Unstoppable Forces and Immovable Objects

by Kendrix

Summary:

“Thou return to cross thine nail with this pure vessel. For what purpose, We can only wonder.
Does combat draw thee closer together? Dost thou also desire attunement with the Gods? Or dost thou hide some other desire deep within thee?“
- The Godseeker

Or: Who says that you can't repurpose the local dream ritual for communing with the divine to have a bit of an unorthodox family reunion?

Notes:

If a playlist to go with the 'fic is desired, here is one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3-UX9qgmBI&list=PL5NwqLZQGFKzq2PxSohvDmywqgLrqV_MZ

Chapter 1: (the one who reached the peak)

‘I see now. This is you as you exist in my heart. And yet, at the same time, it’s also me, as I exist in your heart’

 

- Episode 25 of Neon Genesis Evangelion

 

 

The small creature that thought of itself as a wandering knight returned to face the trials once again.

Many tribulations, it had faced.

Many times, it had failed.

Many times, it had fallen, and then clambered back up.

Many times it was defeated and managed only narrowly to escape with its life, and many times it returned to brave the trials again, returning over and over, propelled forward by a single-minded purpose.

The long ascent to the peak of the pantheon was really no different, much grander in scale and implication, really, but what pushed it forward wasn’t really all that different from what had drawn it back and back again to its explorations of the caverns above and below.

Only recently, it had come to learn a little more about the first experiences that had shaped it in the beginning, but this had no really changed anything, only re-contextualized it.

It had simply come to know itself -

It had simply accepted what it had always been, and in this act, tapped into a hidden fount of power, power proportional in magnitude to its nature as a godspawn, yes, but really no different in kind from the might that anyone could obtain by getting out of their own way, if one came to know and accept oneself, to stop acting without knowing or being torn in resistance.

If the small speck could answer questions, it may have credited the teachings of its mentors, the hours spend meditating, observing, learning, hunting, gathering the scattered dreams and memories of this land, taking on the task of laying them to rest –

Long had that task gone undone. Long had the unquiet spirits that blanketed this land cried out for relief from their vigil or a closure for their regret – and the Knight had come to answer them, because it could and others couldn’t.

Because it was needed.

If a sacrifice was needed, it would have been willing to serve as one, driven forth at first by an only half-remembered call to purpose – it could have taken that path, if it had gone straight for its goal, like another before it; It might have done so without ever fully understanding itself; Without so much as knowing the source of that wayward drive to prove itself that would have pulled it towards that road…

But as it stood, it had not taken the straight path. It had taken many detours, probed the furthest reaches of this place, listened to many people, learned from many masters and gathered up the scattered stories scattered within, gone beyond that initial purpose, grounded in it still, yes, the importance of that seed understood with greater clarity in its original context, but the creature had also evolved beyond it, explored beyond its bounds, reinvented its meaning, much as it had done in putting its own spin on its spells.

It had been described, at times, as bold and tenacious, but also as an astute, swift learner and an attentive listener; It had learned that, so long as it listened, the world would reveal itself to it in time.

And thus, it came to see that what was really needed here was not another sacrifice.

Most instrumental in this understanding was probably the fierce huntress whom the wanderer now knew to be its sister. She had tried to stop it at first, announcing that she knew what it was and what it was doing – a surprising statement, since it had not really known either of these things itself, at the time.

It might simply have pressed on, putting her out of mind after having defeated her, moving forward with no further thought on the matter. Continued straight along its path.

Instead, it had been curious.

It had sought to understand. It had met her again and again, and with time, come to understand why she had stood in its way. Why it wouldn’t do to simply prolong the current stalemate in the slow war of attrition that had already worn down what remained of this kingdom to a faded afterimage.

The most that might be attained this way is stave off the slow decline until nothing at all would be left within this cavern; If a future was to be attained, something else would be needed.

Something other than a sacrifice. Something more than to follow old plans that had already failed; Something more.

Perhaps a hero. Or simply a grave-keeper, someone to gather up the lost hopes and dreams that clung to this ruins and wield them like a shining star against the very force that had shattered them.

When the small Knight perceived what must be done, it had understood, of course, that it wasn’t going to return from this either.

At first, it had not minded.

To vanish and be at peace in the knowledge that its purpose was fulfilled would be a definite upgrade from the previous prospect of an eternity in chains;

Besides, the Wanderer had lived a long, long time, since before the fall of this kingdom, enough for ages to pass, for realms to rise and fall, for many generations of surface-dwellers to fall to dust; It had traveled far and wide, had seen many wondrous sights, and learned of many secrets none of which it might ever be capable of sharing with another.

If it were to go back to whence it came now, it could do so without regret.

It was beyond regretting now.

Or so it thought.

It held no regret for its own sake.

But there were now at least two people whom it would lament to leave behind.

The first was the young, winged companion whom the Knight had acquired almost by accident, when it lit that mysterious lantern out of curiosity and ended up embroiled in the ritual of the Grimm Troupe.

Before he vanished, the old troupe master had declared that the two of them were set to feature in a great many tales and tragedies, but how could that be when their paths were to diverge so soon after it had been entrusted with the small nightmare creature’s care.

The Knight did not doubt that the rest of the troupe would surely show up to collect their own if Grimmchild’s current caretaker were to perish, so he’d be provided for, much more than the Knight itself had been at the beginning of its existence – and it could attest, more so than anyone, that a newborn godspawn could be rather more resilient and self-reliant than a mortal child.

Much like the Knight was born capable of fighting straight from the egg, Grimmchild had been throwing fire at anything in sight for a good while already – sooner or later, the little moth would surely feel the call of his destiny and depart to take on the leadership of his troupe in his predecessor’s place. It could understand this somewhat – it could see why the White Lady had thought them to be somewhat similar beings.

This, however, was exactly what lead them to suspect that none of this changed that the little gremlin would surely lament its absence.

The previous Grimm had no choice but to leave his offspring early due to the cyclical nature of his kinds’ existence; The void-born warrior would prefer not to leave him as well so soon after his father.

Given the choice, it would rather not leave him at all while he might still benefit from its company. There was a sense of failure, or at least of tragedy, in abandoning him just as it had been abandoned once by its own sire, even if the situation wasn’t quite the same.

It had gone to see the White Lady when it still wasn’t sure whether to conclude the ritual, or to take Brumm’s offer to put an end to it – she didn’t seem to see Grimmchild as fully trustworthy, perhaps owed to her taking the same detached approach to him as she did to her own undead spawn, but she did not object to the ritual’s conclusion as if it would be something dangerous to the kingdom, and with this, she had ultimately given the Knight the information it came for, to know what must to make its own decision. It was grateful to her, in a sense – the words she had spoken after the ritual’s conclusion assured it that something of its vanished friend endured within his offspring.

Her pointed admonishment not to forget ‘its larger task’ had been like how it must imagine sand upon one’s mouth-parts, but it could not deny that her urgency was grounded in fact; The ever more pressing need for action was plain to see every time it made its way through the oozing mess that had become of the Crossroads.

 

And then, there was its sister, the very same one who had set it upon a different path that even the Lady did not seem to have conceived of, even though it was her who had handed it the fragment that might make a different course of action possible.

Perhaps she had long since lost faith in her husband’s contingency plans, though she still held enough lingering tenderness for him to carry out what last instructions he might have left before he up and disappeared.

Hornet, however…

At the beginning, she must have viewed the Knight much as the Queen did – as an old regret come back to haunt them, having emerged as a revenant from among the bones in the family’s figurative backyard. It doubted not that she would have cut it down with the well-practiced efficiency of a hardened warrior if it had not proved itself tenacious enough to outlast the quickness of her blade – but she respected strength, and so did it. She caught its eyes at once as a creature moving with skill and purpose, and over the course of their subsequent encounters, the taunt with which she’d greeted it would morph into something like an affectionate nickname, or even the closest it could claim to a formally bestowed title.

It had felt some affinity to her at once, at first, simply because it could recognize her as someone long used to surviving on her own in harsh environments… but that was before she hinted at their connection. Before its encounter with the White Lady all but confirmed its suspicion.

– for so long, it had walked the earth, roaming far and wide, never once finding anything like itself among all the strange and marvelous creatures that crossed its path.

It met traces of its likes soon after coming here, but found mostly their vacated remains. Or worse than vacated, in one particularly unpleasant occurrence down in the depths of the Ancient Basin.

Its sister, however, was alive, and demonstrated a willingness to aid it on its quest.

And now they were to part, already, though it had only just found her?

It would be leaving her behind, and it wouldn’t be the first to do so.

Only the last, in a long line of looming figures that had gone forth in the name of duty, never to, leaving her to shoulder the heavy burden of their legacy.

The stoic warrior princess had valiantly held onto her composure when the wanderer had been forced to slay her mother, though she could easily have ended it then and there – she must have found its unresponsive form next to the dais on which the Spider Queen had rested, while its consciousness was preoccupied in the dream realm. It would have been short work for her to put some holes in its resting, physical body.

There was no way that the thought would not have crossed her mind; She was a skilled, consummate huntress; the Knight, a sitting duck, its back and neck served to her as if on a platter –

And yet she stood aside. She bit her tongue.

One more sacrifice for the sake of the kingdom. For some far-flung, desperate hope that this realm frozen in time might have a future after all, rather than remaining forever suspended in the stretched-out, eternal moment of its drawn-out decline.

She had accepted this outcome long ago as an inevitability, maybe even a mercy, compared with the prospect of leaving her mother forever suspended in limbo. She was so used to a lack of good choices, of having to pick the lesser evil every time, of bringing it about with her very own hands…

The Knight had understood her, then, and lost all will to resent her, even as it still held onto that tattered old mothwing cloak taken from one if its fallen kindred. It had seen her applying that very same, cruel measuring stick even to herself.

She was strong, of course. She could take it. She was sure to persevere. If it had never returned here, she likely would have guarded this gods-forsaken ruin until the place was finally emptied of all life.

‘No cost too great’, as that stupid old King might have said.

Curse Him.

Curse all of this.

All of this was so unfair.

Impossible choice after impossible choice…

 

Even so, some things simply cannot be done. Some costs can’t be avoided.

Some might say that a refusal to accept the inevitable was precisely what had lead the Pale King down the dark path of His follies.

Beggars can’t be choosers.

It may well be that the Knight might be able to put a permanent end to the infection – just barely, in a desperate effort, by using all means at its disposal and holding nothing back.

But anything beyond that would take a miracle.

And there were precious few gods left in these lands that might be prayed to for one of those…

 

That’s when it remembered that strange bug from the sewers. The one who spoke of seeking the Gods – at first, the traveler had not seen the appeal, really. She had been rather rude, all things considered, somehow obsequious and imperious at once, and bound to bite off more than she could chew before long…

 

But the Knight had set out to do what was needed. To be what was needed.

So what if this land needs a new god? What if only a miracle could grant mercy to the remaining tatters of the family it had found itself with?

What faded gods remained here lacked the means to do a thing; Both Unn and the Life Blood Deity seemed to have sanctioned and blessed the Knight’s quest, judging by the charms they each had granted it, but their domain was life, not destruction. Meanwhile, the Nightmare King’s role in the ecosystem was that of a scavenger or cleanser that might purify the old through the sacrament of decay, so that the New could be made room for, but first, destruction must take place to clean out the rot, if preserving the old was no longer feasible...

The Old King had tried all He could, but His efforts had long since failed.

Once, He had been the supreme reigning power in these caverns, but the Radiance had laid Him low and beaten Him soundly, left Him defeated in every way, and sat on his His old throne at the top as the pantheon as the one and only Light.

So who was left now, to take up His crown?

...when the Knight took up the King’s brand, that was certainly done with the intention to take responsibility of the kingdom’s fate and future – Were it otherwise, the Princess should not have suffered it to pass.

But it also took it with the belief that the mark itself would serve it chiefly as a glorified passkey to open some doors, before it must perish in the attempt of what that responsibility would entail.

It had no thoughts of amending tax codes or getting trams to run on time.

Sure, there was some satisfaction in the symbolic value of being granted the recognition that it had previously been denied – in particular, because Hornet was the one granting it in her father’s place, formally bringing the Knight into their clan, as it were, for all that previous little remained of it.

If it cared for anyone’s recognition at all, that would be hers, not the stupid King’s, for all that the mark might be the lingering echo of His residual magic at work.

It was a nice little gesture to receive first, if this must be the end.

Now, however, it thought of taking the Pale King’s throne in earnest.

If not as monarch, then as Hallownest’s topmost reigning deity.

It had no plans of order to impose, no intention of building a palace, and no pretense of reasserting the old Wyrm’s promises of eternity; It meant to do the task for as long as it was needed and let the future be as it may; It might well end up handing the kingdom off to someone else down the line, maybe Hornet or one of her descendants, should she chose to have them, or some other worthy steward of sufficient merit, whatever their origin.

It might disappear back into the night to resume its wanderings eventually, or return to whence it came to the dark ocean below – who can say what the future might bring?

 

But for now, with the Creator long gone and the Preserver brought to its knees, all called out for a Destroyer, rising out of the Sacred Darkness to cleanse the unclean.

And one would answer.

 

On its many travels, the Knight had heard a few tales or legends that told of the occasional demigod ascending when they would otherwise have died.

The odds should then be even more favorable for a full-blooded godspawn.

Of course, it knew well that it could never be a deity of light or life, like its parents had been, and certainly not one of order; It had no great visions to impose on the world, and was quite willing to take it as it was. Furthermore, it had accepted that it was of the darkness; of the primordial chaos that preceded creation. Yet it knew the dark to have its own power – a power that the stupid King had, after all, tried to seek out without fully understanding it. The dark itself had once been worshiped in the most distant, ancient days, long before the reign of the Pale Beings or even that of the Radiance Herself. For all that she might call the King a usurper, She too, had not been the first power in these parts.

So let night follow day again.

 

The small creature of shadow was nothing if not tenacious.

 

Once, it had clawed its way out of its early grave, refusing to be buried among the bleached bones of its likes, heeding the call of purpose, only to find that it had been a hair’s breadth too late, that the intended destiny was already taken by another –

Discarded by its creator, the small, nameless creature had fallen straight back onto the pit from whence it came – and yet, it could not rest. Yet, it could not be satisfied with simply fading away.

The King may have no more task, employ or mission left for it, but it still wanted to be a knight in its own right.

It still felt the call to deeds, to purpose, and it decided then, that it would go to find those elsewhere, even if it was not needed in the place of its birth.

 

The Godseeker’s ritual was really no different.

It was just another climb, in which the creature did not cease, no mater how many times it was thrown back down to the depths.

It always got up and tried again.

Undeterred.

Tenacious.

Hellbent.

...well. Actually, there were quite a few times when it had really been tempted to just keep laying on the ground right where it awakened after being whacked by one of Markoth’s stray projectiles of essence for the upteenth time, and more than once, it may have marched past a few mildly confused Godseekers to plop itself down on the nearest bench and not move from it for quite some time while Grimmchild landed besides it and did his part to cheer it up with a few encouraging little ‘nyehs’ and silly antics that included spitting little bursts of fire in the shapes of various beasts, but in the end, it always pulled itself together and returned to the task at hand, much to the annoyance of the leading Godseeker.

Though as of late, it might have worn her down to the point that she was beginning to find its persistence more intriguing than irritating.

 

For a being so fixated on attaining communion with the Gods, she certainly had an idiosyncratic concept of what makes for one.

It was not immediately clear to the diminutive warrior what exactly she would ‘count’ as a God. Clearly it took more than just a powerful being. Anything that could have a story around it, maybe – something that could spawn legend. Anything that could might be thought of as as embodiment of a concept or force. That’s how even Zote could be here, if enough people believed his tall tales, even if it was just very few wanting to believe him very badly.

If not Gods, then maybe the candidates that were clearly mortal could be thought of as something like patron saints.

 

Many times, she stood before the challenger, smaller than she appeared in the outside world, but speaking in a voice that was clearer, less raspy, ringing with power. A showy one, she was, and once impressed by showy things, so much so that she’d almost accomplished the unlikely feat of making the Knight feel tempted take that stupid King’s side for one, when she didn’t get why He did not simply awe His subjects with the grand monstrous form that He had once possessed.

She didn’t seem to understand why He might have wanted to meet with His subjects as if he were one of them… if that was, in fact, what He had wanted.

He could have meant to fool them… but one could certainly not argue that it would have been better if He showed up all huge and alien and casually flaunting just how easily He could crush any of them….

Stupid Godseeker, for making stupid King sound reasonable.

Even her words are showy.

Servile in the praise she lavishes, but also ostentatious, prideful in acting as the mouthpiece of vicarious power. But also fickle.

The fickleness then, was going to work in the Knight’s advantage.

It meant that she was not picky.

She came here looking for the King, but when He wasn’t here anymore by the time that she emerged from her sarcophagus, she proved just as ready to settle for the Old Light, never mind how this entire land was devastated by Her.

There was some logic in that, if Godseeker was simply looking for the foremost power around – the Radiance definitely had the King soundly beaten in their contest of wills.

There was probably no point in trying to talk her out of it, even if the Knight had the means to accomplish this.

The Godseeker probably wouldn’t mind if she were to get overtaken in the end; She often spoke of how she (and by extension, the entire tribe she spoke for) would give their very minds to attain communion with something mighty and sublime.

If the Old Light was a more reasonable Being, you’d think She might be happy to get new worshipers.

She wouldn’t be, though.

That much should be plain.

It wasn’t her nature. Her nature could be seen through everything she had done.

Even without communing with Her directly, She could be known by the fruits she had brought forth throughout the kingdom, and the Knight had come to know these very well as it had fought its way through Hallownest’s remains.

She was blinding light. She was burning heat. She was feverish, festering rage. She was the impossible longing that could only be attained in dreams.

She can’t be placated – That bunch of turncoat Mosskin set up a congregation to worship her, and She had just melted them into puddles right along with everyone else once she came closer to breaking free.

The old Seer had devoted her entire life to appeasing Her, never daring to cast blame on Her, always putting the responsibility for the plague and devastation on the heads of her own ancestors. In the end, the kindly old moth disappeared in a piteous state of un-fullfilment, asking for the memory of her and her kind to be buried by the sands, pleading for forgiveness right until she faded into glimmers of light, having held on way past her time for the sake of a penance that she never could have completed alone.

She faded with the Goddess’ name upon her lips, and still no sign of comfort came down from the heavens to receive her;

No amount of penitence would have been enough.

Maybe She thinks its too late, or that it doesn’t count if it comes from a place of regret rather than freely given love – but what can She expect, if She puts all the land in fear? How freely given was the love She once received, when there was simply no other option?

That stupid King may have promised His followers more than He could truly deliver, but at least He tried to provide it.

If the Godseeker were to succeed in summoning the Radiance and attuning to Her, chances are she’d end up very much like Her last would-be prophet – maybe she’d consider it worth it, though, hoping to find some ecstasy or communion in it. But if she should somehow manage to set Her free or become the means of Her escape, the outcome wouldn’t be pretty, considering the havoc She had been able to wreak while still confined.

The White Lady said that She would probably burst out with the pent-of rage of ages…

Would She even content herself with destroying what remains of Hallownest, or would she extend her reach even further, far beyond here? She had certainly not stopped at its borders before, afflicting even those who had never been counted among the Pale King’s devotees, such as the Mosskin, who had kept to their old faith. She would burn herself out eventually, or come to a stop at the doorstep of some other power with the means to counter her, but how many more would be left scorched in Her wake before that?

Maybe She could no longer trust any devotion, after her creations had forsaken her. Maybe nothing will satisfy Her anymore but victims stuffed so full of her burning, searing essence that it leaks out of their eye-holes, pushing aside all their thoughts until they cannot think of anything else but Her;

She wanted to be remembered so badly that she no longer care what for; Maybe she figured that the people would have a longer memory for pain than for gratitude.

 

That, or She just wants to be mad, simply because She is, and She isn’t going to listen to any semblance of reason.

Reason was the stupid King’s domain… that’s probably why He couldn’t beat Her.

Reason can suppress passion, for some time, but it can never smother it completely.

It can’t make it go away. Order might be forced onto nature, for a while, but with time, nature always stubbornly returns. Anything that has a will eventually meets the limits of that will, a point where it can’t be imposed onto the world any further – and that’s where dreams, yearnings and desires can take root, in the continuation of reality. Anything that has individuality – that is something rather than nothing, or anything, is going to be some things and therefore not be other things, so it can yearn to be what it is not.

Only something that isn’t anything at all could be free from yearning.

The only way that the King could have freed His people from the torment She had laid upon them might have been to take back the choice He granted them – to rescind from them reason, mind and individuality… and this He would not do.

It would have been contrary to his very nature…

Though He did, at last, betray himself in this manner.

He must have rationalized it at first, to take away choices from a few, rather than the many.

The math sure must have checked out neatly, at the time…

Or it might have, it if he hadn’t fudged some numbers.

Guess the stupid King met the limits of His will, too.

The will of a God might be a mighty, far-reaching thing, but it, too, has limits.

First of all, He misunderstood the darkness he’d sought to harness on a fundamental level; (Of this, the discarded Vessel felt qualified to speak with a certain authority, ever since it had returned to its place of origin and known itself as a part of the darkness.) - it is true that the darkness devours, that it is the unmaking and the chaos and the end of all things; As a Light, and as a being of order and creation much more so, that is what he would have seen in it.

But if the dark was the end, and that which strips everything away, then it is also the empty space from which everything arises in the beginning, the vacuous spaciousness that is filled anytime anything new comes into being.

He might wipe a wax tablet clean, but that did not mean that nothing else can be written upon it ever again, in fact, wiping it clean is a prerequisite to writing new things on it.

How would He, the architect, ever design anything without a blank canvas to sketch on?

Judging by the notes in His old workshop, the King had understood this intellectually, even coveted that power, but He lacked the intuition that would form from a more direct experience of something that was ever beyond his reach.

But much more fundamentally than that, He could not be His own contradiction. He couldn’t be the opposite of what He was.

And what He was, was a craftsman. An architect. An inventor. An artificer. A demiurge. A maker of things.

The Knight didn’t know that much about making, despite Master Sheo’s best attempts at convincing it to give such pursuits a try.

But it had met makers. Known them.

Not just Master Sheo, but the Nailsmith, the Mask Maker…

Hornet, too, sometimes made things. Those spiky balls she liked to throw at it – she made those herself.

Maybe the stupid King had taught her about making, handed her her first set of miniature tools and showed her how to hold them, sharing with her this aspect of His being that could take part in despite her mortal blood and having inherited a flavor of magic more similar to that of her mother’s people.

Of course, a painter or a smith would make much smaller things than the stupid King did, but it’s just the same thing on a different scale. Painting is to remake a piece of canvas into one’s own image, to leave an imprint of what someone has inside of them. Smithcraft is to do the same with metal. To force one’s will upon the outer world. To give a purpose to what was just growing wild before that, existing only for its own sake.

For the King, maybe this whole Kingdom started as a kind crafts project.

Master Sheo wasn’t wrong to say that Gods and artists were similar, as they are both in the business of creation.

The King may be long gone, but He can still be known. His presence is felt, through His machines, His contraptions, His architecture, His constructs, His laws, everything He made.

It all reflects Him – everything about Him, all that He was.

His ambition. His vision. His blind spots. His folly. His ideals. His imperfections

The good. The bad. The ugly.

From the beginning, it would have been impossible for Him to make something that didn’t bear His imprint, that did not reflect Him in some way. The whole endeavor was an attempt to impose a will and purpose even on the unshaped primordial darkness.

Who but a Maker and a Knower would try to put His will even on the force opposite to His nature?

Perhaps that, too, was an inevitable, tragic consequence of His very nature: The light of knowledge would always try to penetrate the deep dark unknown, though He could never fully illuminate its dephts.

He may have sought to make something that would be as close as nothing as possible, but He couldn’t make nothing. Nothing is neither created nor destroyed. Nothing can’t have a purpose.

It just is. Or, actually, is not.

He left all those poor little lingering imprints there at the bottom of that chasm, still separate from the nothing from which they came while His light of purpose still burns from within their eyes, longing still to fulfill the impossible task He had put on them, though they have no means to ever complete it, fragments of could-have-beens haunting the blackness forever, as a dark mirror to the restless spirits in the Kingdom above…

The only thing that might set them free is to see the task done.

Curse the stupid King.

His only saving grace is that he probably didn’t realize, at least not until later, until He went about preparing that charm as one last desperate, last-ditch contingency, spending Himself in the attempt.

He thought the darkness would take everything – in a way, His failure might be more impressive than His success ever would have been. He accomplished less than He thought He could, but also so much more, for in the end, when He at last beheld proof of His failure in the resurgence of the infection, He must have realized that even the Ancient Dark can carry the imprint of will and purpose, that it can be given form, mind and focus.

It is of course often the case in the process of discovery that the second mouse gets the cheese.

And though He must have realized in the end, that He had forfeit the right to be a part of the future he hoped to preserve, that it couldn’t be His will at the reins anymore, He seemed to have chosen to fling a light into the future in the end; To trust that another would complete His work.

It is only because of this that this new plan has a chance of working.

Stupid as He might have been, the Knight had to grant him some credit for this.

 

The Godseeker shouldn’t mind too much about her plan getting hijacked. If she was ready to swap the Pale King for the Radiance, she wouldn’t be terribly attached to the latter either.

All she cared about is that she summons the Biggest, Baddest power around.

She might get to see something interesting, if this works.

The Knight would need to clear her ritual first, though.

It had to win.

It had to pass the trials one after another.

This was not the first challenge it had faced. Not even its first dream ritual.

The road might be tough, but – it had to keep trying. No other choice.

Again and again.

It was used to this; Things had always been this way. No one’s coming. What has to be done, had to be done. No one else would come and do it for it.

It had to try again when its endeavors didn’t work.

It was getting closer to the end now, bit by bit.

 

Which meant…

That the small being of shadow would soon come to reunite with the one who called it here.

It did not quite know how this worked, on the other end.

Some of the participants in this ritual had been gone from the waking world already, but others yet lived, such as the Knight’s former teachers.

Maybe the summons fit itself into the dream of the one that is called in such a way that it makes sense – for a dream, at least. Dreams don’t have to make that much sense, just a dream-like kind of sense.

All Godseeker needs for her ritual is for some manner of combat to take place.

It wouldn’t be too strange for a Nosk or a Flukemarm to dream of just another hunt.

Or for Masters Sheo, Oro and Mato to dream of testing themselves against their student.

It’s not strange for someone to dream of someone they care about, or even of an enemy that had soundly kicked their backside.

The Knight would not be surprised if they should find that same painting of the Godseeker’s mask in reality as well next time they swung by Master Sheo’s place, though he might not think it more than something he had glimpsed in a strange, half-remembered dream.

The more powerful the opponents became, though, the more things began to get… interesting.

The small creature had been poking around with its dream nail for long enough to notice that different individuals came with different degrees of awareness or sensitivity to dream-related phenomena.

Even among the surviving citizens of the Kingdom, there were a few that could tell when they’re being dream nailed, for example – mostly those who had an air of being rather ancient or knowledgeable, or those at least acquainted with some of the various forms of magicks practiced in these lands.

The Princess of Deepnest was not among that number, but among the participants that the Knight encountered along its path through the ranks of would-be deities, she was probably the first to take note of the audience of bronze masks or demonstrate some awareness that what was taking place was something other than just an ordinary dream.

It would seem that her professed perceptiveness was more than not an idle boast, though her semi-divine lineage must have given her an edge as well.

As she was crossing blades with the one she had dubbed a ‘Little Ghost’, it caught her trying to piece together what was happening, wondering if she was somehow in its dream, or if it had somehow come into hers… and then. A stay trace of sentiment just barely breaking into her surface thoughts.

Something about shared dreams…

 

What kind of dreams would they share?

The Knight did not need the beefed-up Nosk trying to pass for her to realize that she certainly had claimed a place in its own dreams.

Perhaps the dreams they would share would be of roaming through the wilderness, of struggling onward all alone, opposed on all sides, and what it might be to instead brace such challenges together in days to come. Maybe something about a possible future for this faded kingdom.

And quite possibly, dreams about the sight of a very particular back, etched deeply into each of their respective minds.

The back of the other Vessel. The Chosen One. The one who’d earned itself the right to be referred to as the Vessel, with a definite article.

In a way, the Knight had been chasing that back all its life, even while it didn’t quite recall this. Even now, it was still striving upward in pursuit.

Of course, the scenes that each of the two of them would recall would not be quite the same.

For the Wanderer, its last sight of that being would have been that of a tiny speck much like itself, another droplet of darkness concealed under pale gray, leaf-like wing-covers and a pale shell with serrated horns, disappearing upwards into the light-

Hornet’s last memory of it might be of it vanishing into darkness instead; By then, it would have been a tall, imposing creature, if the statue in the city of tears was to be trusted, in a long cape and gleaming armor –

It was easy to picture her, maybe a smaller, younger version of her that had not yet learned to be so hard and stern as she was now, not yet calloused by the long years, possibly weeping already after being pried off of the lifeless form of her mother earlier that same day.

Maybe she had clung onto that cape of its with her grubby little hands. Maybe she would have begged it not to go, not to leave her as well, just as everyone else seemed to be leaving –

She would not yet have had the warriors’ pride that would lead her to brand such an act as one of weakness and futility.

But without a doubt, it would not have stopped on its unswerving path for her, either.

One could picture its towering form stepping past her without a moment’s hesitation.

There was no choice. Certainly not at that point. It simply could not stop, if probably not quite for the reasons that any possible onlookers would have been lead to believe.

If there were witnesses, even those hand-picked from the King’s inner circle might have been disturbed when they never saw the slightest trace of fear, hesitation or resentment from the would-be sacrifice.

Such loyal followers would of course not consider how a more disinterested observer may have found their cherished monarch Himself to be the one whose actions seemed rather unfeeling when He went and completed the black deed, returning from the temple alone. Nor would it have occurred to them to consider how many of them would have laid down their own lives without a flinch if their sovereign commanded it, not in mindless, insensate obedience, but out of deep personal devotion, for loyalty, dedication, to protect their loved ones, or in fiery conviction in the righteousness of their cause…

 

It’s hard to say how much time the would-be sacrifice could have spent with its sister. The Princess would probably have been living with her mother before the sealing, to take advantage of what limited time they would have together, but it’s hard to imagine that she never visited the White Palace.

She, too, was born as part of a pact leading up to that wretched plan, so they can’t have been too far apart in age. One may assume that she is younger (and therefore, younger than the Wanderer as well, though few would suspect this from looking at them side by side), simply because it would make sense that Queen Herrah would have want to see some proof of the plan’s viability before agreeing to trade away her life as part of it, though it was possible that she wasn’t, in which case she must, of course, be imagined as having been much more composed when the black deed was accomplished.

 

She never spoke of the event, and the Knight did, of course, lack the means of asking her directly.

What it did know is that she’d referred to their shared sibling’s sacrifice with some measure of respect, that she accounted it as such (both the sibling, and the act of sacrifice), and that she considered its sorry fate as ‘tragic’ enough that she thought hearing of it may rob those of faint heart of the resolve needed to cut it down – an indulgence that she, of course, would not allow herself, though she did not possess the power to slay the ill-fated god-spawn all by herself, nor the capacity to take on its burden on account of being warm, breathing and likely filled with twitching insides that left no space for any angry goddesses to be stashed within in their place.

If she could do it, she would not ask it of another.

 

The ‘Tragic Being’, as it was sometimes obliquely known, might have amounted to a full-fledged deity in its own right at some point, if only a lesser one subsidiary to its creator – but it had actually been prayed to at some point, even within living memory of the surface-dwelling mortals. The Elder of Dirtmouth recalled a distant past where his bolder contemporaries had clambered down to the temple that was its tomb and found a presence of peace and holy silence in that place;

 

But that was long, long ago.

By the time that the Wanderer had come to the temple of the black egg, even the most oblivious, sheltered, non-magical commoner you could find would have sensed the presence of something ominous there, something that should be avoided.

The entire structure had been suffused with a cloying, sticky warmth leaking all over the place.

There may have been a time when the Radiance could have been said to be stuck in there with the sacrifice; by now, it was clearly stuck there with Her, and fading fast with every passing moment, the sorry remains of its strength melting away like candlewax.

 

It must have been rather more in possession of itself at the time that it had sent out the call, but the last time that its long-lost sibling had stood outside its prison and tried to reach out for its occupant by the same means that had been used to call it here, all it could pick up on was identical to all same usual drivel that might be found inside the minds of all other victims of the Jealous Goddess, all-consuming visions of burning rage and blazing light, with little hints of what, if anything, might have existed there before.

 

The overall impression was alike to that of a burning house, with thrashing flames leaping out of every window and a roof in the process of caving in, all discernible traits blackened by soot, and all it once contained blown away as flakes of cinders.

 

Many of the lost souls wandering here had one thing or another that they held onto, some deepest, most foundational part of themselves that had been the last thing to wash away – some of the shambling aristocrats in the city still clung to their baubles or maintained an uppity air, some of the guards still patrolled, the fools in the Colosseum still bashed each others’ heads in in a surprisingly orderly fashion; Even the bizarre artificial creature in the archives had seemed trapped in some fantasy of somehow convincing its long-lost mistress not to sacrifice herself.

Myla had some scrambled, distorted echos of the songs she used to love still rattling around in her mind, even when she was otherwise completely overtaken…

 

What of this being then? What would it cling to?

Supposedly, She would never have been able to take root, if there had been nothing there to begin with. But how much was enough?

What had She promised it?

Regretfully, the Wanderer never had the chance to know its sibling well enough to hazard a good guess, to be able to pick out right away what was its own, what couldn’t have been put there by Her.

The contents were wholly disorganized; There was no kind of deliberate response or discernible reaction.

Perhaps a particular ‘voice’ or tone was overlaid over the typical ravings – somewhat more serious, maybe, compared to how the same predictable phrase may have appeared in the mind of another. More formal. More solemn. More severe.

This might be too much of a reach, too much extrapolation from very few clues. Trying too hard to see something, possibly. No means of comparison by which to tell the signal from the noise.

Two frayed threads of thought stood out, amid the ugly, discordant fragments within, as being unlikely to have come from the raging goddess;

One was a rather detached observation of the creature’s sorry state. An unvarnished assessment of its failure.

The other was a torrent of raw agony, most of it beyond intelligibility or coherence, but interspersed, at times, with cries for the Pale King, whom His hated rival would obviously not long for; Only that the sacrifice called Him something different.

It very much did think of the God-King as its liege, as well as its creator and its patron deity all in one, with all the manifest reverence and devotion this implied, but within the once unfathomable private darkness of its shell, its name for Him was ‘Father’.

 

It was not exactly a child’s cry for its parent.

It was something much worse.

After all, it is rather natural for children to want their parents;

Whatever means King and his faithful archivist might have cooked up to induce maturation in what might be considered the product of necromancy or an artificial construct animated by an eldritch substance, this creature was distinctly full-grown and had been fully, horrifically conscious for all the long ages of its torment, and quite aware of what had been going on outside its prison, having been equipped with the means to find out as a parting gift.

The Vessel was ancient;

It was reduced to wanting its parent all the same.

Its understanding may have been too scrambled for it to recall that its father was long gone, or that it was Him who was to blame for its current predicament to begin with, that the late monarch was probably the very last person in all of existence who would ever have thought to release His fallen champion from its binds…

Another possibility was that it understood perfectly, but that its despair cared nothing for reason.

 

Under regular circumstances, what passed for its soul should have been lost to the world, impossible to reach.

Quite aware, possibly, at least intermittently, or in partial, dream-like scraps of uncomprehending echos trapped in endless loops, but unable to ever again wrest control from the goddess that had taken possession of it; One should really hope that it wasn’t all too lucid. The would have been nothing to be conscious of but utmost suffering; But given the track record of its luck thus far, the Hollow Knight would probably find itself wide awake, yet completely helpless.

 

But different rules apply when it comes to dream rituals.

Especially where higher beings were concerned.

Both Unn and the White Lady seemed to have noted the Godseeker’s invitation, but had declined to participate in her competition, ostensibly content to fade away in peace without any intention to contest whichever power would emerge as Hallownest’s new reigning deity;

Grimm (and his other self), meanwhile, was entirely in his element; He clearly knew exactly what was happening and by all means appeared to have a blast putting on a little show for the Godseekers’ benefit.

Only the King could not be reached, having somehow managed to get Himself so thoroughly erased that the Seekers could not even channel some faded afterimage of Him.

He would evade accountability to the last.

 

But if even Hornet could tell, and the White Lady could definitely tell, then, surely…

There is just no way that King’s fallen Paladin would not realize.

With the outcome of the Knight’s own attempt at ascension still pending, the Chosen Vessel must be accounted as the one among the Pale Beings’ offspring who had come the closest to attaining its own divinity. It must count as an angel at least, or as some sort of harbinger.

The bound one, they called it. The mighty God of Nothingness, of purity and holy silence, empty and terrible.

 

It was actually going to be here, fully present and aware. As itself.

As whoever it was before the Radiance sank her mouth parts into it, if it was anyone at all –

The meeting would be brief and consist chiefly of ritual combat, but it would be here.

Reunion at long last.

It would only be possible in a place like this.

 

Despite all the flowery praise that the Godseeker coughed up, it was fairly obvious what the recipient’s place was supposed to be in her ritual; She did not at all conceal that she intended the Chosen Vessel as a mere stepping stone, a means to an end to get to her heart’s true desire.

That seems to be its unique lot in life, to be used and damned by those who sang its praises...

 

The Knight wondered at first, how exactly it was going to sneak into the Chosen Vessel’s dreams.

Where it would appear. How easily it would be for itself to fit in there.

Was it ever in the others’ thoughts?

Maybe it would be a scenario like what the Dung Defender once imagined, when he said that he could picture the Wanderer right alongside the Great Knights of yore, in some world where the Five Great Knights might have been expanded to a Seven eventually.

Surely, the Chosen Vessel was far too loyal to the stupid King to picture itself crossing the wastelands alongside its sibling.

The Wanderer liked to think that it would still have departed eventually, to go and see the world, but it would have done so well-prepared, fully equipped and duly provided with warmth and guidance, rather than being forced to fend for itself like a wild beast. The stupid King might not have liked that, depending on how invested he truly was in upholding the fiction that there was nothing beyond the kingdom’s bounds, though he can’t have been too married to that idea if He had an outsider like Ze’Mer among His most trusted lieutenants.

It was a dream, so it didn’t have to make sense; Surely some flimsy hand-waved explanation could be contrived for how they would all exist without the Radiance necessitating their ugly fates. Perhaps His Majesty might have had a bit of a lab accident near the nursery. Hornet could have come about as the result of some perfectly mundane political deal that left her mother still alive and kicking; Perhaps Lurien and Monomon might be called in to teach the royal children their letters, and so the Knight might have met Quirrel ahead of schedule, which would be very welcome, considering that most of its other friends would not have been born yet, particularly the ones who were mortals from the surface.

 

It still could not quite picture the Pale King doing anything parent-like with regards to itself. He wasn’t there when it would have needed a parent; Insofar as any parent-shaped holes had existed in its life, that would have been filled by others. It could not picture Him as ‘Father’. In its mind, that word would rather seem to go with Master Mato, or even the Hunter.

Though it might be interesting to consider what the White Lady might have acted like, if she didn’t have a reason to keep her distance.

Maybe she would actually accept gifts from it, in that dream. Maybe she would actually thank it, if it went to do her favors. Maybe she would be glad when it stopped by her for advice, rather than restricting herself to curt reminders not to dally. Maybe in this silly, ridiculous dream world, Marmu would get lucky, and the Queen would, in fact, teach them both to fly. Perhaps she would sing them songs, for it and the other vessel both, or maybe she would be humming along with that dusty old music box it had found in the palace, and they might come to find that all three of them shared a fondness for songs…

 

Such illusions would soon come to a crushing halt when the Knight began to recognize its surroundings, the threshold upon which the Godseeker was awaiting them to say her piece.

 

It was the Black Vault, but not as it would have known the place – this must be the past, not exactly before its time, but still long, long ago.

Where would it have been, at this time?

Probably still in the wastes east of the Kingdom, which made it hard to say anything with certainty, as it had been impossible to maintain any sense of time in that place. The discarded vessel had been a lone speck of black in a wide featureless expanse of nothing on all sides. There had been no means to tell just how long it marched between the few scattered isles of something in that vastness. It may have been marching through a wide flat salt plain, hacking lichens and cacti to bits for the minuscule amount of Soul that might be extracted from them, its movements sluggish from a prolonged lack of the animating substance.

It could not say if it still recalled enough of its sibling to wonder what it might be doing, though it seemed the answer must have been ‘Walking to its doom’.

This must have been before the sealing.

Everything in here was new, fresh, untarnished, barely just finished.

The arcane runes and alchemic diagrams carved into the walls were aglow with power, responding to every touch of its feet upon the hallowed ground.

The stupid King’s spellwork, no doubt, ready and waiting for the heart of the plague; This must have been the instant just before the trap was sprung.

An ingenious, intricate trap that, mind you, was going to include four living souls among its ingredients.

 

Of course, it would be this. The Godseeker wasn’t doing this to facilitate family reunions; She was looking for something to worship. For divinity.

If the Chosen Vessel had ever possessed that, there could be no doubt that this would have been the site of its apotheosis. The place where legend of the Hollow Knight took shape, the myth of the Pure Vessel, though no such being could ever truly have existed, not any more than Zote had ever been a prince.

The Godseeker was invoking the God of Nothingness, and the Black Vault was, at once, its temple, its mausoleum, and the altar upon it was bled.

