Archive of Our Own ^beta

All you knew, for so long, was silence.

You didn't like it, I think. I wasn't ever sure - how do you ascertain the meaning of this empty look as opposed to that? You never shook, never moved, puppet- still, standing sentinel in the corner of my room. I knocked you on the head once, and you rang like a bell. Nobody else ever thought there was anything in there. You were a tool, and nobody bothers to figure out what a needle feels. I was but a child, and all that I called my sibling was communicated in silent glances, ephemeral and subtle.

I never had imaginary friends as a child. I never needed them. You were there, and real, and everyone thought you- you as I saw you, the idea of a person beneath that hollow shell- were a fancy of a childish mind. But I always knew better, you know. I knew from the subtle way you'd stiffen, shoulders straight and elegant, as our father walked past. It was strange, how I was the only one who ever got to see it. Perhaps you knew nobody would ever believe me.

I begged for you to come alive from almost the day we were introduced, you half- grown and already taller than your father, I little more than a babe in arms. I was told you were to be a guard to me, a protector. I was told you were little more than a kingsmold. They whispered of you in the corridors, muttering about the most life-like of Father's dainty machines, dripping molten shadows. I was told never, ever to treat you as a person.

But as every child knows, if you give your toys enough care and attention and love, they may come alive, and finally love you back.

From the day I met you, I never stopped believing, sibling.

Perhaps that was what ruined you.

I listened to your automaton- soft footsteps as you wandered down the halls, and chased you haphazardly on the two spider- legs I had that were not malformed, and as I did, I'd proclaim my faith that you were alive to the world. That there was a person beneath the hollow shell. I chased after you like that for years. Our father hated it, consistently. He'd see us together and drag you away roughly the moment he saw I might be distracting you from your duties, never mind that you were thrice his size.

Our poor, foolish, misguided father. If there hadn't been anything to distract, he wouldn't have had a problem to begin with, would he?. It makes me think he knew, on some level, what you were. He knew, and he sent his child to the fire regardless, without care for the pain he must have known you were able to feel.

I wonder if you've forgiven him. Who could do so, trapped as you are? I think you probably have, though. You loved him, as much as you loved me, with the whole of whatever void - clotted aperture served as your heart. It was obvious enough to anyone who looked at you. You always stood a little straighter when he was around.

So, sibling, have you forgiven him? Do you think of our father with kindness? Does the viscous, golden agony relent for long enough for you to even form thoughts at all?

I don't think I have any forgiveness for him, sibling. Not for what he did to you, or what he did to the others. Not for all those little graves in the dark.

Ah, but you never did like to hear of my anger at our father. You always flinched, barely perceptible but still present, whenever I tried to bring him up in conversation. I think you thought he was right to do what he did, in a way. Either that, or the marks of the cost of his plans were so indelibly written on you that you could do nothing but try to fulfil his wishes, lest the cost grow greater still. I think you cared enough for that to be the case.

I think. How much of what I know of you is nothing but imagining? How much was initially my imagining, and came to be a part of you, bleeding into the fabric of your life like black ink on silk- paper? I created you as you are, in a way. Gave you my stories, and the hopes and dreams of a child, and the desperate wish that you'd come to life and be my friend, and love me. If you had lacked personhood before, those things would have been enough to form you an identity. Enough to tarnish your purity. Enough to doom us all.

But I don't think it was entirely me. You were always more sentient then you seemed, and I think there was life in you from the very beginning. I spent my childhood running after you, cataloguing each stray twitch, every slight inclination of the head, so sure was I that you were a person. That you had been a person all along.

I finally ascertained your sentience when I was eight or so, clicking my half - formed jaws in the childish way spiderlings do, hopping up to reach your height on the two fully developed legs I had. You gave no reaction, but I'd said,

"You're not! You're not- like- a toy, are you? 'Cause I saw you, I did, and you moved on your own, and nobody told you to. Toys don't do that, Vessel."

(I called you Vessel, of course. Because you had no real name, and I knew no other word to use than the one the adults around me used. It was inaccurate, in truth. Sometimes, I wonder- if I'd given you a name, would you have liked it? If you had, would I have even been able to know?)

You gave no real response, but your head twitched.

"Ok, well, don't talk to me if you don't want to. But I think you're Real."

