might see where he was destined to land – except that there was nothing to see. There would never be anything to see again.
Until there was.
Another glint of white, the flash of steel, and an uneasy bleeding of red. Disoriented, the Pale King turned over and held one claw out toward the difference, the color amidst the monochrome that had painted his world.
He reached out and he was met with claws that seized around his wrist. They moored him, snatched him from where he was drifting, and then a face leaned terribly close to his, breath licking his shell like flames. His heart raced while ice flowed through him, freezing the air in his lungs like needlepoints, icicles forming inside of him in an attempt to jut outward. He’d been afraid before. Recognition of the figure that caught him did little to assist with that.
“My, my.”
Scarlet horns and a cheshire smile that knew too much. Confusion settled at the back of the wyrm’s throat, stole away his words, and he gazed up at the floating figure that had caught him on his descent.
The counterpart to the blazing light of morning. The ruler of the other half of the realm of dreams.
The Nightmare King.
“What a sorry, pathetic state I find you in.”
All around him, those glowing white eyes turned, and the voices joined in unison to repeat one word: Grimm. The confusion of the Pale King intensified as the shadows laid over one another in a discordant melody. Grimm. Grimm. Grimm.
How did they know his name, the wyrm would have asked, but when he tried to speak, he found himself with no words.
That was a fitting punishment, perhaps.
He’d denied his children the ability to cry out their agony, to prevent himself from ever having to hear them weep – and they’d still found a way to scream. The Hollow Knight had screamed in agony before their death, and it was only a matter of time before their successor – for there would always be a successor; he’d ensured that any of the vessels who escaped would find their way back to take their place in the chain, each a link in the bonds that held Her at bay – followed suit.
That he should find himself without the ability to wail his despair –
“Nevertheless, I have found you. At last.” Razor-sharp claws plunged deeper, nesting through his chitin to break it, to hold onto the tissue beneath, and he was surprised to find that whatever the void had done to him, he could yet bleed.
Or could he? Was it in his head?
Scarlet eyes left his face and Grimm’s strangely knowing smile settled on the shimmering orbs above them. They flickered and phantom touches settled on the Pale King’s sides. He felt scratching and petting in the same motion. Grimm did not let go of his wrist and did not acknowledge the fact that shadows were winding up to choke the wyrm, cloaking him in ribbons of darkness, blotting out his light.
Some of the void snaked down the Pale King’s wrist, settled at the back of his hand, moved as though to touch Grimm’s, and then drew back with a shiver.
It was not fear. The shadows did not find frightening a force far less remarkable than they. And yet there was a reverence to the way they devoured him, leaving Grimm untouched; there was an almost affectionate way that they surrounded black claws, never touching him.
Fondness, the Pale King realized. There was something in the void that was fond of the god of fear.
“A provisional lease, if you please,” the Nightmare King murmured, and if the darkness answered, the Pale King did not hear it.
He woke instead.
o
The sharp incline of his body told him that he was crashing into consciousness. The waking world was a violent thing, seizing muscles, stiff fingers, broken wings. Blurring white, blue, violet, and crimson filled his vision, obscuring all but the hard dirt ground beneath his body.
The Pale King turned over and choked. His throat was a raw thing, dry and burning, and his claws – what he could make out – were stained with void.
The terrible realization that he was alive tore his confidence asunder.
He was alive. But he hadn’t survived. He was a living thing that hadn’t been allowed to die and he’d been brought back, dragged from the eternal sea with intent and purpose.
He retched and what came out was black.
It took him a moment to realize that it was more of a murky red when the light hit it. Chunks of discarded flesh and fragmented bone mingled within coagulated blood, peppering the darkness with discolored sludges of gray, of white, of sickly green. The smell seized his stomach, threatened to pull it taut once more, vile putrefaction turning his insides into something more liquid than any organ ought to have been.
Something moved. It had wings. And beneath it, wriggling, were slightly translucent white forms.
Larvae.
He was decaying, and smaller insects were laying their larvae within what had once been his corpse.
And that ghastly, grinning specter had put him back inside of it.