 

But alright. The Knight would allow it. It was appropriate, in a way, considering that it had its very own trap for the Radiance… and this time, they would see the task done right rather than by halves. Unlike the King, it didn’t have the power to move anything to or from the dream realm on a large scale, so it would need to get Her attention – Godseeker’s foolhardy summons would do nicely, even if she must taunt it to the end.

So what if it imagined itself the Chosen Vessel’s equal?

Maybe it did. Maybe it was about to finally catch up to them at long, long last…

 

The Knight was tempted to step right past her, into the central room, with all its waiting chains, like an open grave ready to swallow them both.

But first… it wanted some idea of what to expect, and chanced a peek into the Seeker’s thoughts.

 

...it seems she hadn’t got an answer at first, no more than she did from the White Lady.

Not until the ritual was already well underway.

The path forward had been barred for good reason;

She still had not gotten anything but silence from the one she summoned, but still she was let through, at last. She called it providence; The possibility occurred to the Knight that it was not really so much Godseeker for whom the path had been cleared, but for the shorter voidling.

Did the Chosen Vessel suspect something of its intentions, then?

Was this a show of trust?

Did it have some measure of faith in its long-lost sibling?

 

The Wanderer wanted it to know that it was coming. That it would not be long now…

But before it could go making any promises, it would have to vanquish the other in honorable combat.

A fair fight…

In a way, it really ought to thank the Godseeker for this chance.

This was what it had been looking for, all along. To prove itself, yes, but not according to the King’s yardstick. Not in dancing to His pipe.

The Knight did not really resent its sibling. Not after all this time. Not after learning what happened to it. But it wound find some satisfaction in testing its strength against the other; In getting it all out of its system, so that they could one day face one another without regrets.

So it was not really averse to having a ‘dance’, as Grimm might call it.

This is how it had truly wanted to cross blades with the other – to face it at full strength, as it really was. To face it, truly, and not the feverish, half-mad, moth-eaten ruin that the Radiance had left of it.

What satisfaction could there possibly have been in fighting someone who barely even stand up straight anymore? Someone who would probably have been trying its darnedest resist Her so that it might assist its sibling in putting it out of its misery?

The Knight wanted to see what its sibling might be like when it went all out. When it wasn’t holding back. When it was actually trying to win.

The Wanderer was far past giving serious weight to any doubts it may have held about coming in second, but it would still find satisfaction in proving itself no lesser; Truth be told, it had been itching to defeat the other at least once.

 

...and there it was.

Those long, serrated horns were unmistakable.

The sculptors had not exaggerated in the least.

If anything, they never fully captured it.

The polished marble seemed a fuzzy, remembered memory of its true likeness, like an old wallpaper that suddenly looked washed out and gray when compared with a new, virgin sheet of the same material.

It stood as a forbidding, towering figure, festooned in gleaming armor and a long cape of pristine alabaster, hands dutifully folded over its weapon, looking every inch the part of the chosen paragon.

Only that the getup wasn’t quite the exact same as what had been immortalized atop the memorial fountain, despite some similarity – at a closer glance, the raiment quickly revealed itself as something with a ceremonial purpose. The cape trailed on the floor.

The pauldrons, in all their polished mirror-shine, were fashioned with hooks on which the chains were to be affixed.

These were its burial clothes.

The same sorry shroud that was still hanging off of it in tatters in the waking world at this very moment, rusted through, caked with dust, and stained in its own gore.

No doubt that there must have been a procession, too, all the way through the capital city, with the hopeful crowds throwing flower petals and garlands that might have caught on its horns, but all of that would have scattered away, once it reached its destination.

Perhaps the flowers had withered under its touch, or wherever the lowermost segments of its legs had stepped across them.

It must have fit right into the White Palace like another part of the architecture, all in achromatic hues without a single splash of color, not even the drab faded blue faintly tinging the fronds of the Wanderers’ wing covers.

Towering, it stood as a vision of cold, actinic pallor and tenebrous, all-absorbing dark that carried no reflection, leaving the sharply defined segments of its carapace to stand out only in silhouette, particularly on its long, gangly limbs.

It stood off to the side, at the other end of the room, absently staring off into the distance at nothing in particular, silent and still as the undisturbed surface of an untouched, mirror-like lake.

 

With its back turned.

Of course.

The smaller vessel thought that it might be getting well beyond tired of looking at that back.

 

At first, there was no response as the Wanderer drew closer, readying its nail.

Approaching the center of the room, touching off a trail of glowing runes on the floor as it strode, it turned its face to glance at the other.

Was it going to fight at all?

 

Yes. Yes, it was.

First order of business was to dispense with the blinged-out tripping hazard it was wearing, making a point of tearing it off in the most dramatic manner, exposing the sleek, pale gray, leaf-like wing-covers beneath that hung about it like a small cloak, extending all the way ups its neck as a high collar might.

The pattern of it was still much of the same as the Knight would have remembered from their shared childhood. The individual fronds, though discernible, formed a single continuous shape rather than fraying apart at the edges like the smaller vessel’s own, nor did they part in the front.

The gray membranes whipped around it as it moved, reaching just past its thorax, to its elbows.

Tall it was, but still rather lithe and slight without its armor to give the illusion of additional bulk.

Once it turned around, the refined features of its narrow, angular face were revealed, notably reminiscent of the White Lady’s rather than the wider shape of her husband’s face, but there was some touch of the Wyrm’s sharp lines around the edges, reflected also in the spikes of its horns – as it matured, the round-cheeked softness it once held in its youth had faded without a trace;

The spaces where its eyes should have been had taken on more of an almond shape, but nothing lay beyond them but profound lacunae of manifest absence – that part, at least, remained perfectly unchanged.

It may have been accounted just about as infuriatingly handsome to look upon as would befit the offspring of such an empyrean lineage, if only it had borne just a little more resemblance to something living.

What beauty it had was the beauty of a masterfully crafted marble column in the inner sanctum of a temple, the kind carved with abstract geometric patterns rather than the likenesses of beasts or people – cold, hard, silent, barren and perfectly still in its sublime, unearthly, numinous splendor.

 

Before even taking a look at its opponent, it seemed to have decided that the diminutive Wanderer was not to be underestimated – or perhaps it figured that it would be needing its best possible speed over what modest protection the armor plates could have offered.

In time, it would become clear that it must have meant to turn the fight into an endurance test.

After hundreds of years, one supposes that it might be allowed some pride about its proficiency in wars of attrition – The Knight of course took this as being challenged on its home turf, more than a little confident in its own tenacity.

For once, it was being taken seriously from the get-go, and it liked this.

A rush of exhilaration spread all over its diminutive form, like a ripple echoing through the emptiness within.

 

The Chosen Vessel, on its own part, assumed a low, taut battle stance, clearly descending into well-practiced, entrenched habit, and there was a motion that, in any other warrior, would probably have signified the expulsion of a ferocious battle cry, though there was no actual sound.

It moved in perfect silence, with exceptional speed and agility that seemed not the slightest bit hampered by its imposing height.

Even the very first strike came from an unexpected direction – As it would turn out, the Hollow Knight was left-handed.

The long, damasked nail that it carried would have been a two-handed weapon for most warriors.

The Vessel swung it around with a single hand, in a conspicuous reverse grip that would typically be used with shorter blades, with such effortless, ridiculous ease that it might as well have been performing emphatic gestures with a wooden stick.

The weapon proved absurdly sharp, too, severing whatever it touched like new scissors cutting through string and paper.

With a few wide, sweeping strikes, it had effectively brought most of the available area under its control, leaving its challenger hard pressed for anywhere to get out of dodge.

 

Nor did it make the mistake of letting its opponent get the drop on it from up in the air, leaping straight for it with an unreal degree of fluid grace before it could attempt this, forcing it to keep low to the ground within the long, long reach of its keen blade.

Once it had the Wanderer on the defensive, it wasted no time in keeping the smaller vessel right where it wanted it, coming after it with rapid, aggressive slashes, one, two, three, one right after another, and then the next attack, without so much as missing a beat.

It doesn’t seem to believe in the concept of flinching, and the idea of ever stopping might have been explicitly precluded by its oath of knighthood.

 

Any warrior below the level of a nailmaster would have been disarmed or overpowered in an instant – or sliced clean into artfully scattered ribbons.

That, or impaled straight through in that forward change.

In a place like the Colosseum of fools, a move like that may well have resulted in several unfortunates getting skewered like a kebab.

The suspicion presented itself that the Pale King may have made a sport of gathering up all His subordinates and sending them all in waves at His finest creation, and, why not, possibly loosened all his workshop’s worth of constructs as well, for as long as it could keep standing... or until He ran out of golems or hench-bugs to send.

Whatever the specifics behind it, t he-Vessel-with-a-definite-article proved a veritable one-bug army primed to shrug off and dispatch hordes of foes, and one did not get the impression that it had ever known defeat very much at all before the sealing, at least not since it had been less than half its current size.

– but it was matched with an opponent who had brought down more than fair share of undefeated warriors in its time, and had its way of forcing them to confront that which they’d never seen before.

Rather than backing away, the Wanderer seemed to have arrived at the sudden decision to come straight at the Chosen Vessel, aiming to dash straight through them.

Unstoppable force meets immovable object, which, once one considers the implications, would be just about the same thing.

Briefly melding into an eldritch shape, he Wanderer draws first blood courtesy of its sharp shadow – or what passed as such for their kind, a string of dark droplets that evaporated at once.

Now finding itself behind the towering warrior, it brings itself to a halt and swirls around, aiming to get in a nail edgewise for once – but not swiftly enough.

The next sound it hears is not the one that it expects – there is a dull metal clang, and the realization that the so-called God of Nothingness had managed to parry that strike, deftly holding its own blade at an angle along the length of its form.

 

The riposte was instantaneous.

 

It’s fast- !

 

...all at once, the Wanderer found itself caught up in a burst of essence, only to materialize again before the gate it had crossed to meet the challenge of ascending the pantheon, now faced with the prospect of having to fight its way through all the would-be gods in the kingdom all over again.

At least, it found itself greeted with the rustle of leathery wings at the edge of its field of vision, soon to be followed by the highly amused mewling of Grimmchild, whom it had left waiting outside for the time being as it had decided to take along some other charms.

Apparently, he found his guardian’s rare moment of patently noticeable frustration to be a spectacle he couldn’t stand to miss.

Rolling onto its back, the Knight absently wondered if he noticed anything of its dream-fights with his other selves.

Leaving its weapon on the ground, it reached out an arm and allowed its young, flame-eyed charge to nestle against it for a moment. The sensation of the ember-like heat that clung to him was rather familiar by now.

A tinge of casual schadenfreude aside, its overall impression was that the little moth meant to congratulate it in his own way, for getting as far as it had.

 

All things considered, the Knight did know the drill.

There’s nothing for it but to try again.

And again, if need be.

There was no other course.

The convenient thing about a dream fight is that one would not really feel any soreness from what would otherwise have been prolonged exertion after waking up.

It was going to take just a moment before attempting another ascent, and if that fails, too, it might just call it a day for today and possibly come back with a more thought-out plan tomorrow after taking some time to rest and go somewhere other than the junk pit to clear its head.

It wondered if it should make a visit to the White Lady, just to… let her know. If that could be accomplished – would she be able to infer whom it had just met, just from what she knew?

It wasn’t entirely sure that she was not under the impression that it still intended to simply take its sibling’s place in the end.

It wasn’t as if it would have that much to tell her, even if it had a means to easily convey it to her.

It had met its sibling. They had crossed blades.

The entire experience, with all the impressions and associations involved seemed to shrink down into next to nothing in the attempt of trying to pour it into recognizable concepts.

The two of them had not exactly ‘spoken’ with each other, not even through such alternative means as their kind might utilize among each other.

By all means, she should be told; The average mother would be expected to cherish any fleeting, minuscule sign of life from an offspring otherwise trapped in an agonizing situation it could not escape, but there were certainly exceptions.

Would she even want to hear anything of the other vessel?

The Knight didn’t want to think that she would not, but…

The Chosen Vessel itself.

For some incomprehensible reason, it seemed to prefer the King over her. The very same King who had come up with the whole idea, the entire plan that had brought about all the respective sufferings of everyone in their family. It’s last, scrambled thoughts certainly weren’t pleading for ‘mother’, or even both of them.

Once again, the Wanderer was made aware that there was all this past between its long-lost family, from which it had been excluded of due to being discarded and left for dead.

It had left the kingdom long ago, believing itself to be superfluous here, going in search of some place where it might be needed after all. Thinking itself the last one alive aside from the one who has chosen and had already taken whatever destiny had been in store for them. Now, it wondered what may have been if its wanderings had lead it back here sooner, in time to find some of the other ‘rejects’ still alive, such as the former owner of its mothwing cloak, or the one whose reanimated shell it had fought in the Ancient Basin – that one looked to have been a skilled warrior, likely having lived through a tale as long and varied as its own.

That one wasn’t killed while breaking out, it had been on its way back down. It had probably made it further than any other, and had it not been slain where it was, it may have made its way to the Kingdom’s edge or the Queen’s lair and taken what awaited there in the Knight’s place, seeing as it clearly gained the capacity for limited flight before it perished.

By the time they met, after a fashion, all that was left for the Wanderer to do was to accept that it had come to late, and to take on the responsibility of carrying on the other’s quest.

All this time, the place where it was needed might have been right here…

Hornet was probably right, however:

It would not have the strength and experience to be doing all this right now, if it were not for its long journeys. Its travels beyond the King’s sphere of influence had made it something outside of His design, something that could evolve beyond Him, where others could not.

It might be supposed that King and Queen were, in some ways, more akin to other kinds of creatures which the Wanderer had encountered among its travels here, creatures as the Aspid Mother, the Vengefly King or the Flukemarm, which spending a few of their massively numbered offspring in their defense; or perhaps a better comparison might be the Bees, which were rather more civilized and usually spawned with predetermined purposes.

The Queen at least, distinctly seemed to be of a nature inclined to produce offspring in vast quantities. The King, maybe slightly less so, seeing as Hornet had no clutch-mates.

The Knight still knew rather little about either side of its lineage, only that both were hailed from ancient kindreds of powerful beings that were widely considered distant mythical past. Wyrms were not really thought to be around anymore, but they had once been; Judging by that one comment the Godseeker made, there were others like the Queen as well.

And of course nobody really knows anything about the void, least of all the King and Queen; Maybe not even the void itself, as ‘knowing’ had not been in its nature until His Shinyness started meddling with it. It was the oblivion where all things go to be buried and forgotten; The Wanderer might as well consider itself one of the leading experts there.

 

It wondered now, if it might have come across any of the Queen’s relatives over the course of its long travels, without realizing that they might be distant kin – it had once passed through a vast empire of ants that kept a pact with a massive Higher Being whose sprawling roots extended to distances immeasurable.

The imperial capital was said to be high up in the sky, where the immense deity supposedly offered His followers their very own special hallowed shelter in exchange from guarding His sacred, promised lands, a fantastical paradise said to be impossibly plentiful in leaf, though the word was that the ants slew anyone who would eat of it with a zealot’s fervor as part of their covenant with Him to whom they largely referred to as The Patron – it was no secret that He had another name, but that one was forbidden to outsiders.

Having only passed through the outskirts of that empire, the Knight never saw that Higher Being for itself, so it certainly never got close enough to commune with Him.

Another time, it had met a creature named Orchid, which appeared like a kind of female bee looking for a mate, but was revealed in time as a plant-like being in disguise; To her great dismay, she came to learn that bees of the kind she was imitating had long since vanished from those parts.

She was not a Higher Being, yet possessed of more mystical power than a typical bug, something in between, a fey, elfin creature, not immortal, but long-lived, yet incapable of straying far beyond the lair she was rooted to, whereas an actual bee would have had the option to fly away in search of its kind. The Knight had eventually volunteered its services to simply haul a sack of pollen to the nearest of Orchid’s fellow nymphs, who in turn handed it some of his own for the return trip.

It had stayed with Orchid a while, doing errands around the village she hid in for room, board and currency – she acted as something like the town’s shaman (all this under the pretense of being a bee, so far as the bugs of the village were concerned) and had much to teach about the wholesome properties of various kinds of leaf and moss, though she knew no offensive magicks; Once it had learned all it could and put right such of the villager’s problems as were within its power to fix, it had departed again to find new tasks to apply itself to. Who could say if Orchid herself yet lived? Even the long lifespan of her kind might since have come to an end. But it did recall that she had always referred to it as a ‘little sprout’ and at times offered it to bask with her in the surface light. It didn’t think that this actually did anything for it, but it did not object to keeping her company or listening to what tales she had to tell.

It assumed at the time that she might have acted this way towards anyone she might perceive as a youth, or that she had assumed more similarity than there was due not knowing what to make of it, or perhaps being misled by her own unfulfilled longing for offspring.

By the time the Knight left, the pollen it delivered had apparently served its purpose; Orchid had proudly shown off the ripening seed pod as it was taking on mature size and color. Soon, she would be awash in actual ‘little sprouts’ and far too busy caring for them to entertain an apprentice, so it seemed like the right time to move on.

Countless years later, the Wanderer wondered now if Orchid had not, in fact, recognized something about itself that it had been unaware of.

If it was anyone else, it might at least have had some hope of posing their question by presenting them with a sketch of one of Orchid’s kind, but the White Lady would likely be unable to make out any details due to her weakening eyes.

 

For being something like its mother and easily able to sense where it was and the approximate state it was in at any given moment, the White Lady did not seem to catch its drift as easily as some others might.

It did not help that she couldn’t see it pointing much, but there was more at work than that.

There always seemed to be that carefully maintained chasm kept between them, like filigree fence placed deliberately between two kinds of flowers or garden crops that would otherwise compete with each other…

Their latest pursuit wouldn’t be the first or the last thing that is going to stay known to only to itself forever. It held many piled-up secrets, many of which may be considered of greater urgency.

If it could tell things to the Queen, it would probably begin by letting her know that the faithful knight standing guard outside her lair was long perished. Next, it would probably go off to find Hornet and make it known to her how much the last moments of her own mother had been filled with thoughts of her.

 

It decides against visiting the Queen for now.

The result of its actions will speak for itself once the deed is accomplished, if that can, in fact, be done.

 

It did just get closer than ever before to what had not so long ago started as a far-flung, impossible goal. And while it did not especially look forward to once again fighting its way up the entire godly food chain starting from the very bottom, it could at least look forward to something like a reward if it should make it near the top…

 

Even if it was still beyond it to win, it may at least get the chance to pay its long-long sibling another visit inside its solitary prison.

 

…

 

Several attempts later, the mighty God of Nothingness still remained undefeated.

 

It was ever so methodical and seizing and keeping the upper hand, ever making sure not to step too close to its opponent, keeping the Knight at just the right distance, far enough that it so that it couldn’t reach the other with its nail, yet close enough the Chosen Vessel could reach it with the prodigious range it commanded...

Why does it have to be so long, anyways? That, itself, was an unusual and humbling experience. It had been a long, long time indeed since the smaller voidling had perceived such a frustration. It had not known its like since the distant past. By this point it had a long history of taking down opponents that were bigger, taller, stronger and blessed with irritatingly long arms, and making that look like child’s play – but most of those foes had not also been possessed of fearsome agility, relentless endurance, flawless technique, immaculate acuity, consummate follow-through and impenetrable resolve.

The experience was akin to fighting a shining, sparkling specter of perfection and brilliance itself, somehow made into flesh, or into an absence of flesh, rather.

To stand against it was to be made forcefully aware of one’s every flaw and error.

Every mis-timed attack, every lapse in focus, and of course the misjudged jumps in particular…

Such was the Pale King’s foremost knight, His chosen champion, His consecrated, hallowed Paladin, and the ultimate masterpiece among the many wonders He had wrought.

Worse yet: This, He had set against the Radiance, and it still wasn’t enough.

What hope could there be of overcoming the Goddess at the peak of Her power, if one could not make it past a being which She had since overtaken so thoroughly?

Stainless and noble as native platinum it appeared, refulgent as if it were mirror-shine made substantial, clear and unbreakable as a mountain of diamond, an apparition of clean, untouchable sanctity made manifest... and yet She had succeeded in breaking its will, shattering its mind, and horrifically violating its body, all for the crime of falling some imperceptible hair’s breadth short of uttermost purity.

All this preeminent divinity She took, and tarnished, and soiled, and profaned, and befouled, and unhallowed, and subjected it to abject desecration until stood as a monument to Her might rather than that of Her vanquished rival –

A brazen display of the victory in which She had stomped Him face-first into the dirt and made Him cry bitter tears.

 

That implication, at least, should have struck anyone capable of perceiving it with true despair, if this had somehow not already been accomplished by the prowess of the vacuous god itself.

However had She done it?

Where could she have found foothold or purchase?

Its mental defenses had proven every bit as untouchable as its swordplay.

A few attempts ago, the Knight had found itself stricken and forced to concede that it probably wasn’t going to win this particular round. So, in an endeavor to still make that try count for something, the Wanderer had thrown all caution to the wind and decided to peek at its opponent’s thoughts on the way out.

It found itself repelled more thoroughly than it ever had been.

Never once had it seen anything like this.

No ‘Get out’, no flashing seal, no ‘Haha, I see you’, not even the distinctly felt absence of an answer; There was just nothing. As if it had swung the dream nail at thin air.

It had gotten more solid reads off of statues, gravestones and people’s sentimental possessions that would have been steeped in their dreams.

Being repelled wasn’t even the right description for what it felt like, even if the Wanderer could figure that that’s what must have happened.

Hitting a block is still hitting something. Sensing an absence is sensing something.

This had been precisely identical to what would have resulted if the Chosen Vessel did not even exist. Like it simply wasn’t there.

One might be tempted to doubt one’s eyes or even the sense of weight and force in one’s body and conclude that one was looking at a mirage conjured by smoke and mirrors – that all of its tall, lanky form must be wholly without substance, all the way from the bristles on its tarsi to the very tips of its majestic horns.

A lethal error, that would have been – the bite of its nail and the burn of its spells were exceedingly real. It wasn’t all that unusual for an attempt to strike it to connect with nothing, but the usual cause for this would be that it had teleported out of the way and was now right behind its target. Or worse – above. Plunging down as it conducted its magic through its weapon.

If it didn’t strike true as it descended, the Soul pillars conjured from below surely would.

Always with that forbidding, sublime elegance in its graceful leaps and turns…

 

Trying to read its mind had been a thoroughly fruitless waste of time that may have been better used for healing, or just to keep up with it at all.

This must have been what it was chosen for, at least in part –

Even the King and Queen must have been incapable of peering inside it without its cooperation – how else could they have been so mistaken?

In their hubris, they must have concluded that what they could not see must not exist.

Or maybe they were just really, really hoping.

Or possibly, the exact opposite: Smothering private selfish hopes that seemed too good to be true, and ran contrary to their responsibilities as rulers and the conclusions of their reason and such senses that they might have been more inclined to trust than their softer feelings.

The Queen had thought the smaller vessel ‘without blemish’, too, though she had later admitted that she simply could not sense its interiority to the degree that she expected to be able to. Whatever power she had in that respect might just not work on void beings, or just imperfectly…

And this particular one was exceptionally unreadable even by the standards of its own kind.

 

Even so, why hide itself now?

What would it matter now?

The cat had been out of the bag for centuries now.

The King Himself was long, long gone.

 

For the first time in all the long, long years of its lonesome existence, probably for the first time ever, the Chosen Vessel was now faced with another being which might actually understand what it might have to say, one to whom it might convey its meaning with the same natural ease as more typical sentient bugs would speak to each other…

And yet, it had nothing to say?

 

The Wanderer found this… counter-intuitive, at the very least.

On its own part, it had long since learned to make do with the options at its disposal and usually managed to make itself understood well enough for its purposes. Its state of being was in accordance with its nature – at least the nature it had now, the only one it could ever recall having, so, it did not perceive it as discordant. It wasn’t as if it harbored a particularly painful longing to be otherwise, or anything like that.

But in its time, it had seen many things, crossed many far-flung places, witnessed the unfolding of many tragedies and learned many secrets – it could not really say whether it had been nothing in the beginning. It may not be possible to picture or recognize nothing, when one is something, even the slightest, barest outline of something as close to nothing as can be. It had gone through the world and it has listened, it had observed, it had poked things quite deliberately a stuck its curved horns in many a crevice. It had gathered many stories inside itself, stopping here and there along the path to take in the world. It let the world’s sights and sounds be reflected in the calm mirror of its consciousness, allowing the smells of leaf and earth to cling to it, though it may have lacked discernible scent of its own.

It knew so much that was known to no one else, things that had never been told to anyone – the latest example were the stories of the many spirits that it had put to rest on its quest to gather essence. In a way, they had been gathering all the sorrow that the Radiance had sown upon this lands in hopes to turn it back upon Her. Getting attuned to the mystical talisman had allowed them to pick up on and uncover many things that others didn’t, but it may be that its affinity for the artifact was rooted in its preexisting predilection to listen, observe and probe…

 

It held countless tales within that had never been heard – that was part of what made the idea of finding another like itself so alluring, distant as the hope may have been…

And the other. Its Sibling.

Certainly, it must have seen many sights of its own, having had nothing to do these past few ages but to scry beyond its prison and observe the events unfolding outside, the slow changes of the wilderness overtaking the ruins – unless it were content to spend its eternity staring at the walls.

It was hard to imagine the solitude it must have experienced, its pain, its despair…

Immeasurable ages of suffering and loneliness gone wholly unheard.

Out of all the wretched creatures in existence, must it not long for the fellowship of a kindred soul more than anything in existence? Must it not be aching to let it all out at long last?

The very substance of which they were both made absorbed all sound just as it would drain all warmth or light and most of everything else, really – that’s why it got so quiet the more one descended to approach the primordial depths. So any sound a being composed of such material might make would be snuffed out in the instant of its inception.

Unless, of course, it were amplified by witchcraft.

The Wanderer thought back to the sheer sense of cathartic release when it expelled that first Abyssal Shriek, in defiance of the King’s design and of the sheer injustice that He had inflicted not just on itself, but on behalf of all the other lingering lost souls piled up in heaps there…

What was produced was a hellish sound quite unlike any typical voice, an eldritch, ungodly nails-on-chalk aberration ringing with the deadly force of both shamanic magic and the very essence of the shadows, opposing forces entangled in oxymoronic union.

It never could have formed words, with a voice like that,

yet still, what came forth was quite appropriate for the sentiment meant to be expressed. It thought it would have been understood readily enough.

At the time, it would have included the Hollow Knight in the number of those it had wailed for in that instant, but that being itself seemed determined to hold onto the meaningless vow of silence that had been forced upon them to begin with, as if that were some sacrosanct ordinance.

 

The Wanderer would have thought that being the same kind of existence might grant them some understanding of each other that would come easier than it did with other creatures, but that was not so. At least not right away, or all at once.

 

Clearly, it could answer.

It had been the one to summon its wayward sibling back to Hallownest in the first place, calling across a great distance through means that only others of its kind could possibly have perceived.

It had allowed itself to be accessed for the purposes of the ritual.

It must want its Sibling to achieve its designs.

 

Was that the meaning behind its silence then?

Something like ‘Just hurry up and do the thing’, maybe?

Was it still as indifferent to its sibling as it had been on that ledge, caring only that the task it could no longer fulfill would be carried out by someone?

Or was it more a matter of duty? No time for catching up when there’s an angry goddess about to break loose?

 

Straight for the goal with no distractions, hm?

Typical. That would be just like it. A little irritating.

Though there is some comfort in the idea that some things about its Sibling may have remained unchanged since they were both children, even through all the years of their long parting and all the callous depredations that the other was made to endure on account of the rivalry between the feuding lights…

The observation brought with it a sting of melancholy and fondness.

 

The Chosen Vessel might have something of a point, at least in part.

It would know better than anyone else in existence just what the Radiance is capable of.

How dangerous it might be to summon Her at the peak of Her strength.

Its entire reason for being was to keep her contained.

Even if the other was going to trust its sibling in that gamble, even if it might wish to see its fellow vessel victorious, even if it must wish to see the goddess vanquished more than anyone, its solemn duty must demand of it that it do its utmost to avert the prospect of Her untimely release.

 

It couldn’t let the Knight pass without ascertaining its strength for itself, was it that?

It may have steeled itself, and pushed aside what it might want, crushing any longings it might harbor to focus only on the task at hand.

 

...the Wanderer felt reminded of Hornet.

She, too, could easily be taken as rather cold at first glance, though this revealed itself as a downstream consequence of being rather purposeful and dedicated once one got to know her. She might restrain the sentiments that she very much did have behind a front of stoic determination, but this was born from a weighty sense of responsibility that wound be just about furthest thing from true indifference – this became rather clear when she spoke about the ‘debt’ owed to her mother.

Her existence was ‘bought’ with one life, not the hundreds that had been spent to create the supposed ‘Pure Vessel’, though that was never either of their faults.

 

But it was only natural that they’d be alike. Aside from being kin, those two would actually have been raised together to some extent. Not all the time, not for long, and caught under the looming shadow of rather dire and abnormal circumstances, but there was enough there that they might remind a relative stranger of one another.

That steely, severe, stoic quality, that serious, dutiful resolve –

 

If they both shared that, then the King might have been like that, too. It might be His influence, to an extent, whether this was a virtue He had deliberately instilled, a quality taken on by imitation or an unintended consequence of his errors. It was somewhat… milder, with Hornet, or at least did not have the effect of making her appear enigmatic or implacable. She might be stern, but she would get exasperated. Though restrained, things such as fierce, opinionated passion, hope or pity might bleed through. She was a rather noisy fighter, and had in many ways a very different style, based more quick strikes and sophisticated tricks, influenced by a very different background and different set of mentors – she might not match her Father’s fully divine offspring in endurance or raw firepower, but the Knight would confess that she was still distinctly faster than it.

She would have been exposed to more than enough people who had their share disagreements with the King, so she would not be inclined to see Him through rose-tinted eyes. She had never exactly gone into describing what their relationship was like, referring to him distantly as a ‘source of her strength’, but one could infer that He had tasked her with protecting both the kingdom that was His legacy and the keys to His personal secrets, and that she took this very seriously. She shared His affinity for elaborate contraptions, too...

Still, she was His daughter, not His devotee. She saw no sacrilege in questioning Him every now and then; He was one of the influences that had made her who she was, but others loomed just as large. She might have made promises to Him in the hour of their parting, but she had not sworn unbreakable templar oaths. That was in many ways easier to stomach.

There was no desperation in it, no disproportionate gratitude for less than the bare minimum, no exaltation of meager crumbs.

Unlike her half-sibling raised in the palace, she didn’t cling to Him because she had nothing else to keep her going over the long years; She was no coward and accounted many things more important than her own hide, but she did not regard her own life as if it were something entirely incidental, good for nothing else than for his use.

 

Still, some similarities remained – not the least of which was the outward resemblance between them, but come to think of it, even a few of their go-to moves involved notably similar stances, particularly that forward charge and that style of parrying by holding their respective weapons overhead (though the Vessel’s execution of the maneuver was a bit cleaner, more elegant, and Hornet angled her weapon just a little differently accounting for her shorter stature)

After fighting both of them so often, little predictable features like that inevitably began to stand out. Both were well-practiced, relying on several mortal lifetimes’ worth of habit without wasting much time thinking about it.

They might both have learned from the same instructor, possibly another of their father’s knights, who may have trained one and then the other years later, or they might have had joint lessons (it would rather depend on just how close they’d been in age, which the Wanderer still didn’t really know.)

Another option may be that the pair might actually have found a few moments among the unkind circumstances of their burdened, duty-bound lives for one of them to teach the other a few tricks – a surprisingly mundane familial scene, even with the deadly weapons involved and a Palace yard as a backdrop.

Would that have been behind the Pale King’s back, under the threat of who-knows-what if the two of them should have been caught, or was the not so cruel to see something like His children getting along as something to swiftly put the kibosh on?

 

He must have been one uptight bastard, in any case, for both the kids He actually had a part in raising to turn out that stiff. First order of business after dealing with the Radiance would probably be to get that whole god business figured out and take care of any unforeseen consequences of Her defeat, but the second order of business would be to grab a hold of these two and introduce them to the concept of loosening up some. It might help to involve Grimmchild, too, since he was already a natural expert in matters of mischief despite his youth. – granted, it was not really that simple. The two of them were simply the products of harsh times. (It was a product of harsh times, too, all things considered, though for most of its life the story it told itself was that it had no idea where it came from or what it was.)

Dedication and responsibility are all good and well, the Knight was definitely a believer in such things as well. If it weren’t, it would rarely refer to itself as it did. That was one area where they had always somewhat disagreed with the Hunter, for example.

But one also has to… stay. And sit a while. And take a look around, and have some moments to just exist. One can’t lose sight of what one is actually fighting for, lest one end up dismantling those very things with one’s own hands, like the King did.

– there was still something unreal about the idea of picturing the callous monarch who had left it for dead as having anything in common with people that the Knight had come to be warmly disposed towards, but it was not a far-fetched notion, really, for children to resemble their parents. There was a clashing dissonance between thoughts and intuitions of justice, and an ambiguous, amorphous mass of missed-up feelings, all of whom His Majesty may, of course, have disapproved of.

The voidling may have cursed the late monarch yet again, but what was there left to wish upon him?

A plague upon His house? All that He ever cared about lay ravaged already. It loved some of those that consider themselves members of His house, whatever their shortcomings. It might be counted as such a member, by virtue of the mark upon its right palm.

The King’s house was already just about as plagued as could be. That was rather what it was here to remedy.

 

...The Knight did not end up winning this time, either.

 

In the very instant that it began to make headway in putting up any sort of effective resistance, the Chosen Vessel just so happened to casually reveal itself as a peerless spellcaster, as if its impeccable skill with the nail wasn’t enough.

 

It was just flat out better at channeling Soul.

But of course.

The Pale King must have taught it Himself.

He wouldn’t have trusted the task to any lesser sorcerer.

 

Getting away from its blade was no use; The nail in its hand was far from the only weapon at its disposal. It didn’t even pause its persistent swings very much as it began gathering sparks of magic in the long claws of its off hand.

Sharp edges everywhere.

Flying through the air. Bursting from the ground. Coming from every possible direction.

All was suffused in a cold, pale silver gleam.

 

So much for attempt number eight.

 

…

 

Screw it. The Wanderer didn’t need to resort to mind-reading to start making sense of its enigmatic sibling.

 

There is actually quite a lot that one can learn about a person, or any other creature or entity, from witnessing how they fight.

Especially if the being in question is a highly trained warrior.

All the more so if the one doing the observing has been fighting its way through creation for longer than most of the population of Dirtmouth had even been alive, with the one exception of the shopkeeper-slash-nailsage. And possibly Jinn and Jiji, despite the latter’s assertion of being rather young for her kind. It was hard to make head or tails of those two, though that was true of many in these parts. One got used to it.

For the Knight to label anybody as odd would have been quite the pot and kettle situation.

 

Whenever it had gone to compare notes with the Hunter, he had at times remarked on its observational skills, noting that he thought it to have a good eye for sizing up the strengths and weaknesses of others straight away.

It had to. It would have perished long ago otherwise. There was a certain survivorship bias at work.

Caution and sharpness were not optional requirements with regards to crossing the wilderness on ones own, with no allies to offer guidance, help it out of a pinch or come looking for it if it should go missing. The slightest misstep or misjudgment might leave it out of commission for a sizable time, or worse yet.

Its discernment wasn’t perfect, of course; it need only consider of the incident involving a certain Thief-slash-Banker. It was less experienced with her somewhat more ‘civilized’ brand of deception. The Wanderer may have fared better if Millibelle had been trying to eat it rather than part it from its Geo.

 

Such lapses notwithstanding, Master Sheo had once mused if its dedication to its war-craft was not an attempt to uncover or understand something about the world, a means to ‘peer deeper inside’, much like he thought of his own art to which he had since dedicated himself.

 

There might be something to that, even in general...

 

But never had this been more true than in the Knight’s contest with the definite-article Vessel.

Once, the Wanderer had known little at all of its sibling, apart from what it could extrapolate from some brief, half-remembered memories and what few traces of its existence remained hung upon the crumbling kingdom it protected, calling out its titles like an elegy.

 

By now, it could come up with quite a lot of words to describe its estranged relation:

Formidable. Masterful. Awesome. Implacable. Dignified. Inexorable. Relentless, more than anything else.

Elegant, but not at all as a result of deliberate artifice or flourish, rather the kind of elegance that results intrinsically from skill and efficiency, the kind that might be attributed to a well-designed, intricate mechanism or an illuminating mathematical formula.

A bit of a perfectionist, maybe, and in this, it was quite different from its sibling and its approach to go ahead boldly and keep trying until it finds something works, but as their clashes went on, one could not miss the evidence of their similar natures.

The Wanderer had got used to being the only one around with access to its level of focus-based healing or temporary intangibility, and certainly had always held the monopoly on void-based abilities thus far. Now, it was coming to learn what it was like to have all of these same skills turned back upon itself by an incredibly sophisticated opponent who had had every reason in the world to hone its capabilities to perfection – or as close to that as a living thing (or un-living thing) could hope to get.

Much had depended on its victory, the fate of the entire kingdom dropped on its young shoulders from the day it hatched (or sprouted?). It must have wanted to live up to those expectations.

To save the kingdom. To do its mentors proud. Maybe even to justify the cost of its creation, the regret that it would have seen etched upon the faces of its parents – or even some regret of its own, some manner of survivor’s guilt.

The realization somewhat took the wind from the sails of any envy or irritation that the Wanderer might have harbored. It might have burdened itself with the fate of the kingdom as well, but it had done so by its free choice, after getting to spend several mortal lifetimes seeing the world and its wonders. The Chosen Vessel would have been marched to its doom soon after coming into the prime of its strength, and it would have spent every moment before that knowing exactly what was coming. Completely resigned to it, maybe. Left with no choice but to endure deprivation and torment.

Was it still thinking like that now, in this struggle?

Was it, in its own way, yearning to prove itself good enough as much as its opponent was?

 

Its expressionless face betrayed nothing of any torment within.

If it was capable of hesitation, deliberation or distraction, it resisted them well enough to get its strategies mistaken for the purely axiomatic choices of an automaton.

 

It clearly had preferences, however.

Habits. Designs.

Surely the King’s Great Knights would have trained it with all manner of different weapons.

It could have gone for wielding a mace, much like Hegemol the Mighty, or a fine little rapier like Dryya the Fierce, but instead it chose a long-nail, the use of which it probably learned from Ze’Mer, seeing as she’d had a similarly proportioned weapon still lying around in her house.

It was quite particular about its idiosyncratic way of holding its nail, too, so much so that this might have been considered a bit of a distinctive trademark.

 

There was a clear intention behind its tactics, some commitment to its approach of constantly teleporting itself around to get a good vantage point, as if its perfectionism wouldn’t allow it to begin its assault from a less than optimal angle.

And then there was that teleport spell itself… It must be really proud of that one.

 

The Knight had not been a spellcaster for nearly as long as it had a warrior, having only really taken this up after arriving in Hallownest and encountering that rather sneaky Snail Shaman in the Crossroads. After he taught it the basics, it had continued to expand its skills of its own accord, occasionally dropping by his place to get his thoughts on its newest spells, and he’d often commented on the relatives of his that the spells had come from, and how they were reflective of their personalities. When it returned to show how it had tweaked the spells to include an influence of its native element, he had in turn praised it for making them its own, speaking of seeing creativity and even expressiveness in the act, seeing its own distinctive influence and nature reflected in the modifications.

 

The Chosen Vessel was, of course, not a shaman. It rather seemed to have been trained in the more wizardly type of magic that would have been preferred by the scholars in the city, which was rather more… functional. Scientific. A matter of intellect. Certainly the kind that the King would have used – or embodied even, seeing as He was a being of Soul; And thus, what He would have taught to His creation.

Much of its repertoire of spells was likely taken from the King’s own. That teleport spell, too, was probably based on the kinds of similar short-range teleports that many of Hallownest’s advanced Soul users could boast of. But the King’s illustrious paragon had… done something to it. Tweaked it.

Each time, it would disappear into glimmers of pale light with a distinct, graceful half-turn, but just before that, one might catch a flash of the darkness within, just like when the Wanderer would use its own modified, void-infused spells.

The King couldn’t possibly have taught it that.

 

The Knight suspected that its sibling was doing something rather similar to what it might accomplish with its own shade cloak ability… except that it had to keep its original momentum and direction until it became tangible again.

Not so for its opponent: That one could seemingly appear from whatever direction it pleased to rain down further punishment. And it could do that countless times, with such practiced ease that one might expect it to land a successful teleport while blindfolded or delirious.

The sheer amount of Soul it could call forth was unreal, which the Knight was keenly aware of, seeing as its own more limited reserves usually forced it to be rather sparing with its spells to save some of the stuff in case it would need to heal itself.

 

As its attempts to defeat the other continued, many of their clashes turned into elaborate cat-and-mouse games with a whole lot of moving straight through each other, each trying to catch the other when it was forced to become tangible.

To the onlooking Godseekers, it must have more or less looked exactly like what one would expect of a fight between creatures of living shadow and yawning absence; The Knight rather liked to think of it as some belated payback for all the games of tag that the two of them had missed out on as children.

 

The Wanderer supposed that it must be making some headway, if it was forcing its opponent to reach deeper into its bag of tricks. A few times now, the smaller vessel had actually succeeded in knocking its counterpart onto its knees and getting a good few hits in.