Your head twitched again. Most wouldn't have noticed it, but to me, you gave a very distinct impression of someone in deep, embarrassed denial, as you always did when I asked this question. Like if those great voids of eyes could close, you'd be shutting them, and you'd bury your head in the dirt if you could. Anything but really listen to what I was saying.

"You're really bad at being a toy, Vessel. If that's what you're trying to be."

You turned to me- finally!- and I bounced a little- to me, this was confirmation of what I'd been theorising. There was a creature, somewhere in there. My very own imaginary friend.

"Yeah! I was right! You're Real, like in that one book, where the toy came alive, and it was a person like you or me after. Why don't you tell people, Vessel?"

You'd said nothing, statue- still, just another marble element of that long, desolate corridor. My words rang out in the silence.

But that night, as you stood guard outside my room, a pattering rhythm came from the door in the early hours of the morning. It was unclear, but barely recognisable as the tunnel rattles of the Deepnest, the language my people spoke in the dark, the language you'd heard me and my mother clicking out whenever she was allowed to visit me.

It was erratic and shaky in the drumming, but I heard your words clear and loud.

(Father. Need. Empty.)

"Don't - don't listen to him, Vessel!" I half whispered in response. "He's an idiot! You're never going to be nothing, Mam says that's not how it works, you can't play pretend forever, and I'd like it if you'd play with me like a real child, please."

You didn't respond.

The next day, when you were tasked with sparring with me, you struck a little softer, and your footsteps landed light in the cavern's damp air. Looking at your dance wise steps, I stifled a laugh. You were- you were playing with me. The only way you knew how.

From then on, I called out to you every single night, and danced down the corridors of the palace, holding your hand, as if you were truly a sibling of mine. Even then, I had little respect for our father, and hid my distaste for his works poorly at best. Surely whatever he needed you to be empty for could not be as important as my own sibling, after all. Every night, I would sit by the door, and speak to you, and every day I'd go out and tell you of everything I saw when I returned. All those marble walls, and that oppressive silence. I'd have found it dull, but you seemed to bear it well. As placid as the puppet you should have been, you just sat, and listened.

You'd never really answer as I'd chatter throughout the day, but on rare nights, I'd imagine a faint knocking at the door, in the rhythmic voice you'd picked up piecemeal. I'd sit awake late, hoping to hear a flicker of you, learn something more about my great, silent sibling.

And sometimes, in the silence, you'd speak.

(You fought well.)

(Your mother. Kind.)

(Thank you.)

(Sister.)

(Sister.)

(Sister.)

The words you spoke didn't vary much. I didn't care. I treasured each thought that coalesced in your huge, empty head enough to be given voice. Later, of course, it would amaze me, your cleverness, your strength. That given as little as you were, you'd learned enough and were brave enough to give voice to anything at all.

You'd heard us, and learned our language through the briefest of intermittent whispers. Empty indeed. The real wonder was that nobody noticed you were not shaped to the task you'd been given. It must have required wilful effort to ignore it, on the part of a great many courtiers and knights. Even now, I marvel at the fact I was the only one that knew- the life and strength in you was so very obvious.

You were always so very strong, sibling.

But then again, none of the bugs in that court were ever very good at looking at things they did not want to see.

I was no different.

I was youthful, and naive, and chose not to watch for what you were being prepared for; the web, more intricate than any of my mother's kin could weave, that our father had woven around you. I chose not to see the trap closing its jaws about your shadow - stained limbs. I chose not to see the way you walked willingly into it. I wonder, even now, if you had been afraid, as you consigned yourself to destruction, and I had simply chosen not to see it.

You were always so very difficult to read. I did not know, in truth, if you were afraid-

But you'd knocked on my door one final time, on the night of my thirteenth name- day, as I drifted in the veil between dreams and waking. It was five days before the Black Egg would be opened and closed, and the air of the palace was cool and crisp as moonlight. The knocking came in the dark, and, in truth, the hour was so late I thought myself dreaming. Perhaps I was, but-

The knocking rang out in the silence, quiet as a tiktik's steps, clear as the tolling of a bell.

(For you. Sister.)
(For you.)

I hadn't quite acknowledged what would happen to you, before then. Not until the night you spoke to me, fatherlight shining above, the shade of the nighttime clinging to my eyes as much as it spilled from yours. In one night, I realised. I understood all of it, and felt my distaste for our sire solidify into slow- burning anger, cooling into an icy hollow in my chest. All the secrets our father had kept, all the shadows I'd chosen to look away from, all the inky blood I saw as a child, staining the floors of the palace, staining my father's hands!

