Work Text:
He was utterly magnificent in his craft, an architect of mind and memory, and she adored him for it, that ruthless resolve embodied in their nascent kingdom, her roots sent deep into that fallow earth from which their children had first crawled blind and naked to the light, and, wet with gratitude, then laid themselves upon the ground, and stone by stone constructed his design, their shells and shields scored by those infant beasts, until they, too, awoke to his vision, plied by the whip—thus Hallownest had stood eternal.
Then she had dreamt the world again to waking, and watched it perish in the dark. Diminished, but alive, she had borne the cost: the slow erosion of their city; the bodies loosed again to their own whims; the spark of disbelief fanned carefully to an inferno; the ragged, desperate gasps of loss; the pleas for salvation that he had fled.
And there, alone in her decline, she would sleep again, and dream of worlds unborn.