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For this dance, its partner is small.
It looks like any other bug. It has the same pale mask and almost-soft carapace of every other bug in this kingdom; it wears a cloak and holds a nail in the same fashion. Grimm had seen, in a brief glance while the lantern sparked and began to glow, the precious few remaining denizens, with their pale ore nails and their tearing cloaks. So few in number, so uneasily dreamed.
It’s so restless, this kingdom. So restless, so alive. Its edges taste of dreams: the warm sweet kind, freshly prepared, ready to eat. Grimm can almost feel the warmth of it.
Its dance partner takes the child easily. This time it contains itself within a charm─this kingdom’s way of preserving old, strong magic, Grimm can only assume. He’s seen it before, a long time ago, but these things have a way of changing.
In turn, in time, as it always goes.
The third dream Grimm swallowed was in the shape of a starling and it fluttered in the hollow of his then-human throat. Sometimes Grimm still feels the birds’ wings. Now it is in the form of this kingdom’s cloak, grey-and-red and wrapped around him like something halfway living. The starlings’ hollow bones sat unevenly and Grimm swallowed down their weight and felt the wings flutter as if the bird yet lived.
The child is born, perhaps made, also small. Fleeting. It swallows the flame easily, warmth curling in its belly, settling in the place where its heart will one day lie. Grimm spies it between moments, asleep at the dancer’s feet, making tiny little mewling sounds.
Grimm does not let itself look for too long. After all, they are damned to be one and the same eventually─what is Grimm’s is the child’s, and what is the child’s is Grimm’s. They are the ouroboros swallowing its own tail. When it stretches, it has wings, no legs. Grimm has six, at last count. The numbers don’t know how to stay still.
Its partner may look and sound like a bug, but it isn’t.
Grimm does not know when he realises. Perhaps he has always known: there is no mistaking the acrid taste in this mouth that is not quite a mouth; the sounds it makes are raspy and strange, even to his own ears. Sometimes the silhouette of something else becomes its partner’s shadow. Others the shape of it twists. Its body catches on corners. Grimm traces its appearances, finds it curled in shadows and unreachable corners, gated away, child at its side.
Grimm dreams.
His body nestles at the back of the troupe tent. Brumm knows this routine─though his memory may fade, this bit he always remembers, and he notices the signs that the ritual has begun. He tires more easily, these days. The flames spill from his body, ebb and flow. Grimm finds himself cold.
The heart speaks to him. Grimm recollects the facts: the child has been growing well; last he looked, the dance had taken the child into a land of grey and dull stone; the ritual has entered its second phase. Nothing of note. There is no reason for the heart to want to see him.
Does it have a name? It asks. The flame around it pulses. The seams of its being unwind.
“No,” Grimm says. “Come to think of it, I have not seen it or the ritual conductor speak at all.”
The heart says nothing more. But Grimm lingers, his soul soothed by the red-gold splash where dream and nightmare meet─and isn’t that strange, having a soul! His last body had been so quiet and still. It almost makes him smile.
The flames bring its partner deeper into Hallownest’s belly. They gorge lines into the dirt, lines that stretch from the entrance Grimm did not take to the basin far below. It follows their presence as deep as it can. When something older than it and stronger than it blocks its sight of the kingdom’s end, its partner and the child keep moving.
Grimm does not worry. The heart, that deep primal instinct to survive and begin anew, does.
(They both know that Grimm himself is brief, ephemeral circumstance. The ritual’s toll grows greater; his voice rasps, he sleeps for longer. His energy conserves itself for the last grand performance, and from then he will sleep until the ritual concludes itself.
We are like the last notes in an old, old song, the heart says. You know that. This is your refrain. )
The ritual continues. Grimm extends himself in a bow before this partner, watches through his half-closed eyes as they bow back. Respectful, this one. Their nail shimmers under the red-purple lights of the tent, cuts smooth arcs through the air. Even though this dance is new, each ritual with its own newly-constructed routine, they know their part.
The flame moves around him in circuits, tracing paths. Grimm watches it sluice off the dancer’s shell, the twisting vines of their being creeping out and knows, suddenly. It is something he has always known. It is something he had forgotten.
This child, made of wyrm and root and nightmare and void below, is something new. A lot of things are, for those who wander between kingdoms, but this is a kind of new that is surprising. He has not felt it in a long time.
The child’s mewling sounds grow louder. The void tempers them into something soft and still, cold core settling against Grimm’s side. Will they be able to use void, as the partner does? Will their power remain constricted to flame alone?
So many unknowns. Grimm would like to see them all.
The ritual draws to a close. The seams of it tear further, with a sound like something breaking. Grimm sinks into sleep, cloak pulled close around him. Somewhere deep and dark below, Brumm guards the last of the flame.
In blinks between sleep, the heart watches the final steps. Its partner moves through empty city and empty palace and empty birthplace alike. Grimm sees it step into the hollowed-out shell of a temple, sitting quietly, contemplatively, as if in prayer. The child sleeps at its feet, still mewling. The mewls have almost become words.
Grimm watches it enter the temple, and watches, and watches. The air has gone still and cold; Grimm feels the world flood with essence. Its partner does not dream at all, but feels like it, sometimes, replete with memory.
The ritual is unfinished.