I had never cried in our father's palace, but I sobbed, that night. Wept my eyes out in the silence, in the darkness of my little steeple- room, high above the rest of the caverns. Cried, wanting it to be different.

I wonder if it meant something to you, that I wept for you. I wonder if it only made her task easier. One more crack for her to weave her threads of fire into.

Was your love for me the flaw in your shining armour? Was it my fault you failed?

All of us in that court must share some blame, I think. But I am the only one left. The rest of those shining courtiers, those resplendent, overfed examples of nobility, are gone, and so the burden of regret falls heavily on my shoulders alone.

I still regret the way it ended.

I didn't come to see you, on the day of the Sealing. You walked there, regal and tall, and no puppet strings were needed to move your steps to your tomb. And I didn't watch, because I was in Deepnest at the side of my mother, as she closed her eyes for the final time, to provide a barrier between you and the world. She was matter - of - fact about the whole thing, in the way of spider queens, and even found time to be sympathetic to me, in her rough, hardy fashion. You'd have loved my mother, I think, had you the chance to truly know her. She was a harsh woman, in many ways, but certainly kinder than our other parent, and she would have been far better as a mother for you.

Had she known you were real, not just a child's toy, she'd have taken you into her tunnels in a heartbeat. We'd have grown up alongside each other, and conversed fluently in our rhythmic knock - sign, and she'd have been there to teach us all of it, all the ways and idioms and little idiosyncrasies of the Nest. My legs would not have grown stunted as they did in the Palace, and you'd have learned to wield a greatneedle, and spin Soul around you to mimic silk.

You'd have been allowed to be a person. To wear pretty things and bright colours, to complement the red of my dress, as you never could in the Palace. To have an identity that was more than shadows and purpose and the distracted imaginings of a child nine years younger than yourself.

But that life never happened, and three days after my thirteenth name- day, I lost both of you. My mother and my sibling. And I was not there to see you go.

When father returned to meet me at the gates of the palace, his head was bowed. His manner was subdued, far more so than was usual. Wyrms are a proud species, and I have inherited my fair share of that inborn arrogance, yet I have never come close to projecting the image that our shared father held up to his subjects. He was never to be seen without a stiff, regal posture light shining from the cracks in his carapace. Not even by his daughter. He had no flexibility, no emotion in his bearing, in those days when we were children. He likely does not even now, wherever he has scurried off to.

But the day we lost you to the Egg, he hunched in his throne, and in front of every citizen who would come see, Hallownest saw our father weep. His tears were dark as the night. To this day, there is a legend among the bugs that remain alive about the Shining King, bright as the moonlight on the surface, who leaks liquid shadow from his eyes. Trying in vain to repent for his sins.

He loved you, sibling. I don't know if you ever knew. He was more sensible, more restrained than I, and if he considered you knowing his love to be a threat, he'd have had no compunction in hiding it away. It would have shaped you into a person, as my love for you shaped you in turn. I doubt he ever told you, but yes, sibling. He loved you.

To be honest, I think that fact only makes the things he did worse. How he could do that, to a creature he had come to love… How he did that to his own child!

…I apologise. You would not want to hear me speak ill of him. I will speak of happier things.

Not that there are many happy things around these days, of course. But there is one piece of good news I can grant you.

I have been wandering around the remains of this old kingdom for many years. Every so often I encounter one of your kind. They are callow and pale, and very few are even to my height. Perhaps they are trapped forever, as you are, in stasis.

They do not speak, and seem to understand neither the modern languages of the wastes outside the kingdom or the tunnel- chattering of my people, yet they comprehend the old high tongue of Hallownest with ease. It is in this old, dead language I have been able to speak to them. I wonder if that ability was inborn into them, as they have certainly had no pale father to teach them their letters. They wander the wastes, but every so often one of them finds its way through here.

They all have distinct personalities. Every one of them. None of their minds are fully formed, as you would expect from a creature created to be thoughtless, from one that has lived its whole life in the howling wastes beyond memory, but they are people still. Each with its own way of walking, its own distinctive stance, bold or uncertain or afraid. Each brimming with life they were never meant to have, against all odds.