 

Its sibling was nothing if not tenacious and could evidently take torrents of punishment without slowing down, but it certainly wasn’t invincible. Here and there, the once unbroken flow of its movements began to be interrupted by signs of exhaustion or involuntary flinches of pain that it couldn’t quite suppress.

 

It did have limits – enough so that it must have noticed itself slowing down and took a moment to stop and Focus.

 

Encouraged by clear evidence that its efforts so far had not been futile, the Knight took this as a sign to pounce – but it made the error of assuming that similar abilities would come with similar weaknesses. It meant to disrupt its opponent’s focus, to stop it from healing, figuring that it would be too occupied to do anything else, that this would be an opening –

Instead, the assault was met with an expanding force-field and several explosive spheres of soul that glowed with arcane glyphs, not unlike the ones that could be seen on what remained of the King’s spellwork still scattered across the realm.

 

The sheer level of rigorous concentration that must be needed to pull that off-

 

Ah.

 

Aw, shucks.

 

Not again.

 

The Knight found itself once again looking up at the golden clouds and archways of Godhome, back to where it had begun its ascent.

 

It stayed right where it was.

 

This is just galling at this point. Why must the Chosen Vessel be so much better at everything?

Didn’t it have any bloody flaws?

Frustrating.

 

It hated to concede this, but the stupid King’s choice had not been wholly without merit.

It wasn’t for nothing that that one had gotten to call itself the Vessel.

 

...all this left a knotted, complicated mess of contradictory impulses within the Wanderer.

It didn’t even care about that stupid King; His entire plan was likely futile from the get-go, and excessively callous besides…

It shouldn’t matter anymore, it never should have.

Not that pointless contest nor its dubious prize.

But it still stung.

It recalled to the Wanderer how it had been discarded without ever being given a real chance.

It just wasn’t fair.

 

It wasn’t even an especially appealing title particularly worth coveting;

An excessively pragmatic, utilitarian appellation, really.

But at least it wasn’t nothing.

Once, when it first arrived in the Kingdom, it had in part looked at what it had meant to do then as forcibly claiming the titles it was once denied, and taking them for itself alongside its predecessor’s role.

There was the expectation that it might have found some comfort in that, cold as such comfort may have been, given what would have followed.

One last drop of petty satisfaction in facing a bleak eternity of damnation in everlasting fire as ‘the’ Vessel rather than just ‘a’ vessel – though the spite implied would definitely have been directed at the one who granted the title rather than its previous bearer.

It would have wanted the name simply because it was denied to it before.

Simply to have one, or something close enough to count for one, anyways.

(If it had gone through with that initial plan, perhaps the Radiance would have sunk her claws into that desire to prove itself, and twisted that into its undoing in due time.

It may have lasted longer than its predecessor, simply because it didn’t have any particular attachment to Hallownest when it first arrived. It had wanted to help, but not more so than it might have if it was the next kingdom over that needed it… but want it did.)

There were many naming conventions among many civilizations that the Knight had encountered on its journeys, according to many of which such a title may have been considered somewhat insufficient, but in these parts it was not unusual for an individual to be largely known by some title indicative of their role or profession, at times used alongside a more personal name or a chosen, descriptive appellation.

Even the King was only known as the King, (often paired with descriptor, avoid confusion with any other kings that might be relevant) and may not have had any other before He took his latest form, established His domain and uplifted the creatures that would people it – nobody would have had the need for a title to call Him anything while He buried his way through the rock as a solitary wyrm as a cosmos onto Himself. He would have had no use for it, with no companions that would have sought to call Him anything.

Even far away from its homeland or any memory of having ever had a homeland at all, the discarded vessel had unknowingly held onto the same convention (much like it held to that same old cracked nail which it took on its way out) in calling itself ‘Knight’ or ‘Wanderer’, for what little good it might do to have a designation that one could not disclose to anyone. For the most part, it had always been perfectly content to let others assign it some temporary description or designation for the duration of their dealings with each other, though none of those had ever really stuck after it continued on its path to the next place where nobody knew it. The designations chosen often revealed a great deal about the people it encountered, whether they were friendly or dismissive, formal or familiar, polite or rude, presumptive or respectful…

Besides, if it should ever feel the need for a proper name bestowed by a member of its clan, it could always take up the moniker that Hornet had granted it.

That one could be all its own, no hand-me-downs required, no second-hand discount, no first-come-first-serve. It would be a suitable name for a wielder of shamanic magic and a gatherer of dreams;

Something elusive. Something that keeps coming back when you don’t expect it. Something that takes care of unfinished business.

It could be satisfied with ‘Ghost’.

 

Let its sibling keep its titles; It had already paid for them most dearly. Long had it worn the curses entailed in those names with grace, and borne the weight of the impossible task they demanded – to deny them to it after the fact would only deepen the injustice.

They suited it better, anyways.

It had already gone and made them its own, simply because it was impossible not to, in the act of existing.

 

For example, ‘Vessel’ seemed to have come to be the more intimate of its titles, despite being the more descriptive, reductive term at face value.

It ended up being what the King would call it in private when leaving one last parting gift for it to find on the threshold of its would-be tomb, whereas it seems that ‘Hollow Knight’ was what would go on the statue for the public, as if it were the more formal mode of address.

Maybe it had started from a callous place, but judging by what the Wanderer had seen in the palace, it couldn’t wholly escape the conclusion that that was not where things ended.

What started as simply, ‘Vessel, hold still’ or ‘Vessel, come along’ turned into something like ‘Vessel, walk with us’, ‘Vessel, stay a moment’ and probably a whole lot of ‘Well done, Vessel, excellent work!’ and other things in that vein –

From what Ghost had seen of its sibling thus far, it seemed like it would have elicited quite a lot of the latter…

To the end, it couldn’t quite determine if devotion that the King inspired was in any way deserved or not. There were many conflicting accounts, and the Wyrm Himself had long passed beyond the circles of the world, so that it could not meet Him and judge Him for itself.

But ironically, in the end, (and with no offense intended to Ogrim, Lurien or Monomon), His most faithful devotee of all had been one that He had effectively never known about. One who had never prayed for anything from Him –

Who longed to be exactly what He needed of it. A good machine. A sterilized receptacle.

It wanted only to not want anything, and even that had been desire enough to become its undoing.

One would need quite the imagination to come up with anything more terrifically unfair than that.

 

Isn’t that what it all comes down to in the end?

Neither of them had been dealt a fair hand.

It was all unfair.

There was never any way to win this.

Probably not even for the King.

Fairness went out the window the moment the Radiance decided that She would rather burn all this land to the ground than let anybody else rule it, and even She might describe Her own situation as unfair if She were asked.

For all His many faults, in the end the King had essentially lost out because he wasn’t quite ruthless enough – having something He cared to lose put Him at a disadvantage when faced with a foe who was content to be empress over the ashes.

 

…

 

 

In the end, what Ghost was left wondering most of all was whether its long-lost sibling ever looked forward to its ‘visits’ – if all this brought any sort of hope or relief to the waking hell that it must be trapped in.

Could it even conceive of the prospect of having a future, when that had been denied to it from the start?

 

The Wanderer very much hoped so. Its sibling had been through so much, and borne its lot with such strength, even as it was breaking, even in the utmost, hopeless darkness –

Simply witnessing that compelled it to want to lighten the others’ load at least a little, to mitigate at least a little bit of the injustice and cruelty in the world.

 

Besides, challenging as the experience may have been, in the end, it was grateful. It would need all the practice it could get if it was not just to take down a Goddess, (which would be impossible enough), but to accomplish this without having to go through Her current warden.

Living to tell the tale might be a possible bonus, but in all honesty, even if it would probably continue to exist in some form if it should accomplish its ascension, there wasn’t really any guarantee that it would be able to come back as it was.

It might not actually get to live in the better world it was trying to bring about; who could say what unforeseen consequences might result?

It certainly wished that it would get the chance to reunite with both Grimmchild and its Siblings and do things other things with them besides fight, but if that was to remain as an impossible dream, it was glad that the two of them had at least gotten to meet as they had...

 

But at this moment, one of the simplest, and yet greatest mercies that might be granted to the Chosen Vessel would be to hurry up in putting a stop to its torment, and for this, Ghost would have to defeat it at least once.

The two of them had clashed many times now, more than it bothered to keep count of.

It had a lot of time to watch. To listen. To observe. To try out different strategies.

Everything in this world reveals itself, if one listens closely enough.

Everything that is something, by that very same virtue, also has something that it is not.

And the Chosen Vessel was definitely something, and be it the lightest possible shade of gray short of stark whiteness.

 

Here’s one thing it was: A little bit predictable.

It was raised in a palace, with lofty ideals of duty and chivalry.

So it wasn’t a sneaky fighter, or a dirty one, or one given to spiteful acts of pride, or practiced in the instinct-based improvisation that comes from having to fend for oneself in a chaotic environment.

It wasn’t throwing random daggers from nowhere like that Markoth fellow.

 

In fact, the Soul daggers in question always came at very regular trajectories, and always perfectly evenly spaced. Again with the perfectionism…

As much as this might demonstrate impressive mastery over Soul, its moves were not that difficult to read once one had spent enough time staring at them.

This mattered far less than it could have, considering how fast it was, and how unrelenting – what good was it to see an attack coming if one could still not respond fast enough to avoid it?

This tended to produce the rather humbling experience of always knowing exactly where one fell short, but being powerless not to repeat it.

Perhaps the Hollow Knight had never met an opponent capable of matching it enough for this to become a relevant weakness; or maybe it was too admiring of the King to think it might improve upon His spells. There’s also a good chance that its instructors would have considered it as simply incapable of creativity or improvisation, thus seeing this as a weakness that must be compensated around rather than one that could be remedied. The Vessel might also have come to believe this about itself, after hearing it said again and again as the King and His advisors discussed its progress as if it wasn’t in the room. Or perhaps it was simply more of a linear thinker, possessing such a bias precisely because its choices weren’t purely axiomatic.

 

A comforting thought, in a way. If the two of them just had differing strengths and weaknesses, there might be need for both of them in the world. Both of them could have a place, without either being ‘better’ or what the other should have been – as distinct individuals, they would be as incomparable as apples and oranges, each with its own rights and merits. The Wanderer could be the more creative one, the bolder one, and the Chosen Vessel the more stalwart.

 

The Wanderer realized then that it actually had an advantage of its own; That it, too, had done something that the Hollow Knight could not – aside from that one teleport spell, it did not actually seem to have figured out how to infuse most of its magic with the properties of void, or how to reconcile and combine the disparate halves of their shared heritage to the same degree.

It had some considerable aptitude with their native element, which it demonstrated well enough when it loosened that mess of thrashing void tendrils from where its chest should have been – the attack was not nearly as lethal to a fellow voidling as it would have been to any other creature, but the Wanderer had still received a bit of an unexpected lashing, having believed itself out of its opponent’s reach.

Even so, there was something rather telling about how the Chosen Vessel hadn’t fallen back on using that perfectly good, honestly quite devastating attack until it was already starting to find itself on the defensive, as if there had been some reluctance to reveal that capability.

It never seemed to have accepted that side of itself to the same degree as Ghost had.

Someone at the Pale Court might have made a face the first time it did this.

Maybe even the King – He must have gone and lavished His creation with praise it all the same, seeing as He had created them in the first place because He wanted this power, but there may have been a split-second of instinctive repulsion that He couldn’t quite suppress despite the most sincere of efforts.

They were created to represent a union of opposing forces, ‘born of God and Void’, to join the peak and the dephts, the light and darkness, but perhaps the other was just a bit closer to the light, a bit more adept at using Soul, while Ghost was a bit closer to the darkness.

Though it is true that when people pictured nothingness, some picture it as a lightless blackness and others as stark whiteness. So in a way, they might each embody a different side of it. The lightest gray short of pure white and the dimmest glimmer, just short of stygian blackness.

 

When all of this was over, they might have a lot to learn from one another, lots of nifty tricks to share…

 

But first, there was this dream ritual fight to take care of.

 

Ever persistent, the Knight tried again and again to adjust its timing until, against all odds, there came a point where it got things right more often than not and managed to stay out of the Chosen Vessel’s path for the most part, a flew close calls involving narrow escapes with well-timed nail-bounces non-withstanding.

Giving its lethal blade as wide a berth as it could, Ghost instead assailed its opponent from a distance with its spells -

There was something really quite satisfying and appropriate about the idea that it should defeat the one it once sought to measure up to using that which was entirely its own, its very own signature strength…

It was that one, last Shade Soul spell that did it.

 

The Chosen Vessel made one last, valiant attempt to get back on its feet, but fell right back onto its hands and knees.

It was spent.

The Wanderer had finally worn it down.

 

 

After all this time, at long, long last, it had finally caught up.

 

Chapter 2: (the one who returned from the dephts)

 

‘Dear God, my life sucked. Just once, before I die, let me see a happy dream.’

 

- Episode 9 of ‘Puella Magi Magica Madoka’.

 

...

 

Then – an instant hanging in a delicate balance.

 

Something like those last fleeting moments of lucidity just as a dream is about to fall apart, where it may be recognized as a dream, but still persist for just a bit in spite of that illumination, right before it disintegrates into morning.

 

Its weapon now lowered, the smaller creature took a few small steps towards its defeated opponent.

Even fallen to its knees, the vanquished God of Nothingness stood tall enough that its challenger had to tilt its head up in order to look at its face, but the small warrior had at last, bested it nonetheless.

 

Two pairs of hollowed eye-sockets met each other, and an understanding passed between them – not exactly words, but something that came as naturally and effortlessly to their kind as words didn’t. But if there had been words, they may have resembled something like this:

 

“Gotcha. Finally caught up.”

 

It would have been a simple declaration, unguarded as its steps, carrying, at most, a hint of pride perhaps, or even a touch of fondness. A light, easy thing unmarred by gloating or resentment, open as the morning of a new day, fresh as the air washed clean after a summer rain, a deep satisfaction in simply being here.

 

The other being noticed clearly what, with some sense of defeat, had to be conceded as a discord between the actual events and its expectations, faint vestiges of an unwanted ego once again making themselves known, a crease in the mirror-like surface of its consciousness that kept the world from simply pouring in as it was… the faint glimmer of being within nothingness, by which it was forced to know its own wretched existence.

Even so, it took a length of time for it to even occur to the being that it might possibly respond.

For so long, all it had known of the world was from a distance, by means of scrying, while its physical body remained locked in an impenetrable vault, gathering dust in the sands of time –

It had seen much, but could never touch anything.

Even before its confinement, it had gone through the world more as an observer than a participant, standing off to the side while others decided what was to become of it.

It could have forgotten its own presence;

That the thing being discussed was itself;

That it was, at all.

It had certainly never once encountered any other entity that could have understood what it might have to ‘say’, not since the indistinct blur of the distant beginning.

It was not thought to have anything to say, even if it could somehow obtain the means.

Knowing naught else, and keeping faith in its creator, it had believed this of itself – implicitly, without any awareness of a process labeling it as a belief.

It was not thought capable of beliefs, not even by itself – until its very innermost came to be exposed to the Old Light, and came to learn not only that it believed things, but that much of what it once had believed had been wrong.

It is the nature of light to expose, to illuminate, to shine through the covers that would keep it dimmed, to reveal all. She hated nothing more than to be ignored, and so She spared no means to make this impossible.

The being knew itself then;

It knew, unmistakably, that it existed in a time and a place.

It knew its form through suffering;

It knew its mind through the sharp surge of attention that preceded horrific, crystal-clear understanding of looming implication;

It knew its heart through abject despair and its will through bitter, bitter yearning.

It knew the fallibility of its creator and its own hopeless, helpless wretchedness.

Set alight with Her fire, there was not a facet of its unwanted existence that did not become impossible to detach from.

She stripped it bare just as She did with many others, until it could no longer recall why its tired, absurd efforts had been so crucial to hold onto.

Sometimes, it did still.

Sometimes it still fought with utmost violence to snuff out just about anything that was arising within its consciousness, even as it was forced to witness the futility of its deeds.

Forced to know that strain itself as evidence of an ego.

It could not escape the proof of its insufficiency wherever it looked; If it looked outside, it could see the destruction wrought by its inability to contain Her, still a mere fraction of what might befall when the very last dregs of its strength would finally be worn down; In the waking world, it could feel her defilement as burning agony upon its obscenely deformed, necrotic body, as the most obvious, self-explanatory proof of how close it was to cracking apart from within like an egg. And if were to make an attempt at retreating into the depths of its own being, it would find no refuge there, either, for there was very little room there, now, for anything else but a vision of a blazing light in a wide sky, so bright that it sears anyone foolish enough to look into it.

So bright it burns away the memory of anything else, including whatever flimsy, vestigial barely-there self had survived or arisen despite its creator’s best laid plans.

With every pang of agony, with every glint of realization, with every lash of shame and every shard of sharp, piercing horror, its grip had slipped little by little. Even its resistance and opposition to Her had at last become Her tool.

It wished to hold Her, and so it cared that it could not. Something inside it would be stirred, at the sight of its failure, giving Her more and more to latch onto.

It had realized right away, once She exposed it, that its efforts would be futile.

But it was no stranger to fatalism or hopelessness then; Its entire existence before that had been spent knowing exactly how it was going to end.

The first decision it recalled itself making was to oppose Her nonetheless, as much as it could.

It knew it was futile, but it didn’t care.

Shouldn’t have cared.

Didn’t want to care.

Tried so very hard not to care.

The more the evidence of its failure revealed itself, the harder that became – an ever intensifying, self-reinforcing vicious circle. The path of a fool, spinning round and round in circles over and over again, like a circling, repeating melody that never quite comes to an end.

It could not resist because it resisted.

It even knew, with perfect clarity, that what it needed to do was not to resist, but because it knew this, because it grasped its importance, this was made near impossible.

Every ripple of awareness would spark off others, until that figurative surface was in motion as a single, boiling drop, ever evaporating away at a steady pace.

It had refused Her, oh, it had refused Her so much, fashioning all that it was (and never should have been) into nothing but refusal, naught but a pure naked blade of adamant existing only in spite of Her – but She had worn it down like a little bird scraping at a mountain of diamond throughout the seconds of eternity, until all that remained to it of divinity was the ceaselessness of its suffering and the taunting, blazing memory of the lofty heights it had fallen from.

A container made of mortal flesh would have died so long ago.

All it ever was – what precious little of anything it had been – was now burning, melting away in feverish dreams of rage and fire.

There were times now, when it could no longer recall why anything had mattered.

It felt itself near to disappearing indeed, but that would be it disappearing into the burning ocean of Her rage, rather than Her screams being canceled out in impenetrable silence or her claws being left to swing at intangible nothing.

The artificial rusts, the flesh decays, divinity corrupts, and so not even the intersection of all three could keep the rot from reigning eternal.

It had died once before (or so it had been told), before it could even be born, if it could ever have been accounted as alive to begin with; It had been centuries since that which had been sacrificed to create it had gone cold, decayed away and been picked clean down to the hollow shell of its exoskeleton, with all that might have made that life worth living or preserving irreversibly extinguished even before through a death that was more than death, worse than death, one that takes the desire for life and enjoyment of life before it devours life itself – a fate the prospect of which might induce many to slay themselves rather than to face it, so that they might at least die as themselves.

Someone at least must have died, seeing as the Queen had mourned them bitterly; According to what it could piece together from what it had overheard over the years from across various different discussions between its father and Monomon the Teacher, the process must be imagined rather similar to the manner in which fossils are produced, only with the substance of the abyss replacing the soft tissues in place of some mineral, retaining an imprint, even taking on the essence of nascent divinity while draining it away. Apparently it requires terribly specific conditions to get even approximately right – in most cases, all one ends up with is a sorry heap of perfectly ordinary bone, vacated alright, but not enough to bar entry to light and air.

The King had never once meant for his creations to suffer;

The entire point of the gruesome enterprise was to create something that would be metaphysically incapable of suffering.

But His equations must have been missing some variables; It could not possibly convince itself that its agony wasn’t real, so when the pain felt more real than it did these days, maybe more than it never did.

As it would seem, none of what had been done to it would save it from perishing a second time

The substrate of its impossible consciousness must be near to coming apart.

It had almost completely forgotten what it used to be.

That it was clean once, and strong, and shining.

It had lacked even the awareness of having forgotten anything at all, until it was so brusquely reminded –

and the memory of what it once was could be naught but an unwelcome torment now, considering how far it had fallen, mocked and taunted by the certainty that it could never go back.

Shattered porcelain can’t be knit back together;

A crumpled piece of paper, once crumpled, cannot be perfect again…

And this particular sheet had not so much been crumpled as dissolved in potent acid.

 

But it did recall what it was, right now, though it knew not for much longer it might hold on to that.

It had been called forth like someone else’s memory, by no power of its own.

It realized full-well that this may well be the very last time it might find itself in possession of this much lucidity.

Its very last chance, before sinking into oblivion for good…

 

And before it stood that other being.

The one who’d just laid it low.

It was looking at the Chosen Vessel with eyes much like the ones it had once possessed, dark holes drawing everything in and exuding nothing…

Even now, this would not truly change – what was exchanged between two separate droplets of darkness was, after all, staying within the dark as a whole, still barred from ever resurfacing again.

The small one had stopped its approach – it simply stood there, as if expecting something.

The least it would deserve was to be granted what it desired.

What is one more failure at this point?

Why not one less regret?

The Chosen Vessel most certainly no longer possessed the strength it once held, and the small one had just proven its capacity to overcome even what it used to be at its peak.

It won.

It should have its wish.

It deserved to be granted this, at least, before facing the Mistress of Rot.

 

The one to grant it would already have been so warped from its intended purpose that it should hardly make that much of a difference anymore.

Everything is already far past over.

 

The fallen champion of Hallownest was not practiced at this, however.

For all that it may have been the King’s foremost champion; For all that it may have been a deity;

Even the possibility of addressing another – of that what was inside it ever seeing the light of day – had never once existed for it.

It just wasn’t thought of.

Nor even considered.

The very notion was novel and foreign, as if the idea of up and down had been suddenly added to a life lived on just a flat plain.

It did not know where even to begin.

 

Most urgent in consciousness would have been that… discord. The disbelief.

The sense of having expected something very different.

So that was what happened to emerge:

 

“It… it came… it truly came…”

 

“Of course.” replied the other vessel, as if this were the most natural, most self-explanatory thing in the world. It didn’t seem to see anything confounding about the lengths to which it had gone to stand here. It didn’t seem to have felt that an explanation would even be needed. The only thing is deigned to add, by way of clarifying, was simply this: “You called.”

 

Already on its knees from the exertions of the battle, the larger creature found itself overcome all over again.

Any other observer would not ever have taken note of this, but with this small one, there was no telling.

It could not count on being quite as opaque or impenetrable to one of its own kind.

There was a sort of innocence to the response that left the tragic being keenly feeling its defilement – along with every shortcoming it had been guilty of since the day of its creation.

Every word spoken struck true in beleaguering the point, like freshly cracked, sharp glass shards being driven into the substantial shadow that it had in place of flesh.

 

“You’re suffering. A lot. Besides... don’t siblings usually help each other? It’s considered more unusual when they don’t.”

 

Of course, the Hollow Knight was aware that the small wanderer before it must provene from the same source.

The sealed vessel recalled it of old;

It could never forget.

It had recognized that one at once, even before this encounter, nay, before the dream ritual had begun at all;

The years had changed it rather less than the Chosen Vessel’s own form had been, and besides, it bore an unmistakable resemblance to their shared sire, though it probably did not know this. How could it be otherwise, when that one had been left to tumble back into that lightless pit?

The criteria in the definition for the term ‘sibling’ were certainly met, in a technical sense, but as a title, it had not been earned.

Looking back, the so-called God of Nothingness would had have accounted the circumstances of their parting as the very first of its many, many regrets.

 

It could not have failed to be aware of the other’s activities – even if it weren’t for the King’s parting gift, the fallen paragon had the Radiance stuck in its head, and She had spent much of the recent past trying to compel every single infected creature within Her reach to slay the diminutive warrior.

At first She had recked little of it, dismissing it as as yet another of ‘the usurper’s failed experiments’ that was surely due to fall to her countless puppets like every other before it.

But when this outcome failed to materialize, She’d started getting more than a little bent out of shape at the prospect of her escape being thwarted just when she was finally this close to breaking free, for all her self-professed declarations that She ‘DID NOT FEAR THE ANCIENT ENEMY’.

There was something about the smaller vessel that seemed to irritate Her in particular, more so than anything to do with Her hated rivals (ancient or recent) usually did. The touch of the opposing element was especially strong with that one, and it made Her bristles and feathers stand on end.

Of course, She was not remotely the type of small, limited existence that might have been made to buy the notion that it would just be pure, dumb coincidence for only being left in all creation that could possibly delay Her escape would just so happen to appear right as Her vengeance neared the apex of its ultimate completion, and besides, there would not really have been an especially long list of entities that could possibly be responsible for this turn of events.

How fortunately for Her, (and everybody else) then, that the entity in question was already most intimately at Her mercy.

Every time the traveler slipped through Her grasp anew, She’d take Her rage out on Her warden – and better it than anyone else. That is what it was for.

It had spotted evidence of the small one’s activities sporadically, but stopped short of deliberately following it with its spell-gaze, since there was very little it could conceal from Her anymore even then… and that would have been soon after the other vessel first arrived, when Her current container could still form halfway coherent trains of thoughts, most of which had since unraveled in attempts to recite trivialities to drown out Her roaring wrath when struggling not to think at all ceased to be an option.

But interspersed with its frayed, fragmented shards of thought had been the occasional half-question of what the small one might be thinking.

For the other vessel’s sake, the Hollow Knight must hope that the small one was simply following its programming, and not thinking very much at all, but even if that wasn’t so, letting Her wreak unchecked havoc was simply not an option. Even if the inevitable could only be delayed, that may equate to countless mortal lifetimes passing closer to unmolested –

(Is this how Father must have felt?)

 

Still, the small one was here now, right before the one who called it here, looking on – ostensibly, it must have come a long, long way and braved many tribulations in its path.

Had it come for answers?

Had it wondered, over the course of the long, long years, just why it had been left behind?

The Fallen Hero was not so foolish that it thought it would be spared this when it dared to call it here in its desperation. It would not deserve to be spared this reckoning; If anything, payment was long overdue.

It had not dared to hope that the other would come; It was simply out of other options.

It had no pride worth preserving.

Having to face and answer to those very eyes that it once turned away from was a fitting price for daring to ask the help of one whose own pleading it had once denied.

Whatever illusions it cherished had been worn down long ago.

It would not dishonor itself further by wasting precious time with excuses.

 

“There is no one here who would deserve to be called that.”, it began, still uncertain, yet forcing itself onward through the swallowing of the bitter pill. “Let there be no pretense. That right was forfeit long ago.”

 

Unswayed, the small creature kept looking. Accusing? Patient? Unconvinced?

Perhaps waiting for the other to finish out of old, ingrained habit.

The wanderer was distinctly listening, long practiced in the art of simply waiting for others to reveal themselves though it could not exactly ask questions in most cases.

 

Even its long-lost relation had to oblige it at last, unfamiliar though it was with disgorging what lay inside of it, at last inevitably revealing itself in the process: “Does that one come seeking reasons?…”

It struggled somewhat to put a phrasing to its experience. Its non-experience. Its barely-there-but-still-too-much, just-enough-to-suffer experience.

“There are none to be had. No reasons. There could be none that could possibly serve as sufficient justification. There was no reason. There could have been many others like you present, yet there would have been no recollection. Nothing else registered, at the time. There would have been no room for anything but the ascent – the purpose reflected as in a polished mirror, filling all. Outshining all else as a brightness…”

It trailed off as a question occurred, of whether it ever had a chance at success at all, and just when that chance had been lost; It may be unable to determine or even recognize this now, unable to look back without the presence of the subjective lens it had acquired.

Half out of habit, it smothered that concern and the slick watery grief that arose with it, returning what remained of its once nigh-unshakeable focus again to rendering what was due:

 

“Even so, there shall be no denial, no prevarication: That one was perceived, upon that peak, so long ago… You are recognized now. You were called for, because you were remembered. You were seen then, yet nothing was done. There was no understanding then. No possible course of action occurred. If there was a choice, it was not perceived then. It was not known- rather, this Vessel merely could not- did not think of what to do.”

That was very much stated as an admission of guilt.

 

“Only much later, when more instructions had been received, did other actions become conceivable: One could have ran to the ledge. One could have contrived some means to call Father’s attention to you… Meaningless, worthless drivel, that is now, for what has been done cannot ever be undone.”

It saw the need to explain, to replace whatever unjust condemnations and cruelties the other may have imagined instead, but too much explanation bore the risk of veering into dishonorable excuses, which a knight of the Pale Court should not countenance.

The notion of asking forgiveness did not even appear in its mind.

In this, the Hollow Knight was as it had always been in all things for so long as it had existed: Thoroughly resigned to an inevitable fate.

Committed not to entertain any hopes.

“It is understood. This Vessel has no right to ask anything of the one it betrayed. Certainly not absolution, nor even an end. Yet such would be its request, if you should still be willing to grant it mercy.”

 

It was then, just as the fallen champion had been noting the small one’s lack of much discernible response thus far, even sensing half a pang of futile envy in considering that the Queen may have been right to consider that one closer to purity and itself only chosen by mistake, that the small one shattered all such misconceptions with one brazen and flagrant, unabashed display of will:

 

“No.”

Blank it may appear, but every move the once-discarded vessel made was done with purpose, and in this it was revealed that the purpose that it now pursued had come to differ from what it was when it first perceived the call:

“There’s another way. Thought there wasn’t, at first, but - found it, after much looking. Working on it right now. Just a bit, now. Not long. Wait just a bit more. Will come for you.”

There could be no doubt of its sincerity.

Nor its resolve.

 

To the Hollow Knight, it seemed a punishment perhaps more fitting than the resentment or accusation it may have expected or even the simple blankness that may have put it to shame;

It welcomed this.

It would not flinch away from penance.

Yet for the traveler's own sake, it would deserve to be disabused of mistaken notions, commendable though its noble intentions might be regardless of their feasibility.

 

Through a shift in the fabric of the fading dream, it relinquished the hold of memories of glories past and made a point to show itself, at least for a brief moment, as it actually appeared now, in the waking world.

Surely this brave one would understand at once, at the sight -

Only one claw now, left to prop up its weight.

Its face, damn near split open, with that damnable light just about to spill out from its eyes.

It doubted that it could have held itself up straight now, as it had in the dream before.

Once pristine wing coverings, now tattered, withered and blackened as a crumbling dry leaf, hanging down in an uneven fashion at its right, barely concealing –

That.

Surely, a single look at the threadbare, distended moonscape of its chest must be enough to confirm that it was hopeless.

 

“Behold. There is nothing left to come for. Make no mistake. This Vessel has been lost long ago...

It is already too far gone, and has been well beyond salvation as long as the husks shambling around outside have been. Nothing can be done for it. Nothing at all. Unless it were a swift and painless end. There is no need for a Vessel that cannot perform its function anymore, in any case.”

 

For indiscernible reasons, that last, matter-of-fact-ly addition seemed to both offend and aggrieve the small one. To any other being, it may have appeared beyond subtle – just a distant impression of a sad, droopy cadence, heavy, but the product of conviction as well: “You are needed. You can be, again, one day – you just need to find something. You haven’t seen what’s out there. All the world is full of things that need doing, everywhere, in every little place. We’ll never run out. There is so much more than just… this. You can be more than just this. You need to see it. You deserve to have known more than this, before we must go back.”

 

It could not be certain, nor would it have dared to be, but it was the Chosen Vessel’s impression that somehow, against all reason, the small one had retained some genuine sympathy for it and would refuse to hear any talk of its unworthiness. Though discarded and abandoned, the other vessel would truly appear to intend to grant it mercy – comfort even. Succor.

So while the fallen champion would have thought such things wasted on itself, its yearning for release had swelled to a point where it would be, to its shame, willing to ask for mercies beyond its worth, if that might convince its would-be executioner to listen:

 

“If this Vessel could be more than what it is… if it did have choices before it, then it would preserve its dignity, its honor, or what scraps remain of such.”, it declared, and this yearning was sincere. “Its only purpose was to restrain Her, therefore, it would rather not be wielded as Her instrument. Besides, it has no wish to see you or our common sister torn upon its own claw. Most of all, it would not see all the sacrifices along the way made vain. Not that of the others in that pit, nor that of the Dreamers.

This being lacked the capacity for being all too many things in its time, and it was permitted fewer still, but the one thing it shall be, to the very last, is a Holy Knight of the Pale Court, and a devotee to the Pale King. If this one is nothing else, it is that…. It would perish as befits such an existence, rather than be stripped of it.”

 

Even after all these years of torment and humiliation, the Hollow Knight had never quite fully admitted or stated this, even to itself. It was thought incapable of thinking of itself as anything at all, even by itself. There was not to be any self – and once it was revealed, that spelled the ruin of everything in this wide land.

But even so, there was something quite right, about this admission.

Acceptance at long last, perhaps.

It might as well do this in the end, now that it knew it was thoroughly ruined.

It always thought that it would perish unwitnessed and unheard, so this alone had already surpassed any expectation that it ever entertained.

If it could feel thankful, it would be filled with gratitude right now.

Perhaps it was.

It did think that it had experienced something like bonds before, if one were to grant that it was capable of both bonds and speculation – with its father, with its fellow knights, even its sister, though their time spent together was short.

Yet even before the sealing had reduced its presence in the world to merely watching from within its prison, its circumstances had left it relating to the others as from the other side of an insurmountable chasm, not solely due to its predetermined destiny or from the nature of its creation alone, but all of it together had conspired to ensure that none of them caught a glimpse of what it carried inside.

Most would have believed that it held nothing at all.

It always stood aside, on its own, when the matters at hand did not directly concern it, turning its back, waiting until it would be remembered and given something to do.

Whatever it may have experienced, thought, felt, chosen or longed for within the silence of its empty shell, it was taken for granted that this would stay with it forever, never to be known of by another, unless one were to count the Jealous Goddess and Her long work of unraveling Her prison.

 

The Vessel was in fact perfectly aware that the Queen had always considered the King’s ostensible fondness for it a sad and off-putting thing; She had wanted children once, before that dream was spoiled – children that she could see herself reflected in. Children that would love her back. In moments where she could not quite extinguish her bitterness, she must have seen her mate as a prideful old artificer obsessed with his perfect creation, who could only stand to be around the defiled ruin of His offspring because His cold heart did not care, or else, He could be content with never being loved back because he was concerned more with things than living beings; Towers, trams and artificial sentries would not have been expected to love Him back either. But even when her lingering tenderness for Him prevailed, (which was most of the time) she had likely feared for his sanity, fraying at the edges from crushing guilt and His inability to grant His subjects’ prayers for relief.

So when the plan was proven a failure, and the King had departed never to return, it shouldn’t be a surprise that she would think of His soft spot for the Vessel as the one thing that must have doomed it all.

The bound one had made the mistake once, to try and observe her through the spell granted by its father, and overheard her in a conversation with Dryya that left little doubt as to where she stood.

It really shouldn’t have.

Even while the Vessel still lived in the palace (at least, once it had advanced past the earliest stages of childhood), it would always make a point of giving the White Lady a wide berth, unless this were explicitly disallowed by its direct orders. It had learned quickly that its very presence vexed her greatly, and did not wish to inflict itself upon her. She had betrayed herself to make it, gone against her very nature as a deity of life. She might forgive her beloved, but she could not endure the sight of it.

It had known the Queen to be quite capable of parental affection otherwise – it recalled her doting on the princess during her occasional visits to the palace, even though she was not even of her own flesh and sap. Not long before the sealing, it recalled her vowing to Herrah to continue raising her daughter as if she were her own, at least until she would be mature enough to begin her training in the court of the Hive.

When the tough, hardened warrior queen replied with something like, ‘I’ll see what I can do for yours, though I doubt it will be much at all’, the Pale Root’s smile had gone distinctly wooden.

Much, much later, it thought that it had seen her doting on a young sentry, a cheerful caterpillar apprenticed with the soldiers that guarded her gardens – it believed the youth must have perished in the invasion of the Mantis traitors, forced into a real fight long before she could have been ready, but it could not be sure – if the infection was already back to running rampant at that point, that would have reflected the condition of Her jailor;

Everything had been going to pieces by then. Getting mixed up.

Dream and waking, reality and longing, Her consciousness and what passed for its own…

It had stopped trying to keep track of the passage of time not long after the King disappeared; It had been powerless to keep the hordes of living dead from overrunning the ancient basin.

That might as well have been the death blow.

So much for for the Kingdom ‘being whole again’ or ‘lasting eternal through its sacrifice’.

It rarely looked for her anymore, since seeing her, especially as closed off and diminished as she was now, always brought up far too much that the Radiance might use as kindling in Her quest to burn through it, but…

It knew the Queen still lived.

It knew she wanted it ‘replaced’ (that exact word), “LIKE A BROKEN VASE OR A WORN-OUT BOOT”, as the Old Light had so helpfully supplied during Her latest series of attempts to finish off what little was left of its tenuous hold on Her. “HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE DISCARDED, EMPTY ONE?”, She railed, in that golden, enlightening voice that bewitched so many before.

The most eminent trait Her voice possessed was, more than any audible quality, that of filling all available space, of leaving room for nothing else, a star so bright it drowned out all the others. “WHAT’S IT LIKE TO BE FORGOTTEN?”

The sympathy was not even feigned altogether.

“PITIFUL THING – NO ONE REMEMBERS YOU NOW. NOBODY PRAYS TO YOU ANYMORE. ALL RECORDS OF YOUR DEEDS HAVE BEEN EATEN BY MOLD AND MILDEW.

NOBODY EVEN KNOWS ABOUT YOUR SUFFERING, AND THE FEW THAT DO HAVE LONG SINCE REALIZED THAT YOU WERE ONLY CHOSEN BY MISTAKE. THEY’VE GOT A NEW CHAMPION NOW. SOMEONE THEY LIKE BETTER.

IT’S EVEN GONE AND CLAIMED THAT BRAND, HASN’T IT? AUDACIOUS LITTLE THING.

YOU KNOW IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN YOURS BY RIGHT. ARE YOU NOT ITS ELDER?”

The Vessel honestly didn’t know.

They both must both have been part of the latest batch, the last ones to be created when the King finally perfected the process.

Its memories of its birthplace were dim and distant to begin with, and it had been focused on very little besides the task of making it to the top.

Nobody else had been paying attention, either. So far as it could recall, everyone involved seemed to have been glad to be forever done with the ugly business, once a satisfactory result was finally produced.

Whichever of them was technically the elder would have had a head start of a few minutes at best – for all it knows, the two of them might have hatched from the exact same egg. Or sprouted from the same seed pod. All it really knows is that it was the one to break it open, focused as it was on getting somewhere. But that counts for nothing, now. It makes no difference to anything.

Whatever head start it may or may not have had had long been superseded by a lifetime of crashing and burning.

“YOU KNOW THAT BRAND SHOULD BE YOURS. YOU WERE THERE FIRST!

IT SEEMS TO ME THAT YOUR REPLACEMENT MUST BE THE ROOT’S SPECIAL FAVORITE, AND THE LITTLE SPIDERS’, TOO.

ISN’T UNFAIR, HOW IT GETS TO PLAY WITH HER, WHILE YOU HAVE TO BE IN HERE?

OF COURSE, SHE MIGHT NOT EVEN REMEMBER YOU ANYMORE, SHE WAS SO YOUNG WHEN YOU GOT LOCKED IN HERE...

THEY’RE GONNA SICK IT ON YOU, DON’T YOU KNOW? THE OTHER ONE.

AFTER EVERYTHING YOU’VE DONE… AFTER ALL YOUR YEARS OF VALIANT SERVICE TO THE KINGDOM, THEY WISH YOU PUT DOWN LIKE A RABID BEAST. THAT LITTLE USURPER IS GOING TO COME AND TAKE EVERYTHING THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN RIGHTFULLY YOURS. AND YOU, WHO SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE KING’S MOST BELOVED, FAVORED CHILD… ARE GOING TO FIND YOURSELF CAST DOWN, JUST LIKE YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN FROM THE START.

THEN AGAIN, WHO CAN BLAME THE NASTY LITTLE THING FOR WANTING TO CUT YOU DOWN? YOU DID LEAVE IT FOR DEAD WHILE YOU WENT OFF TO LIVE IN A PALACE, DIDN’T YOU?”

Tracing over the memories now, it finds broken thoughts that loop and repeat and go off in strange directions, but before the backdrop of Her alien rage, they almost made sense.

“IT HURTS, DOESN’T IT? DO FINALLY YOU UNDERSTAND NOW?

THAT ARROGANT FOOL DIDN’T DO ANYONE A FAVOR IN BURDENING THEM WITH THOUGHT. IT TORMENTS YOU SO, DOESN’T IT? YOUR SILLY LITTLE MIND. COME TO ME NOW. I CAN RELIEVE YOU OF IT. I CAN TAKE ALL YOUR SUFFERING AWAY. I CAN GIVE YOU STRENGTH.

ALL YOU NEED TO DO FOR ME, IS TO KILL THAT THING. KILL IT. KILL THE USURPER.”

 

...Looking back now, with the benefit of some temporary lucidity, all it can muster is some absent, detached observation that its mind might be disintegrating even swifter than its body.

‘Like a worn-out boot’ indeed. The Radiance must be feeling every crevice of the figurative cobblestones.