Waking horror made his claws shake and he brought one up to scratch the side of his face. Trembling, the wyrm took in the shadow that loomed over him, stretching far taller than he was, and he longed to curse.
When he opened his mouth, though, no sound came out, and the chuckle that Grimm offered was an awful thing: smug, condescending, and very self-satisfied.
“It will be some time before you are allowed the privilege of words,” he said, circling the Pale King’s half-doubled over form.
Just as in the void, just as in his prison of shadow, he had no voice with which to beg and plead for salvation.
Not that Grimm represented it. No, that harbinger of the end offered nothing that the Pale King wanted, and yet…
They were in the Basin, he realized.
His vision cleared enough for him to recognize the void-stained earth on which he was sitting. The smells carried heavily – roses, magnolias, and chrysanthemums, the flowers that his Root had planted so long ago – and he could taste them on the back of a half-decomposed tongue.
He lifted his head, secondary arms wrapping around himself for comfort, his expression impassive as outrage worked its way through him. The great caverns he’d once carved with his own claws lay in ruins around him, stained and ruined by the gaping maw of darkness on which he’d built his kingdom. Vegetation rested lifeless, the abyss draining all semblance of color away until the rocky gray earth was peppered with black veining in place of roots. Amidst it all, the decrepit arched entrance of his Palace stood, guarded by a lifeless kingsmould, but the structure itself was long gone.
Sent away. He’d sent it away, and himself with it. He remembered that, if little else was clear in the haze of pain and the awful stench of darkness that felt like damp salt in his throat.
Grimm hadn’t simply retrieved him from the void. He’d put him into his old body, which meant he’d found it somewhere in the Dream World. And he hadn’t bothered to heal any of it. Would he continue to rot and decompose? Die properly, then, as all things did when their organs shut down?
“You will have to settle for mine instead,” Grimm continued. He crouched in front of the wyrm, wings pooling at his feet, claws coming up to settle on his mask, though it did little to disguise the self-satisfied smile that he wore. “More’s the pity for you, I expect.”
A foot settled under his chin and then, violently, it smashed into the bottom of his chin and knocked him onto his back.
Any delusions that he might have held that this was an act of mercy were immediately dispelled. Pain shot through his face, settling as a searing ache in his throat, and he scraped his claws along the ground to brace himself. He felt Soul thrum beneath them, the living pulse of the world, but – where he could have called it, made it sing for him, before, it was distant now, far away, as if at some great height.
“Get up,” Grimm pressed. There was no malice in his tone, despite the violent outburst, but there was also no mercy: it was a command and he expected to be obeyed. “We have places to be.”
A far easier demand to make than to execute. He struggled, claws scrambling over cracked and disheveled rocks, to pull himself upright. Flecks of chitin broke away from his carapace where he’d been kicked and he choked again, gagging. The reflexive urge to vomit rose anew, blurring his vision, but this time – this time it was accompanied by the fleeting chill of fear and the worry that if he let himself become distracted by excising the tiny parasites using his body as host, he would be kicked again for his trouble.
They’d met before, he and the Nightmare King, and he had not found Grimm impressive then. His main feelings toward the butterfly had been that he was a flickering light where his counterpart had been brilliant, and that whatever had birthed nightmare had been something that the blazing light of morning had found repulsive, shameful, a thing to be hidden away in the dark. He’d looked down upon him and was met with coy, mocking terms of endearment, ‘How fascinating, the view from your tower made of glass. May it not come crumbling down upon you bathed in flame, dear wyrm – whatever would you do then?’
It was one meeting. The Pale King had believed they’d never again see one another.
Foolish. Foolish. Foolish.
One could not outrun death.
His stomach lurched and he vomited again. The sensation was a distant one, writhing maggots in his mouth, and each little spit had more and more of them, along with the fractured chunks of his internal mechanisms.
He should not have been alive. No creature deserved to live on in such a state, undead and wrong.
Hadn’t he wanted to spare his kingdom’s people such atrocities? Was that not the point?