The first one I met was in the Basin, many years ago. It is the only one I have known to have grown past my height, and when I first saw it, the branching of its horns reminded me so painfully of your kind mother that I could not help but feel some sense of kinship, some shared familiarity. It wielded its nail with a dancer's grace. It had clearly found time to train under a Nailmaster, as its stance as it fought bore the hallmarks of those ancient Arts.

It stood so proud. That is what I remember most of it- the graceful way it moved, how it held its head up high. The way it kept its nail clean of infection and void after every battle, polishing it to shining with its inky hands. It collected geo for its purposes, as most bugs do, but the most perfectly formed pieces it never bartered away, but kept a hold of. It liked pretty things, I think. Our father told us all the vessels had a flaw, aside from you. I struggle to see it that way. Who could look at that creature, at the pride and joy it took in its life and possessions, at the effort it put into learning the graceful arts of swordplay, and see a flaw?

It was a good fighter, as well. It fought the infected creatures with me, and I think we became friends, of a sort, over time. It seemed to have some sort of mission pushing it forward, but it took a while for me to deduce what it was.

When I finally realised its purpose in this kingdom, it was already too late. The Infection had a hold of it, and I ran. I was little more than a girl at the time, newly fled from the recently infected Hive, and uninfected, it was a stronger fighter than I. If I had fought it, it seemed likely to me it would have won, and so I left it there, eyes shining unearthly orange in the pervasive night of the Basin, where our father's palace once stood. It was one of only two of those little Vessels that I came to know. One of two I have not had to kill.

I have had to kill most of them.

Their mission is the same, no matter their personality. It must be imbued into your being, something innate they are unable to overcome. They seek to replace you. To take your burden. No matter how weak, how flawed they might be. No matter how unequipped they are to bear your burden. Sibling, they have not your strength. I know you hold Her back still, the shattered remnants of your purity standing as a barrier between her light and this kingdom. A few still live in this old place, though they are mere fragments of the colonies that once swarmed in these caves. You are all that keeps them alive.

So I tested them, and killed those that could not stand against me. If they could not defeat me, what hope have they against Her fire? They would not have stopped. It is not in their nature to. I had no other choice but to kill them, even as I grieved their deaths.

But, sibling, one still lives. There is one I could not kill.

There is another vessel. It is similar in personality to you, as a young child. Short of stature, and as brave as any bug I ever met. And nowhere near hollow, of course. None of you were ever really empty vessels, but certainly not this one. I never knew enough of either of you to know if you'd like it much, but I think you'd at least respect each other. I wish you'd at least had the chance to find out.

Yes, I think you would like it. It is bold, and possessed of a ruthless efficiency. Even resting at a bench, it sits poised, ready to jump into battle at the first sign of danger, and it rests for a minimal amount of time. I have faced it in the dance of nail and needle twice now, among the verdant bushes of Greenpath, and again at the edge of the world, where our father shed his skin an aeon ago. It fights with a single- minded ferocity, though its style is far from elegant. Each move it makes is practical and decisive, and has clearly been thought out with a fighter's precision.

It is so reluctant to stop that I have only once seen it still, unmoving. It was looking up at your statue in the City. To remind itself of its goal, perhaps. The goal it is driven towards, like no vessel or bug I have ever met before. It is determined to reach it. I think it is incapable of thinking of much else.

It has a will, sibling. And, this time, I do not think it is to our detriment.

Do you remember what our father told us, about his plans, about why he went through so many of the discards to get you? He told us each of the useless vessels had a flaw, a little, cracked piece of a person that would have been, hiding inside. In a sense, it is true; I have witnessed it firsthand. The vessel in the Basin, with its bright, shining pride. One I met in Greenpath, and killed, that shook with fear as it fell to my blade. I once met one which even seemed to have a sense of bravado to it, dressing its mask up with smears of charcoal, brandishing a wooden nail against me.

You were flawed too. It was your love, I think, love for me and my father and that city of tears that never wept for you. Love you tried so hard to hide. It was your single weak point. It let Her crack your defences in the end.

But this vessel… the remnants of a creature within it have come together and formed something different. It is stubborn, but it is stubborn in the way of the steady snowfall that precipitates an avalanche, in the way that water cuts a groove through stone given a thousand years. It has a will as I have never seen, a singleness of purpose shining as sharp as the blade it wields. Looking at it, I think it could do it. Move mountains, cut through dreams. Blot out the light plaguing this kingdom.