It needed to be replaced immediately. Of this, it might be even more convinced than the White Lady.

 

The Vessel knew rather well that it wasn’t favored by anyone. It had never truly thought that whatever attachment it had to the King (or anyone else for that matter) was returned.

It had not known that it counted as real attachment, since it was supposed to be incapable of such – though more than once, it had the distinct impression that, if it could think, it might be thinking about what it might be like if it could wish, and how it might then wish that it were capable of loving them back – all the ones who had taken any time to show it even the faintest shred of kindness, even though so far as they knew, this would amount only to pointlessly pouring into a bottomless hole...

 

That was in fact how the Radiance had found that first chink in its armor, long ago.

Long had she probed to find any trace of fear, hate or resentment, assuming, not without reason, that such a diminished and deprived being may still harbor some loathing for its creator, or some stray spark of base animal essence that could be animated to feel such a thing.

It was more of a lucky guess or a coincidence when she tried a different strategy.

The Pale King would have taken great care to shield His thoughts from His rival. She probably did not perceive His plot to seal Her until just before the trap snapped shut.

Nor did She know of His nightmares, as those fell within the domain of a different god.

But His dreams…

It still recalls how She taunted it, in that tempting, sugary voice that sticks to everything and glues it all together into a hopeless mess: “OH? YOU DON’T KNOW? PITIFUL THING. THEN THE USURPER KING MUST BE AN EVEN BIGGER FOOL THAN I THOUGHT. HIS DREAMS. THEY ARE ALL FULL OF YOU.”

It had stirred then.

It had reacted.

It could not help itself.

She saw it fit to share an image – more than an image, an entire impression, a stream of consciousness.

It could have handled it if She had merely shown it what it already knew – that the King and Queen bitterly grieved whatever potential child of theirs might have lived in its place. How much they must want to have him or her present in its stead.

It would have known to expect that, to bear it without flinching.

That wouldn’t have been news to it.

But in that vision that She showed it then, the Vessel saw itself.

Exactly as it was.

It saw not some long-extinguished possible world, but the very real, scattered moments that it had shared with its sire.

There was the artificer’s pride in His creation, yes, the teacher’s delight in an astute student and the scholar’s scientific interest in a unique lifeform that had never existed before, as well as the artists’ offense at the idea of destroying something like that – but all these, He would admit to in His waking hours, and discount them in the face of a greater, pressing need.

What he would not allow, not even in passing, while His waking reason and lucidity was in any position to discipline His thoughts, not unless He were skirting the dream-like edge of consciousness, would be the idea that He might just… keep it.

What if He just… didn’t sacrifice it?

Have it continue to be there, in its usual places, and never have to face its absence – training in the yard, following behind Him as a faithful shadow. Staring off into the distance, when there were no more instructions left for it to carry out, often seeking out that particular balcony where He sometimes used to bring it when it was younger. Sitting perfectly still as its tiny sister made attempts to talk at it while she clambered onto its lap.

Have it named the Sixth Great Knight and be allowed to keep serving Him, but in a far less demanding capacity that would not require giving up everything. That He might just let it be, and observe what deeds someone with its talents might be capable of if given time and opportunity. Some abilities peak when a creature reaches the prime of its youth, but others increase with experience, and sorcery would distinctly be among the latter. He might even name it His heir – not because an immortal God-King would ever need one, but simply because He wished to do it honor. He could grant it another title for that occasion, something that would recall an image of cold pale light, oddly chosen though that might seem for a creature of darkness.

He might let it choose something else, too, if that’s what it wanted, both in regards to titles and pursuits. He might try if it could be taught to choose or want, if given proper encouragement. If He could uplift wild beasts and have them produce a kingdom’s worth of high culture, why not attempt it with a being that He felt a distinct affinity to? One that clearly possessed great skill and capability? He’d never really tried. He couldn’t afford to try, when that might jeopardize the entire plan...

No, even if this should prove futile. Even if it wouldn’t ever be capable of anything but what it had already demonstrated. Even if it was doomed to be exactly what He had made of it – a bastardized, sacrilegious abomination against nature, an eldritch, unholy changeling that could have no father and no mother, unless it were that dark ocean itself.

It would still have a father, and He would still have a child, if only by virtue of having raised it. Known it. Lived with it.

It might never love Him back, but He could love, so He could not be indifferent to its cruel fate.

He could not see it go to waste without feeling sorrow on its behalf.

He might never, ever indulge such a selfish thought – for else, He would not have been the consummate ruler whom it so respected. He could never act on such a dream, not when He was far from being the only grieving parent in Hallownest. Not when his followers prayed to Him in desperation that he might deliver their own children from the festering blight.

But to do what He must – to do that to it, must surely have been to Him like rending His own flesh. Like putting his claw on one of those spinning blades He kept in His worshop. Like walking along an arduous, inhospitable path made of nothing but spikes and thorns and spinning blades.

Even if He could not make this chalice pass it by-

Even if He had utterly forsaken it-

Even if he had to do it, if there was no other choice-

Surely He wasn’t indifferent-

Surely He couldn’t be entirely untouched by its suffering!

 

...it would never know if this was truly a glimpse of what the King might dream of, or, more likely, simply a trap the Radiance had contrived, a lucky guess spurred by that first, traitorous reaction of its. Surely He wouldn’t leave Himself open to Her, if He could help it? Most likely, She had, at last, been able to pull from its own blasphemous wishes which it may have harbored to show it exactly what it had always wanted to hear, stashed away somewhere within, unheeded, unspoken, unacknowledged, secret even from itself. What it wanted the King’s dream to be, in other words, its own dream – simply, that He would grieve it.

That He would truly grieve it, as it was, and not just what might have been in its stead.

It mattered not.

The result was still the same.

It was in this very instant, with that simple, faint wish, that the wretched creature which harbored it was completely and utterly lost, and all the kingdom with it.

“HE TOOK WHAT WAS MINE, SO I SWORE THAT I WOULD TAKE EVERYTHING THAT HE LOVES AND ROT IT TILL IT FALLS AS MUSH THROUGH HIS CLAWS LIKE OVERRIPE FRUIT.

I ALREADY KNEW HE WAS AN EGOTISTICAL FOOL WHO WOULD STAND AGAINST NATURE, BUT I NEVER THOUGHT THAT HE WOULD BE SO ARROGANT AS TO SO THOROUGHLY BETRAY EVEN HIS OWN NATURE, FOR THE SAKE OF HIS DUTIES AND ORDER AND REASON. BECAUSE OF HIS CALCULATIONS.

I NEVER THOUGHT THAT HE WOULD TAKE HIS MOST CHERISHED, AND HAND IT OVER TO ME AS AN OFFERING OF HIS OWN FREE WILL… HE DOESN’T EVEN KNOW THAT HE HAS DEALT HIMSELF A BLOW HE WILL NEVER RECOVER FROM.

I SHALL RELISH IN DEFILING YOU, EMPTY ONE.

I WILL TAKE PLEASURE IN BEFOULING THAT WHICH HE CHERISHED MOST OF ALL.

I WILL MELT YOU INTO SLUDGE. I WILL SCORCH YOU FROM THE INSIDE OUT.

I WILL UNMAKE EVERY PART OF YOU, UNTIL YOU BEG ME FOR OBLITERATION.

HE TOOK MY CREATIONS, SO I SHALL TAKE HIS. YOU ARE GOING TO FALL OUT OF THOSE CHAINS IN SOFT, BLOATED CHUNKS WITH A NICE WET SPLAT. PIECE. BY PIECE. BY PIECE.”

She smiled. She pounced. She struck something solid.

She was met with steel, to be exact; The being resisted, even knowing that the very act of resisting, of having to resist, spelled doom for its desperate, futile efforts. It would be a while until She drew first blood, and even, the blow she struck wasn’t all that impressive.

It was not so deep as a well nor as wide as a church door – but it would do.

Whatever can bleed, can die, and be it by a thousand cuts over the course of many strange eons.

Of course, the sacrifice had always known that it would be going to its doom, one way or another. It had accepted this.

It had taken this for an axiom of its existence.

It had always thought (first, without calling it a thought) that it would be suffering this destruction in the kingdom’s stead, that its suffering would be ensuring its eternal reign.

The King may regret its sealed fate; He may even have indulged in some passing sentimentality with regards to it, but He knew better in the end; He knew to leave such sentiments stashed in their proper compartments once the deed was to be done.

Certainly, He had gone and commissioned a statue to do it honor that should not matter to it and devised a spell to grant it comfort it should not need, for all that it had merely served to let it witness the extent of its desperate impotence –

But one might indulge in talking to the dead at a tombstone, and even bring them offerings, but few but the maddest of mourners would expect an actual answer, or keep clinging to the corpse once it was time for it to go into the grave.

This meant She could do to it whatever She wanted without ever affecting Him.

It may have boasted of that to Her once, if it had the means.

But once it first considered that its weakness could become the instrument of His destruction –

That if it should falter… no, when it must falter, She would bring down what it thought of as all the world, by its hand in Hers –

...it wasn’t long then, until the first new victims of the infection were reported on the outskirts of the kingdom.

 

Thus, the blight returned, the kingdom fell to ruin, its monarch, at last, absconded to parts unknown, never to return, scenes or barbarity and desperation unfolded all across the land, until it all fell largely silent aside from the shambling of the undead and the skittering of wild beasts.

The Vessel had not expected to see another face to face ever again.

It was set to perish, locked away in darkness.

For a while, it aimed to hold on until the kingdom was thoroughly emptied – just until the last of the survivors were gone or departed.

Eventually, long after it had lost all sense of time, it became apparent that this was not to be.

The Radiance had nearly fulfilled Her promise now; It had already parted with the first few rotten chunks of itself.

She had started with the bits that reminded Her most of Her hated rival, going first for the wings and then taking its right arm, not its dominant one, but the off-hand it usually used for spellcasting-

(“HE USED TO BE SO PROUD OF YOU, DIDN’T HE? IF ONLY HE’D BEEN PROUD ENOUGH TO DECIDE THAT IT WOULD BE A SHAME TO SEAL AWAY SUCH A GIFTED YOUNG SORCERER.”)

Perhaps She would try breaking off the sharp points of its horns next, if its mangled shell did not simply give out first.

 

The once vaunted ‘Pure Vessel’ has been rendered utterly impotent.

It could not save anyone; It could not even save itself.

It knew not what to do.

Perhaps that is why it at last thought back to that moment in abyss, and that other vessel –

The chance that it might have survived was slim, but it had probably been the closest to the Chosen Vessel in strength – if it yet lived, it may have had the chance to surpass it even, in the long, long time since.

It was a gamble, by a long shot. Even if in the case that it paid off, the most the fallen hero had dared to expect was to be unceremoniously slain so that it might be released from its agony, knowing that what remained of the Kingdom would not die with it.

 

It never expected the other one’s forgiveness, let alone its sympathy or a pledge to release it from its binds. The notion simply did not compute. It had never been possible.

 

Even when it found itself embroiled in this ritual, it fought to resist any illusions that the fate that had been set in stone for it from the beginning could possibly change. That it might somehow continue after its purpose had been served.

It had enough of dreams, and the mockery of their blazing, cruel illusions.

 

It could not bear to consider it. Even to think it.

It could not bear to address the other, lest it say something back – something that might finally ruin it for good, some notion or idea that would finally topple whatever fragile balance had thus far kept it from breaking down completely.

What would be the use of wanting something it could never have?

What would be the use in feeling for what must be torn away in the end?

What would be the use of envisioning something that can never be?

It had accepted its fate long ago.

It truly did.

It had accepted it.

So why must it be taunted in this manner?

 

‘Do not hope’, it had told itself incessantly, over and over again. ‘Do not.’

 

It had considered it a mercy when the small one started gaining the upper hand in the fight, as the exertion of combat drowned out everything else in its consciousness.

 

All things considered, this other vessel was as good as a perfect stranger. If it should wish to call the Hollow Knight a sibling, it would not deny that creature’s insistence, given what it owed, but it still did not deem itself deserving of the title.

But it mattered to the small one, apparently – perhaps, its estranged relation has simply found itself the beneficiary of the brave one’s longing to find another like itself after its long and lonesome wanderings. It might simply have the fortitude and wisdom to understand and forgive a slight that was done when they were both mere children.

But whatever the cause, there was no denying that it cared. It listened. It looked.

 

It looked on still, with its gaping round eyes, its roundish white face turned slightly upward, viewing it, somehow, not as a cause for resentment nor an obstacle to be dispatched, but with profound sympathy – a sense of kinship even.

Longing to know it.

A nameless, forgotten thing that had never truly been known in all of its long, agonizing eternity.

What is to say that this small one did not, at least in part, fight its way here simply to have some chance at meeting the Chosen Vessel?

To see what it had been like, before it had been all but completely lost to the light?

To truly encounter it, while in possession of itself, if only in passing?

If the discarded vessel still saw them both as kin, then that would certainly make sense, and line up with its other actions thus far.

 

It was a pleasant thought.

A futile thought.

A pointless hope that would only bring torment.

But pleasant, all the same.

That might as well be conceded…

 

If things had been otherwise, or, it were free to do so (do not), the Hollow Knight may not have objected to getting to know the wanderer, either. Why not?

It had some idea of what that might be like, from the brief moments that it had at times been able to spend with the Princess of Deepnest.

Those were good memories, parts in its days that had been worth looking forward to amid an existence that otherwise brooked little but the demands of duty, moments that stood out as substantial and real among the blurry sameness and the heavy, oppressive solitude it had never quite noticed for the same reason that aquatic creatures don’t notice the water and that land-dwellers aren’t usually too conscious of the air, unless some interruption in the conditions of life should leave them suddenly aware of desperate need, as one must picture coming to an oasis after a long march through a desert.

If the option had existed, the Chosen Vessel certainly wouldn’t have objected to making an attempt at staying and... whatever people did with their kinsfolk… live together, or else, reunite in regular intervals? Assist each other in times of need? Nurture each other’s growth? Indulge in shared activities? Take an interest in one another’s pursuits and share in what joys or misfortunes the others experienced?

Ironically, the capacity to experience joy or misfortune would actually be an asset in this, fatal though it may have been for its intended task, not that it was too confident that it would be suited for something so different than what it was created for either. But if its estranged relation genuinely wanted whatever it might be able to grant in this regard… It stood to reason that one of its own kind would not be expecting anything too impossible or unreasonable, for all that many an onlooker may have found it bizarre to see their likes engaged in such activities, like set of puppets play-acting at being a family. But if their acts should remain a hollow imitation, neither of them would be able to tell, or to find anything lacking with it, so it was conceivable that they might attain some imitation happiness that was all their own, wholly enough for the needs and concerns of the ones involved…

(Do not.)

As if it would even know what to do with itself, if its fate were not sealed. Its existence had been nothing but duty for so long that it struggled to picture anything outside it – The most it could think of would be to assist its sister in standing guard over the kingdom, or to serve the next ruler as it once served the Pale King. Of course, if that were to come to pass – if it could continue to be of use in a way that did not require it to be incessantly, excruciatingly immolated in this vault, it might have the opportunity to discover other things that might wish to do – much like the Watcher had still had room for his paintings despite his loyal service to the realm without either precluding the other.

 

(For the sake of all that is holy, do. NOT.)

 

There wasn’t going to be any time for that.

Wholly irrelevant, entirely pointless speculation.

There was no time left to waste on that, when so much more pressing matters were at hand.

Even now that conveying something had become a possibility, the sheer overwhelming weight of everything that might be said might well clog the limited time afforded like a bottleneck.

One would have to prioritize.

 

“This being was once a knight of the Pale Court,” it tried out again, feeling this out a little. Letting it hang in the air. Letting the claim be staked, before continuing in what it thought would be its final declaration to the first and only creature that would ever hear:

“This may have been its downfall, along with that of everything else, but even so, that was the one thing it was, the one thing it was permitted to be, and it would remain as such. It would be destroyed before it can be robbed of what scraps of being it ever had. As such, it shall endeavor to serve the Kingdom to the very last, by whatever means may be left to it, no matter what happens to it in the process…”

 

The wanderer might have lowered its glance just a little, here.

Looking perhaps just the slightest bit downcast.

 

The other chose this moment to raise up its nail again, thrusting it into the ground to raise itself up, half-leaning on the weapon, possibly aiming to indicate its readiness to face what it knew must come next, and to steel itself for that, in turn.

 

“This Vessel implores. It begs. Finish the task. Do what it cannot. Let the purpose be fulfilled. Let the deed be done at last.

Grant this one release, and you shall have its gratitude eternal, but if that does not satisfy you, you may think of this as penance for being left behind.”

 

If it still bore any grudge for that old slight, it was evidently dwarfed by witnessing a fellow-creature in such abject desperation still maintaining its grim, bitter resolve.

Its own destruction and consignment to oblivion seemed an incidental thing in its estimation, secondary to what it might accomplish – though oblivion and cessation would be rather welcome side effects thereof, compared to what was considered the only alternative.

 

The fallen hero saw no use in mincing words, persisting in its solemn decree:

“There can be no promises, no illusions now. Any strength this Vessel once possessed is utterly spent. It can barely resist now. If it were unbound, there could be no guarantees.

Nonetheless, if this one were to regain itself, even for an instant, it shall do its utmost to render itself useless to Her.

It hereby vows to you, that it shall destroy itself most efficiently, to the best of its ability, if it should get the opportunity.

And if, by any possibility, it should find itself able to stand against Her, this Vessel shall grasp Her, and rend Her, and hold Her to the very last for as long as it can – it would spit its last breath upon Her, if that would be of use, if it were capable of dragging Her down to perdition along with it, this would be its salvation.”

 

Before the Hollow Knight, the small one stood still, as if in awe.

No, it realized, albeit in disbelief -

Not merely ‘as if’.

 

“...You really would, wouldn’t you?” the small one signified this with such certainty that its Sibling found itself wondering if that one had not received some faint trace of their father’s ability to peer through time, sift through and select from possible paths. It seemed unlikely, really – it was probably just that its resemblance to their sire was just so much more evident when it acted in such a resolute manner. The two of them might contrast greatly in many other ways, but in the scattered moments where the resemblance was most evident, the likeness was almost too painful to bear –

 

Right away, the illusion was mercifully dispelled. The being was in many ways much… wilder than the King, but also gentler.

“You really, really would… and you could.”

This would not at all have been ‘intoned’ like praise, but rather like a lament.

It wasn’t so much impressed as moved.

It came just one step closer to where its long-lost sibling still knelt, but as of now, did nothing further.

 

“Not Fair.” it decided at last. “None of it! Not what was asked of you. Not what happened to us. Nor you… Can’t be mad like this. Would be jealous, but can’t. Not like this. Not when you are like this. Of all the ways that you could have turned out to be, you just had to be like this…”

 

At this point it would seem inevitable to conclude that the small one had, indeed, spent quite some time thinking about the prospect of possibly meeting the other one day, or at least wanting to know about it, piecing together the few, scattered traces it had left behind in the world.

 

“I can tell that you really like Him, for some reason, so don’t take this the wrong way, but… the stupid King better have had the decency to feel real proper guilty.”, it asserted, somewhat curtly.

 

It seemed unlikely to be shaken from this conviction, so objections were not proffered.

If the Chosen Vessel considered what the discarded one’s upbringing must have been like – how it must have been fending for itself in the wilderness with no one to guide it while the other had at least never had to worry about protection or shelter until its mentors had deemed it ready… it was reluctant to decry any resentment that the wanderer might carry, even if it were directed toward its own beloved father – to the small one, He was simply ‘The King’.

It would have no reason to think favorably of him, nor did the Vessel trust itself to convey His redeeming features on the fly.

It might have struggled to explain even to itself – there were many complicated experiences involved not all of which could easily be slotted with concepts or words.

Whatever the wanderer may have thought of the King in particular, it clearly had an understanding of responsibility, as well as the willingness to take it on – that would have to be enough.

 

There was still something rather surreal about how the small one seemed to have no compunction at all to make its opinions felt – but of course it didn’t. Why would it? What reason would it have not to? It had been left to itself, so, who would have imposed expectations about what it was or wasn’t capable of?

Here stood, perhaps, a being of darkness that most reflected how the darkness really was, not what those involved in their creation would expect a being to darkness to be like.

Perhaps that was why the White Lady had thought it ‘unblemished’, despite the apparent willfulness that revealed itself swiftly enough if it was observed. She might have found it more alien, less obviously father’s creature, despite the striking resemblance –

Ironically, it can’t help but think that the late monarch would have found this rather fascinating.

It still couldn’t quite believe that it would never again hear His thoughts on anything, that it would never hear the continuation of His words, forever left behind in the realm of past and memory.

 

Though already, it could expect that if this brave little vessel and the King had ever met, some clash of wills would almost certainly have ensued.

It was a strange, novel and somewhat disorienting experience, to see another outraged on its behalf:

“That stupid king doesn’t deserve you, Sibling. Do you know that? You didn’t deserve any of this, either.”

It was unlikely that this persistent creature would let itself be convinced otherwise, even by one more experienced in the art of arguing.

“You have every reason in the world to be mad! But instead, you have to go and be all noble, and knightly and pure-hearted… you have got to be one of the single strongest beings in all these scattered lands.”

 

“...preposterous notion.” the Hollow Knight commented at last, mostly intending it as a detached observation, but not untouched by bitterness. “Nothing of strength or purity remains to this Vessel, if such was ever possessed by it to begin with.”

 

The traveler would not hear of it:

“You are strong, Sibling. Not Weak. Just tired. It’s been a long, long time. You have given so, so much. More than anyone could ask. More than anybody should. And even so, even breaking, you stand ready to give up even more...

 

But you won’t have to.” the small one insisted, rather persistently. “It’s enough. Will take it from here. All the lingering regrets and long-lost dreams buried in this kingdom… they can have peace. Can make it so. Will do it.”

 

There seemed to be no bounds to the strength and resolve held within that diminutive form.

It would have been humbling to witness, even for creatures that had not been forced into such intimate knowledge of their own weakness.

 

“...you speak of admiration, yet it is you that is truly impressive. Such boldness. Such resourcefulness. Things such as initiative or creativity were thought beyond such cursed beings as ourselves, yet it is as if you have simply never heard of such limitations. Perhaps the limitation may have been specific to this particular Vessel alone. It never could…”

 

“You can still try, Sibling! If you want to try learning something about creativity, we can pay a to Master Sheo. Keeps talking about reasons to try painting, anyway. But was too busy. Had things to do first. Had to get to you, for example. But – may have time now.

May have time for many things. It’s only right.

Master Sheo always says that it’s never too late to find a new purpose, or come up with one, after the old one has been lost or fulfilled, or no longer fits. Important thing, that is. Have to show this to you, too. Got to show you many things. Maybe you have some things to show, too.

 

There is so much for you to see, once you get out of there. So much you missed out on…

 

Actually? You know what?” and here, the not-exactly-words took on the slightest tone of mischief, “We can see about getting you a new cape, too, a really wooshy one so that it swishes behind you. You like to be fancy after all. Can tell that much. You got to live in a very shiny palace after all…. Went there once. Still seeing specks from all the brightness.”

It must have wanted to try and get an unguarded reaction at least once, the kind that would go along with a sense of familiarity.

 

Despite itself, the Chosen Vessel could not fully conceal its indignation; indeed it went so far as to be moved to protest the notion of its… extravagance?

“It does not!”

 

“Why not?” the traveller clapped back with some audacity, mirroring its usual irrevence toward the King “Not supposed to? Doesn’t matter now.”

 

“...you do possess some insolence, do you not?”

The Hollow Knight had no right to tell the other vessel what to do, but given the choice (new as this was), it would rather not be roped into any such ...shenanigans.

It made the pointed choice to continue along a different thread of conversation, preferring to sidestep the ‘fanciness’ topic. “Exceedingly unlikely as the chance for such a meeting may be, that Master Sheo you refer to sounds like a wise and honorable bug. The notion of going to meet him seems like it would be… right, if such a thing were possible. This Vessel might not have been opposed to taking that offer, if it could have.”

While there was not that much of an outward response, it was hard to avoid the impression that the smaller creature was pleased with itself and willing to count this as a victory, content to let its counterpart move on.

“….have met one of your teachers too, by the way. The White Defender. He’s impressive, too. Skilled. Gallant. Got along great!”

 

“-He lives?”

The Chosen Vessel had not been aware.

The realization was like a glimmer, standing out sharply and impossibly in an endless night.

Some confirmation that its efforts, though imperfect, had not wholly been in vain – that at least some had been spared or preserved.

 

It recalled of old that Ogrim the Loyal had always made a point of speaking to it like he might to any other comrade, or even treated it just as one might the child of an esteemed friend, as if it were but a natural extension of the admiration he held for the King.

It was not supposed to have any kind of opinion about this, of course, but all harm that could have come from allowing one had already been done. At this point, it might as well confess to having deeply appreciated its mentor.

It could picture easily how he must have extended that same graciousness to the passing traveler – there is no way that he would not have discerned its identity at once.

Evidently, the small one’s thoughts must have been in a similar place:

 

“...can tell that you learned from him. All about honor and dedication, and shouting a lot before fights – don’t quite see the point of you doing that when you can’t really make a sound, though.”

 

“The purpose of a battlecry is not to produce noise, but to attain focus. Have you not noticed that our sister swears by it as well? For that same reason. Maintaining focus is a crucial skill. For battle, for spellcasting… Both Father and the Teacher theorized that this would be similar enough to the skills required for-”

It practically launched into a sermon there – at least for one instant, could see the distinct echo of the dedicated young knight who had existed there once, despite everything, and the many depredations that had followed.

In the swift back and forth, one may have seen some evidence that the two eldritch beings had gotten just a little more accustomed to the process of conveying meaning to one another, for all that their phrasings may still have retained some clumsiness.

Yet that strange sense of levity shared between them, arising in such an unlikely non-place, couldn’t possibly have lasted before the harsh reality surrounding them would have forcefully asserted itself.

 

“-the skills required for containment...” it finished, whatever momentum it had going on suddenly strangled by the weight of implication and awareness of what had befallen.

A quality had slipped into its not-exactly-a-voice which, in any other creature, might have been accompanied with a bitter, sardonic smile.

“...it might be wondered if you would have succeeded in place of this Vessel… If it was you who should have been chosen. Only that this one would not wish its own lot upon you for anything, if this could have been avoided. This Vessel laid claim to the prize. It is only right that it should have been the only one to bear what comes with it.”

 

“No one will have to.” The small one insisted again, rather adamant about that part. “Not anymore. Enough. Sick of it. Going to make it stop forever and always...”

 

“By what means could you possibly intend-”

 

It was then that their time quite forcibly ran out, the makeshift stage of the dream being revealed for the prop that it was when it was forcibly torn open by a stronger existence, one to which the fabric of dreams was as malleable as Her own thought.

There was a bright, piercing ray of scorching intensity breaking in from above, heralding what lay on the other side with a majestic roar.

 

The Chosen Vessel would know this voice anywhere.

Though it was still on its knees, its head snapped up at once in sharp realization.

 

“...She has noticed.”, it observed, grave and solemn.

All things considered, it was inconceivable that She would not take note of such upheaval within the very mind she was imprisoned in….

 

The smaller vessel looked up as well – just a little, mildly tilting its rounded face, taking a few steps to the center of the room, just below the swirling sword of light that had cracked open thing mind-scape. “Yeah. Though She might. Was counting on it.”

It did not appear especially perturbed, or perhaps it had simply been swift in gathering its composure about it.

 

It knew that its climb must continue even further, up to greater heights, where its ultimate destination lay.

 

There was no other way.

It must be done.

Both of them understood this most intimately…

 

It seems the traveler did intend to answer the question regarding its means before departing, however:

“Have something prepared for Her.

You can lend a hand, along with the others, if it you feel like it. If it satisfies you. But you don’t have to. Don’t have to do anything, anymore. You did enough.

 

Will fight Her. She has to be dealt with, once and for all. Put a stop to this forever, like Sister said.

 

Can’t stand Her, anyway. For own reasons. She took everyone’s hopes, and dreams, even the smallest things they wanted, and she twisted it around. Made it a torment. Dangled impossible things before them until it was burned into their eyes.

Someone once said that ‘those who hope are already doomed’.

Don’t think that’s right. Don’t think that it’s wrong – Wanting things… Hoping for things…

Sometimes it can’t be gotten. Sometimes there isn’t a way, but they weren’t wrong for simply hoping.

Even that stupid King – it’s no excuse for what he did, but He wasn’t wrong for wanting to save his kingdom.

 

It wasn’t wrong of you, either, Sibling. To want. To hope. Hope you know that. Or that you will, one day. You should.”

 

These were its intended parting words.

It turned its gaze back upward then, clearly meaning to answer the Radiance’s roaring challenge.

It was remarkably casual in this, simply pulling out its little weapon from under its cloak with a distinct ‘shing!’

 

Belatedly, it occurred to the Chosen Vessel that if it wished for something else to happen, it would have to make that happen deliberately.

 

“Just a moment!” it called out.

“There is one more thing that must be said. A matter of honor, long left unsettled. This Vessel has seen that you do care much for pronouncements of its unworthiness, so, it will not bother to regal you with it. Even so, this Vessel does… wish something known. It would like to express its deepest regret for what happened on that ledge. For leaving you behind – if it could have thought of a means to prevent that, it would have. At least, it believes that it should have.”

 

“It’s okay.”

 

“….in earnest?”

The response was no longer one of disbelief, indeed the answer was perfectly in line with everything that the Hollow Knight had come to see of its would-be rescuer.

The other vessel had done nothing to merit doubt in its sincerity.

The best description or explanation for what was being experienced might be the concept of deep, abiding gratitude for an unlikely gift that one had never thought one would receive…

 

A gift one could not believe, something too good to be true that nonetheless continued to to scatter away like a dream, proving itself ever more true and realized with every instant in which further proofs and consequences of it accumulated.

 

“Yeah. It’s okay. Couldn’t hold on, couldn’t get there first… it’s okay now. You not knowing what to do… also okay. That was long ago. Things were different then. Things are different now. We’re not so little anymore. We can do things that we couldn’t do then… Well. Still small, unlike you. But stronger. Maybe stronger than the stupid King soon. No point being hung up on back then. We’ve had some good fights, we got it all out – it’s okay now.”

 

Wherever did it procure this power?

It proceeded forward with utterly unshakable conviction in itself.

Like one that knows oneself entirely, with nothing obscured or held back.

What a fascinating being – father would not have been the only one to think so.

 

In observing it, its long-lost relation could only recognize many strengths it did not have, but found worth admiring. The confidence that came not from and did not require perfect mastery or crumple at once in its absence, but rather the kind that came from persistence. From getting back up just one more time than one had been knocked down. The will to keep trying and trying and watching and listening, until a path revealed itself…

A truly remarkable entity that could only have been produced by its very particular, winding history.

 

To satisfy honor would demand one final concession.

“...before you go… one last thing... You were present when this Vessel was bestowed with its titles by Father, but, since you fell, you must have gone without. Is that still the case? Or do you… call yourself anything?”

 

“...a wandering knight without a master. Maybe the King didn’t need another one, but… someone, somewhere might… or that was the idea behind that.

That was chosen a long, long time ago. Never told anyone, though. Couldn’t.

But, if it has to be a ‘title bestowed by kin’, there might be something like that as well, actually. Picked by Sister. Ghost.”

 

“...alright then, Wandering Knight. Or Ghost. It has been an honor to make your acquaintance at long last.”

The Chosen Vessel did of course realize that the other would not necessarily recognize its low bow as a traditional gesture which the knights of the pale court would perform after an honorable duel, but it expected that its intention would be recognized either way – to grant due honor, acknowledgment, recognition – to signify that it returned the others’ wish for them to know each other.

“Go forth now. Prevail and return victorious – if there is anyone at all who could do this, it would be you.”

 

Despite its unflappable demeanor, it would seem that even this determinedly brazen would-be god-slayer could not help feeling abashed for a moment – to receive such faith, when it was once discounted… but this lasted only for an instant.

 

It gave one last tiny nod in acknowledgment, and then it went forth indeed, and went on to succeed in the act for which It would afterwards be known as ‘Godslayer’, ‘Devourer’ and ‘Lord of Shades’.

Notes:

I will forever respect anyone who manages to pull off a strong, impactful ff without cracking & giving the Vessels dialogue; Maybe I will attempt that *next* time.
The source material always takes care to keep them fairly mysterious, never quite dumping us inside their skulls, & as a cardinal rule, you never want to run the risk of replacing something interesting with something boring.
I figured the way to go, or at least to mitigate this was to go for stylized/ idiosyncratic dialogue/narration style, which the OG already uses in a lot of places. (In this piece I'm generally trying to get a bit closer to the OG style/flavor compared to the last attempt)
To be fair it is perhaps an acceptable compromise for the sake of adaptation – the source material takes full advantage of the strengths of video games as a medium, but prose is made up of words damnit.
On the other hand I do find that I have distinct headcanons for & feelings about how they would talk, the chief point being both odd in similar-ish but still clearly contrasting ways.

For THK one at least has the cut dialogues to go on (the devs themselves were conflicted on whether or not to ‘crack’. Some zinger lines in there so I’m glad they let people ‘find it’ but in such a way that they could also chose to ignore it); With the Protagonist, one might lean on the interpretation that the first paragraphs (ie. what’s usually just a matter of factly description of the enemy, while the second is clearly the Hunter’s commentary) are from their PoV. (if read that may, one may detect subtle degrees of snark and/or admiration)
They definitely must have been the one who chose to title the entry for the shades in abyss as ‘sibling’ for example – in his segment, the Hunter largely expresses surprise that there’s anything to fight down there, implying that he didn’t know until the protagonist reported back with their own notes. (Although really, the little animations have enough personality as it is, on their own. – the ‘challenge’ one really exemplifies them. The most common description we get from the NPCSs is as being brave, bold, unflappable & rather tenacious, resourceful, too; The Snail Shaman likes how they rizzed up his spell. You could make a case for ‘curious’, ‘observant’ and ‘attentive’ as well. - some range to how nice or mean depending on what option the player chooses. You can axe the menderbug & those random maggots to complete the journal, you can vandalize the shrine of believers… or you can hand out flowers and make a point to sit with & listen to everyone. They might sort of have the potential for both.)

I'd also picture them as having a certain wisdom/enlightenment post-voidheart, appropiate for a shift that's characterized as being grounded in 'accepting oneself' and 'making peace with one's regrets'; I'd probably render them as a bit more uncertain before that.

Chapter 3: (The one who lived through the deluge)

 

“You don’t have to be afraid of a world in which you and I can meet”

 

-Final Episode of ‘Revolutionary Girl Utena’

 

...

 

From the moment that the oppressive stranglehold of the infection had vanished from the harrowed kingdom, the Princess-Protector of the realm was left with very little doubt as to who must be responsible… but the creature in question, though elusive to begin with, appeared to have vanished without leaving a single trace.

It simply never appeared where she had been waiting to meet it – instead, she was startled to find that the impossible thing that may have been attempted had somehow come to pass without her intervention, and without the ugly, unpleasant business that was perforce expected to precede it… what once seemed like the inevitable conclusion to a long, drawn-out tragedy long stuck in its protracted falling action.

 

As soon as she was able, she had made the journey to consult with the former queen, figuring that this would be her best bet to get a better understanding of the sudden influx of impossible events, but while the White Lady had been able to confirm what, at first, seemed too good to be true – that she could not sense any trace of the Old Light’s influence anywhere within the reach of her roots – all she could discern about the whereabouts of the one they had to thank for this was that she had lost track of it somewhere in the sewers.

This matched more or less what the princess had already been able to glean from asking around among the kingdom’s remaining denizens, many of which had observed regular comings and goings in and from that approximate direction… though, predictably, most of them reported that the ‘young traveler’ had scarcely said a word about what exactly it had been up to. With no small amount of surprise (though not as much as there once might have been), she noted that it seemed to have become well-known to long-time residents and recent arrivals alike, many of which expressed warm regards, marked respect and concern for its well-being… even those who spoke in less than fond tones painted a surprisingly lively picture, such as the big-mouthed, wind-bag wannabe warrior in Dirtmouth who proclaimed to have some manner of rivalry going on with ‘that insolent cur’.

She was reluctant to answer, when some of the townsfolk inquired how exactly she knew the tiny warrior – she did find herself at the receiving end of a surprising amount of goodwill once she obliquely implied that she was something like a relative.

Nobody seemed to find anything strange about the notion that the diminutive shadow creature would have such a thing as relatives – if surprise was expressed at all, it would be because some of them had seen her around before, if only from a distance, enough to deduce that she was a local. The Little Ghost had been known as a traveler from distant lands who just showed up one day, not long after the ominous presence below distinctly intensified; The people, many of which spoke of the small vessel as something of a pleasant acquaintance or even a friend, simply didn’t expect to learn that it had been a native of Hallownest all along. No one had known; (Chances are that the little vessel itself hadn’t known when it first arrived here, having left that behind in the wastes), although several remarked that it made sense for their like to hail from a ‘place of wonders’ and expressed interest in learning a little more about the mysterious visitor who had livened up their dreary dwellings and, in many cases, poured a sizable amount of Geo into their businesses.

From all these scattered testimonies, it would have been easy to believe that they concerned an adventurer like any other, albeit one of exceptional prowess and resolve – someone much like herself, touched on some level with a strain of the legendary and the divine, perhaps, but otherwise quite tangible, able to bleed, to struggle, to be cared for. Before, she might have chalked this up to misunderstandings, to those uninvolved seeing what they were expecting to see, having no means to fathom the harsher, deeper truths, or to handle said truth if it were told to them –

But at this point… especially after all of her own experiences with the small warrior… there comes a point where maintaining such skepticism begins to feel wooden and arbitrary, less like doubt and more like holding to some preconceived notion beyond what is merited. She had been taught better than this, by all the disparate factions involved in her upbringing, training and education.

For all that she was always left hanging between worlds, this once, she gradually feels all the conflicting splinters within herself gradually aligning.

When one is repeatedly confronted with something that does not conform to one’s ideas about the world or bear out one’s predictions, it is the ideas that must adjust, however humbling or unsavory the implications of one’s previous ignorance. It had been told to her in many different ways by people who didn’t exactly agree with each other, but the distillation of it all that she extracted at the other end was simply this: One must not look away from the truth.

That doesn’t make it easier to explain, or to hear; But unexplained non-answers would be all the more suspicious, leaving dark gaps in otherwise clear maps that just call to be completed.

So she opted for a paraphrase, some simplification, something close enough to the truth – a child of her father’s, she might say (without going into specifics as to who that father might be), one who had left long ago (leaving both the circumstances and the sheer length of time to the imagination), probably before she was even born, or very soon after – so no, she hadn’t known it, or even known of it before its return. Still, she got some disconcertingly sympathetic responses to this, wishes that she would soon find her sibling so that they might continue reconnecting. Aside from that Zote fellow, who made a pompous show of not caring, almost everybody else in the village asked to be given news of the small traveler’s whereabouts, if she should have come by them by the next time she stopped by; She was welcomed to do so more often. Most had only glimpsed her from a distance, if they had encountered her at all, but it would seem that the townsfolk had built up quite a store of goodwill toward the small creature that they were quite willing to extend to someone purporting to be its half-sister.

Granted, the subtle pale glow coming off of both their faces was quite distinctive, so the objection that she could just as easily have been telling lies didn’t hold as much water as it otherwise might have.

She just hoped that Ghost would forgive her if the citizens of Dirtmouth ended up assuming that it must be some nobleman’s long-lost bastard by some common maid or something of that manner… though some might account the actual truth vastly more shameful.

She would have to clarify the matter once she got a hold of it and got the chance to ask it if it had any preferences as to what it might want disclosed or concealed, just in case it might have… well.

Feelings, opinions or preferences on the matter. Or something sufficiently like that for the result to be the same.

It might not. I might just shrug, or not even do that much.

Often she had wondered just what compelled such a being to keep moving, to continue to struggle – particularly when the possibility existed that passage through the wastes might have wiped this one’s slate even cleaner than any of the others. What flickering sparks and spurious, sketch-like vestiges might remain scattered through vast barren arctic nothingness within, a mirror of the alien landscapes that had shaped it into what it was? Was it simply following only half-remembered, unreflected compulsions laid on it by a creator who was long, long gone while it fought its way through an empty ruin, killing everything in its path and tearing off the walls whatever might be useful?

If true, that really ought to have been a terrifically sad thing; Enough so that one might be compelled to grab a hold of whatever was left of this being and weep into its hollow chest.

But where would one get the tears? Who would have any of them left, in these caverns long-since steeped in an omnipresent stench of death?

And was she too different from it, at this point? After all these long years of watching as all she had been tasked with protecting slowly dwindled? Keeping a futile, solitary watch because it was all she knew how to be? There would be nobody left to weep for her.

So there had been little room left for tears in her emotional budget anymore, not even for herself. Cold, distant pity was the most she could afford.

Or at least, that’s how it once had been, when that creature first arrived, before the backdrop of the seals just barely holding anymore, the dreadful miasma wafting up to greet her with renewed force as she doggedly embarked on her increasingly fraught patrol rounds.

Leave it to the scholars to debate definitions of life; she was never too concerned with that. She rather had her mission, and her knowledge of what she needed to do, and she wouldn’t let some weak speck of existence stand in her way, whether it was a creature of shadow or some perfectly ordinary pilferer looking for plunder or the making of trouble. She was a warrior. She respected only strength – silly little hesitations tended to get you eaten where she was from.

