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Hornet Enacting Big Sister Rights Lace Gets Adopted Ghost Exhibiting Cat Behavior ™ Addendum to Adoption

• Radi and Grimm actually started out as one unified god of the dreaming realm. This god-Slumber- was a being more on par with Unn at her prime(check out my thoughts on the best slug, they’re somewhere probably) and was the functional opposite to the void. This was true both in scope, and in behavior.
• notably other gods we see in canon still make use of essence and dreams(ie white palace, and godhome to and extent). All essence and the dreams of both mortals and gods alike used to fall under Slumbers ponderous gaze
• Thematically Slumber opposed the void in a couple of ways. First it was bright, among the brightest of the first generation of bright gods even. Second instead of devouring ideas, people, and gods that entered it, it instead preserved them as sort of echoes(this is how the radiance clung on) functionally these echoes appear as ghosts but they’re really more like imprints on the dreaming realm. In some places these imprints punch through to the waking world, becoming wounds and sorta spilling essence out(Slumbers blood, though I think it’s probably more like how crinoids use sea water as blood basically)
• Slumber, if it ever bothered to take a form, would be some sort of grub or large caterpillar(lifeblood creature?????)
• It really was essentially the foil and other half to the void and so despite the differences between the two they also operated similarly, with neither really taking physical form or engaging in direct battle with one another, if anything their “fight” looked a lot like one giant chess game played over time with gods and mortals servings as the pieces. The end goal was seemingly over who could get the most gods and mortals to fall into their realm/be absorbed by them. So basically politics and a popularity contest.
• Going back to the “wounds” that sometimes happen, ie dreamnail and all it’s shit with ghosts, these only began occurring with the birth of the Radiance, and represent the weakening of the borders between the dreaming and physical worlds.
• See what happened is that over time “lighter” dreams sorta moved towards the outer edges of the dreaming/Slumber, and the “denser/heavier” ones got pushed towards the center, and eventually congealed into the nightmare heart.
• Interestingly this makes Grimm the older sibling(kinda the heart and Grimm are very much not the same thing)
• Anyway all of lighter dreams eventually accumulated into the Radiance, when she was born Slumber officially stopped existing as one deity, before her birth it just had a semi independent heart.
• You’ll note both of their births parallel stars with Radiance effectively having been born from a nebula and Grim mimicking an early born red dwarf star or a small black hole.
• they both parallel/represent a binary star system.
• After they come into existence Slumber ceases existing, but dreams and nightmares continue to share a realm for a while.

• She has far broader range of powers compared to the heart and Grimm, this is because of how she was formed. She’s made of a much larger variety of dream/essence compared to Grimm, and came into being from that larger distribution condensing.
• Starts the fight with the Heart that eventually ripped the two realms apart because it actually had/has a stronger hold on those entering its realm and had begun to infringe on hers by sheer spiritual gravity/mass accumulation.
• Basically it was getting too big and she also really cared for her dreamers back then, though this eventually warped into possessiveness in the lead up to the fight.
• She doesn’t actually care about nightmares though, like she doesn’t find them distasteful until after the spilt.
• The battle between her and the Heart took place entirely in the dreaming and was really less of a violent but brief struggle and more of a cruel, protracted, and deliberate war between the two where each one attempted to twist and distort the nightmares and dreams of mortals, the goal being to turn dreams into nightmares and vice versa in a way the other wouldn’t notice, essentially they were trying to poison or override eachother.
• Radiance largely won this, just due to the width of her power when compared to the Hearts, that said the Heart become far far more insidious as a result of this.
• the final excision of the Heart came when the Radiance had managed to subvert most of its agents, both in the mortal and dreaming world. She essentially gave the Heart the choice of being subsumed or fleeing and it, being much wiser, fled.
• Radiance uses the techniques she learned during this war to create the infection.
• PK reminds her of the heart, which is one of the reasons she really hates him.
• Radiance thinks the war is over, the Heart very much disagrees, and likely wins in the long run. This scheming is actually why Grimm befriends/allows Ghost to summon them, it clues ghost in to other possible alternatives to taking THKs place, eventually leading to the void consuming Radiance.
• Also Radi literally doesn’t have a heart, like her body is entirety missing one. This isn’t a huge deal for her, especially because she’s the goddess of dreams so like, runs on dream logic basically. In general most gods could survive something as fatal as literally cutting out their own heart, but not with as much ease as she did.
• She isn’t aware if how it’s hurt her conceptually though.
• The Heart may have been responsible for terror and all manner of horrors, but it was only out of those horrors that growth and compassion could spring. Over time it’s absence causes her to grow callous and her realm to grow stagnant
• see the Heart may only mostly be a metaphorical heart, but it also was responsible for basically cycling and refreshing dreams, dreams that had gotten too old/stale were drawn into the Heart, becoming nightmares, and then after a time returned to being dreams, albeit completely unrecognizable.
• Basically it did what hearts do, pump shit, and without it Radiance is literally a corpse and doesn’t even know it because she’s so disconnected.

• Grimm himself is one of the few bugs that was left over from the war between the Heart and Radiance, he was sort of a high priest and advisor to the heart. It was at his advice that the Heart fled, and to honor him and keep the Heart(which was grievously injured) alive they settled on the symbiosis we see in game.
• The ritual is basically the divine version of both a dialysis machine, and iron lung, and a pace maker.
• it allows the heart to survive outside of its body(which is now Radiance) and continue to perform and use abilities most whole deities are capable of.
• Needless to say it’s an agonizing form of existence, but as the millennia pass it gets more and more bearable, it may even be possible for it to grow its own “body” for a lack of better terms if it were to gain enough followers.
• Due to the nature of the Heart as well as Grimms natural curiosity, members of the troupe tend to be cycled through rather frequently. They get picked up, offered the chance to forget their troubles(whatever they may be) by wearing the mask of the troupe. By the time they’ve completely forgotten who they were they either try to leave the troupe and become a refreshed version of themselves(like Nymm) who aren’t burdened by their past, or they choose to stay and let themselves dissolve, becoming one of the troupes specters and fusing with the heart itself. Essentially they’re something between blood cells and stem cells that the heart is using to rebuild.
• Meanwhile Grimm is just kinda chilling and also happy to be traveling the world and seeing new and beautiful sights.
• this sorta parallels how the heart feels, it misses the beauty of dreams, but it also found beauty in twisting them into nightmares as well so who knows.