It has a will, sibling, and this does not make me despair, as perhaps it should. This vessel is flawed, but that fact gives me hope. I think… I really do think it will kill Her. I think it can.

It has begun to tread that path already. It has taken our father's mark from his cast off shell, and wields a strange, foreign weapon sharp enough to slice through dreams. It knows what I would have it do. It journies to her destruction. To a new, untainted sunrise.

It will kill Her, and then the kingdom will be free. The sun will rise above these caverns, and no sickly miasma will drift in with the dawn. The remaining peoples of Hallownest, and the travellers who drift in from the wastes, will live here again.

One day, the City of Tears will have real people walking its rainsoaked streets, who can look up and wonder at the waters that fall from the sky. They'll stand by this statue, that I stand by now, and wonder who you were, and who loved you so much to carve your mask in stone, and exactly what you sacrificed. And they'll create music and art and science, a whole new civilization, out of the remnants of our father's powers of mind. They'll bow to no bright kings or queens, and worship no gods but themselves. It will be beautiful.

And you'll not live to see it, my sibling.

Be under no illusions about that. She is closer bound to you than any of her Infected, and even those in thrall to a god are unlikely to survive the death of their deity. Her fury at you burns bright for all to see, in the eyes of every bug she has bound to her, in the screams that ring through the kingdom, the agonising sound of a voice you were never meant to have. Even if she dies, she will not let you go. You'll die with her, your shadow flickering out with the light that casts it.

There's a part of me, buried deep in silence and dried blood, that's breaking over it. That little girl who roamed the halls of the palace, begging her sibling to come alive, wants to scream and weep and shout. Shout to the heavens, hunt down gods who are long since dead, turn back time and force its course to flow differently.

Because it's not fair. And you deserved better. All of you deserved better.

…

… I'm sorry.

I don't think anyone's ever told you that before, have they?

Did our father, who shaped you and twisted you and broke you, who made you so nearly what he needed, but for your love for him? Did any of the people, those bloated courtiers, the remnants of that rotten, opulent society? Did any of the ones who benefited from your sacrifice?

I don't know why I'm asking you these questions. You've no way of replying. And, anyway, I know the answer is no. No, you were never told that they were sorry. Because they never saw it as a sacrifice in the first place, because you were never more than a delicate, powerful machine. The only ones who saw to the core of you were my father and I, but I was dismissed as a child, the foolish girl who sobbed in the darkness, wept her heart out over the loss of her imaginary friend.

And our father never would have told you. Because if he showed you the depth of his love, you might have come alive in response to it, reached out with your clever mind that should have been silent, and the heart you were never meant to have. Because if he acknowledged that there was enough of you that he thought of you as a child, it was one small step from there to the reality of your existence, and then every atrocity he'd committed would have been for nothing.

But this statue, which I stand in front of, is proof enough of his heart. I don't know if you can really see the world through it, if the ancient magic worked. But I hope you can hear me speak these words, whispered through the walls of your black prison, so you know I love you. And so you know our father, on some level, knew what you were. And that he loved you too.

You were nothing but love, at the core of it. That love you held in your hollow heart was Her way in, the only flaw in your shining armour. It was the path by which she destroyed you. Now, let that love give you hope. I hope it keeps you going, through the sickly miasma of her endless, burning dawn, through the destruction of your body and mind and will. I hope you hear me, and know that you only need to hold on a little longer. Know you are loved, and know it will be over soon.

It will be over, and a new world will rise from the ashes of that fire, and your statue will stand watch over it all. It will be beautiful. And it will be through the sacrifice of every little lost child that has walked the streets of Hallownest, and that little vessel with the blank - eyed stare and a will to shatter the stars, and you. My sibling.

It will all have meant something, someday. That vessel certainly believes it. And I am beginning to believe it, too.

I will have to leave this city soon. Make my journey through the sickly caverns, up to the top of the city, where you hang imprisoned in that onyx temple. I will keep my vigil there, among the infected denizens of those crossroads, and wait for the little vessel to approach.

This will have to be goodbye. But know it is only for a little while.

I will see you soon, sibling. In person, this time, not through the stony prism of your statue. Our meeting will not be kind to you, but it will, I hope, be swift.

I hope it is not too lonely without me here, looking out at the world through this statue. I hope you see the rain fall in this city through its eyes, and know these caverns weep for you.

Just hold on a little longer.

I will be there soon.