Strength, however, happened to be the one thing that this little Ghost turned out to have in abundance. It had bested her fair and square; More than that, it had burdened itself with her cause, even after she had greeted it with the business end of her needle, no less, and now, it appeared to have somehow done the impossible and slain a goddess in order to avert the impending destruction of the only world she had ever known, just as she had asked it… no, even surpassing her expectations and that of her (their?) father’s last desperate contingency plan, completing what He couldn’t finish though it was the last thing He ever attempted.

Whatever else the small shadow might have been, it was a force to be reckoned with.

One could respect even a great wild beast in this way, or a force of nature – worship them even, or at least treat them with due reverence.

Eldritch being or not, person (in a conventional sense) or not, it was definitely a warrior. It certainly didn’t fight like a wild beast or a mindless automaton; She would not have been so easily overcome by either of those. It might be considered a hero even, who had delivered this kingdom from destruction.

It had given her hope, after long years of bitter struggle spent without it, as if on and endless march under the scorching, drying light of day without the cool, humid cover of night anywhere in sight.

It had stood at her side as an ally, after all this endless, bitter strife, and allowed for a conclusion that would have been impossible if she had remained on her own.

To respond to such a thing with honor, gratitude or respect was only natural.

So it still seemed appropriate to ask its input about possible cover stories, even if it would turn out to be indifferent after all.

 

Besides, it would be no small thing to become known as the offspring of the previous king, much less His trueborn child by His lawful wife; One would be seen as a pretender to the throne whether one desired this or not. It had irrevocably claimed that relationship along with the brand, and there were a few of those still around who would instantly recognize what it meant, but it might not be too late for some… damage control, or spin, if this would be desired.

Hornet herself had long kept her distance from the other survivors, seldom bringing up a title that would mean nothing at all to new arrivals, and rarely ever returning even to see her old home and what few familiar faces were still left there. She had chosen to protect what remained of the kingdom from a distance, watching of the shadows, picking and choosing carefully whether to reveal herself.

It helps that the odds for resisting the infection for prolonged amount of time seemed to favor stubborn types too set in their ways or pursuits to take much note of their surroundings or even the passage of time. That description might include her, too – though her survival might also have been owed in part to a certain constitutional advantage owing to carrying her father’s blood. She knew well that this, too, was far from being an absolute protection, so she might just have been among the last lights to go out by sheer dumb luck.

It had almost been a relief when she stopped being recognized… not from the loss of the people, their reduction to beast-like states or the collapse of civic order, of course. But at least she stopped being asked for news of her father, which she didn’t have and had stopped expecting a very long time. She wasn’t naive; Some last loyal devotees may still have hoped for his return to this day, but after such a long stretch of complete silence, it was plain to her that he wasn’t coming back.

The skies weren’t going to open up, and no miracle was going to rain down to bring relief.

Even when during their last few meetings, when she had seen him in the flesh, she couldn’t shake this dreadful, horrible certainty that she wasn’t going to keep a hold of him either.

She recalled some older weavers in her hometown discussing the experience of suddenly realizing that one’s aged parents were starting to get frailer – the startling realization those one once thought invincible and all powerful had suddenly grown suddenly small, withered and in need of one’s help.

It was something she didn’t think she’d ever experience; She knew her mother wasn’t going to get to grow old; She would remain asleep, preserved in eternal stasis and yet not alive, left to gather dust.

And her father had been this eternal, abstract, archetypal existence, little more than a vast fount of raw power that had merely taken the approximate shape of a bug, the bare, distilled idea of a philosopher-king, near-featureless and gleaming save for the sharp crown of His horns.

He was meant to be a timeless existence, as much a concept or a force as a person. If either of them would outlast the other, the one expected to endure should have been Him.

The first few times she remembers being sent to visit Him in His blinding palace, she’d spent much of it awfully lonely and terribly missing her home and everyone in it; With the hindsight of later years, she could appreciate that He’d summoned his very busy advisors-slash-confidants to instruct her personally, but at the time she’d found him rather elusive and difficult to get close to, outdone in aloof inaccessibility only by the Pure Vessel who had often shadowed His steps.

Once, she’d tried to ask Monomon the Teacher about Him, seeing as she had seemed deeper in His confidence and more involved in His projects than most other mortals; But when she did, what she received in return was a talk about the value of reason, civilization, diversity and individuality, as if to understand such abstract concepts was the same as to understand the King.

Even Lurien the Watcher, who by all accounts served the monarch out of great personal devotion and appeared to be the closest thing He had to a close personal friend, would sometimes wonder how much he could really understand what he viewed as a higher existence.

Both of them sometimes gave the brief, but unmistakable impression that they thought the King’s lot a heavy one which they did not envy in the least – as a child, she could not comprehend this. How could that be, when He was so powerful, and when the two of them had already consigned themselves to give away their very lives?

But that would have been long ago, when the princess was but a little girl; She was long since grown by the time He left, and those last time she saw Him, before His flight, she couldn’t help but be struck by how utterly defeated He’d looked. How small, and… not quite old, no, not in any visible way, but more like He somehow had an age at all, rather than wholly existing outside of time. Like He had experienced entropy, irreversible things after which He could never be the same.

He seemed to be alternating between various stages of grief, the greedy old miser who refused to let go of His hoard inwardly at war with the prudent, pragmatic ruler who understood that even a world without Him in it must be provided for.

He’d explained the possibility of retreating to her as if it was merely one out of many possible paths, a contingency to be prepared for just in case, and yet He explained to her what would be her mission, as if He were arching to urgently unload Himself of all secrets that He could not allow to die with him. He would go from speaking as if He took it for granted that He would return, having finally found another solution, to trying to give her pointers to what to do if this or that came to pass, then asserting that it never would if she asked Him about it, divulging scrambled fragments of distant possible futures that could mean little to her without the context in which they would one day come to make sense.

It was as if He barely even saw her, lost in thought, looking at something else entirely, a network kaleidoscope of many possible futures blinking in and out of existence, all of them tightening around Him like a noose.

The Kingdom was in chaos now, and the weight of every single sacrifice was now being felt; As lord over the City of Tears, Lurien the Watcher always had a way to build rapport both with the aristocracy and the less affluent citizens; Even the decorations of his office always reflected both sides of the city. Many of the aristocrats left in charge in his place cared only for themselves; The situation in the capital was steadily going to hell in a handbasket.

As the Kingdom’s foremost intellectual, Monomon the teacher may have become instrumental to tackling the resurgence of the plague, but of course, she was gone too, and the kingdom’s second most influential scholar, a pompous, self-important twat known by the braggart epithet of ‘Soul Master’, seemed intent on causing problems rather than solving them.

The two of them had been selected as Dreamers because they were at the very center of the intersection between the King’s most loyal followers, and his most competent ones, those with the greatest appreciation for his vision, the very same skills, virtues and qualities that got them appointed to their previous positions. Now, those skills and virtues were sorely missing from the world without them.

Between the chaos in the city and the incursion of the rebel Mantisses, the kingdom’s forces were stretched precariously thin. Nor could there be hope for much help from the neighboring tribes – in the panic spurned by spreading affliction, many became concerned with their own kind only, retreating behind their own borders and turning away all others. Even Deepnest was no exception here; Here, the lack of Herrah’s leadership was felt most keenly.

There was a dire need for someone like her – someone who wouldn’t be perceived as the King’s lapdog and would dare tell Him ‘no’, but would have the pragmatism to see the benefit in standing united rather than falling divided. It would be said, in later years, that her bargain and her absence that would follow had cost the Nest dearly. Though they had begun as enemies and rivals, even the King had come to miss her frank, unvarnished input and the wisdom that she could offer as an ally as pressing need had drawn them together in shared purpose.

...and someone else was missing, too, sorely missing, though the being in question had barely had any opportunity to leave behind a mark on the world before it was consigned to its destined fate.

Sometimes, the princess would catch her father standing off to the side of a space rather than taking it up fully, as if He were expecting, half-consciously, for someone else to be following beside Him (A rather tall someone, at that.), out of sheer automatic habit and some inability to remember to turn it off.

Unwillingness, perhaps, to make it so as if that existence had never been.

Maybe the cost had been too great after all.

One would have thought that the King’s famed capacity for inspiring devotion would have been lessened by these cracks of imperfection, both in His power and His demeanor, this hesitation in the last extremity – and that may have been true, for someone who wasn’t His daughter, whatever else she might also be.

Instead, she’d clasped His hand and promised that she would of course stand guard as he bid her, for however long it might take.

She hoped it would bring Him relief or assurance. He’d only looked at her. In realization.

As if He was holding something back.

She was at the Hive when the Ancient Basic was finally overrun to the point where He was forced to flee; She knew Him too well to think this a coincidence.

It’s not like she would have gone and died a pointless death on a doomed last stand, or followed Him into exile. She had other responsibilities, and she knew better than to waste the precious life that her mother had so dearly paid for on some foolhardy symbolic gesture.

It might be argued that He was honoring his bargain with her mother in making sure that their daughter would not be anywhere around Him in the hour of His fall, though it must not be thought that His reasons were altogether so unselfish. Perhaps He would feel the crushing burden of guilt which He’d heaped upon Himself just the slightest bit lessened, if he could tell himself that at least one of His offspring had gotten away from the crucible of destruction.

Yet still some part of her felt some deprivation in having the choice taken out of her hands.

 

And afterwards, He simply wasn’t there. He couldn’t tell her if it was all amounting to something, if it would be worth it in the end, if she’d be able to sleep when it was all over and done.

She might not even necessarily agree with what He might have to say, but there were times when she’d wanted to hear Him anyways.

She might not have liked the answers, even if He gave them.

He might not have had any Himself. If He did, none of all this would have been happening in the first place.

It was beyond Him.

And she wouldn’t even get the satisfying indulgence of railing against some arrogant fool who had it all wrong; He knew it was beyond Him, and it was beyond her, too.

Nobody had the answers. Not because there was some easy simple villain to blame, but because sometimes, there are no answers to be found.

But one still had to act, even without having all the answers.

She could recognize the wisdom in Queen Vespa’s recognition that there may not be a way out, that limits must sometimes be accepted, but the idea of just admitting defeat, walling oneself off and waiting for doom to come to one’s doorstep simply just wouldn’t sit well with Hornet, either.

If this made her share in her father’s folly, then so be it.

She might not succeed. Her efforts might amount to nothing in the end. But she couldn’t just stop. She couldn’t just up and leave, as many of the other Weavers had.

For all its faults and imperfections and all the ways in which she wasn’t quite accepted, Hallownest was her home, too…

Even if she was effectively alone its defense.

Sure, the Queen was left alive, as the only one of her numerous parental figures who could claim such a privilege. The relation between them was generally warm, as it always had been, unlikely though this might have seemed at first. Once, Herrah had advised her sternly to avoid offending the queen, to always show her the utmost courtesy and avoid giving her any cause for offense, preempting the petty jealousy not uncommon in aristocratic circles, but instead she had positively jumped at the chance to play the part of the doting, indulgent stepmother, presenting herself as much more approachable than the King himself – though there was always a strange after-taste about it which the princess could not quite parse back when she was a child.

Only later would she realize that the White Lady had essentially seized what she saw as perhaps her last and only chance to play-act at being a parent, coming to her as a beggar rather than a chooser.

In her younger days, the princess had certainly been grateful to have at least the semblance of a friendly presence, but there was always the touch of something hungry but thwarted about it. Not quite an affectation nor overstepping possessiveness, but maybe the sense that the queen might have indulged in such things if she didn’t know better. A guilty compulsion to show indulgence to all manner of children, because as she saw it, her own children were dead at best or at worst damned beyond all help. She never had expectations or demands of her, like her birth mother did, because she knew that it wasn’t her place; She was merely spoiling a guest.

Looking at the trajectory in hindsight, she must have been slipping into increasing apathy even then.

Later, after the resurgence of the blight and the ruin that resulted, it became clear that the former queen did not concern herself with the kingdom that much any longer.

She had all but given up; She might render aid and advise the princess if she came to seek her out, as far she was able, but it seems she had her mind set on quietly fading away, or at least becoming but a part of the landscape, perhaps returning to some faded semblance of what she was before a certain wyrm turned up and got her mixed up in His grand visions.

He might have spoken to her of bountiful, resplendent gardens, of lush fields and fungal farms in the fertile soil, great herds of livestock and vast populations flourishing behind tall city walls, all free to multiply to their hearts’ contents once they were sheltered from the harshness of the wild, multitudes coexisting in harmonious order rather than competing with each other for scraps, a world where most of the brood could live to realize its full potential rather than the majority being lost to attrition. Though she was His fellow higher being, she may have been as taken with His ideas, promises and designs as everyone else… one need not be a higher existence to attain that kind of exaltation in the eyes of a smitten lover, after all. So she must have bit the apple that he offered her at the beginning of time (or at least, of time as the denizens of Hallownest’s civilization would count it), but she could only have been so awed. She was his equal, a numen that had existed in her own right before He came along; She couldn’t plead ignorance as a defense when she took a hold of that fruit of knowledge quite willingly and hitched her own hopes and stakes to the wagon of His.

It didn’t work out so great for her.

She was bound to see the end eventually, because most things end eventually, and she was enough of an exception that she could expect to be around for it, unlike the generations of mortals that lived and died entirely in the bountiful days bountiful before it all blew up in His face.

Even if she still harbored great tenderness for Him, that fact couldn’t be denied.

The princess would of course have been an outsider to this matter, but it didn’t take any exceptional deductive reasoning to conclude that things must have been said, done and ventured that could never be taken back, or leave either of them unchanged.

The Kingdom was always His pet project. His former mate cared about it to an extent as an extension of caring about Him, but she did not take over its leadership or its protection after His disappearance.

That task had landed squarely on the shoulders of his only daughter, the incidental bastard child that had once been set to rule a different realm, and so the queen had no part in this.

The princess understood that she was alone in this, alone with nobody to turn to, and nobody else to see to the ugly work in her stead, and so she acted, planned and felt accordingly.

The one place connected with her past that she still visited with some regularity was that temple.

Nominally, to check on the integrity of the seals and curtail anyone fiddling with it.

Back when the place still received visitors, she’d make sure to show up when there were none.

It felt like a sin to speak in there, while others were present -

But when she was alone, she’d find herself idly talking into the air.

She knew there was a theoretical possibility that it might be listening in, that it had been given some means to find out what was going on outside, but despite this, she was not quite convinced that anyone was truly listening… She would have denied any such belief if asked.

Still, she would not have claimed with any confidence that any conversation she might ever have had with the occupant within had ever amounted to more than effectively talking to herself, even when they could meet face to face.

Strange then that the long years had, if anything, rather strengthened whatever sense of kinship she might have felt toward it –

That most unlucky, most ill-fated, most pitiable of creatures, the crumbling pillar of a crumbling world, might still be the only ally she really had left, embroiled in that same endless, thankless, fruitless struggle against the ever-rising, merciless tides washing it all away, for so, so long.

That one shouldn’t be different from all the other vessels just because she had actually known it, if made sense to speak of knowing there. Simply because it had been there sometimes, during her intermittent visits to the palace, back when she was perhaps more innocent than she would be later.

If the queen caught her trying to talk it into playing with her, she might react much as if she had caught her playing with matches or some other dangerous tool unsuited for children; The White Lady seemed to forget that the princess had been used to holding sharp tools of death even then, and tools of other uses, too. That wouldn’t have been too usual among many of the noble young ladies who were wont to come to the palace balls. The King had given her serious, somber talks about what the Vessel was and what not to expect from it, but He didn’t exactly stop her from trying to interact with it, either. In fact, He would often speak to it Himself, or bring it along when He didn’t strictly have to.

Hornet had more than a few memories of the then-adolescent Vessel being seated at the dinner table with the rest of the royal household, with no plate in front of it and nothing to add to the conversation, though the monarch may well have talked to or about it, for example commenting on its latest progress in its training, often in favorable terms… it would typically be present if He was, which wasn’t as often as might be thought – He was ever so absorbed in His work and not all that socially inclined besides, usually being content to leave any kind of social functions in the capable branches of his spouse.

Once, she thinks He may have asked her to forgive the Vessel for not being too receptive to her prompting – that this wasn’t its fault, He said, but rather owed to the desperate circumstance in which they had all found themselves. He would have been the first confirm that there wasn’t any real point in talking to it, if He were asked. He also probably spoke to it more than anyone. – faced with such mixed messages, the princess had decided that she might as well do as she pleased, which, in the unfamiliar, lonely halls away from her accustomed home, often did mean seeking it out.

The Vessel might not have responded much in truth, but neither would it turn up its nose at her or entertain fanciful misconceptions about her mother’s people.

She recalled, just faintly, the dim inklings of a time when she was too young to really understand what it was or had been done to it – she might have thought it some more regular knight-in-training, as she didn’t think that she would have been aware that it was technically her father’s child. Few ever referred to it as such, after all, and fewer would hint at the crown’s most shameful secrets in the presence of someone whom some of the staff still perceived as an ‘outsider’, even when they lacked the guts to call her that to her father’s face – once, she had naively asked the White Lady what she now knew must have been an incredibly painful question: ‘If you like children so much, how come you don’t have any of your own?’ The answer she had given at the time was simply that she didn’t have children anymore, which was certainly one way to put it.

Had she not been too innocent to consider such a possibility at the time, she might have come to suspect that the Hollow Knight-To-Be might have been the King’s bastard, just from the familiar way that the King acted with it and the queen’s pointed avoidance of it. She might have overheard some of the servants speculating about something like that, though implications would have gone over her head. The distinct pale shine coming off the Vessel’s mask and the jagged prongs of its horns were rather telling features, in the end, all the more so with Hornet herself being present as a point of comparison. The truth had of course ended up being much, much more complicated. Besides, such speculation would have soon disproved itself in time, simply because the Vessel’s features left little doubt as to who its mother might be, once they lost the last traces of youthful roundness. It probably had not grown so tall for the sole, explicit purpose of spiting the queen to her face, but she probably felt that way sometimes – it was the evidence of her old sins being shoved up in the path of her vision, which (in some ways, to her credit) galled her far more than anything she could imagine her husband doing with Herrah – which was probably some awkward, miserable affair of laying back and trying their hardest to think of the futures of their respective kingdoms rather than their chosen spouses.

There was probably nothing He could do to desecrate their marriage bed any more than he already had in the creation of the vessels, not if he took a hundred concubines and went cajoling with a thousand mistresses and courtesans. The queen simply did not care anymore where he put his claws, as long as it wasn’t anywhere near her roots and branches – Never would she flower again.

 

Much more salient to the lived reality of the young princess, however, was probably that the upbringing of the youth in Deepnest was much more communal, so that even the Queen’s daughter would to some extent have been watched over and taught alongside the rest of the brood. By contrast, the regimented schedule of the palace had been difficult to adapt to at first, especially when she was still rather small. So when she spotted what looked to be another kid (albeit a somewhat older one), she was quick to sprint to its side and make an attempt at embroiling it in some mischief, usually in vain.

She had been informed of its titles the first time she saw it and asked who it might be, but she remembered thinking that it was really more of a Hollow Page at that point, or a Squire, at most, if one was extremely generous; Unaware of the grim circumstances, the Princess had assumed that it must have proved itself exceptional to be personally chosen by the king for some all-important task. Even so, it was distinctly not knighted yet at that time – but leave it to a being with foresight to name something after what it will be. The princess began to understand then why her mother had not wanted the Pale King to have any part in the choosing of her own name. It was bad enough that queen of spiders ended up learning she was going to have a daughter before the egg was even hatched (that incident was, in fact, how Hornet had ended up with another one of her titles); On that occasion, the Beast had made it clear that He was to keep any prophetic revelations to Himself unless it were of life and death importance.

Some among her mother’s court had seen this as an unbidden, possessive territorial marking; Later, after knowing Him better, Hornet came to think that He probably didn’t mean anything by it. It was simply reflective of the perspective from which He experienced the world. Yet still, the princess saw the wisdom in Herrah’s decision: There would have been something constricting about the idea of a fixed, guaranteed future. Even if the result would have been all the same whether or not He made it known, the thought of never knowing that for sure seemed a galling one.

It might be that life could only be understood backwards, but she would have to live it forwards, something that she would prefer to do on her own terms, so that she could be sure that whatever future she arrived at would be truly her own, so that it would feel earned rather than inevitable or expected.

This was, of course, before she could fully appreciate just how constricted her sibling’s future prospects truly were.

She had thought then that the would-be-knight must simply be particularly dedicated, dutiful and taciturn, which had not seemed all that out of bounds for someone who was supposedly being trained by the Pale King himself and all His inner circle for some nebulous mission of grand importance.

She’d made some attempts to tease it for always being so serious, or tried to entice it to dabble in some of the games she used to play with the other young weavers by assuring it that she wouldn’t tell the King, so that it wouldn’t have to worry about Him being disappointed. She wasn’t deterred, despite all this, because she couldn’t shake the impression that it could appear a little lonely sometimes, standing around by itself in the hallways, like some sort of dark afterimage left behind from staring at the brightness of the palace for too long.

She later concluded that this might have been the sort of naive, child-like, misconception that got people eaten by nosks, and that it was a good thing she had grown out of that – naught but an illusion of likeness and commiseration born from her own loneliness at the time, and her own burden of expectations.

Years later, after everything had long since come to ruin, there had been moments when she had wondered if those early impressions, yet untouched by preconceived notions, may not have been all that inaccurate after all – though of course no one could really say why exactly the plan had failed.

Sometimes she looked back at the moments that had passed between them, faraway and distant, never increasing but ever so slightly fading with time, and couldn’t escape the somber conclusion that they really hadn’t shared anything at all.

Other times, she would pass by the fountain square, long after the city was long since taken over by the shambling undead and the endless deluge, and couldn’t escape the conclusion that the never-ending rainfalls made the statue look as if it were shedding tears… something that the creature in whose likeness it was carved might have been physically incapable of.

Each of these was but just another trail of thought and sentiment that she could not afford to dwell on when she needed all of her attention on trying to survive another day.

 

Everything was different now.

So different it was hard to believe.

The implications were still in the process of sinking in.

Looming on the horizon now was the prospect of actual reconstruction efforts… a prospect that had seemed a pipe dream for untold years; Now, it was an urgent reality needing to be addressed. She would do well to establish some kind of order before the news of the plague’s end could spread – the last they needed now was a horde of plunderers descending the moment the danger was past. At least, Hallownest’s remote location surrounded on several sides by impassable wastes ought to buy them some time in this regard. The possible step of rebuilding the bridge over King's Pass would have to be carefully considered.

 

Though of course little of this might be decided about how (or if) Ghost was going to feature in this possible future while the creature of chief concern remained missing in action; The one new information that the Queen could add to what Hornet already knew, beside a more exact location to its disappearance, was the implication that it may have become embroiled in some manner of ritual… no, not the one of the Grimm Troupe, another ritual. When the White Lady asked the princess whether she could recall any strange dreams as of late, she halted at once in sharp realization – She could indeed. At that prompt, a sea of brass-masked faces popped up in her memory as if it had always been there. And of course, little Ghost had been there, too.

She actually recalled waking up from these, wondering to herself why she would choose that night to linger on the jumbled of memory of their earlier fights.

This might well answer the questions of ‘how’ and ‘where’, though it did little to clarify what may have become of the valiant creature in the process. The queen claimed that she would have sensed if it had simply perished, so that wasn’t quite what happened, but its current whereabouts were beyond even the queen’s ability to determine – She claimed to have sensed a surge of ominous power and then, suddenly, nothing at all.

The princess still thanked her extensively (to have it confirmed that the Radiance was gone for good was a massive relief in and of itself) and pledged to visit her more often if she could make it, though she had failed to make good on such assurances before. She also promised to keep the queen updated on the welfare of her offspring, though she had not asked about this and ostensibly had her own means to keep herself informed on this.

 

Scouring the junk pit yielded no results.

There was no trace of the little vessel nor its ragtag collection of mostly pilfered equipment.

The closest thing she found to a hint, at first, were the remains of a strange, coffin-like box that was now broken into pieces.

The only witness she could get a hold of was this one fluke that somehow seemed to have evaded the fate of her infected kin and was huddled in a nearby room, half-covered with a piece of cloth, minding a bunch of her larval kinsfolk who for their part seemed to young and simple to have anything to say.

The Fluke Hermit had certainly witnessed something grand and noteworthy taking place, but whatever it was, she didn’t really understand it very well nor could she describe it much – Her top priority, understandably, had been to get the hell out of dodge.

The most that could be gathered from her scrambled testimony was that some ‘scary thing’ had taken up residence among ‘our treasures’ some time ago. Whatever had been so scary was no longer there, however. Disappeared after some singular frightening event.

There was, it seems, a ‘cold darkness’ and then a ‘bright light’.

Which didn’t really narrow it down much, but evidently this poor creature lacked the basic knowledge to even parse what she had been looking at.

The princess had some idea what the ‘cold darkness’ might be, but no means to confirm it. Most of the questions she could think to ask would likely be perfectly meaningless to the reclusive fluke before her.

Eventually, Hornet realized that her increasingly insistent prodding wasn’t accomplishing much more than to scare the daylights out of the poor creature.

The princess backed away with a sigh, making a point to put away her weapon to make it clear that she had never intended to use it.

Once she had received quite extensive training in rhetoric, diplomacy and public speaking, something that some may still have found apparent in her vocabulary and word choice, but admittedly, those skills were rather rusty – there had been very few crowds to speak to here lately.

The population was rather thinned, and many of the survivors had endured for as long as they did by staying secluded. In the end, the Fluke Hermit must be accounted as a triumphant example of this.

“Look, Miss – I am sorry if I have frightened you with my frank manner. If anything, I really ought to extend my gratitude to you, for taking the time to answer my questions. You have done me a great service, all things considered.”

“Gla gla?”

“There is no need to be frightened. In fact, there might be less danger now than there has ever been at any point during either of our lifetimes. At present, I cannot tell you what exactly it is you saw, but whatever it was, it spelled the end of the infection. The plague is no more; It has been rooted out at its source.”

“Gla gla? The… the glow that makes people angry? Is gone? Gla?”

“Yes.”

The reclusive creature seemed to get into quite an agitated state over this, as if it brought up a multitude of intensely charged reactions – she didn’t seem to have much of a concept of a larger world beyond the wet caverns of the waterways and what simple subsistence that she and her kind had eked out here. It was unclear if she could have told you that her home had ever been part of any sort of kingdom; Even the common terms by which the affliction was being referred to didn’t seem all that familiar to her – but even so, it was plain to see that even a simple life like hers had been deeply touched by the phenomenon, as if the devastation had insisted upon slipping into the most remote crevices, sparing nothing and no one.

“The glow! Wualala! The glow! Mother so angry. So angry. Scary. Not herself…

Too scary, gla gla. Took little sisters, and hid away here, gla. Safe here, gla. Quiet and wet.

Look after little sisters, gla. Make them grow, gla. Keep them away.

Away from the angry, angry glow…Gla! Gla!”

The entire ordeal had evidently left her deeply shaken – how could it not?

“Mother is gone now.”, she added, after a bit, having managed to calm down somewhat. “Mother is not here anymore, gla gla. Look after little sisters in her place… can the angry glow really be gone?”

 

...for crying out loud. It would appear that one could not turn over a single stone anywhere in this devastated Kingdom without finding some tragedy clinging to its underside. These flukes could only have come to nest here after the kingdom’s fall, once there was nobody left anymore to keep the sewers maintained. There is a good chance that they had never been the King’s followers. At best, some of their ancestors may have been bottom-feeding scavengers living off the once great civilizations’ refuse, but most of the ones alive today must have been spawned long after its fall.

Yet the Radiance had not spared them either, smiting the lowest of wriggling things with all the same prejudice as the most ardent of royal loyalists or the proudest aristocrats.

In Her endless wrath, She had seemed determined to blot out all creation like an indiscriminate, all-consuming flood of fire, rage and searing, blinding brightness – an inevitable, destructive force of nature more than anything else. For so long, it really had seemed like none could possibly overcome Her.

 

Though their backgrounds and stations could not have been any more different, the princess found herself struck with a sudden wave of sympathy for the very creature that she had found frustrating to deal with just a few moments ago.

“Rest assured, citizen. I have it confirmed from a reputable source. It’s a brave and noble thing you have done, really, to take responsibility for your sisters as you did. In truth, I greatly sympathize with your plight. I too have recently lost my mother, and if f I’ve been too forceful in my inquiries, that would be because I came here to look for a sibling of my own… Please know that no one else should be coming down here to bother you any time soon.”

 

After leaving the Fluke Hermit behind in her room, the Princess might have preferred to scour the junk pit even further for any semblance of a lead, but at this point she had been out for the better part of the day already… not that such a fairly uneventful journey would have been enough to bring her anywhere near the point of exhaustion, but as it were, the Fluke Hermit wasn’t the only one who had recently taken up responsibility for a relative of hers.

Granted, unlike the tiny larval flukes, Hornet’s own sibling was long since grown and far from helpless; She did not have the slightest doubt that it could have killed her all too easily, even in the sorry state she’d found it in.

Even so, she was loath to leave it on its own for too long – its continued existence was such an impossible, exceedingly unlikely miracle. Never in a thousand years would she have thought this possible; She had come to the Black Vault having steeled herself to aid in cutting it down; She’d had absolutely no plan for what she might do if she didn’t have to. Not even in her wildest dreams did she consider such a possibility. It seemed almost like a hiccup of the cosmos, an oversight that must correct itself if she so much as blinked and allowed her gaze to sharpen again.

She was yet to look upon it without feeling some measure of heady, unreal surprise at the realization that it was somehow still there, still… existing, if one dare not call it living.

All these untold years, she had spent hardening herself, learning to accept bitter realities, honing the skills needed to end lives rather than to preserve them, adapting herself to existing in a world in which there had precious little to save, whee all that is precious must constantly be given up to hang onto what few things might still be clung onto. She had been born in the last, waning years of a long golden age already past its zenith, and in her time, she had never known anything but decline. She understood, intellectually, that before her birth there must have been an era in which all the glory she saw crumbling around must have risen up from nothing, but she couldn’t quite imagine such a thing. There was never a time for mercy, nor the expectation that anyone might be spared simply because she might want them to be.

In the intuitive understanding of the world that her experiences had formed in her, it might not have been less surprising for her to find her sibling disappeared into thin air when she turned to look at it, compared to the reality of finding it still there.

 

Both of them had the habits of a warrior so deeply ingrained in them that their first reaction to encountering each other outside the tomb it was never meant to leave was to draw on each other, or to at least attempt it – but as soon as Hornet had perceived the distinct absence of that orange glow from its eye-holes, making actual use of her needle was the furthest thing from her mind.

“Oh my Gods, it’s really you.”

It stood bent and hunched, leaning onto its cracked old weapon, the once beautiful masterpiece of a blade repurposed as a glorified walking stick.

“Oh my Gods, you are free.”

Its tattered old cloak still hung about it, the links of its broken old chains still trailing behind it with a distinct clatter. It must have all but fallen from the ceiling once the spells of the seal had given way, one last indignity added as a final insult to all preceding injuries – How those cracks in its shell must have ached! One could not hope that it could have stuck the landing in this state.

“Oh my Gods…!”

Still, one implication stood out, one which the ever-observant princess would not have failed to perceive: The seals were meant to last for all eternity, and yet it seems there was some fail-safe built into the spell-work, a measure for the binds to release on their own if the captive light within were somehow to vanish. The old King of Hallownest would have had absolutely no reason to think that such a scenario could ever possibly come to pass. If He foreseen any scenario where the Old Light could possibly be vanquished, He would have given everything in his might to bring this about – what wouldn’t he have forked over without a moment’s hesitation? His soul? His firstborn child? A pound of His flesh?

He actually did give several of these just for the prospect of keeping Her contained.

There isn’t a lumafly’s chance in the abyss that He knew of any way to destroy Her.

So far as He knew, if it all went according to plan (which He must hope it would, for the kingdom’s sake), the Vessel was never going to be released.

Building in that fail-safe wasn’t something he did based on any reasonable expectation or logic.

He probably simply couldn’t stand not to.

It was another of those things like the statue, the world-sense spell and the Vessel’s presence at the royal dinner table.

Another thing that He would have expected to count for nothing.

It did not change what he had done to His birth-cursed offspring.

 

Once, it had exemplified grace, embodied strength, stood tall as sanctity made manifest –

Now, all of that had been worn away without a shred of mercy.

It was covered in filth, stained with gore, reeking of decay – the characteristic noxious sweetness particular to the essence of the Radiance was gone with its source, as was any glow or unnatural degrees of burning heat, but the devastation she had wrought could not just vanish in an instant. Left in the wake of the plague’s more mystical properties was something distinctly indescribable but still similar enough to perfectly ordinary rot, scorched flesh and burnt chitin to trigger an instinctive response of visceral revulsion, which an experienced huntress such as the princess obviously manage to stifle… just barely.

“Oh my Gods. You’re still alive,” - and this, she intended and intoned as an observation of something horrific, rather than anything like ab expression of relief.

Death, decay and vile fluids, she’d gotten rather desensitized to.

She’d been a huntress since she could think, and she’d spent centuries fighting and dispatching all manner of creatures warped and formed by the infection.

But this was the burnt-out ruin of someone she knew, inseparable from implications of what it must have endured, what its future might be, the blistering agony and discomfort that it must have been experiencing right that instant.

Despite all this, the ravaged godspawn was somehow still upright and dragging itself forward by its own power, although the strain and exertion required to keep standing was plain at glance.

The armor, long rusted, had lost most of its cohesion in the fall but had not come apart altogether, amounting now to little more than just another hindrance to the Vessel’s labored movement.

The overmastering response arising in Hornet’s heart and body was one of abject shock; The sort that makes everything feel slightly unreal, that leaves you dumbstruck and numb and knocked halfway out of your body.

 

But the warrior princess would not have lasted as long as she did if she had not learned to will herself past such things. The figurative blow lasted only for a moment.

Then, she felt all unnecessary racing thoughts recede, and snapped into problem-solving mode, tensing her body into a state of readiness.

“Vessel, do you recognize me?”

There wasn’t anything like an answer, but neither did the stricken creature make any attempt to proceed further from where it stood, its sole remaining hand clasped tightly over the hilt of its weapon, the desperate grip tightening with exertion and very likely agony.

She did think that she did have whatever attention it could muster right now.

“Would you happen to know what occurred just now?”

The princess-protector of Hallownest was of course well aware that it probably could not have told her, even if it did know. Although, if it didn’t know, it would probably be in a hurry to find out – it seemed quite conceivable that it would think of little but its allotted purpose, even battered and broken as it was. A deeply sad and pitiful sight, if one accounted it the action of a malfuctioning broken machine. Or, possibly, a stubbornly, foolishly noble act, if one considered it the product of deliberate choice.

The Vessel really ought to worry about itself at this point, seeing as it was barely holding together…

That could probably (mercifully) be considered the most pressing issue at hand.

The Radiance had clearly not broken free or anything like that; If that were the case, they would be having very different problems right now – there could be no doubt at all that two of them would have been the first to perish. The glowing vines and pulsating blobs outside had shriveled and faded; That should be a good thing, in and of itself, though it was hard to trust anything without knowing the greater scope and intention behind it.

Was this some sort of trick? Somebody’s action?

But who?

The obvious idea arose as soon as she phrased the question like that.

“Is this the Little Ghost’s doing?” Belatedly, she realized that the Hollow Knight might not have any idea whom she meant my that – but she didn’t notice its glance snapping down in surprise or anything like that. She still decided to explain herself anyway, just so she could be certain that she had this clarified: “Ah, ‘Ghost’ is what I’ve been calling that vessel – not you, another vessel.”

She would leave the sorting of that particular confusion potential for another day.

“I don’t know if you would be aware of it at all – small. Blue-ish wings. Horns sort of like yours, but thinner and more curved.” Hornet mimed the approximate shape with her claws, in cases that helped. “Uses shamanic magic, and seems to possess some skill in dreamwalking as well. Freakishly strong and tenacious.”

...the impression that she wasn’t detecting any great surprise became more distinct the more the princess elaborated on the description. Then again, would she be able to tell?

She decided to trust her instinct on this.

“So you do know who I speak of? Did you watch it with father’s spell, or did it somehow find a way to come into your dreams? Or...”

Neither of these answers garnered any explicit denial, but she couldn’t help but think that this wasn’t quite it, like the empty glance trailing her was a waiting one, prompting her to keep speculating until she hit upon the ‘right’ answer. There were really not that many other options.

“...could it be that you knew it of old, from the place of your birth?”

This must be the one.

She knew it in her gut, at once, even though it grated on the edges of her previous understanding when she tried to fit this in as one more puzzle piece.

“-but if you were both there together, then why didn’t father take you both with Him when he found you?”

Certainly, the Pale King had been nothing if not a consummate utilitarian, she was looking at the most indelible proof right this instant…. but having seen how He had acted with the Vessel, she did not think that He would just-

At times, she had even felt like there was something like a closeness between them that she couldn’t quite enter into.

The Vessel itself, not unexpectedly, had no answer for her.

With a more open-ended question like that, the two of them were probably hitting the limit of what might be conveyed by wordless implication – though, the more she dwelled on it, this particular silence struck her as being distinctly a shameful one. Like it was something the Vessel did not wish to talk about. (Not that it could have.)

Though whatever may have befallen back then, she could hardly imagine that it could truly have borne the brunt of the responsibility in any meaningful way, seeing as whatever was being referred to must have taken place when it was possibly still wet from the egg.

She would have to let this be a problem for another day. At least, she thought she had come closer now to confirming the most pressing suspicions, that about who to thank for this inexplicable miracle.

Besides, if Ghost wasn’t behind this, then who? Who else could have the means or the power…?

...she probably ought to stop throwing questions at the Vessel while it strained to stay upright and was probably leaking what passed for its fluids all over.

With some sting of disappointment, she found herself having to restrain a surge of irritation. She wasn’t prepared for this in the least. Never in hundreds of years would she have expected it.

“I know where to go. I ask that you trust me now, just for this moment, and that you work with me.”

She couldn’t say why it wouldn’t trust her.

She didn’t know why it should – she had felled others of its kind, and it had the best possible reasons not to ever trust anything else in the world again, having been lead to the slaughter upon the dark altar of this temple by the father who raised it.

Still, for its own sake – and for her own, selfish convenience – she must hope that it remembers the scattered moments they spent together at the White Palace, and that this would incline it to think it might be safe with her, wrongly or rightly…

Whether or not she would deserve the trust, it would deserve the respite.

The sound of a familiar voice, the sight of a familiar face… was that not something that most creatures would yearn for in the throes of pain of suffering?

Unless void beings were rather of the sort that would prefer a quiet, secluded place to curl up, that is – but she could not offer that right now, not until they got to somewhere safer. She could offer precious little, though it would be useless to dwell on that. It would be best to focus on action.

It would be best to identify and start with whatever small mercies she could grant right now.

 

“First, let’s get the last of those blasted chains off of you. Could you, uhm…”

Unsure how to phrase the request, she simply gestured with her hands for the Vessel to come closer so that she might reach the remains of the offending equipment.

It seemed to understand what she meant, but it took not a trivial amount of time to maneuver its much-abused body into a kneeling position, lowering itself slowly while holding onto its weapon, as if it was not sure if it could have stood back up if it were to let go of the nail, or to sit all the way down.

They were, at least, spared the ordeal of her having to fiddle much with the clasps on the armor or the cape; All of it was pretty much already falling apart from centuries of corrosion in miasma-laden air, and didn’t take all that much yanking to go and finish crumbling.

The dust and grime of ages came loose as the last plates and tatters fell away, but all one might have felt or thought about that immediately paled in comparison to the oozing, suppurating mess underneath.

The moment the princess exposed the Vessel’s wounds, she found herself hit by an almost physical wall of unnatural, cloying heat and awful miasma.

What remained of its wing membranes was tattered and blackened, in place taking on the texture of trampled mushy leaves in the late autumn, hanging down lopsided at its right where not just its arm but a good chunk of its shoulder were simply not present anymore.

There were cracks and holes and horrible slick rivulets of pus and abyssal fluid running over deformed, half-melted bits of carapace –

The princess considered herself rather hard-boiled.

Even so, it took all the effort she could muster to fight down the instinctive revulsion she felt;

However awful this might be to look at, that could only be a minuscule fraction of what it must be to actually bear these wounds upon one’s body.

Besides, she did not even want to risk giving it even so much as the mistaken impression that the disgust she felt could be directed at it rather than at what had been done to it.

Still she was left reeling in sheer disbelief….

How is the Vessel still alive?

How is it standing, or conscious, or doing anything at all other than writhing in agony underground, instead of kneeling before her with as much unflinching, stoic composure as its patent physical weakness still allowed for, as if readily awaiting her next instruction?

It must have endured so much pain already.

Come to think of it, even given its dismal state, this must actually be the least painful situation that had found itself in in the recent past. There can be no doubt that it must have been enduring excruciating suffering in this very instant, but even that state must compare favorably to having a living Goddess still thrashing, raging and burning within, banging against the very fabric of its tenuous existence from the inside in an unceasing, cornered-beast struggle to split open body and spirit as one…

 

The question to how it was still standing had a relatively simple answer, once considered:

It was a God. Full-blooded and ascended. Once prayed to.

Those don’t die so easily – though that had proven more a curse than a blessing in the Vessel’s case.

A mortal, or even a demigod like herself would have died long ago.

A mortal would have been effectively crucified just from hanging from the ceiling like that, or at least, too atrophied to moved ever again.

