#it’s just them and their little void baby!!! coparenting with boatem village!!!

[lunarblazes]

They’ve been feeding it, undeniably. It’s not really harming anyone, but. But.

Pearl knows that feeding the void is typically not considered a good idea. She does! She’s not stupid, and neither is the rest of Boatem, no matter how much evidence to the contrary piles up. But they kept falling in, and now there’s definitely something down there. It hasn’t grown big yet. She’s not sure what it is, or what it will do, or when it will wake up, but she knows it has eyes.

Eyes that stared lifelessly at her when she fell from the meeting room. Eyes full of stars and galaxies and nebulae and pillars and pillars of space dust.

(The moon can even be seen from under the world, in the void. She doesn’t see it in the creature’s eyes. It’s only stars and her reflection, shining white, falling into the darkness, and then the cold fills her lungs and she chokes on oil. It’s over much faster this time. She hardly feels a thing.)

Pearl knows they’ve been unintentionally feeding it. She knew even before she was talking to Grian around the lip of the chasm and the void snaked from the hole in clouds, curious and new. It grabbed hold of a bush and took a leaf back down with it. Grian watched as it withdrew. Carefully, hesitantly, he detached a budding flower from the bush and passed the pink petals down.

They both stared down as it disappears.

Pearl knows they’ve been unintentionally feeding it. But after that, they start slipping it things they love. It never occurs to any of them to be afraid of it, not really; they don’t know why they do it. Scar feeds it copper, polished and shined to the highest degree, so that it can see the light that barely reaches into its home more clearly. Grian feeds it end rods, makeshift stars from his base, and hopes that it knows what he means when he whispers to it in Galactic about a lullaby of the galaxy. Impulse lands right on the bedrock, kneels, and hands it amethyst shards and candy prototypes. He thinks it should be able to know what magic feels like, and chocolate is part of that, he tells Pearl when she asks. Mumbo never stops for more than a couple seconds— he has no ritual closeness with the abyssal creature— but he tosses it something precious: the last of his diamonds. He never elaborates on why.

Pearl hems and haws over what to feed it for a long while. She wants it to be something of life, because the void only knows the fear in a creature’s eyes as it dies. She wants it to know what it’s like to live. The petals were a good start— as were the lullabies, and the magic, and the light, and the wealth, but it needs to know life as she knows it: bright and beautiful and bigger than even the darkness at the center of their world. It needs to see the moon. So she decides on her gift.

Every so often, Pearl will take off her armor and visit the creature that lives under her village. It never says anything back, but she’s showing it what life is, and every time she ventures down she comes back up a little quicker. Soon, she goes, and she sees the moon in its eyes; seconds later, she’ll choke on oil again, cough and sputter for a moment, and sit up in her room, but right now?

Pearl sees the remnants of the village in the creature’s eyes— the reflection of coppery light, the swirling knowledge of endless galaxies, the magic and sparks, the vast and expansive shine of love shown from the earth— and most of all, she sees slivers of the moon staring at her.

It’s close to waking, and Pearl wakes up in her room without coughing at all. She has to call a meeting, right now. None of them will want to miss its hatching (made of milk and love, amethyst and copper, end rods and fake stars, stories and diamond, a soul and the moon).

Something is born under Boatem, and its arrival is made of nothing but the curiosity and care of the hermits who live above it.