Grimm gazed down at him with that unearthly scarlet stare and fury settled in his claws as they dug into the ground for purchase. His mouth curled back in a snarl, bearing needle-like fangs, and when he met the Nightmare’s eyes, a growl rattled in his chest.
He was met with laughter.
“Be careful,” Grimm said, rocking on the ends of his feet, wicked smile lingering on his mask. “Wouldn’t want to disrupt any more parts of your internal organs.” He turned and nudged the mess between them, splattered gelatinous blood solidifying on lifeless dirt, with the end of his paw. “I believe that might be a chunk of your liver.”
The growling subsided. The Pale King dropped his gaze to the chunk of tissue, of flesh, of organ meat within the oozing puddle of bile-filled blood, and then straightened his jaw. It realigned, hinging back on itself, teeth slowly folding downward within his mouth.
It was, indeed, a chunk of his liver.
He should have been dead. He should have wished for such peace. Fear held him in a vice grip, though, and despite the itching sensation that resembled thousands of little feet skittering across his shell, the wyrm made it to his feet. His vision blurred and disoriented him, but he dared not reach out to brace himself, dared not show further that he was struggling in the catastrophic state that he was in.
Grimm needed no further ammunition for the unvoiced laughter and his pride struggled beneath the weight of the blows.
That he should sink so low as to be at the mercy of a creature barely qualifying as a god himself –
That he should be obedient, subservient, to a mere fragment of his enemy’s power that dared to think and breathe on its own –
The thought chafed.
“We have quite the walk ahead of us,” Grimm purred. To hear such a tone from so deep, so damaged a voice, was unsettling. The unadulterated joy in Grimm’s eyes felt like nails slamming through the wyrm to his core and he looked at the ground rather than meet laughing scarlet. “Dirtmouth. You do remember the way, do you not? To your little hub town, your connection to the outside world? When all else of your kingdom lay in ruins, they yet live on. The further from your grace they are, the more stable they remain.”
Dirtmouth…?
The name brought to mind images of small, dilapidated buildings and a failed tram project that he’d meant to connect Hallownest with; it brought to mind great cliffs and the moth tribe’s altar to the morning in the distance; it brought to mind the howling cliffs and transients who knew little about his kingdom and even less about its monarch. He’d largely left Dirtmouth as it was, with it serving as a waypoint for those coming from the wastes who would have sought greater prospects in the underground kingdom.
It did not surprise him to hear it was largely untouched by the plague of dreams. Why attack those who meant nothing to him, when there were so many that she could hurt him with?
She’d left them to the tender care of her counterpart, ambassador of death that he was, it would seem. Whether or not his wings were merciful would remain to be seen.
The Pale King wanted to ask Grimm if he would be gentle when he swept Hallownest into oblivion. That was what the Nightmare Troupe did, was it not? They came to the ruins of a dying land and feasted on its corpse, carrion creatures that they were, and then they left it barebones and forgotten. He’d encountered many in the wilds, before he’d become… this. He knew how they operated. Not with malice, but with purpose. Was it so for the butterfly and his people?
Words failed. He had no way to ask.
He had no right to, either.
He’d failed Hallownest and all hope that he had for a better future hinged on a plan that required sacrifice after sacrifice, death after death, links in a chain, congruent suffering until their lives all ran out.
Time frozen. The last eternal kingdom.
What a fool he’d been. What a fool he still was.
He let Grimm lead the way and fell into shambling steps behind him, each movement its own new agony, muscles and shell pulling on parts of his body that should have dissolved long ago. The void was taking its time reminding him of his failure over and over again, and as much as he longed to argue, he could not.
Hallownest was dying and there was nothing that he could do about it. Grimm’s presence there was proof.
But why was he alive?
The question was answered by an all-too-familiar mantra within his mind, made up of thousands of voices overlaying over top of one another. A chill made him tremble anew as he recognized his own words recited back to him in empty, callous answer:
No cost too great.
No mind to think.
No will to break.
No voice to cry suffering.
Born of God and Void.
You shall seal the blinding light that plagues their dreams.
You are the vessel.
But the last line –
The last line never came.