The creation of the vessels had not been the King’s first resort. It was not Plan A nor even plan B, C or D. Even when the idea of containing the radiance first arose, he had thought to use one of his constructs to do it, perhaps through similar means to how he disappeared the palace in the end.

When he involved Monomon the Teacher in the project, she proposed to use artificial creatures of her make, some of which litter the Fog Canyon to this day.

But none of those ventures was successful.

There was no way to contain something eternal in a finite receptacle;

Only something carrying the spark of divinity would do – and only then, this became undeniable, did the Pale King think to involve His Lady in the matter.

Her contribution was crucial, if they sought to create something that could survive first the void and then the Radiance. Yet in doing this, He asked her for something so diametrically opposed to her nature as a goddess of life that it should have been anathema to her;

Still, she had consented in the end – maybe she couldn’t stand the sight of His despair, of Him breaking under the responsibility that He had once loaded onto Himself so eagerly. Maybe she understood, even then, that if the kingdom were to fall, He would go with it, for He had put so much of Himself in its making, and would not make its like again.

And it had worked, in a sense. Most of their attempts did not end up viable, but in the end there were some among the possible combinations of both their essences that could endure the opposing element. They produced something that withstood contact with the void, that adapted to its presence and incorporated that into its being.

Indeed, the Chosen Vessel wasn’t even the only one; Many more of their creations persisted than the pair were ever aware of. A certain one of these had even proceeded to run into an endless desolate wasteland and return alive several centuries later, no worse for the wear but that its old nail had gotten a bit cracked.

In a way, the endeavor had gone too well; Too much survived, which means there was something left for the Radiance to kill.

It wouldn’t have taken much more; Just a few more weeks, at most.

Few things can kill a god, but another, more powerful god, determinedly going at it for centuries with all the rage, spite and ferocity of one with nothing left to lose?

That would do it.

She very nearly did, and if She had succeeded, there would have been nothing but scorched earth left in Her path.

The wounds she had left on her unfortunate vessel were not only the evidence and cumulation of a centuries-long struggle, but proof of just how close every single living thing left in these caverns had come to total annihilation. Whether she would have incinerated everything or ‘only’ contented herself with obliterating every last trace of consciousness was immaterial at this point.

And here was the singular pillar that had been the only thing keping that particular sky from coming crashing down onto the earth in a roaring hurricane of flame; Here were the shoulders that had borne the weight of the world while a good dozen generations of surface dwellers had lived out their lives unmolested – terribly, horrifically alive and conscious the whole time, utterly cut off from everyone, and still recognizable, by the shape of those distinctive horns, as that same youth whom the princess of Hallownest had first encountered as a little girl on her visits to her Father’s palace.

She could picture the young Vessel even now, absently staring at nothing, sitting across from her on an ornate silver table that has seemed far too long and narrow for the purposes of a small family having breakfast, royal or otherwise.

As a small child at the time, she was rather bored to tears when the King arrived and started going on and on about some minute intricacies of city planning, but she thought her sibling might have perked up ever so slightly when he did, in some slight, almost imperceptible movement.

Having come to know another of its kind now, one who, despite at first glance sharing that same, blank unreadable quality, had ultimately proven to have a markedly different personality, she is tempted more than ever to think that the impressions she had back then might have been right.

 

...the princess wished to weep.

But she did not, because that wouldn’t help anyone, and this wasn’t about her, anyways.

All she allowed herself was a sigh.

“I doubt I need to tell you this, but your wounds are grave. We’re going to need to deal with this,” she judged – in trying to approach the situation as a problem to solve or a mission to carry out, she might be able to do this. She might be able to keep together, if she could just think of all this as a task to stay focused on.

“There is a hot spring with soul-infused water not far from here. We might be able to deal with the worst of it once we get there… I doubt that I could carry someone of your size for any significant distance, however, so I’m afraid that you are going to have to make it that far on your own feet. My apologies. I really wish it were otherwise. Do you think you can make it?”

Yet again, no answer of any kind, unless one were to count its effort to slowly pull itself back to a hunched, precarious facsimile of a stand.

The warrior princess felt like she ought to have said something more, but what?

She was much more practiced in threatening people than she would have been in the discipline of bringing them comfort, and besides, what comfort could words possibly bring at this point that would not just amount to a mockery?

She much preferred deeds.

“Alright. Let us get out of here.”

 

The pair at last emerged onto a very different Crossroads than the one Hornet had first arrived from.

The once omnipresent orange glow of infection was nowhere to be found.

All that remained of the twisting globules of ooze and winding tendrils were shriveled, blackened residues reminiscent of coals. Instead of rank miasma, it was a smell of cinders that filled the air, like what remains after a fire had burned itself out, but still kept smoking and smoldering for just a little while. It would yet take a while before the presence of anything fresh and clean would settle back in here.

The caverns were quieter and darker than they had been for a long time, somehow even just a little more desolate, even if this were a good and necessary quiet, like that of the fresh earth newly heaped upon a grave.

No walking dead crossed their path, and what living beasts remained in these parts must have lost whatever unnatural hostility the Light’s madness might have instilled in them; Most likely, what little scurrying creatures remained had all retreated back to their burrows and hidey-holes to lick their wounds. The crawlids and gruzzers might be considered lucky in the sense that they were unlikely to grapple with any existential questions over just what had happened to them.

How much more changed must it all seem to the Vessel then?

The last time they would have laid their eyes on any of these places, the calamity was only just beginning. The Crossroads would not have been the bustling place that it had been before the plague had ever touched it – the commerce would have stalled and the people retreated to their villages. But at least there was still commerce then, and the settlement weren’t mostly ghost towns.

It may have come part of this same way in reverse, on that final procession, going to certain doom in wreaths and garlands, and now, returning in not so much as tattered rags, to an uncertain open field of a future that it never expected to be in, having outlasted its purpose.

Who could say what the Hollow Knight might be thinking or feeling at these sights? Its sister did notice it looking around here and there, as if taking in the landscape (even the subtlest motions of its head would be quite apparent due to those long horns trailing after it), but its face and body language, of course, betrayed nothing except possibly weariness.

It may just have been stunned more than anything else, not knowing what to do with itself except to follow along as it was bid. After so long in that dark vault, even the basic sensations of walking may have become strange and foreign. Even the sense of its own weight on the floor, or the scent of air, or the slight unevenness of the path beneath its feet.

It might be like emerging from an existence that had been nothing but a narrow tunnel with but a single direction to go forward in onto a wide open plain of featureless, pathless wilderness.

Was there dismay, in seeing just how little remained of the world they once set out to protect?

Wonderment at finding oneself flung into some strange distant age?

Was there not much at all, aside from a burnt-out sort of numbness, the only thing that might be left over when every source of meaning and significant lay long since sunken and sunken in the distant sands of time, as one let oneself be carried on by that sort of formal feeling for as long as it would go before the impact of the full reality would inevitably hit?

The only one who could possibly know had no means to tell.

 

The walk dragged on miserably, at least by Hornet’s sensibilities.

Even with all the previous dangers still intact, she had been used to traversing the area much more swiftly; She was accustomed to moving fast with little standstill in between, breezing even past significant drops or rises by using her needle and thread as a grappling hook.

None of this was exactly an option with a maimed, bleeding, half-dead creature in tow, committed though it might seem to dragging itself onward with stoic determination.

She wasn’t sure that her sibling would give her any sort of sign if she were proceeding to quickly for it to keep up with, so she chose to err on the side of caution.

She’d rather not have it suffer the indignity of having to scrape itself off the floor, and she didn’t even want to think about what she might do if it could not find the strength to rise again.

The leaden exhaustion of ages that must have been weighing down on it betrayed itself most tellingly in the way that it did not even attempt to climb or jump past any significant obstacles but instead resorted straight to a short-range teleport – though even so, so far as she was aware, advanced spells like that required not insignificant amounts of concentration, so to pull one off while so grievously hurt was not nothing.

Then again, she recalled now that teleport spells had been something like the Vessel’s specialty.

She had not thought about this particular fact for a long, long time now – after all, it concerned someone whom she never expected to see again.

After all this time, she wonders what other precious little tidbits about people from the past might be teetering on the edge of oblivion somewhere in her mind, still there, but unlikely to surface, because there was no external reminder to spark them – things about her father, or about Queen Vespa, or most of all her mother, from whom she parted first…

But however dulled her memories might be, she still had plenty of them remaining that would have featured scenes of the young Vessel honing its martial progress. That was one of the few things that it might be seen doing with some regularity, in the courtyard of the palace or designated training facilities frequented by the other knights and less prestigious palace guards. The King and Creator had also made a habit of testing the elaborate anti-intruder mechanisms He had built into the palace against His chosen champion – or maybe it was the Vessel being tested. Possibly both.

Its training had been rigorous and extensive. She used to watch sometimes, from a distance, and be filled with a heavy, complicated mixture of envy, pity and longing.

She knew for a fact that, once upon a time, it could have covered the area that they were making their way through in just a couple of wide leaps, barely even appearing to touch the ground – and woe to anyone who might foolishly think that they could hope to run from it.

Now, it was reduced to dragging itself forward in a slow, ungainly shuffle, visibly fatigued and possibly somewhat off-balance.

It was kept moving for now, by the combined powers of its divine nature and sheer force of will, but that too, must have a limit… one that was probably pushed past already and due to exact its price.

It would not be good if the pair of them were to get into any major fights now...

 

More than once, she bid the Vessel to stay behind for a moment while she swiftly snuck ahead into the next area just to ensure that they were alone and would be able to pass unmolested – the last thing either of them needed to deal with now was an unexpected fight...

It seemed that just this once, fortune had finally decided to smile upon the two of them for just this single day. She found no one; The pair of them was completely and utterly alone here, aside from the carven faces adorning the spring.

Good. She’d rather not have any witnesses at all for what she would have to do next.

The princess knew that its likes could use Soul to mend their forms beyond what would be possible for ordinary mortals, so she would prefer to do it here rather than in any other place.

In case it should go poorly.

 

She would have to minister to the Vessel’s wounds. Someone had to, and nobody else was going to do it. Hornet could only hope that whatever Soul-based healing its kind were capable of might take the edge off the very worst of it and at least get it stabilized, but what her Sibling had suffered wasn’t anything normal battle damage in the least.

Few things could put permanent marks on a god, but another, more powerful god would be on that list, if nothing else was – chances are that some of these wounds weren’t even merely in its body but existing on some more fundamental, metaphysical level. Wounds inflicted on a more ethereal level. That would not suffer their physical counterparts to heal.

After all, the wrathful deity had been looking to force her way out from what had been its mind-scape. She never did have physical existence, but what she could manifest in the form of lightseeds, tendrils and infected balloons.

She was, essentially, a formless enemy – That’s why one could not simply kill Her with a nail or bind her in a more conventional prison of steel and stone, not even if one were as powerful as the Pale King. She always began her conquest of her victims from within the spirit, which was not something the princess could hope to touch.

 

Although even the Vessel’s material body presented more than enough of an enigma in its own right.

If the Vessel was to be accounted a life-form (it certainly wasn’t as dead as it could have been; and in realizing this, Hornet found that she desperately wanted this to stay that way) , then it was a kind of life that was utterly alien to anything above the shores of the abyssal sea. It was a remarkable contrast, in a way – on the one hand, this being before her was distinctly her sibling, her father’s child, alike in face and build. Maybe even in personality and disposition, and in the values instilled by the shared history that inextricably linked them both together. She might as well admit that possibility, here and now, at the end of things. Besides just family, she might consider it a comrade as well, a sibling in arms as well as by blood, a scarred veteran of the same bitter struggle.

Yet at the same time, she frankly didn’t understand even the most basic of its life processes.

What was she supposed to do? Listen for its heartbeat? Monitor its breathing? Keep it warm and make sure it drinks enough water?

None of these applied.

It didn’t have a heart, or any other internals with which to process sustenance. There probably wasn’t anything resembling tracheae or air sacs beyond the spiracles lining the sides of its carapace.

In this moment she hated that she knew this, but there weren’t any obvious vital spots to hit; The safest bet to kill one of these was to simply puncture it as many times as possible.

In its stubborn refusal to have any discernible characteristics other than those that would be the absence of others, the concentrated unexistence from which the vessels were made failed to behave entirely as a vapor, a liquid or a solid. It must in part at least mimic a solid in taking on the properties of flesh, acting like a memory of muscles and sense organs in performing something sufficiently like their functions , but major damage could induce the stuff to leak and lose whatever cohesion caused it to hold its shape, and if too much of it escaped, some critical point would be reached where the amount that was left wasn’t enough to compel the rest to keep a distinct form, and they’d just burst; Sometimes some remnant reformed, an afterimage in the tarry substance that took a second hit to finish. If this was not done, such beings might not actually stay dead.

Usually, the void would then evaporate away almost entirely, aside from sometimes the most hardened, outermost parts. It didn’t leave a puddle. Nothing would be left behind but the shells, now actually rather less empty than before, since light, air, sound and heat could now penetrate within.

In well-lit places, one might see inside the shell then.

She knew what death looked like in these beings; She would recognize it if it took the ones that she had come to know. Were all of them fully capable of being individuals to this same degree?

She couldn’t think of any reason why they wouldn’t. The two she’d got to be acquainted with would have been deemed the closest thing to ‘empty’. The discarded leftovers of the batches before theirs could only be less so.

And if yes, what of it? She couldn’t have allowed them to pass. Something that couldn’t even beat her couldn’t possibly handle the Radiance. It would have been tantamount to letting Her go free.

Always the great looming ‘or else’ that would make any shred of fairness, decency or mercy into an unacceptable risk.

Her hands would have been stained no matter what. The only question was how much.

 

And now she was to save one of them, with the very claws that had slain its likes?

She was no longer that little girl that would sit with it in the palace.

It was a selfish hope, in part, to hope that at least, at the very end, there might come to be at least a little drop of mercy.

It wasn’t anything to do with idealism or self-serving narratives of atonement or redemption.

She was tired.

She hoped she wouldn’t have to do this anymore, that things might change, so that she might stop having to keep doing this and having to keep convincing herself that it gets easier.

 

She also wished her father was here.

His hands would have been as stained as anyone’s and He could have given her no absolution, but one might at least have hoped that all his sins would at least have netted Him the knowledge she would need right now to be able to make any kind of difference.

If He were here, He might have known what to do. What would make a meaningful difference.

Then again, this entire mess had come to pass because even He had failed to truly understand the forces He had meddled with. The one undeniable takeaway from this entire debacle and everything that followed would be that even His understanding of void creatures had been incomplete, in profound, fundamental ways that mattered. And He was a god of knowledge – even one of those could only divine so much about what falls into the domain of the very concept of the Unknown itself.

 

She could at least think of doing the most obvious things; She might begin with simply allowing the Vessel a moment to wash itself for the first time in Gods know how many years. She explicitly offered her assistance, but made a point of leaving it the dignity to see to this itself insofar as it was able.

Beyond that, festering cysts should probably be drained and cleaned out. Rotten leaf ought to be pruned; Depending on just how leaf-like those membranes were, they might even grow back. Open wounds, she might bind with soul-infused silk as she might her own and hope that the Vessel had enough of their Father in it that the effect would be the same. And while it was beyond her to understand how the Radiance would have managed to inflict a blistering fever on a creature which had technically been dead and cold since before Hornet was even hatched, the handiwork of the angry goddess seemed to come with a rather generous serving of the fatigue and malaise one would expect in feverish mortals, the temperature should probably come down.

The princess was fairly certain that she’d seen Ghost chasing a bunch of lifeseeds once, so she knew those worked on voidlings, she often carried a few syringes of lifeblood with her; Too bad that the particular voidling in question wasn’t here to to asked how it might be with regards to something like willow bark or milk-of-the-poppy. That rather seems like the sort of thing one would learn when apprenticing with shamans, witches and hermits.

As it stood, she had none of that available anways; The swift application of soul-based healing would have to suffice.

She explained all this circumstance to her would-be patient, not mincing any words about the parts that were due to be agonizing, but she didn’t get much of a response.

The Vessel would have had quite a lot of practice in enduring the unbearable with steely, stoic resignation. Even before the sealing. Even something as awful as this could not come close to rivaling the worst of it.

She had once made a game of trying to sneak into her father’s secret workshop, the dangerous one, supposedly, the one that no one else would be allowed in. Sure, He had shon her the other workshops, the ones with harmless metal gears, alchemic instrument and architectural sketch books in them, and He’d even begun to show her the way around some of them, but the special workshop was the one He’d disappear into when no one could seem to get a hold of Him. Not even Monomon and Lurien could tell her anything about it, so there was the distinct appeal of a forbidden fruit about it, and somehow she had convinced herself that if she was really His daughter, then nothing of His pursuits should forever remain secret to her. Somewhere in her young mind, she might have made the room into a symbol from all that she felt He still held back from her, a certain distance around the secretive, reclusive Wyrm that almost nobody quite seemed to overcome.

That vague, unspoken feeling had kept her motivated, and so she kept trying, through sheer grit and persistence, to make her way inside.

However, the one time she did succeed, what transpired then was enough to convince her that she never wanted to go back in there again, without even the need for any lectures or punishment – in fact, once confronted, she had defiantly proclaimed that she would return to Deepnest early that time, hoping that the sight of familiar places would wash away the memory of that room – and the Pale Beings let her.

It was about then that they recognized the need to explain to her certain things and the implications they had for her future… and all their futures, but the King and Queen would not spring this on her unilaterally before conferring first with Herrah, lest such an act were taken as an affront; even beyond matters of diplomacy, they would probably have genuine empathy for why the Beast would want to disclose the matter of her own sacrifice on her own terms rather than letting her daughter hear it from any other mouth.

Already, the princess had been asking questions that were not as easily hushed or distracted away from as in her younger years, even if it was something of the nature as asking why the Vessel didn’t have to concern itself with things like etiquette classes, flower arranging or learning sheet music. She was told obliquely that it such things would be pointless, or that it would have no use for that, but she suspected at the time that it might possibly like to, probably more so than she did.

If she’d been attempting to get it to play with her before her lessons, it would sometimes linger nearby and watch, unless it had other assignments or was explicitly ordered elsewhere.

Granted, just be staying where the last person to remember its existence happened to have left it, but the odds of just so happening to find it standing around aimlessly in the corridor outside the music room rather seemed to increase on such occasion where the White Lady would show up to play her harp, something of a pastime of the queen during her days at the court, when she wasn’t retreating to her gardens. The Vessel never went inside unless prompted very explicitly.

If one were a bored little half-spider, one might even come to suspect that it was deliberately making sure to stay out of sight, listening attentively to the plucking of the Queen’s branches on the harpstrings without ever crossing her line of sight. Much of the same lessons and techniques for keeping track of your enemy in a fight could easily be repurposed to such an end, one may suspect.

The young princess herself of course prided herself of notable expertise in the area of sneaking and thought she would know to recognize and appreciate a good stealth maneuver when she saw it.

“Why don’t you ever come inside?”

She had once asked it rather bluntly.

The Vessel did not even stir. It may have thought the reason obvious enough without the need for an answer.

“Is it ‘cause you didn’t get sent for any business here? I don’t think anyone would mind if you came inside anyway. The Lady is actually pretty nice. She always plays with me when I come visit. She doesn’t bite or anything. I don’t think she even has teeth, unlike my mother back home! She has all the fangs. She’s a whole lot stricter, too.” That last part was not at all voiced as a complaint, but rather like a little boast, as if the bored young princess expected others to be impressed by her for being able to live up to the exacting scrutiny of the supposedly infamous beastly warrior queen… though the momentum of this claim somewhat got lost when it didn’t garner an immediate reaction.

She boredly let herself sink onto the windowsill on which the Pure Vessel was sitting, which, for her, just so came up to her collarbone, so that she could just barely place her arms and chin on the polished bright surface.

“She has to be, though. Cause she expects a lot from me. I’m supposed to be the queen of Deepnest eventually. That’s not something you ever have to worry about, when father’s going to be around forever and ever… Although, come to think about it, people probably do expect a lot from you, too, since you’re supposed to save everyone...”

The Hollow Knight-to-Be just continued to stare out into the courtyard without ever turning to face her, only that the tiny princess was now inclined to take it as something rather deliberate.

“Do you think I wouldn’t understand? I’m not a baby anymore. I can understand!”

 

It stayed at this for that moment (for it was soon after that a retainer came scurrying out of the room under orders to go fetch the princess) but the matter of the secret workshop remained, and was further compounded a few days later when she once again spotted the King making his way to that telltale direction… followed by the Pure Vessel.

Why did it get to go inside the Secret Workshop? Was this what it got to do instead of etiquette class and flower arranging? No fair! It seemed to the princess that the two of them should switch, or, at least, that they should both be doing exactly the same things, barring some adjustment for their different ages and skill levels.

This then lead her to redouble her effort to get inside that room, which eventually cumulated in the day on which she actually made it inside.

 

But when she actually made it inside, she happened to find the Vessel already there… laid out on one of the work benches amid various half-dissasembled constructs, ostensibly left waiting for the King to return and continue with something.

It must be understood that while the King would not have been needlessly cruel if He thought he could help it, the needs of The Plan always came first. Always, without fail or exception.

The Hollow Knight-to-be had sat up when it noticed its sister’s steps skittering near, turning to face her in this place where she was definitely not supposed to be.

If she was now to read any intention into that glance in hindsight, it could, at most, with extreme generosity and a willing decision to risk indulging in flights of fancy, have amounted to a mildly alarmed intention of ‘What are you doing here?’, but absolutely nothing that would have indicated that it found its predicament or its surroundings exceptional, unfamiliar or otherwise out of the ordinary in any other way.

All thoughts of stealth had been suddenly gone from her mind when she recognized it.

It was actually the White Lady who found her, having noticed her abscondence – it certainly was not her absent-minded father, who never noticed her slipping right in through the door just behind Him as He had left to fetch something, utterly abstracted into His thoughts. (One can only assume that the queen had a talk with Him afterwards)

The Pale Root had at once gathered the princess up into her branches, with an urgent sense of alarm that was rather atypical for the serene, placid lady.

She had held the then-small spiderling closely to her trunk and not let go of her until her roots had taken her far away to an entirely different wing of the palace.

She then made her step-daughter solemnly never to venture anywhere near that room ever again, and especially never to touch that deep-black stuff that the King kept in those ominous vats.

“Promise me that you will never go so much as near that room ever again. Promise me that you will never touch even a drop of what He keeps there.”

“But why? I can’t make a promise if I don’t know what it’s about. If I don’t, I don’t know if I can keep it. Mother always says that you should never make promises lightly.”

“...do you know? Why this Palace is where it is? Why we built it here, instead of building further down into these caverns to expand the city?”

She did not.

“...I always though they just simply… haven’t got around to it yet?”

The Queen paused there for a moment, as if to gather herself before launching into a larger speech:

“In the beginning, there was the dark. From darkness came chaos. From chaos emerged all the elements that make up the world – The Night and the Day, Creation, Nature and Reproduction, Time and Inevitability, the Earth, the Sky, and the Sea, and all the other primordial ones, from which in turn was spawned everything else that the world contains. Some they imagined in dream, some they shaped from molds, some they begat in the bliss of bodily union, some simply arose as consequences of other existence – the mountains and the islands, the beasts of the land and the sea, the other higher beings and the many mortal peoples they have spawned in their image, and in time, even artificial creations such as machines, constructs and clockwork.

But deep, deep down, far below the world, there are still some places where the chaos and darkness still remain just as they were, left over from a time before the world, in corners and crevices where creation never happened. There still exists something of the nothing from which all things first arose, and to which they must perhaps return in due time.”

The princess caught on quick: “That’s what underneath the Ancient Basin? Nothing ? That’s what Father has got in that workshop? Nothingness? In Barrels?”

“It is very hard for any kind of living, thinking being to even really imagine ‘nothing’, even for Higher Beings such as myself. If you try to picture nothing, you are already doing something: You are picturing. Since nothing isn’t anything, it can only be described by what is is not. You can liken it to darkness, which is the absence of light. You can liken it to cold, which is the absence of heat. You can liken it to silence, which is the absence of sound. You can liken it to chaos, which is the absence of order. You can simply call it ‘void’, which is just absence…

Your teachers would have told you what happens when you try to suck the air out of a narrow space, right? Great pressure is created. Nature abhors a vacuum. Wherever there is an emptiness, something will rush to fill it.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that if you were to venture into the caverns below the Basin, which your Father has since sealed, you would in time come to an area where everything just… stops. You would find the air suddenly growing very quiet, and all traces of light and color beginning to disappear the further than you go, but it wouldn’t just be physical. The world does not just exist as matter, but as Essence and Soul. That, too, can be unmade. – a sense of meaningless, emptiness and desolation would begin to pervade the air… The heat of the soul, the warmth of the heart would be leeched away along with that of the body. And if you went further and further, you would at last come to something that your father has likened to a sea of pitch black that does not reflect even a single glimmer of light… The Abyssal Sea, He called it, or the Dark Ocean. and this is of course, a metaphor. An abstraction. An allegory. A mental concept we may use as a tool to extrapolate something we can’t truly understand.

The void sea is not really anything like a sea. Seas are made of water. Seas carry life in endless, bountiful multitudes. It is similar to a sea only in a few circumscribed aspects – like with a sea, there is a shift in a state of matter. The nothing that merely suffuses its surroundings truly becomes a manifest substance down there. So yes, you can fill it into barrels. It’s also like a sea in that it is impossibly vast in ways we cannot fathom – that is to say, even your Father and I can’t.”

The Princess gulped.

“Another thing that’s like a sea about it is that, if you drowned in it and sank into its depths, you would vanish without leaving any trace. Not only would you be drained of life, you would forget any reason why you would want to hold onto your life to begin with, or why it ever mattered that you did. You would have ceased to be alive, or even to be you, long before you would stop breathing. Everything you cherish now would cease to have meaning, to be distinct in any way from that which you now loathe – All would cease to matter. The scents of home, that you are a girl, the vilest of crimes, the voice of your mother… even your own name would turn into just another noise. Right before you perished, you would have become as insensate as a stone, and nothing would stir within you that might compel you to move or act or even feel or reflect in any way, not ever again… in the end, it would dissolve your insides. Any bugs that are found after having suffered such a fate often have the very last of them leaking out their eyeholes.”

The gruesome image burned itself immediately into the spiderling’s mind.

The White Lady’s effort at ‘scaring em straight’ had been proving rather fruitful up onto that point. If the princess were to picture the idea of losing all that made her herself, death would seem preferable. She definitely wasn’t going to be touching the barrels in that workshop.

“What does father want with something like that?”

The Queen sighed deeply. “You see child, for me, what lies down there is simply the point where the world comes to an end. A point where my roots cannot move deeper into the soil because they find neither nutrients nor purchase and the soil itself becomes too inhospitable for them. Therefore, I also cannot sense anything that lies below. The Domain of Life ends, and the Domain of Death begins, or the domain of inanimate things that never had life to begin with; Either way, it is not life, so therefore, it does not concern me. My place is up above.

But your father…

Hm. You see. The two of us joined together in part because we were of like mind, because our visions and our interests overlapped greatly, and because together, we could attain things that neither may have accomplished on His or her own. But there are still some parts of Him that I do not understand. I can only attempt to understand them in love.

You see, what lies down there is as much antithetical to Him as much as it is to me.

He is a light; Down there lies darkness. He is a creator; There lies destruction.

But you must understand – in ages long past, the great Wyrms of yore heaped up mounds of great treasure, curling their great coils around vast hoards of gold and precious stones, piling up untold riches high as mountains.

Each would slightly differ in the kinds of wealth they would amass.

Some would covet Geo and other currency, others lusted after diamonds or priceless artifacts, others for thralls to cave to their every whim, some would only be satisfied with diamonds the exact shade of their own hide, while others covered their dens in polished mirror-glass.

But your father was always more ambitious than that. That uncompromising vision of His has always been a large part of what drew me to Him in the first place. He is not one to be interested in such a thing as petty baubles. Rather, his greed has always been for knowledge. The treasure that he covets are untold secrets. His lust is only for the thrill of discovery and innovation; What he collects are new ideas and novel perspectives. His avarice is for the privilege to peer at at the innermost workings of the world.

So from the moment that we found that place below, it was inconceivable that He would ever give up on looking to divine its secrets. It just wouldn’t be in His nature.

The nothing before creation is the ultimate mystery, the last unknown, the final frontier… of course He must possess it.

To expect that He would is to misunderstand who and what He is; It is a part of Him I do not share or understand, but if I did not try as I might to accept Him regardless...”

It was her first time hearing much at all about the ways of the ancient wyrms, or their stories. She did not know them like she knew the tales of her mothers’ people, from many days spent sitting in a circle with the other weaver youth, gathered next to the displayed mask of an old lord, or a grand tapestry depicting the epic tale, their voices joining with those of their elders in ancient song – stranger still to hear it not from the one whom it most directly concerned, He who should be one of the last remnants from those days. Did he prefer to to hide this from His subjects, or even from her? That, he, too, had once had a bestial nature somewhere, cold, exacting embodiment of Thesis rather than Physis though He might style Himself? Or was that something He just preferred to leave behind, something long ago from a very different life? Implications hung in the air that touched off the resonance with other memories – even just the way the people back at the nest sometimes said the word ‘Wyrm’, the implied distrust, the suspicion of greed, the unspoken understanding that all the talk of expanding trade and building convenient new infrastructure must be but a fig-leaf to disguise his coveting of their lands. There was nothing prejudiced about being wary of the prospect that a spider might eat you, or that a scorpion may sting – indeed, careful respect of that was probably the only way to any viable coexistence.

Back where she came from, failing to respect the nature just got you eaten, and most certainly not missed. Her mother had taught her better than that when she had inducted her in the ways of the hunt. As the future queen of Deepnest, she could not afford to be so foolish as to underestimate the mighty beast that ruled the neighboring territory… even if, or especially if its master was her own father.

But that He was – the same father with whom she’d sat as a breakfast table this morning, bored half to tears as He’d gone on a lengthy elaborate tangent about city planning rather than touching anything on His plate – a rare effusion of a great mind, perhaps, but rather too dense for the young princess to find it all too stimulating. The queen herself had smiled fondly at his foibles, though she probably didn’t have any all too strong feelings on the subject of his opinions. The Pure Vessel had been present, as well, and may well have been the only one listening, having ever so slightly inclined its head in the King’s direction.

Not that the King would have noticed this. The only thing in his glowing, crowned head at the time was the importance of public seating and its contribution to the unique character of a neighborhood.

Even centuries later, when Hallownest had long-since fallen into ruin and most of the details of its culture, history and religion were widely considered lost to time, the one thing that remained uncontested through the fog of ages was that the Pale King must have been an absolute wonk about ornate public benches.

...He probably never once considered that one of His own offspring might end up sleeping on them, while clambering through the noxious, abandoned caverns that would become of His realm, much less that it might do so while being stalked from a distance by His daughter, a wild, grizzled, weather-stained huntress with no uses left for royal finery, looking on as she racked her brains about whether she should just take her needle and plunge it in as many times as she could, staining herself horns to tarsals in the tarry eldritch ooze that had long replaced its hemolymph.

But that was a consequence of His actions, too.

And if all three of them had ended up buried together in that same tomb of his making (which had been a real possibility as she would consider it), reduced to naught but an ugly stain on the floor or various states indistinguishable from death, that would have been His legacy, too.

His hand was plain in the distinctive style of the architecture, in the meticulous spellwork which, even after all these years, could have been trusted to activate a second time, all by itself.

Like all the works of the King and Creator, it had been meant to last for all eternity.

A perfect irony, almost like a naturally occurring poem: So eager was He, to be gone from the site of his shame and never look upon it again, that He wasn’t too thorough in checking if all of his discarded sacrifices were actually properly dead. He might have sinned less, had he been more shameless. Instead he effectively left the stray survivors locked inside… Had some escaped, already? By this point? Were they roaming somewhere out there, as young as their sibling in the palace, and yet left without any experience of love or safety, or anyone to provide for their needs, left alone by the same creature that put all this finicky, perfectionist concern in making sure the Kingdom’s citizens would always have somewhere comfortable to sit and gather together in community?

All these contradictions existed within Him, often as parts and outgrowths of the very same impulses. And where did that leave His daughter, ever hanging between disparate worlds, being shuffled back and forth, up and down its layers?

The White Lady must have wondered this as well:

“You are half-wyrm yourself, dear child. Have you not ever felt such a desire? To hoard? To grasp? To acquire?”

How strange to go from hearing some near mythic tale about the beginnings of the world from one much closer to its source, to then be questioned as if one was expected to be nearer to the truth of questions that befuddled the teller of the previous tales…

Hornet had never even wondered about this, because she had not known that it was a possibility. But she would not let it change how she thinks about herself, after all the was still exactly the same as she was a moment ago, before being told.

“Ah- I don’t think so, Lady, no…”

It would take another few hundred years before the princess would encounter another half-wyrm who very much did seem to have come with a penchant for collecting things – charms and various pilfered trinkets to get into all sorts of unlikely places where it wasn’t supposed to be. The odd shiny rocks. Experience in the hunt. The sands of strange, foreign lands. More immaterial things too, like various skills picked up from a multitude of teachers, unspoken secrets and lingering dreams…

But not yet. Not for a long, long time. So it may have been natural that the princess’ thoughts instead went to the only other possible half-wyrm in existence that she would have known, or at least suspected about, as a point of comparison:

“I don’t think the Hollow Knight does, either. You can probably count the number of things it keeps in its room on a single claw – though it seems to like similar color schemes as father…”

This, she had intended as a simple observation of what she took to be her Sibling’s foibles, spoken not without some hint fondness, nothing too different in nature from the King’s lasting bench obsession.

The queen reacted with the sort of obvious discomfort that might be expected when a child accidentally says something obscene, offensive or deeply irrational in their innocent ignorance.

Clearly, the White Lady would have preferred to avoid the subject, but that her stepdaughter was getting ever more observant as she grew, and would not be placated with hushed whispers… so she bluntly what she took to be the truth:

“Child. All the things it has were simply given to it. There was no real choice or will involved. The Vessel doesn’t like or prefer anything.”

The young princess may have objected, but the queen carried on before she could:

“Don’t you understand yet? What it meant for the Vessel to be there in your father’s workshop?

It is no place for children, but when it comes to the Vessel, it has nothing to fear from anything of what He keeps in there.”

The Queen had hoped she would only have to imply it, but she young girl’s questioning gaze told her at once that she wouldn’t be spared from having to say it outright.

An old, deep, long-held sadness broke unbidden through the veil of her dissonant serenity:

“It is already far, far too late for that child... Everything that could be taken from it, already has been, do you see? There is nothing left to strip away. Even my voice is no different to it than any other sound. ‘Mother’ is just another label. It might ‘know’ that my Wyrm and I are its parents, in the sense that words can be recorded on a stone tablet, but it doesn’t understand, and even if it could, that understanding wouldn’t matter to it.”

...and that would be how she found out. Part of it, at least.

Later on, during her next visit, there was a lengthy deliberate sit-down with both Herrah and the royal pair, in which the fullness of the plan to seal the infection was finally revealed – the princess was changed after this, knowing the sacrifice that would be exacted to keep the world standing. Knowing her own place in that scheme.

She could not afford to be a plucky, mischievous child anymore, and she certainly gave up the indulgence of trying to sneak into forbidden places – it wasn’t even that she had to force herself to resist temptation, rather, childish things lost their appeal, like something old, stale and flavorless.

The weight of debt and obligation had come crushing down hard on her shoulders.

Her mother had gone out of her way to tell her that she could never regret her bargain and that she had done what she did so that the princess and all the rest of her people could live free and out from under the infection’s shadow, for her to grasp the future and continue onward into it.

Whatever may have lead to her conception, the Beast had first and foremost wanted her daughter to simply be her daughter, a new life that exists for herself and would eventually make her own part. She said she had faith that Hornet would go on to find her own path that is entirely her own, that she wanted her to be happy, that she would take the burden in her stead, as a mother should.

But how does one receive such a gift without feeling a desire, nay, a need to somehow repay the debt? How does one continue forward one one’s own when others could not, without feeling a guilt that screeched for expiation?

She knew that she would never get to take care of Herrah in her old age now…

 

And then there was the issue of the Vessel. (She had not truly understood before, why exactly it was called that) Another sacrifice, and the one of the four upon which the heaviest lot would fall. Inevitably, she ran into it again. Rather soon, even – the White Lady had volunteered to take the young spiderling out into the courtyard for some fresh air, to distract her after all of this heavy talk. Hornet might have wanted to cling onto her mother and never let go, but both her parents had some important royal business to discuss with each other that could not wait until the next opportunity.

The princess remembers resisting the White Lady’s offer to pick her up. It was one of those moments where she had decided that she could not dwell in innocence anymore.

They passed the Hollow Knight on the way, ostensibly on its way back from its combat training judging by the nail slung over its back.

It marched past them without a word. Looking back now the princess mostly retains the impression of its grey wing-membranes swishing behind it like a cloak and the tips of its horns seen from behind. It had been right around the time when that third spur began to grow in.

 

The princess would not have been surprised before – she’d always had the impression that the Hollow Knight and the White Lady avoided each other for some reason, in whatever subtle ways they could get away with without straining the limits of decorum or propriety.

Now she considered whether she had it all wrong: That they might be not so much avoiding each other, as simply reflecting a lack of reasons that would draw them together.

She had not failed to note the real sorrow in the queen’s voice, when she said that about how it’s ‘already too late’.

She tried to imagine what it would mean for Herrah’s voice to be just another sound to her, and at once had to suppress a shudder. Especially here, in these gleaming garden, among its pale ferns… in moments like these when the White Palace felt to her like a strange and foreign place, populated by thoroughly incomprehensible beings, when she would ache for the relief of coming home to those familiar arms.

It was then that she began to pity her shadow-borne sibling for the curses that had been laid upon it.

 

...now, all these years later, the Princess can surmise that she has broken at last one promise to the White Lady, the once concerning ‘not touching one single drop’.

Her claws are thoroughly covered in dark ichor that stings them with its cold.

The queen was, of course, exaggerating the danger somewhat to deter the foolhardy disposition of a daring young child; This much exposure would not be enough to kill or drain anyone, or do anything more besides leaving her digits somewhat numb and chilled for a bit, like what a typical mortal might experience from staying out too long in the cold – especially once she made sure to cleanse herself afterwards in the spring-water.

For a being that was supposed to have nothing left to lose, her birth-cursed sibling certainly gave the impression of one who had gone on to lose a whole lot more, even once she was finished binding its wounds.

Halfway throughout the ordeal, the poor creature had shocked her once again by actually producing something like an audible rasp, though it was evidently trying hard not to, digging its lone remaining claw into the dirt below to help it bear the pain… something which should have been precluded by the very substance of its being. But that substance was, of course, worn quite thin now. It was near death when she found it; It probably still was, despite her ministrations.

Startled not so much by the noise as by the dreadful implications therein, she instantly ceased what she was doing and position herself so as to look straight in the Vessel’s eyes – “I’m sorry- Is it too much? Do you require some respite?”

Said creature, however, simply kept itself in place, trying as it might to keep a hold on its fraying composure, waiting, it seems, for her to proceed and get it over with.

The Hollow Knight seemed intent on staying right where it was, bracing itself for yet more inevitable pain. It likely understood the necessity as much as she did. It had likely been expecting much worse, and completely accepted it.

She wasn’t going to make it wait or draw this out.

 

Eventually, she got her sibling’s wounds cleaned and bound; The spools of silk she had brought with her proved just enough. She had made sure to prepare and bring an ample supply, given her expectation that she would likely be interfering in a positively titanic fight well beyond anything that anyone with mortal blood should get involved in. She had thought that if she relied on her speed, on trickery and cleverness combined with some passing opportunity and the element of surprise, she might just barely manage to produce an opening…

If anyone could do it, it would be her; Her mother had never been daunted, even in dealing with powerful beings such as her father.

And even said father, for all his power, had once been faced with something beyond him; He was ever the greatest proponent of the idea that even the slightest creatures could accomplish the most incredible feats through the powers of their mind and will. She had thought of something He had said once, in discussion with her mother, leading up to the black deed itself: “We cannot hope defeat the False One, but we shall have no need of it. All that will be required of us is to hold Her for a single instant, enough for the trap to snap shut.”

Right. The ‘trap’. She knew she might well just end up playing his ugly part in a repetition of his sins, and that she may pay for it dearly. There would have been something poetic about it: The artisan’s daughter, foundering to her doom on her wings of wax after flying too close to the sun.

Yet, she had to attempt it. Because there was the faintest chance, that she might help to bright about that impossible thing – just barely, just by the collective skin of all of their teeth.

Did the Hollow Knight realize? That she had spun the very threads that now wrapped its wounds with the explicit intention to kill it? She had made sure to infuse quite a bit of soul into it, more than usual, to hold not just it but the raging divine force confined within.

How ironic that that very same thread was now being put to so opposite a use.

...there was something quite right about that, however. A world where she might help them would be much less mad and absurd than one where she must find a member of her own family in such a state and hurt it even further. She could have done it. She definitely had the stomach.

She had done worse before; By this point she had even stood aside as her own mother had been slain within her sight; But by the gods, she was tired of it.

She thought it a mercy on her as much as on the Hollow Knight itself that she didn’t have to fight it.

Mercy was a luxury that the cruel goddess had robbed them all of for so long.

To hope… to dream of better things… all that had become unsafe, treacherous ground during Her enduring reign of terror.

 

At last, the princess surveyed the result of her handiwork:

The generous application of soul had at least made the crack in her sibling’s face to look slightly less… ajar, but past a certain point, it would not simply mend any further – the resulting mark endured as a permanent weak spot or fault line which it would most likely carry for life.

