I’m new to slay the princess (got it last Tuesday, beaten it twice and still trying to meet all the princesses) but I came up with what I think is a cool au idea I wanted to share.
So pre construct being made, the Narrator is still mortal and desperately wants to save everyone from death, so he makes his plan to split Change into two and create the construct. He prepares to lock them all away, to create the long quiet so it can destroy the shifting mound, and he strengthens his resolve to sacrifice himself for a world he can never be a part of. He traps them, splits them into two ugly, imperfect halves, destroying some of himself in the process.
For a moment they’re right in front of him, being shaped by his beliefs into a binary structure at the beginning of their physical existence, something tangible he can entrap and destroy…
And then they’re both gone.
He’s still himself, not yet an echo but… not fully Whole anymore. The construct is ready to hold the Long Quiet and the Shifting Mound, but his two key components are missing.
He’s angry for a while. Angry and not quite the same, wrong like he doesn’t fit in his world anymore. The world itself seems to know it as he struggles to partake in humanity anymore, constantly othered by his own kind, and he sulks in his rage and despair and loneliness as the world keeps changing and he can’t stop it.
But he knows they’re not gone. They’re not gone and now they’re tangible, just somewhere in the world. He just has to find them.
Some time passes, to his dismay, and Unrelated to any of That, he happens to find two small children.
A girl and a boy. He’s not sure the age, they’re old enough to stumble around and talk in sometimes babbles and sometimes words but too small to truly understand the world around them. They’re also both dirty, and don’t seem to know where they are or who their parents are, he’s not even sure if they’re related.
But they call each other Princess and Quiet and become gravely distressed when they’re separated and they look up at him like he’s Important.
They’re the first beings in so long to not look at him like he’s Other.
Through a series of unusual happenings He ends up keeping the children. Sure it’s not the safest to have two kids around when he’s planning to destroy himself to rid the world of the eventuality that is death, but his big, quiet home is large enough that there’s no real risk of them finding something dangerous while there’s still enough room for them to grow, and it’s not like he’s going to destroy himself right now without those missing pieces, and if he can’t save the world yet he can at least save these two small children for now.
Besides, they’re well behaved enough to not need constant supervision, although they always know to- and already have a few times- come to his home office if they need help. And listening to them over meals as they recite stories of the games they played when he’s working and the dreams they seem to share at night has quickly become a bright point in his days. Even if the games in question are a little violent or unusual for his taste at times. Should five(?) year olds know that the liver regulates blood and without it a nervous system would die? And he’s not sure he’ll ever figure out where they got enough water to flood the landing when they played ‘vengeful widow’. Not to mention there certainly seems to be a lot of betrayal going on between the two of them. But games are how children learn about the world and themselves and each other, of course their games would push boundaries. And the two of them have always been so imaginative, constantly creating new roles for themselves as their games develop. It seems like every other day Princess is a Witch or a Fury or a Spector or some other degree of creature to torment Quiet, who himself seems to enjoy embodying ideas more than creatures, announcing his emotions as reasons for why he made some decision or other in their games.
Having them in his life has only strengthened his resolve to destroy the shifting mound and create a peaceful eternity for everyone. Now if only he could figure out why all his tools to find them are only pointing back to his house where he first summoned them, sure that’s the last place He saw them, but they must both exist somewhere else now.
OOOOOHHHHH MY GOD THIS IS SO PEAK <33333 I need like 200 chapters of this on my desk by friday AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA this is so so fire <33333