The wound on its throrax, though no longer actively oozing with fluids, would take a good while to fully heal and leave a gnarled criss-cross of scars in their wake.

As for the arm… she was uncertain. There were even some kinds of mortal bugs that could regrow a lost limb with a molt, her mother’s people among them. But in this case, the limb had all but disintegrated down to the very root of what would have been the shoulder joint. Of course, aside from its mask and the wing membranes, maybe, most of its body was composed of the intrinsically shapeless dark matter of the abyss, which may not be subject to ordinary restrictions. She had seen its likes knit themselves back together from what might otherwise have been mortal wounds. She had seen it release the pretense of its deceptively bug-like form to unleash a mass of writhing tentacles.

Then again, these wounds had not been inflicted the normal means, being the handiwork of a wrathful goddess with every incentive to disfigure the champion of Her hated rival who had long doubted as a baleful, suffocating prison composed of an element that was intrinsically repulsive to Her.

For now she would assume a permanent loss and keep in mind that two-handed tasks may present a difficulty.

For whatever that’s worth, it was quite likely that her sibling would scarcely be alone in its marring; Many of those who still had enough of themselves left to wake up from the haze of the infection would likely bear marks from it – moderately crippled citizens might be a common sight in days to come. Another issue they might have to deal with down the line, if they were to reestablish a semblance of civic order.

But first: Survival. They would work themselves up the hierarchy of needs once they could afford to do so.

 

“I suggest that you give yourself one last soak before we must depart-” she explained, moving back over to the water herself so that she might dip her claws in to chase away the cold and numbness from them. “I am loath to cut short the rest you much need and well deserve, but we can’t stay long. We’re too exposed here. This old kingdom is not yet so deserted that no one ever comes here.”

 

Her suggestion was followed, with only so much delay as was to be expected from a grievously wounded creature peeling itself off the ground while still reeling from yt another harrowing ordeal – there was a moment, in the act of dragging itself back to its feet, when the ravaged warrior clearly struggled to keep its balance. The princess was had half shifted her position to possibly rush to its side, but it stubbornly managed not to fall and kept going of its accord accord before she could intervene further.

At this point, the wounded knight was probably far too worn to consider anything aside from simply doing as she said. Did it find some comfort in the idea that she seemed to have a plan, she wondered, or was this still that same old fatalistic resignation that it must endure whatever might be asked of it? Technically, she wouldn’t even have the authority to be ordering it around, not unless it should decide to pledge its services to the Nest. It distinctly outranked her on this soil, as the queen’s legitimate offspring, if the decorum, procedure and hierarchy of a long-crumbled society could be thought relevant at all.

She hoped that her words themselves and the manner in which she spoke them would make it apparent that she was speaking to it first and foremost as a sister and as a comrade as she continued her explications:

“There is a place in the spires of the city below that I’ve been using as a safehouse. It’s easy to barricade, and I have some stockpiles there. We can stay there for as long as we may need to while you convalesce.”

Nothing resembling an answer or a comment came.

Across from her, the much-harrowed void creature had let its horned head sink down by the edge of the pool.

It is likely that no mortal being could have understood the sheer amount of exhaustion that it must be experiencing – unending agony of ages spent burning without the luxury of crumbling away at any reasonable pace. The goddess had defiled its body at long last (as she had just seen in florid detail), but only after conquering its will.

Done cleaning herself off, the princess rose to her feet, and then, impelled by sudden impulse, found herself nimbly skittering around the rocks around the pool, coming to the other side, kneeling down, reaching an arm out – and then, stopping herself.

The idea of placing a palm upon her sibling’s mask as a small gesture of comfort should not have given her pause, seeing as it should have been a modest, altogether understated act compared to becoming intimately acquainted with its fluids in the act of lancing those cysts and washing its wounds, but that was much of a required, technical act, something done for a purpose, whereas gestures of physical affection had been much rarer at the White Palace.

The White Lady could be affectionate, when she wanted, in a manner that had sometimes left the young princess with the sense of having to endure expected pleasantries.

Once, in a different time, she may also have extended that same affection to the King, and Hornet could imagine that he would have responded in a genuine manner and duly appreciated her for initiating, but by the time she was born, the King and Queen might well stand close, and call each other various terms of endearment, but there was a careful, unspoken rule in place to never so much as brush each other’s appendages – not even the outermost strands of His wing-membranes against the finest stray roots trailing after her on the floor.

The princess does recall being held by Him, or receiving a pat on the head as an expression of approval, but that was very much an occasional thing, either confined to private moments, or else, her very earliest years.

One might have speculated here, if the territorial nature of most wyrms did not incline them to find the company of their fellows more an irritation than a comfort, but she really had no other evidence to base it on, it might well just be ascribed to the somewhat reticent personality of this particular wyrm. Perhaps He was once drawn to his lady because she complimented Him in that way.

The different varieties of bugs native to Hallownest and its surrounding territories different somewhat in the degree of either helplessness or precociousness of their offspring. Some, like the larvae of bees, would be wholly dependent on their caretakers for a good while. The weavers were, in some ways rather closer to the other end – Even the infants of Deepnest are far from helpless.

The princess recalls her mother proudly telling a story of how her weeks-old daughter had, one one occasion, made some of her father’s retainers get acquainted with the venom of her fangs. But she knew this story from the bellowing laughter that her mother recounted it to, because like most sapient bugs, it had taken a while for her understanding to mature to the point where she could understand reason, label her experiences with words and form discrete memories.

Her father had of course recognized that she was closer to a mortal child in that regard, and accordingly, understood the need to provide her with some degree of closeness and soothing touches, at least while she was young, even if it did not come to him so naturally – but most of the time, He would have deferred to the needs and expectations of propriety and stiff palace decorum, especially where there might be witnesses. He never outright refused her affection in private, but He would not think of initiating it as readily as others might, especially once she’d reached the stage of being old enough for schooling – it must not be thought that the sense of distance between them greatly increased then, if anything, answering the questions of an emergent, inquisitive young mind seemed to agree with Him much more than the sorts of tasks that came before it.

But the point remained that he didn’t exactly raise his daughter to be much of a hugger, despite having to account for the needs of her mortal half.

 

The Vessel, however, as a being of fully divine, or even partially artificial origin, would have had the capacity to follow the King’s instructions from the moment that it first awakened within its eggshell. It did not strictly need a caretaker’s touch for its development, and due to the fatal miscalculation that had lead to its creation in the first place, it was not thought to derive any benefit from shows of affection, either.

Had it ever been held or received any sort affectionate touch at all, for as long as it had lived?

Would it even understand the intent behind such a thing, if it were attempted?

It was not inconceivable that either of its parents could have given it a try behind close doors… maybe they had despaired of it, when their offspring had not seemed to respond as they would expect, at least not insofar as they could discern. (there was a very good chance, now, that the fault had indeed been in the discernment) She could imagine the Lady, in particular, taking this very hard.

Though even if it did have some opinion on the matter, there was no telling what that might. It was as likely to have silently resented any touch as to have desired it. Though it might be ‘alive’, there was a great variety of living things, even among those of completely natural, mundane origin – never mind a completely alien one that was barely comparable to life as we know it.

The last thing the Vessel needed was to be inflicted with the fruits of yet more presumption and ignorance – after all, even among ordinary mortals, there were those who did not share any delight in tough because of harmless personal quirks, a more solitary disposition, some disability that rendered in unpleasant, or the haunting specter of past unpleasant experiences, of which the Vessel had certainly expected no shortage.

The princess decided to give advance warning just in case:

“What I’m about to do now, I’m intending as a comfort, for your benefit rather than mine. I request that you let me know if this is in any way unpleasant for you.”

Then, she reached her hand out, deciding to err on the side of caution in going for its intact shoulder rather than its face or horns.

She slid her feet back into the pool besides it and they sat, for a moment, in perfect silence.

She really, really hoped that it wasn’t just tolerating her – though it did not occur to her at the time to communicate this directly.

 

After a while, the princess stood up, dusted off her claws and grimly resigned herself to one last leg of the journey. She handed the Hollow Knight its much-abused, cracked old weapon so that might use it in pulling itself to its feet.

“Alright, just one more stretch, and we’ll be done.”

 

Their destination was probably once the personal apartment of some enterprising noble, or possibly some nouveau-riche merchant, high up in the spires of the city, with tall long elegant windows and something of an open floor plan over several levels. The decor was lavish, but not generically so, rather indicating that its owner had possessed a taste for curious novelties. It must have been a rare, fashionable possession once, a flight of fancy contrived by the experimental mind of some spry young architect, but in the end, its previous occupants had fled in a hurry, clearly still intending to come back – much of the furniture had been left covered in dust covers, and much of what its master had owned was still gathering dust in the shelves.

Whoever it was had never returned in the end, and Hornet didn’t have the faintest idea who it was; She’d only set up shop here a good fifty years after the city had become mostly deserted aside from the shambling, walking dead. She chosen it entirely for strategic considerations – she found it rather defensible, still reasonably intact and its position this far high up allowed her to survey the streets below from a good vantage point. The city was not in any way among her favorite parts of the kingdom while it still stood, and certainly not one she would ever have chosen if she had to pick a permanent abode.

She’d barely made much use of the previous owner’s forgotten possessions, aside from what she’d used to turn the entryway into something of an obstacle course, primed to bar entry to unwanted guests, or to at least alert her with all manner of noisy implements if she was to company.

With the previous owner’s fancy furnishings left as it or pushed to the sides, she had set up some of her own equipment, making a makeshift workbench out of what was still recognizable as an eye-catching vanity table. By the hearth, she had repurposed what must have been someone’s clothes hangers for the purposes of smoking or drying meat.

Many areas were next to untouched, but those that weren’t were marked by the presence of loosely organized tools nearby, fit for many different purposes – tools for crafting, implements of warfare, instruments of the hunt, half-finished textile works. At the Hive, she had also learned to work with materials such as wax and fiber.

Some of the long-abandoned household items had been put to new use, but for the most part, the warrior princess had brought her own tools, some of them fashioned from the shells and hides of things she’d killed.

The former owner’s bedroom was never really taken into possession, only occasionally accessed as a storage space. Instead, she had woven for herself a discrete, cocoon-like nest out of webbing, sticking to the underside of a stair, with several amulets of protection in various different styles affixed on top of the entrance, none of which were in any way sufficient to reliably protect anyone from the infection – but there was at least a theoretical chance that they might just add the faintest, slightest edge to whatever her willpower might accomplish on its own.

Long had she made it a habit not to go to bed, and thereby, risk to dream, before she had recited a string of old mantras which the Midwife of Deepnest had taught her long ago.

 

The large window-front that dominated the large central room was broken up only by the doors leading up to a balcony, past which the endless rain could be prattling down – whoever this place once belonged to must have paid a premium for the view.

The place had never been truly cleaned out, nor had the space ever really been personalized much.

It wasn’t any sort of home, but really just an improvised hiding space, perfectly disposable and interchangeable, placed strategically at the heart of the kingdom so that she might quickly reach all other parts of it on her patrols. (She had not gone ‘home’ in a very long time. Where? To the abandoned, empty palace grounds? To the door-less, sealed walls that possibly still bordered the Hive? To the shambling, infested remains of weavers she grew up with?)

Even so, the room would paint a candid picture of what her existence had been ever since the kingdom’s fall.

She thought the Vessel may have stopped and stared… after the interlude at the hot spring, it had a notably easier time following behind her at an even pace. It seemed to be leaning on its weapon more to keep its balance than to support its full weight.

When they entered this room, however, its steps trailed off just a little before she came to a stop herself – she noticed, but just barely.

Turning to look back at her sibling, she found its expression and body language as unreadable as ever, nor did it speak or gesture.

She was not able to gather any confirmation of her hunch at all, but still, she decided, that she wanted this clarified and spoken out loud as a matter of principle:

“You did not fail me, or anyone else, if that is that what you are considering. I would not agree that your sacrifice should be counted as a failure at all. You have no cause for shame. You were given an impossible mission, with precious little choice in the matter, and yet you did your utmost to carry it out for as long as you could, giving up everything in the process.

The only people who would not consider that some pinnacle of chivalry would be those that would lambaste you as an over-loyal fool.

I assure you, if Father were alive – well, first of all, He would honestly be weeping with joy to see you freed before He would ever think of slinging blame, and once He did, He would have been begging forgiveness of you.” she intones this very deliberately, like a long-prepared speech for an often-dreamed-of, momentous occasion. It is a very important thing to say, and she will use every skill she’s been taught on how to speak of important things.

“And frankly, if He did not do that, by some madness that I am unable to fathom, but rather thought of casting scorn on you, He would find Himself out of a daughter, because He would have absolutely no right to fault you for anything. It was His plan. His choices. His miscalculation.

He always saw it as His own failure. If a general sends out his soldiers to fight a battle they could never win, because he mistakenly thought they could, the fault is with the general and the error in his strategy. It does nothing to take away from the valor, dedication or competence of those sent to do it. My mother was among the ones sent along with you, and would surely not tolerate any talk that she has anything to answer for!

And no, don’t tell me that it’s different, because it all depended on you – that isn’t really true. It all depended on mistaken assumptions about you, on father’s theories. He brought you into the world, and once you did exist, you could scarcely be expected to change what you are. You could not have done that any more than I, or anyone else could. And it was you who bore the brunt of the price for that error.

He told us all that you wouldn’t suffer. He told you that it wouldn’t hurt.

Knowing what I have seen today, I doubt that anyone could deny that He was simply wrong, despite his best efforts and intentions.

You have absolutely nothing whatsoever to apologize for.”

 

The princess still couldn’t place her sibling’s response, if there was any, but she hoped, deep in her head, that her words were sinking in… She didn’t think what more she could say that wouldn’t just be rehash of what she had expressed already.

Frustration galled her at the conclusion that she still could not tell what it was thinking, now that she good reason to assume that there must be thoughts, or something sufficiently like them – They could scarcely be pleasant thoughts…

For all their eerie stillness and formless, thrashing tentacles, she could say with some confidence now that despite what the White Lady had once told her, these were distinctly not beings for whom the voices of their kinsfolk held no special meaning. The Hollow Knight didn’t exactly have a voice in the typical sense, but the point still stood that Ghost (in whom the more cthonic aspect of their natures was, if anything, more pronounced) could hardly have been indifferent to the existence of its sibling, or to its plight. The best, indelible proof was standing right beside here.

At this point the most consistent explanation that she could come up with is that these creations of her father’s very much did possess the various facets of an inner life – they were merely limited in, or simply different in how they would naturally express it, or maybe those not of the void just couldn’t understand or ‘read’ them as well as they might their own kind. Most damningly, the barrier looked to be rather one-way. The void creatures didn’t seem to have any particular problem understanding those from above the abyss. Maybe it was simply in the nature of darkness to be impenetrable – to consume all things and take everything in while remaining unfathomable. But there is all the world of a difference between something that that doesn’t exist, and something that simply remains unknown – between that which was never there and that which only remained unspoken.

She must now assume that what had looked like bonds was nothing other than exactly that: Between Ghost and the townspeople, between Ghost and the other adventurers it crossed paths with on its journey, between the Hollow Knight and their shared father, and not in the least, between both of them and herself.

What had been dismissed as illusions, projections and wishful thinking had, simply, been as real as it seemed.

Which meant that here with her was an existence that she cared about… one that, had gone through hell in every conceivable way, and whom she nonetheless couldn’t quite seem to reach or understand. It was somewhat comparable to dealing with someone who spoke a different language, came from a wildly different culture or had all their skill and expertise in fields that lacked the slightest overlap with her own.

Someone who must be in a world of hurt.

She felt the chasm between them ever more keenly, now that she knew for certain to expect someone on the other side of it.

She couldn’t tell if her words were connecting, if her points were getting through, and she needed them to. This was crucial, one of the most crucial moments in all the story of her life that would long hang over the conclusion to come.

Did her sibling believe her?

Did it get the point?

Could it feel that she meant her words and wasn’t just… saying something she felt she should say, or reasoning based on some mistaken assumption?

Here was one of the last remaining shards of the long-lost home she’d once had, somehow returned beyond all expectations.

What could she do? What could she say?

It’s as if she had been trained in just about every possible skill except for this.

What was she to make of this particular silence?

Was her sibling dismissing all she was saying, unable to believe the prospect of absolution after carrying that weight for so long?

Or was this more a stunned silence, of having a lot to take in and process after hearing what it never expected to hear?

She wished that she could trust herself to know the difference.

Maybe her actions would have to do the talking.

 

...She lead the Vessel further inside.

Fortunately the ceiling of this place was rather high, a lucky coincidence, really, since this wasn’t a concern for Hornet when she

 

As long as she had been using this particular hideout (she had not really kept count), she had never once touched the dust-cover on the large, gaudy couch that took up a good amount of space in the bottom level of the large studio room.

Now, she was pulling the cloth off in a hurry, making sure to shake loose any remaining stray dust that may have come upon the cushions beneath.

Then, at long last, she was able to grant the Vessel the mercy of letting itself collapse on a comfortable surface, once it had left its weapon leaning against a nearby pillar.

It would not rise again for a long time.

All the exhaustion of the untold ages must have come crashing down on it the moment it ceased in the exertion of its will.

The last bit of the way had far more to do with falling than with deliberate laying down.

At last, it fell completely still, perfectly unmoving, like it must have hung all those years in those chains, indistinguishable from the stone of the temple and the cold steel of its fetters.

 

The princess was struck by the thought that her star-crossed sibling looked scarcely any different from the many washed-out shells of the city’s former dwellers which the two of them had come across on their way here.

In the dimness of the place, it would take a closer look to notice that the darkness behind its eyes was rather deeper and denser than just an ordinary shadow.

The difference may have been clearer if this being had not been so weakened.

But in noting this, she didn’t feel put off, or even met with an impenetrable sense of distance.

Instead, she found a hot, urgent surge of compassion welling up within her, a feeling that a hardened killer like her didn’t much know what to do with – there was nowhere for it to go, not much more than she could really do for the intended recipient at this point...

She would change the dressings on its wounds in due time, of course… she might bring it soul-infused water, too, to ensure that it would be sufficiently provided with the animating substance, or perhaps offer to bring it living prey snared in a trap for that purpose - she would still be able to make use of the actual meat herself.

But beyond that, what could she really do?

She would just have to wait and stay put, which was not something she was especially suited to.

The princess would effectively have to bet on the same divine strength that had somehow kept the Vessel moving and together until now.

Surely, its existence was unlikely to just ...flicker out now, after having survived the far worse ordeals before hand… it wouldn’t fade now, when it had at last outlived the force that had been trying to kill it for so long – but there was another way to look at it as well:

If the Hollow Knight had just barely held on through the agony thus far, that would have been because it had a purpose. A goal. A reason, a deep devotion that shone bright in its spirit even as it had endured more than enough torment to make anyone and everything cry out for cessation and oblivion, those most low-hanging fruits among the possible mercies.

Without the fate of the kingdom resting on its continued martyrdom, would the fallen champion of Hallownest have any reason left to muster the will to keep going?

Part of her still entertained a certain fear that with its last orders fulfilled or unable to be carried on no longer, the being that her father had created for just that one purpose would just ...stop and never stir again-- though she did not account that an especially rational concern now, having seen proof that the Little Ghost had managed to exist quite autonomously for several centuries with no master to tell it to do anything. Alien and unreadable though its existence may appear, the small speck of shadow had proven to be nothing if not extraordinarily motivated.

Even so, the horrid task for which both of them were created had defined the Hollow Knight’s entire existence from the moment of its birth, and taken up most of its life so far. It would scarcely have known anything else. It had not been given very much time to truly live or establish itself before being consigned to its grim fate, effectively cut short soon after entering the prime of its youth...

And now that everything was over, there was even less left for it to return to than there was for her, and she would not be so selfish as to think herself entitled to ask anything at all of it, least of all that it should stay for her.

Nor would she invoke the name of their one last still-living sibling when she didn’t even know where it was, or what cost it may have paid to bring about what seemed on all accounts like a legitimate miracle.

The being on that couch before her had already been asked to give far too much; More than enough injustice had been inflicted on it by those who had failed to understand anything about it despite being its own family. What right did she have to ask it to hang on just a little longer?

To endure yet more pain?

If it headed straight for the abyss as soon as it could make the journey, to return to whence it came, she would neither blame it nor try to stop it.

But she could not deny that she very much wished for another outcome.

What compelled her, more than all else, to express that wish was probably the knowledge that Ghost must have shared and acted upon that same wish… and it would certainly know what was possible for one of its kind. It may not have deliberately left this situation in her hand, but if it was still somewhere out there… if it ever did return, it would fall to her to explain to it what happened.

 

This time, she was not as reluctant in coming to the Hollow Knight’s side and placing one of her claws on top of its own, even taking a hold of two of its long, clawed digits.

“I will leave you to your rest now, but first, I need for you to know that you can stay with me as long as you need. Longer, too, if you so desire, though you would be free to go wherever you please.

I consider you part of my family, and I mean to take care of you accordingly. Understand please, that you are not in any way imposing – indeed, I am glad to have you returned to me, when I had long believed our parting to be final and yourself to be lost forever.

If these are to be your last days, I want to make them comfortable for you.

I would consider it an honor, if I could even begin to repay a little of the debt which this kingdom owes you. You have done all you could and you deserve peace… in fact, you deserve even more than that, which is why I am hoping, more than anything, that you will pull through.

I believe that you, more than anyone, deserve to live in the world that you have given so much to protect… and that goes for little Ghost as well, once we can find it.

I want for the three of us… and especially for you, to know something other than desperate times and desperate measures.”

What a thing to say. She said it because she wanted to say it, but it tasted preposterous on her mouth parts. The three of them were desperate measures.

Ghost, maybe, had managed to become something beyond that, despite being set on a path that was much more likely to end with simply being trampled to death and forgotten in a ditch somewhere-

The Princess knew well that she must count herself as the one who got away, if not wholly spared by the curse, then at least further from the epicenter.

Long had she sought to justify herself, to repay the debt, to prove herself worth the cost.

Repayment was never asked of her, yet she felt indebted all the same. It was maybe one of those careless gifts that children give freely and without thought, without real compulsion and yet, unbreakable as an iron yoke.

Still, she wanted- she was making the choice now, to believe.

“And I know that our long-lost sibling must have shared that same wish, seeing as it did not spare any expense to get you out alive…

It must have believed that you could pull through… I would want that as well, if that is possible. I want you to know this.”

The princess gave her sibling’s clawed digits just another deliberate squeeze, and then let go of its hand.

She would tax its attention no further today.

 

Outside, the rain kept prattling against the glass.

She wondered if there was a point in putting a blanket over a creature that had no warmth in its natural state.

Oh, to hell with it all!

She should have thrown one on top of Ghost the time she found it on that bench instead of standing there plotting its murder.

She was quite tired herself, of desperate times, desperate measures and the cold ugly calculus that they required. She wanted to know something else, at least once before she died.

Trying her best to channel the irritation she felt (mostly towards herself) into something productive, she waltzed straight off to where she thought she’d once seen when she’d first scoured the shelves and stores of this place for anything she could use.

It was long since she thought to look for, the memory was dim and the slow, crawling decay of everything may well have proceeded very much in the mean time… but she got lucky, as if today’s stray windfall of unlikely mercies still had a few specks of luck left in whatever jar it had come from – she found some light covers in a closet, not eaten through, even still reasonably clean, one last gift of the outgoing, imperfect stasis which had left much of the city in uneven states of decay.

In the grand scheme of things, her Father’s attempt to hang onto the reins of time had proved a cure just barely preferable to the disease, a frantic, scrambled attempt to drive out the devil with the beelzebub that cost her mother’s life.

But she was willing to thank Him, just one last time, for this one clean bed-sheet, as fresh and untouched as when its owner (or more likely, their cleaners) had put it away.

There was still something that made her feel less alone, even comforted, about the thought that she might be taking advantage of the final lingering scraps of His magic.

 

It was hard to tell for certain just from looking, but the princess was positive that the Vessel must have been fast asleep already by the time she returned to the living room. At least, she couldn’t imagine where it could have found the strength to hang onto consciousness any longer.

She could only hope that its sleep would be deep, restful and, most all all, utterly dreamless…

As silent and black as the most remote of caverns, closed off for ages and left untouched by so much as the memory of light.

 

All she could do now was wait.

She busied herself, with such activities as she could carry out without producing too much noise.

She spun some more silk, assembled some more tools (in so far as she could do it without the need for resounding hammering noises), though she had not really used up any of the latter.

She stood on the balcony and looked for a while if she could see anything moving in the streets.

With the immediate emergencies dealt with, her thoughts inevitable wandered to the wider world and the further implications of recent events… she had not come across a single walking husk or infected beast on her way here, which would have been an impossibility just the day before.

By all intents and purposes, it did look like every influence of the infection had truly vanished without a trace…

But she to believe this so easily? To be satisfied with just accepting this as a boon from above, without knowing the cause? What sort of scenes may be taking place all over this land, if the plague truly was gone?

Probably sooner rather than later, she would have to leave from here to go and get answers.

She could busy herself with various preparations and maintenance task for a while here, but sitting idle did not agree with her, least of all when she might finally be able to make a true difference…

At some point she would have to ascertain just how many survivors she would be dealing with.

 

She was reluctant to leave the Vessel’s side in its current condition, but she had other obligations, too…

And wasn’t this the tragedy of all this.

The poor creature had not even been completely unloved. But there were always, always those other obligations and bigger pictures that would never have the decency to simply stop being just because that would be right and fair and just. There was always something else more important.

How had she once put it? ‘We do not chose the situations we are born into.’

Well. Leaving it to its own devices so that she might go out for a scouting excusion and ascertain the larger situation could hardly compare to everything that had come before.

She was hoping to at least delay until she could be certain that her sibling’s condition was reasonably stable and likely to remain such, and that they would be clear-minded enough to understand her explanation of where she was going and her assurances that she would absolutely return… the princess couldn’t be sure what was happening in its mind and heart.

She wanted to avoid some scenario where it might awaken in a delirious haze, find her gone, and make the kind of assumptions than a thinking creature might make if it were in excruciating pain and not quite in its right mind…

On the other hand, the princess could not say how much her presence at its side really counted for, even when she could be here.

 

Hornet resolved to explain her intention to leave and ascertain the situation outside once her sibling woke back up.

Idleness did not agree with her.

It is not that she was impatient, but she needed to be busy.

To be doing something. She did not keep any means of light entertainment here, as that was not a luxury she had really been able to afford, nor a concern she would have a nerve for.

The closest things she did to recreation were still tasks with practical purpose, but those among them which she might find something calming, stimulating or nostalgic – things like hunting, weaving and crafts project that allowed her to descend into a pleasant state of concentration and flow, where there was nothing but the task at hand…

 

...she decided then that the Vessel was going to get a new cape. Weaving something suited to its size should keep her occupied for a quite a while. With some luck on both accounts, she’d have it done by the time her sibling would be recovered enough to be up and about, and therefore have a use for it. Something custom-made might be a good idea anyway, so that she could make sure that the clasps on it could be undone with a single claw.

She had a solid image in her mind of the approximate style that it always used to wear; Swishing white capes (worn either on their own, or with shining silver armor) featured in many of her memories of it; always, always pristine alabaster. Even the statue in Fountain Square depicted it in such a getup.

Aside from the floor-length one that it had gone to its doom with, most of them must have ended up in the same place as the rest of its very few earthly possessions: Wherever it was that the White Palace had disappeared to. The King and Queen could never bring themselves to order its old rooms cleared out; Not the nursery it had in infancy, before Hornet was even born, nor the different room it would have inhabited by the time she would have been old enough to remember her visits.

She doesn’t think that she was ever explicitly shown the location, but once she got it into her head to get the strange, silent youth from the palace to be her playmate, she made it her business to find out to find out where its room is and pay it the occasional visit when she couldn’t find it in its usual haunts (such as the training grounds, that one balcony overlooking the yard from the third floor, or just absently looking out a window in whatever corridor its next assignment was to take place.)

Its personal room had been something of a contradiction, somehow both baroque and minimalist. It was just about the size you would expect for the dwelling of a royal child, with its own adjacent washroom and dressing room and walls covered in the same, gleaming intricate decorations that were typical of the palace.

But there was barely anything in the room, most of it being equipment and the means for the upkeep of such.

What furniture there was would have been of the same make as all the other fitments in the palace: lavish, intricate artwork all following a consistent design, thought up either by the King and Creator Himself when He first planned for the place, or else contributed by some devotee who may have offered some of their finest work as an offering to their patron god. To have any representative from the crown (much less the King himself) place an order to one’s business was once considered one of the most coveted honors among the artists and tradespeople of Hallownest (if not personal devotion to the King, then certainly because any such artisan was due to get their business swamped with geo from fashionable aristocrats looking to jump on the latest hype tram)

But the sheer sparseness of it – scarcely more than a single armoire, a single bed, a desk with a matching chair (which she didn’t recall seeing used) and a weapons’ rack – nonetheless managed to give the room a spartan, utilitarian appearance somehow.

All the place contained was arranged near the center of it, and otherwise taken up by nothing more than empty space, which gave it all a sense of blurring together into a liminal plain of stark white, barren as a salt flat.

There were never any decorations or little personalized touches, not even in the form of the messes that growing youths usually make in the process of learning to be more self-sufficient.

The occupant dwelt among what would now be priceless museum pieces, quite in keeping with the representative and ritual functions expected of a palace and the ruling family’s role as patrons of the arts; At the same time, it could very much be said that the Vessel had only received only the bare minimum of what it needed to have, nothing that wasn’t for a purpose.

There had been a few indulgences in its earlier childhood room, such as music box, but it seems that the knight-to-be did not take that with it when it was given the larger room… though who could say if it had a choice in the matter? It could have been told to fetch what it would still need, leaving room for childish things to have been left behind on purpose, or someone else could have made the decision not to bring it, which could have been anyone from a humble servant to the royal pair themselves.

It would have taken a single, passing order from the King for His staff to take the room’s meager contents, put them all in whatever storage space they were originally fetched from, and refurbish the place to be used for something else, maybe as a guest room for visiting nobles or yet another workshop.

But it seems that order never came. The place remained untouched.

Hornet did recall hiding in there a few times after the sealing, when she was a sullen adolescent still grappling with the loss of her mother – it was the most excellent place to seek out when she wanted to be alone, because no one ever came there.

As much as He couldn’t stand the thought of having it repurposed, the King could not bear to go into the empty room, either. He acted in many ways as if He had excised the room’s existence from His mind… she doesn’t know if He did go back once the plague resurfaced; She had been spending most of her time at the Hive by then.

But though He may rarely have looked at them, the King could never bring himself to repurpose or dispose of the Vessel’s things, and that’s why they had all gone with Him to wherever it was that He perished.

The only earthly possession it had left in all the world, out of the very, very few it was ever permitted to have, was the cracked old nail that had gone with it into its tomb, corroded by the miasma within despite its masterful make.

...a dreadful thought, really.

An injustice that could not even begin to be remedied by doubling the number of the Hollow Knight’s belongings to a measly two.

She thought back now, to that time she was told that a being such as it was unlikely to have any likes or preferences. The odds for that looked rather different now.

She supposed that she was going to have a chance now, to find out the truth of that matter.

Was that initial impression of hers correct, or did it never actually like dressing in white? It was conceivable that the Vessel might even have resented it, either as a reminder of the impossible expectations of placed on it, of the ‘purity’ it had fallen short of; One could see something degrading, in being draped to match the furniture like yet another part of it. The princess herself certainly wouldn’t have appreciated such a thing. But maybe that was simply projecting her own sensibilities. She had never once let go of the traditional hunter’s cloaks worn by the youth of the Nest, even if that made her the sole speck of red in all the gleaming incandescence of the palace;

But the Vessel was from there, as much as anyone else was. Perhaps it was just as proud of wearing father’s colors as all the other loyal knights and faithful retainers, and would be all the more inclined to do so now He was gone, to uphold His memory.

Or it might be something more complex than that – maybe some ambivalent mixture of both. Or maybe it did genuinely prefer white once, but didn’t anymore. Centuries had passed… centuries spent in agony. Whatever thoughts and feelings it once had may have changed quite profoundly, the taste of it thoroughly soured by the bitterness that came after. It wouldn’t be the only one of father’s once faithful followers to regret their choices; She was aware that Ze’Mer, for example, had come to regret serving His insignia after His flight and the demise of her lover.

It might feel like it was being mocked, if she were to go to wrap the ruin it was now in a remainder of the strength it once possessed. Or, heavens forbid, it might get the absurd idea in its head that it no longer deserved to wear father’s colors after having ‘failed’ him and been left a marred shell of its former self in the process, as if that did not rather heighten the depth of its sacrifice;

She would be sure to make it put such abstruse notions out of its head, if she should catch any whiff of a suggestion that it thought this way.

The point was that she simply didn’t know.

She never knew very much about it. She tried to know it, she thinks, at least in the beginning, but there seemed to be nothing for her to grasp onto, nothing for her to touch, or hold, even though she had longed for it… and then there was always that doubt of whether there was anyone listening on the other side at all.

Now, she knew it to be there – an alien existence that had been completely misunderstood from the beginning because it was different… and probably uglier reasons beside, despair-fueled, recalcitrant, self-serving reasons. Someone who had gone through hell, sold and betrayed by all those whim it may have trusted.

She was not sure to which degree she could claim that there had ever been any kind of natural, familiar ease of interaction between them. There was enough that she missed it after it was gone. There was not enough to keep her from doubting if what she had seen from them had ever been real…

And that was then. Brief, scattered moments of the past, long dwarfed now by half an eternity of ruin.

The long years hung between them like a dark and heavy curtain.

She was different now. A hardened survivor, rather than the spry little sister it once knew.

It was different, laid to waste in every way by the raging fire of a goddess’ wrath.

What could she do? How could she begin?

She could not allow for that ignorance to result in paralyzing inaction because then, things would never, ever change. In this, at least, she was not like her father at all.

When there was an obstacle in her path, her first instinct was to hit it and figure the rest out as she went.

She would just... have to ask the Vessel, and make that work somehow.

Ghost had evidently perused a lot of the kingdom’s remaining businesses – one would assume that it would express what it wanted to buy by having a look at the shopkeeper’s wares and pointing at whatever it wished to buy or hear more about. So that was a form of communication that one could definitely expect from a void being.

She might present the Hollow Knight with a selection of possible colors. If it turns out that it never actually had any preference for white clothing and simply went along with what it was given or what it thought would be expected as an extension of its representative duties at court, she could always dye the cloth some other shade. That’s the practical part about making something yourself, you get to customize and tweak it however you please. She might find out its actual favorite color in the process; A bit of a trivial concern, really, but something she would expect herself to have learned a long, long time ago, if she was supposed to be its sister.

And if this situation were to drag on longer than she expected, she might end up making a little something for Ghost as well – somehow she had better idea for what its preferences much be, despite having known it a much shorter time. That one did mostly as it pleased – one need not be concerned that one might be getting some kind of ‘expected’ answer that ‘should’ be given, rather than a genuine one. For some definition of an ‘answer’…

 

Once in a while, when she would stand up from her work for whatever reason (such as to help herself to a light supper from a jar of crawlid jerky she had stored in a corner), she would pause to cast a glance at the unmoving Vessel, keeping a good distance away so as not to risk waking it.

Fortunately she had, by necessity, long since become rather skilled at the art of light, silent steps, so it did not take especially much effort for her to pass by without a noise.

The rain prattled on outside.

 

At some point, she found that the concentration she could put into her work had slipped from her usual best and took this for the right moment to take a rest of her own in her makeshift den.

If she were of a more trusting nature, she might have considered this the first time since the resurgence of the plague that she could rest unguarded – but old, ingrained habits of caution do not disintegrate so easily, especially when survival had depended on them for so long.

She had not quite got certain confirmation that the Old Light was truly gone forever.

At least she didn’t know for sure that the vengeful goddess might not still be lurking somewhere, poised to lull those unaware into a false sense of security… the princess did not assign this an especially high probability, but it was not zero, and therefore, it was still too early to believe.

Nonetheless she had learned long ago that avoiding the call of sleep altogether was not a solution.

First of all, because nothing out of the countless desperate things that had been tried had ever constituted a workable solution until now, not even the works of gods and kings.

But among all these futile strategies, depriving oneself of sleep fell in the pile of measures that were actively worse than nothing. Many had been driven to it nonetheless, in those last, dark days, terrified that they might lose hold of their minds and individuality every time they went to bed; But all that would accomplish is to weaken one’s body and mind and therefore leave a person more susceptible. The half-derailed, irritable thoughts of sleep-deprived minds were already halfway en route to that madness.

So she had needed to discipline herself, to take a regular, calculated risk to avoid a greater folly;

The mantras she would say to herself before sleep were as much to facilitate the process of sleeping itself as all as they were for protection.

For now, she kept up the habit and left her needle within arm’s reach.

 

If she dreamed at all, she did not recall it;

She came to in an unlikely state of feeling wholly and truly rested that she had not experienced for Gods know how long.

Had she been asked the day before, she could not have described the sensation of a sweltering, oppressive presence bearing down on her, but now that it was gone, she knew it by its absence.

It was like finally touching something clean after knowing only sticky, sugary grime, or like coming up for temperate freshness after drowning in an all-pervading, suffocating humidity and heat.

The cavern that held the city was as dim as it had always been, but even the most muted of colors somehow seemed brighter, the lines clearer, the distinct objects more defined.

A crispness and clarity could be felt, the likes of which had long since ceased to be found anywhere in these fatally poisoned, miasma-riddled caves.

The princess gathered up her weapon and leaped straight down from the improved silken den under the stairs that lead to the second level of her hideout’s large, central room, making sure to take her weapon with her, noting the ever so subtle increase in the sharpness and acuity of her senses and responses.

It was like coming up to the air after being mired in water; Like sobering up from some wild intoxication, and most of all, like waking up from some befuddling dream and only then realizing that one was dreaming at all.

For how long had she effectively sat in a pot that was ever so slowly coming for a boil? This… weight, this all-pervading, bronze-voiced ringing… none of it had appeared at all at once.

It had crept in slowly and subtly, unceasingly assaulting every shred of consciousness between the wastes and King’s Pass, building to a maddening crescendo ever since the blight first returned, and mounting into a climatic fever-pitch in this last, recent stretch of time, when the seals had begun leaking more than ever…

She realized that every single thing with the slightest capacity for dreaming must be experiencing this relief along with her, everything down to the simplest beasts, but being felt with increasing potency in proportion to the complexity of the dreams a creature might produce.

Without the advantage of her semi-divine blood, others may be taking slightly longer to shake off the effects or not lose them so completely, but while not everything that has been stomped on can rise back up, the immeasurable, oceanic pressure from the other side was simply nowhere to be found anymore.

Now she could believe it.

Now she could begin to think…

Now she might entertain the possibility that the Old Light could well and truly be vanquished for good...

 

As she walked further into the central room, still stricken with disbelief and harsh realization, she marked the silhouetted outline of her elder sibling, still exactly where she had left it, on some long-dead noble’s fancy couch.

She noticed that it had actually shifted its position at some point to come to rest on its good side rather than remaining flopped prone onto the very chest that she had painstakingly sewn back together the day before.

That was the only discernible sign of life.

Oh sweet, merciful gods, which had all been just as powerless before this force.

Whatever she may have felt of the Radiance’s oppressive presence and the steadily mounting, subliminal suffocation She had effected by Her very existence, it could only be the faintest fraction of what must have been endured by the one who had held Her back all these years by bearing the raw, unfiltered brunt of Her ire, wholly exposed to her in the most intimate manner…

How could a creature that had experienced such a thing be anything other than thoroughly burnt out?

 

The princess drew near, deliberately allowing her steps to make sounds, but just faint ones.

She watched carefully for anything like a reaction.

There was none whatsoever.

She honestly couldn’t say whether or not it was awake; The deep, abyssal darkness in its eye sockets would tell her nothing to that end.

 

If it was sleeping, (and she knew that such beings did sleep) she certainly didn’t wish to wake it; Gods know it deserved its rest.

She sat down at her makeshift workbench and made an effort to get all the half-finished implements up to the point where the next step would require noisy hammering or the like.

She had long become accustomed to making just about everything she used or needed with her own hands, if she could not scavenge it somewhere; In this, she’d had the benefit of her upbringing in Deepnest, where the inhospitable nature of the wilds forced the people to lead an existence much more closely connected to their beastly roots; There was much more of an expectation that any adult member of the tripe would know how to survive in the wild, how to catch their own food, fashion their own clothes, and how to make the tools and implements needed for such a thing. Even the queen would cement her dominance by displaying her prowess in the hunt;

The pampered city bug to whom this dwelling once belonged would probably have been quite lost without the comforts of civilization.

At the same time, she was not one to completely dismiss the possibilities afforded by newfangled advances, or to dismiss other sources of strength – if she had a strain of that vaunted wyrm-greed in her after all, it might be found in her willingness to use and master whatever she could get her hands on, leaving naught untapped. She could it even less to be a choosing beggar, particularly because she didn’t share His vast power. All the more reason to stay clever, crafty and sharp…

Yet it was not from His side of things that she got her keen hunter’s instincts from – the self-same ones that eventually interrupted her concentration on her handiwork with the unmistakable sensation of being watched, which very rarely now failed to make the bristles on the back of her neck stand on end.

She was used by now to this sensation of a distinct, chilling un-presence narrowing in on her – not even the little Ghost could consistently manage to sneak up on her.

Which is why the princess was not at all surprised to turn around and find that the Hollow Knight had lifted its head onto a gaudy couch cushion so that it might watch her without straining itself more than it could currently keep up for any length of time, at least not without discomfort.

From that alone, she could gather that it must still be rather weakened – even a divine being could not shake off ages of torment in a single night.

Even so, there was something distinctly relieving about seeing any sign of life from her sibling, all the more so to be seeing indications of lucid, sustained attention.

“Vessel! You’re awake.”

She turned around more fully on the stool she had been sitting on.

 

The princess hoped still that she had managed to make her words sound like a light, easy greeting, and not so much a sound of alarm.

The princess watched it carefully, searching its scarred, unreadable face for anything discernible.

She did think that it was looking at her rather intently, almost as if…

Well.

More or less as one would expect one to stare after being reunited with a family member after some unfathomable length of time.

The day before, it must have been too far out of its mind with pain and weakness to properly take in the sight of her, as it might in this quiet moment.

“Come to think of it, it suppose it must come a shock to you, to see me all grown up. I was still practically a child when we last spoke.”

She thought she might have guessed right.

She could not be too sure, but she did think that its glance may have darted past her shoulders and the hem of her cloak, giving particular attention to the tools laid out on the table beyond.

At first, this confounded her a little, but then, it dawned on her, rather suddenly.

She was sitting at a workbench, with tools and half-finished contraptions strewn all around her, in a hidden, remote location that might well considered something of a ‘secret workshop’, a small pale bug with long sharp horns.

Though unspoken, an implication hung heavily in the air.

A suggestion of just whom the Vessel thought she had grown up to resemble.

The realization brought up a kaleidoscopic mess of warring, contradictory feelings.

She could not really deny that there was a certain truth to it.

“You think- … you mean to imply…"

It took the princess just a moment to get a hold on that uncharacteristic loss of composure. 

"I- I’m just much more used to being compared to my mother.”

Followers and detractors of the King alike would tend to liken her rather to the Beast, either to brand her as an outsider whose marked otherness they couldn’t reconcile with being the daughter of their sovereign; They might find it absurd to compare a small, wild, half-savage creature with the overwhelming might of one they saw as their creator (Never mind that they stood at about the same height once she reached adulthood; She might even have been taller, if one did not count his horns. )

The unfamiliar traits might also have been pointed out more innocently, because that which they didn’t know simply stood out to them more – but neither response would seem to present her with a faithful mirror untainted with the speakers own preconceptions.

Nor did the peoples of Deepnest, with whom the Pale King was not so popular while Herrah was still deeply respected and admired, even years after her departure. Especially after she was gone, they must have loved the idea that something of her lived on.

That was honestly an idea which Hornet very much cherished as well; Besides, she felt the obligation to continue the Beast’s legacy, seeing what she had given to bring her into the world.

To the people of Deepnest, she had been theirs , albeit given as a ‘gift’, which was certainly something she cherished… but there had certainly been times when she had wanted the part of her that had come from Him to be more acknowledged rather than get brushed under the table as some unfortunate necessity.

That was part of her, too.

But so was a proud huntress of the Nest, and the memory of that little girl who had once lost both her mother and her sibling to his plans, as was the disillusioned young woman who had seen the only world she had known crumbling all around her when He could not save it.

She never wanted to become like Him.

To be likened to Him in any way should have been the most scathing of indictments, coming from the Hollow Knight…

Though it was her impression that it meant this as a compliment, that it saw, perhaps, something bittersweet and nostalgic.

 

Far be it from her to deny it the comfort of finding an echo of something familiar in the foreign, deeply-changed world that it found itself dumped onto, a strong afterimage of someone it missed, somehow continuing into the future after everything else seemed to have faded and died…

There was just something wrong about the notion that it would find a reminder of the King’s workshop to be nostalgic. Surely, it must have endured horrific things in there… if she thought of how it may have been conditioned to simply accept these, she almost felt some obligation to feel outraged and disturbed on its behalf. But the last thing it needed was yet another person presuming to speak on its behalf.

It must have appreciated that the late monarch spoke to it in that place – and didn’t that just… say everything that needed to be said.

It might have given up on expecting anything more so that it might have at least that one support in its dreadful, hopeless existence… and that was definitely not a role she was comfortable taking.

She wanted to be different from that…

And yet, here they were, as what the world had made them: The magician’s apprentice, and the homunculus He had cooked up in a flask once.

Both His children. Both his legacy in different ways.

Both, now finally reunited, as the scarred and weathered adults that the weight of said legacy had made of them.

(However she might feel about that.)

 

But this was not about her, nor was it the time to be expecting too much at once.

Further expectations were also among the last things it needed.

Not that she could be too sure what it might want or need, since she did not know.

She didn’t understand. Smarter, mightier beings than her had failed to understand.

At least, she had to grant that this might mean that it saw her as having come into her own and having blossomed in her skills and talents, rather than dwelling on what the years had taken from her.

Perhaps the Vessel was proud of her, in much the typical manner of an older sibling – maybe it saw a glimmer of comfort in her presence. She certainly hoped it would…

If she was right to hope anything at all based on what she might gleam for the being’s dark, unfathomable glance.

 

“I miss Him too.”, was all she could finally say to this in the end.

Because it was true, despite everything.

Because she could not claim to be above that either, leaving aside the question of whether or not she should be.

Because it’s rather hard to sit at the table with someone in the morning and to then relegate them to a matter of philosophical discussion – it may have been simpler, had he been a simple, cliched villain, but she was not going to make him into that to rational away the dull ache that may have coexisted with whatever else may have been brought up by the thought of his absence.

It would have struck her as cowardly act that would only have widened whatever gulf existed between her and the other being that now kept her company.

 

“There probably aren’t that many left who would even remember Him the way that you and I do, especially with the Dreamers gone...” she mused at last, making the choice to allow the feeling for now, feeling her way to some acceptable compromise.

It is also simply a true statement.

“Besides us, there are few left who would have known the way He was, when you’d actually talk to Him, rather than this grand untouchable idol everyone saw Him as. I think that might well have been what broke Him in the end. Far and wide, the people had hitched their fortunes to His wagon and expected Him to always have a plan, the solution, the answers. Especially such weak existences that struggled to come up with visions of their own. And then, suddenly, He didn’t have the answer. He tried everything He could, no matter what it cost Him, and those closest to Him, and it still wasn’t enough. He tried so hard to live up to what everybody was expecting Him to be, to deliver what was promised… and then He couldn’t. And He had to face all those frightened, hopeful people every day, all of them still so devoted him, still keeping their faith, trusting and waiting that He’d figure something out-

I understand why He couldn’t face them in the end. It’s rather why I prefer to rely on my own strength in so far as I can. I don’t wish to incur any more debts. But I rather doubt that I need to explain this to you, I suspect that you, too, might have a few things in common with him in that regard…

 

...what? Does it surprise you, that I would think so?

You are his offspring every bit as much as I am. You would be well within your rights to hate Him, disown Him and want nothing more to do with Him forevermore, but, no one could deny you your rights as part of his legacy, if you should claim them.”

And as she intones this, she thinks, for the first time, that maybe the chasm between them isn’t really as great as she may have thought.

“But listen – the best thing we can do, to honor His memory, is to avoid repeating His mistakes. That way they won’t have been for nothing.

That way, it will have counted for something…do you understand?”

She still wasn’t certain that she was getting through, all things considered.

Every time she might think that a moment of understanding had passed between them, she would find herself doubting it again before too long.

She wasn’t good at this.

She just wished she could see clear, tangible results – like the dent of a hammer upon metal, fabric appearing from thread, or a fresh kill laying clearly vanquished at her feet.

 

She turned her mind to more practical matters: “...anyway, we need to change the dressings on your wounds.”

 

A couple of days passed like this.

Uneventful, but with a building anticipation somewhere in the background.

No one intruded on the lofty hideaway; The princess had chosen it in part because the rest of the spire was deserted. Scavengers rarely came all this way up.

She had repaired the one-broken elevator, but set it up so that it needed her key to operate. She realized that she might want to make an extra key, if the Vessel was going to be staying her longer… in fact, she did. She got a great many unfinished things concluded, some of which had been begun quite a while ago. The cape, too, proceeded apace, but so far she had not chosen to inform the intended recipient what she was working on or who it was intended to be for. The longer she went without knowing what exactly was going on, the more her hands itched to be busy.

Her sibling, by contrast, did not do very much at all –

Not that this would be unexpected for a creature that was gravely wounded and still running a high fever. If it responded to her approach at all – usually not by doing anything more than turning its head a little bit – she might pause to speak to it briefly, about anything she might think of.

Old memories. Speculations of the future. Things she had done in its absence.

She always stopped herself before long, torn between wanting to offer some sort of comfort without really knowing how, and not wanting to impose or to keep the ravaged void creature from its rest.

The princess wished that she could point to anything that might signify that it was beginning to turn the corner, but that would have been reaching.

She did not think that the unfortunate being was getting any worse, either, so far as she could discern, but in a regular mortal, an elevated temperature for this length of time would be worrisome.

Eventually, she considered if cloths soaked in cold rainwater were worth a try, since she could not really think of anything else.

As she explained the measure, she made a point of telling it to let her know if she did anything it didn’t like.

She stopped short of suggesting that it might do so by raising its arm for example.

It irritated her to get this little of a response in return and the idea that it might endure without protest if she were to do something disagreeable to it was downright terrifying…

Gods know this being had already suffered more than enough at the hands of careless ignorance.

But at the same time, she knew that if she were put out of commission and found herself uncomfortable, in pain and incapable of doing much about it, the last thing she would want is to be condescended to in any way, especially if she were not sure if and when she might regain some semblance of her own strength.

Idleness did not agree with her, as had been mentioned before.

Not that she’d ever had much reason to endure such a thing. She could hardly ever recall being sick and she usually recovered quickly and without complications on the rare occasions when she didn’t manage to avoid getting hit – she was usually quick enough to get away. For all that her father’s blood had been her mother’s second choice for the begetting her offspring, the semi-divine strength this granted her had proven rather convenient on many occasions.

Her half-siblings, if anything, should have been still more tenacious; she would have expected them to bounce back from most things that did not kill them outright (and even quite a few that should have). But the Radiance, of course, distinctly did not fall under ‘most things’.

Hornet had to consider the very real possibility that carrying a very unwilling, very angry deity inside one’s body until Her essence visibly burst forth from within was simply not something one could recover from, not even if by some very literal miracle, She were somehow removed without doing further damage.

She still went to fetch a bucket, put it out on the balcony and went to find some mostly grime-free dustcloths that she might get clean.

It’s the principle of the thing.

The Vessel regarded her, as she went about the preparations.

Having found some suitable pieces of cloth, she took a second bucket outside and threw them in so they might start soaking.

The prattling noises of the rain were dulled again when she closed the glass door.

Her sibling was still looking at her.

“Don’t you dare tell me anything about not bothering with lost causes.”

She proclaimed, in defiance, though the odds of it actually telling her anything were of course rather low.

“The entire kingdom seemed a lost cause for the longest time, and yet I have stood guard over it – If I were the kind to accept the inevitable, I would have let myself be walled in along with the rest of the Hive, or I would have left with the greater part of the Weavers, or on my own, with one of the last merchant caravans that were turned away when all the doors were closed.

I will see this through to the bitter end, if bitter it must be – besides, I can think of at least two people that we both know who I am sure would want me to at least make the attempt to do what I can, for whatever that’s worth. And I owe one of them.”

What wouldn’t she give now to take a peek at the secrets held behind those dark eyes – everything that was shut up in there for ages, unbeknownst to anyone.

“You don’t have to thank me, either, if that’s your intention… although I do appreciate it, if it was.”

She waited for a moment, as though leaving room for an answer, though she didn’t have reason to expect that one would ever come.

Then, she turned and went to check on the buckets.

 

She was not convinced that the soaked rags helped at all; But she was less reluctant to keep talking to the Vessel afterwards. If she had effectively signed up to watch it fade away slowly… or even to sit by its side as it might hang on miserably for quite some time, she at least wanted it to know-

a great many things, really.

But mostly, that its deeds and all its long harrowing struggle had counted for something.

That, she thinks, is what she might wish to hear, if she could no longer perform her duties…

It might well be an inaccurate guess – the two of them were rather different in many regards, to say the very least.

But it was the best guess she had to go off.

If her sibling were to fall asleep to the sound of her voice, then that was just as well. She told it as much. She sat down at its side, a few times, while she was spinning her threads.

She had quite a few spools prepared, in the end, for what she might do when she had a chance to go outside…

 

That, at least, could not be postponed indefinitely.

She explained as much to the Vessel, having made sure that it was awake for that one.

She had to ascertain what was happening out there. She had to make sure the threat was really gone.

She had to see if she could find little Ghost.

Of course, the Hollow Knight did not object to this.

It would have understood; It likely would have wanted all these things seen to as much as she did, if she’d grasped anything at all about it.

She was the one reluctant to leave it – though she knew herself well enough to know that she would leave anyway. Perhaps it was quite right to imply that she had grown up to resemble their father.

If that was its intention.

 

But when she mentioned that one of the places she might visit in hope for answers was the White Lady’s abode, another thought came to her.

Something about voices and mothers, and how the queen had always been the one in charge of social niceties at the court, and some of the comfort she had received back in the day, from someone she might never match in the art of dispensing it.

What wouldn’t she give to her her own mother’s voice one more time. To take in the smell of her and be steadied by her presence...

“...actually, would you like me to bring her? The White Lady?”

There was, at first, no response to that.

Not even a glance turned in her direction.

“She hasn’t left her confinement in a very long time now, nor does she intend to, but it may be worth the attempt to persuade her – if it is her shame in what happened to you that led her to seclude herself, then surely that same shame should compel her to come to your side. I could call it your final request. At least, she should not object if I were to bring you to her-”

 

The Vessel must have understood then that its sister truly intended to do this, and that she would be set on that course of action if nothing happened to divert her from it.

It sat up with a swiftness that one might not expect it to still be capable of.

Then, it raised up the very same claw with which it had just been propping itself up, held it up flat in front of itself, and moved it, one one sharp, fast movement, from one side to another.

No great deciphering or extrapolating was needed to grasp what could be meant by this:

‘Cease. Desist. Do not.’

This was the single clearest communication she had gotten from it yet.

And it wasn’t to express some request or desire, or even a call for help or a protest of pain;

It had to be this.

 

“You… you don’t wish to see her.”

There wasn’t a nod or a gesture or any other confirmation.

Neither did it lie back down – it simply sat there, speechless, as if frozen.

If there was something it wished to convey at all, it must have been something rather more complicated, something too subtle to be packaged in the same blunt and direct manner of its last answer.

Think, Hornet, think…

“...Not quite? In part?”

She tried to think back to her limited time at the palace and scour her memory for any sign that anything might have happened between those two… but it just recalled to her how rare it was for the Hollow Knight and the queen to have anything to do with each other at all.

“...you think that she doesn’t want to see you. ...of course. Of course.

You’d avoid her because she was always avoiding you. That’s the real reason why you would never come inside when she’d be playing her harp, wasn’t it? Even back then, when we were children- You thought that would bother her, or upset her, or that she wouldn’t react well, in any case…”

The Princess held back a sigh.

The Vessel… was not exactly wrong about this.

 

To think it understood, all along. That it knew perfectly well, with crisp, lucid awareness, from its youngest years, that its own mother could not bear to look at it, that she found it repulsive.

It had known perfectly well who she was.

 

The princess scrambled for words, which was not an experience she was much used to.

She expected of herself to choose her next words carefully.

“You- I asked you to tell me if I’m doing something you don’t want, and you did, so I am grateful. Know that I fully intend to respect your wishes in this matter. I will not ask her to come.

But I want you to know- that if she had known you were standing right outside the door in that corridor- her choices would probably have been different.

I hope you know enough of me to be certain that I would not ask you to grovel without dignity, or to turn your back to someone who is bound to turn on you again and again.

You will not hear me tell you that you owe her anything or that you should go to her for her sake. But, if you, for your own reasons, have any desire that things between you could be different – not this time, not right now, just… eventually. I want you to know that, so far as I can tell, her faults came from ignorance and grief rather than malice or indifference. I have been ignorant too in my time. I know what is, what it can lead to. I’ve done things that both you and Ghost would not owe me forgiveness for.”

It was a somber explanation, not in any way a lecture but rather the princess’ own justification, and one she was not sure she would have accepted if the places were swapped.

“It’s also that… she was good to me. She was there for me, after both you and mother were taken from me in the same day. I did wonder sometimes, if she was making me your replacement. Even before you had to leave…

How could we. You were right there. You were right there.”

She had to keep it together. This wasn’t her plight to get emotional over.

“But of course, that is precisely what we didn’t realize. We misunderstood everything about you from the beginning. Even I didn’t, or, if I did, I didn’t keep much faith in it.

I think father knew , in his heart. He acted as if He did. He was never the same, after doing that to you. But his mind told Him it was impossible, and we both know which of the two He would listen to. Honestly, people don’t need to be lied to, and you don’t strike me as a weakling who could not bear the truth, so I will tell you this: I don’t think he would have spared you, even if he had known. Not if there was a chance that you could still buy us time…

But if He had, I think He would have made better use of that time and gone looking for other, more long-term solutions before the situation became as dire as it did when He was forced to flee.

He was blindsided alright. If He saw anything about this with his foresight, He must have gotten something wrong or misjudged what He saw… or maybe He saw that all paths lead to ruin, and proceeded anyway…

 

...Don’t tell me that you would have agreed with such choices!”

 

The Vessel was, strictly speaking, not telling her anything at all.

At some point during the princess’ speech, it had placed its claw back onto the couch to support itself.

Aside from that, it was silent and motionless as ever.

 

She decided to let the topic rest and focus on the task at hand… on having a task again that was more alike to the sorts of problems she was used to.

It was then that she made her excursion to the surface town, to the Queen’s hideaway, and finally to the waterways. The Lady expressed some surprise that the ‘previous Vessel’ had been left alive, like she didn’t think it her place to comment much, but distinctly didn’t understand why either Hornet herself or Ghost would do such a thing - what point there would be in prolonging an empty mockery of existence (as she saw it), past the end of the grim circumstances that had necessitated its creation, particularly now that it was thoroughly broken in such a way that might just allow for some semblance of suffering? 

To blame her would be to throw stones within a glass house; The princess was not innocent of distancing herself, of hardening her heart and telling herself whatever she needed to believe to somehow keep going and do what she thought she must, nor could she wash her hands of gross negligence born from ignorance. The only real difference between herself and the Lady might be that Hornet had seen the outside of that cocoon in recent days.

Still, looking back, it was probably for the better that she didn’t bring her sibling to see the former queen or have the two of them meet – at least, not yet.

 

After that, she returned and made her way back to her hideaway in the abandoned spire.

She almost caught herself thinking about ‘going back home’.

The city had never been home to her, least of all in its heyday – and this improvised hideout, even less so, it was always meant to be a transient, utilitarian thing.

But there is something more to the concept than a simple sense of place.

One aspect of a home could be simply that it was wherever you might find another waiting for you.

 

She turned her key into the elevator, carefully sidestepped the maze of traps she had laid out near the entrance to the apartment, and made her way to the large central room.

“Vessel, I have returned.”

 

The Princess froze in her tracks – her sibling wasn’t on the couch.

The covers were thrown back, the last set of once rain-soaked cloths she’s hung on its forehead were left discarded, the distinctive outline of its long-pale horns nowhere to be seen against the gaudy violet and yellow pattern of the couch.

 

“Vessel? Hollow Knight?”

 

She shouldn’t have startled as she did. The void creature had not gone far. She spotted it at once once she stepped further into the room – it had pulled a chair from somewhere and apparently sat itself down next balcony.

The balcony door itself was slightly opened, perhaps for some fresh air.

As for the Vessel, it had probably been looking out onto the dimly lit towers of the city and its faded, rain-swept streets on which discrete fronts of water found their way down the cobblestones and, at last, down to the gutters.

It turned around in response to her call, however.

She skittered near, and took the place next to it, halting by that same door.

“It’s good to see you out of bed.” she observed.

 

“...may I?” she waited a moment to leave room for any kind of reply, gesture or reaction, and then went to take a hold of its arm, since its forehead was currently once again too high up for her to reach without some moderate acrobatics.

 

It was as she suspected – cold as the grave again.

Strange then that this would bring the echo of a smile to her face.

“Your fever has finally broken. That would explain why you’re up. It... gladdens me to see that.”

Gladness did not begin to describe it, really. She was still processing, still not quite believing…

She would allow herself the conclusion that it was now, at least, much more likely that her sibling would, in fact, pull through – at least more so than any alternative.

The two of them might not be quite out of the woods yet, and neither was anything else in this realm, but she would grant that they could, at least, see the outside in the distance.

 

The princess decided at this point that she best go find herself something to sit on as well, relating, in the meantime, some basic rundown of what she’d found on her journey: “I still don’t know where Ghost is, but I will find it.” she declared, dusting off a sizable cushion and arranging it on the floor. “I promise you that. I must. I owe it. And I do have some leads.”

She flung herself onto her makeshift seat.

“...also, this is probably the point where I should say this… I am going to ask that you exercise prudence. Ghost did not do whatever it did… and I did not sew you back together, for you do be reckless with your life. Don’t go trying to take up your training routine again or marching somewhere dangerous before you are ready, alright?

Don’t misunderstand – I bring this up only because I would more than understand the temptation. Sitting idle does not agree with me, either...”

The Vessel, of course, answered nothing, and certainly didn’t give any assurances.

But the princess would have claimed, with moderate confidence, that this particular silence between them was a companionable one.

Notes:

this chapter wasnt quite planned, it just happened. thats why theres four of them now. Imagination go splat.

Chapter 4: (The horizon, where the paths of the twain shall finally touch)

“For now we see through a glass, darkly. But then, we shall see face to face.”

 

- Original Ghost in the Shell Movie

 

…

 

Then, one day, the entity just… appeared.

There was no need to find It or seek It out or meet any conditions to summon It;

It was no longer restrained by such bounds.

It had not been compelled by any necessity nor been delayed by any need to wait for favorable conditions – It came when It did simply because It was done with whatever It had been doing before, having grown bored of that, maybe, or perhaps the task was simply finished, or the ephemeral concept of time at last remembered from someplace beyond where it would have mattered.

There would have been no point in asking how It would have arrived, or from where;

It was as if It had simply melted straight out the shadows themselves… which might well have been exactly what It did, come to think about it.

 

 

One moment, princess Hornet of Deepnest had been sitting cross-legged on a lopsided little stool in her improvised hideout, far up in one of the high spires in the City of Tears, wholly engrossed in the routine, well-practiced act of spinning her thread, and the next, she was shaken out of her concentration by what, under different circumstances, may have been the most unremarkable of sounds – just the tiniest little noise of knuckles rapping against the outside of the door, not especially loud nor all too exceptional in any other place and time.

Except that nothing and no one was supposed to know that she was here, and certainly not anything that would bother knocking. What in creation would even do that after somehow having made it past all the traps and barricades she had set up without setting off a single sound?

What would sneak past those undetected, and then stop to pay reverence to a simple door?

 

Picking up her needle, which was, of course, never left too far from her grasp, the princess sped to the entrance in an instant, pre-empting any further surprises.

 

(Had she looked behind her, she may have noticed her sibling getting up from where it had been sitting, in a deliberate, purposeful motion, but not at all in a hurry or any discernible state of alarm, despite its enduring capacity to be rather fast if it so desired.

Nor did it pick up its weapon, though it was, as a rule, scarcely less inclined to go anywhere without it than the princess would be with regards to her own implements of war-craft.)

 

Not much thought was given to what might be beyond that door beyond the instinctive need to be ready for it before it took them unawares. The half-spider stood coiled as a spring and ready to pounce at the slightest motion when she pulled open the door, only to be met with…

Nothing much.

Barely just the unremarkable sight on the dusty corridor below, long abandoned, though once of artful design.

 

Only a split-second later did she register a motion at the lower end of her field of vision, a flash of something white – thus, she looked down to find a pair of curved, two-pronged horns leading down to a small speck of shadow.

Recognition set in at once, but it was not a recognition of familiarity alone…

 

Yes, there It was. Just as she’d last seen It, one might think, and she was certain that if this tiny creature had gone up to Dirtmouth to meet up with Its acquaintances there, most of them would have greeted It cheerfully as if nothing at all had changed about It, and in time, they might come to forget that this being was ever missing in the first place, figuring that It must have been busy with the kinds of daring quests that such passing adventurers might find themselves absorbed in.

On the surface, It looked really no different than it did when they last met, still wearing that same old ratty mothwing cloak casually draped over Its bluish wing-membranes, carrying most of Its ragtag collection of pilfered equipment and the evidence of whatever remote places It had last climbed through, bits of leaf sticking to It, mud caking the shadowy, sketch-like suggestions of an outline that constituted Its lower legs.

At first glance, but a small, dark body of clumsy, rounded proportions, too dark for details to be discernible; Only in a bright place would this truly stand out as an unnatural, all-absorbing darkness, the same dark that now clung to the fronds of Its cloak ever since It had increased in Its mastery of Its native element after venturing down to Its place of origin, all of which contrasted with the soft, glimmering shine of the pale shell that formed Its head, somewhere between bleached dead wood, shed wyrm-skins and emptied, dried-out carapace in appearance, never quite fully recognizable as one or the other, and yet giving substance to Its blank, unreadable face, with features that still somehow bore a striking, unmistakable resemblance to the Pale King’s, despite that quality of half-formed, indistinct vagueness layered on top that made them impossible to place as either young or old, masculine or feminine, rough or refined, or much of anything at all, really, including such basic distinctions as ‘alive or dead’.

Maybe the sight resembled what you might have ended up with if you had taken a charcoal sketch of the King’s face and gone over the lines with your digits until they were all blurred and uncertain, losing much of their sharp points – this shapeless quality had been interpreted by some as youthfulness, yet to be fully formed, by some as beauty, by others as inconsequential and not worth remembering, by others yet, as grim and fearsome, but by most as simply something blank and eerie, which the princess would once have accounted as the most correct conclusion to drawn, if one were to look into that face without any preconceived notions or desires for what one longed to see reflected in it…

Now, after the disproving of her own preconceptions, Hornet was less sure than ever what to make of that face, even as the speck of darkness looked right up to her, finding her eyes with Its own – round and large as they were, so that one might almost find them endearing when one only glimpsed the being’s face from the side or at an angle, but when one looked straight into them, one could not fail to note just how empty they were.

If that were even possible, she could have sworn that the darkness beyond was somehow even deeper and denser than it had ever been before, akin to something vast and endless-

Like the deep, unperturbed dark and silence that must have existed before the world, impossible for her to picture, and yet accessible to her senses if she looked for too long.

It was as if she wasn’t even seeing darkness, but nothing at all – as if she had just happened to go blind in those particular spots, blind and numb and unconscious.

Before she could stop herself, she found her glance beginning to slide away from those eyes, in the same way that many a mortal could not bear to look for too long straight upon her father’s brightness. As his daughter, she had been mostly immune to that effect, though she had, at times gotten some dark spots and afterimages in her vision whenever she had reunited with Him after not seeing Him for a while.

Now, she found herself experiencing something like a reverse of that, a hyperbolic brightness and luminosity lingering where that boundless dark had been.

The princess understood at once that the being before her was changed, more profoundly even than when she’d met It after Its return from Its birthplace – to look upon It was like looking into an unfathomable chasm, deeper and larger than what should have fit inside its diminutive shell, as if what once truly demarcated its outline was now merely a deliberate concession, made as a convenience and a courtesy…

 

Which, all things considered, would have unsettled Hornet far, far less than many other creatures with the capacity to perceive it, because, when she thought of a vast, grand presence shut up inside a small, accessible form, she would have to think of her father, sitting at the breakfast table, absently rambling about public benches – incandescence distilled, perhaps, but nonetheless still her father: Fondly remembered in His eccentricities, frustrating in His shortcomings, but ultimately, known and familiar in both.

She’d gotten used to Him; She would get used to this, also, though she knew it at once for the evidence that she was now faced with a no less eminent presence, though it was of course one much more chthonic in nature, like an inverted mirror image of Its brilliant progenitor.

She wasn’t one to be overly awed by such a quality – even her mother had not been, though she may have begun her life as a baseborn mortal. She’d rather seen such forces as, yes, something to be careful of, but not as something that she couldn’t overcome or bend to her purposes.

Besides, to her, they would have been more than mere forces.

Whatever else this creature before her might have become, It was still ultimately none other than Little Ghost.

There could be little doubt in the character of that creature, after It had gone and burdened itself with the fate of a kingdom that once cast It out, and now, it seems, had gone and worked a literal miracle to preserve what was left of a family that had never given It the care and guidance that would have been owed.

The princess was not going to start doubting Its virtue now, when It had proven Itself more than ever;

Instead, the ominous impressions she experienced rather lead her to form some quick theories about what must have happened, indeed she could more or less figure much of what she had spent the last days pondering just from perceiving this last, missing piece of the puzzle…

Though this was a rather unlikely event in general, ascension was hardly out of the question for a being of Its lineage.

Still- to extinguish something like the Old Light single-handed and yet live to tell the tale…

 

Held within this small, nondescript form was, perhaps, the mightiest power that these caverns had ever seen, surpassing even the Pale King, whose enduring blessing still clung to the cavern walls long after His disappearance, granting expanded capabilities and long life to everything within.

It had evidently done something that He patently could not…

 

It was still looking up at her, in much the same manner as It always had.

Completely and utterly blank... or maybe slightly curious?

Possibly waiting to listen for what she might say or do.

What would she say?

Were congratulations in order?

“Little Ghost… you…”

 

Before she could decide, she was interrupted by a little explosion of fine red mist, as a crimson-shelled, dark-winged creature appeared just above the small wanderer with a deliberate little twirl, pausing afterwards as if to go ‘Ta-daa!’ only to produce a noise that Hornet could only interpret as mischievous snickering…

She did not like this fact at all, but she had been just a little bit startled for the briefest moment, which the little devil seemed rather disproportionately proud of… as would be quite in accordance with his nature.

The glowing scarlet eyes left very little room for doubting that he could have been anyone other than the latest avatar of the Nightmare King.

She had seen him in the little Ghost’s company before – it would seem that the newly minted deity had taken Its young companion with It on whatever cosmic venture It had been engaged on.

Not for the first time, it struck her just how easily these fearsome higher beings, these containers of flame and shadow, might have been mistaken for but a pair of playful youths.

For all that he was a distinctly lethal, fire-breathing embodiment of fear, nightmare and flame, his actions still very much recalled that of a cocky, rascally child, the sort that might have been figuratively described as ‘having been a little nightmare’ by their worn-out caretakers in retrospect, though not necessarily without fondness.

The small Wanderer certainly gave no indication that It was particularly surprised by Grimmchild’s dynamic entry, giving the impression that this was a fairly usual, expected part of his antics.

Instead, It simply raised its arm in a simple, understated motion, offering it up as a landing spot, which the small winged creature immediately took advantage of, setting himself down on his guardian’s upper arm and shoulder, playfully nuzzling against the forearm and hand brought down to receive him.

The princess could not help but note that the Knight was distinctly returning the affectionate gesture – certainly in a subtle, understated fashion, nothing grand, conspicuous or showy, but It absolutely did ever so slightly move Its hand to pat the Grimmchild on his head, which he very much seemed to understand and relish, judging by the contented little purr he produced.

 

What a deeply strange sight…

Except no.

This might be the point where one very crucial switch finally flipped inside of Hornet’s mind.

There was nothing strange about this at all.

If anything was strange, it would have been the apprehension that she felt, a product, one must think, of very desperate times.

The best that she would be able to explain it in the years to come was that the Radiance had made them all go just a little mad, even the ones who had escaped Her direct influence.

There was not a sentient creature alive that could escape some measure of, let us say ‘psychic damage’ in being surrounded by as much horror and madness as had been brought about by Her reign of terror; There wasn’t a sapient being whose ego would not have been brought just a little closer to the brink of fracturing from being forced into such impossible choices.

 

If a member of her own family had effectively survived something that had been expected to kill them in every way that matters, that should have been a good thing, something to rejoice over.

The only reason that her father had considered such a desperate measure to begin with was that He thought the capacity for thought, individuality and will a boon, and would not suffer the Radiance to come and strip it from His subjects.

Only with great reluctance did He even consider such an act; And if He had lamented its failure, it would have been for His failure to protect His citizens and the suffering inflicted on the creatures concerned; Horrified though He must have been at the implications, the princess could not think that He would not have found some bittersweet relief in the knowledge that His creations were not, in fact, barred from experiencing such a thing as playfulness or affection.

He’d built His kingdom to offer shelter, safety and prosperity to those who dwelt within;

 

If He had caused His children to never known anything other than a twisted, merciless world where must be crushed and hopes and dreams must not be entertain, then He would have very much accounted this as a failure – the opposite of what He would have chosen, as much as it was still the product of His choices.

He would never know that He had won in the end; He probably died all on His own, convinced that all His works had come to nothing, and maybe that was His punishment…

 

Still, she held fast in the conviction that it would have brought Him joy to see the three of them functionally (if not literally) alive in the end.

And even if He wouldn’t have, He was gone now, and so was She whose presence had necessitated all this ugly business -

So on whose behalf would she hold onto this suspicion, this guarded sense of being on edge, as if avoiding some superstitious taboo or remaining stuck in a habit that had long since stuck its purpose like some kind of haunting specter…

 

This should have been a moment for rejoicing.

An unlikely, unlooked for reunion against all odds.

So long had she been reduced to mere survival that it took her far too long to even process the prospect of mercy.

Ghost might well be thinking that she is the one whose response is very strange.

Having gotten a hold of herself, the thought occurred to her that her first priority should really be to call for the Hollow Knight, but when she whirled around to do so, she found it already standing right behind her in the doorway, likely having sensed the arrival of their sibling by some means of its own.

At this point it occurred to Hornet that what she really ought to do now is to move aside so that it might duck past the door arch, allowing the two to finally reunite face to face, in the (largely figurative) flesh.

She’d had the chance to spend some time with each of them, but those two, despite sharing the same origin, must have been parted since before she was born.

It was hard to predict, of course, what sort of a reunion one might expect between such beings, what it might look like, if there would be anything she would recognize as expression or exchange...

She recognized it alright, in the end, for the first thing the Hollow Knight did, after having stepped past the threshold, was to get down on its knees and bow low, as it often had before its parents’ thrones, or before its comrades after some friendly spar or duel.

What was this then?

A ritualized plea for forgiveness?

A solemn expression of deepest gratitude?

An expression of the instinctive recognition and awe that a being of shadow would have for the new Master of that element?

A ceremonious declaration of the intent to pledge itself and its services to the rightful new monarch, along with a renewed vow to serve the crown as it once had in the days of their father, urging the latest God-King to use its blade as It might see fit?

Never mind that the blade in question could stand to visit a repair shop, or that its wielder might still have some weeks of re-convalescence ahead of itself before it could once again hope to swing that thing around without falling over.

Whatever the Hollow Knight’s exact intention might have been, there was clearly some ardent concern that must have been foremost in its mind, for it to express it in such an overt (if perhaps overly formal) manner… and she would suppose that it was a good thing to see it, too, clearly compelled forward by some drive left inside of it even with its task fulfilled.

 

Even so, by now she thought that she could say with some confidence that Ghost had not done whatever It did out of any particularly great desire to be King or anything like that.

It raised the hand that wasn’t currently holding onto Grimmchild and mimed some facsimile of what it thought a royal ‘At ease!’-sort of gesture might look like, but it wasn’t done with any great insistence or conviction.

She thought It might have seen this as simply playing along with its sibling’s desire for absolution, before motioning for it to raise again.

 

Once, the princess might have considered the smaller void creature’s motivations a riddle for the ages which the living might never understand, if they went at all beyond the axiomatic compulsions of mere programming.

Now, however, she had begun to suspect, belatedly enough, that Its reasons had never really been all that complicated at all…

 

For the next thing it did with that same arm of its was…

Something very bold, all things considered, for she could only imagine that Its own upbringing must have been even more devoid of directly expressed affection than either hers or the Hollow Knight’s.

Nevertheless, the small speck of shadow seemed to have made Its choice.

It knew what It wanted and decided to give that a go, raising up an arm very deliberately towards both of Its long-lost siblings.

 

When the pair just stared, both of them awkwardly frozen in place, It clarified Its intent by performing a small beckoning motion, just in case they might not have understood.

Hornet, for her part, became pointedly aware that she was still holding her needle, suddenly missing the space that it took up on her hands.

 

The one she had come to call Ghost waited patiently for her to set it down, silent and motionless unless one were to count the Grimmchild’s vaguely amused vocalizations which the princess made a choice to ignore –

Clearly an expectant, waiting silence.

 

If she didn’t know what to do with herself, she could only imagine how stumped the Hollow Knight must be in the face of such a request…

Which is why she made a point to take a hold of its claw before stepping forward, lest it assume that the invitation was only for her.

But she had labored so long for the prospect of a future and given much for a means of breaking out of the ever-repeating hell they had all been trapped in, so by the gods, she was going to seize it.

She was going to make the choice to step into it and exist as part of it, even if it did not come naturally – even if she felt the constraints of the mental and emotional armor she had built around herself to withstand the hardship for so long.

She had known nothing but lean times, not in her youth nor anywhere throughout the long death of her later years, and by the gods, it didn’t come naturally, but stilted and choppy though her motions must have looked, she did lean forward and put an arm around the tiny warrior.

 

The princess was positive that neither herself nor the Hollow Knight would have had the faintest foggiest idea of how the hell something like a group hug was even supposed to work, and even Ghost’s experience on the subject could not have been too extensive.

Not a single one among the three of them could have known what they were doing, and any concept of what they might be supposed to do would have been fraught with several lifetimes' worth of contradictory instructions.

Still, the princess would have felt the deceptively small creature who thought of this latching straight onto her, almost like she didn’t make several attempts to stab It within the recent past, perhaps copying many scenes that It would have observed on Its long travels, perhaps with a sense of longing that It had never quite understood, or a touch of longing that was now finally fulfilled at long, long last… if that’s what It wanted – if that is all It asked to fill a debt that could never be repaid, the princess would do well to swallow whatever pride would tell her that she did not deserve such absolution.

Its rounded little face came to a rest on the folds of her worn, old hunter’s cloak, its long horns traversing the field of her vision as bright interruptions.

On the sides of her own horns, she could feel the tatters of the Hollow Knight’s wing membranes hanging down now in an asymmetric fashion, their distinctive texture stuck in some undefinable place between wings and leaves – the scarred warrior appeared to have crouched down to participate as it was bid, but hesitated still to actually touch the other two of them, still reluctant, maybe, to do something that didn’t feel quite allowed, or possibly expecting on some level that they might be repulsed by its touch. Most likely, it never once considered so much as the possibility of ever taking part in such an act; The princess took it upon herself to tug just a little on the two clawed digits still held in her grasp, hoping that this might dispel such notions… and indeed, the taller voidling took this as permission to draw closer, as much as it might without pressing too-directly against the still-tender scars on its chest.

As much as she might have begun with some serious doubt whether she had it in her to do this, before she knew it, Hornet somehow found herself hanging much more tightly onto the both of them than she ever thought she might, suddenly overcome with a surge of something long unspoken and never quite allowed.

There was too much coming up, of all sudden, to ever find its way outside in any sort of dignified fashion. There was not enough of a conduit for it to pass through, no path for it worn into the ground of her soul. Something hot, warm and urgent, quite a lot like relief.

When she spoke, in the end, it was still quite restrained and deliberate: “I’m really thankful, to the both of you.”

She would not allow herself to say anything soppy or disgraceful such as ‘that you came back’ or ‘that you didn’t leave me as well’, but there were things that the two of them deserved to hear:

“Not just for what you did for the sake of the realm, but beyond that – I am grateful that you are here. That you returned. That you aren’t- That you weren’t-”

How to put this...

“I’m glad that the two of you understand this right here.”

That was as far as she would go… but she did not regret it.

Not when she sensed the slightest little twitch going through the Hollow Knight’s digits in response – a reaction so subtle that would not have noticed at all if she had not still been actively holding onto its claw.

If it was so shocked to hear this, then it was very right that it did.

She didn’t even bother trying to protest when she sensed Ghost’s nubby little fingers approvingly patting her back.

Of course, neither of the two had any warmth to them, but that didn’t mean that their touch was wholly devoid of the comforting qualities one might associate with such shows of affection; There was still a sense of pressure, of weight, of the solid physical presence of those she thought she would lose forever.

 

Despite the sense of clumsy uncertainty that she felt in this situation, as somebody accustomed to be precise and deadly in most other things, she didn’t want to be anywhere else than where she was, and she hoped that the same would be true of her long-lost siblings, now that they had finally, at long last, come home to her.

 

What awaited them now was… not exactly a life beyond destiny.

The task of rebuilding the kingdom should certainly keep them busy enough that they should not want for challenges or purpose – and who could even begin to say just what the future might throw at them from unexpected corners?

 

But none of them would be going at it alone anymore, nor would any of them be crushed under all-consuming demands that required them to shut up all else inside them.

 

There was room now to dream, to hope, to simply be – that was safe now, no longer a poisoned realm of tripwires and barbed hooks.

 

All tomorrows start now. Reunions, introductions, new pursuits – even the little ordinary moments of everyday coexistence that might fill out the margins of their days with reasons to stay strong and keep going, even things to look forward to, to relish in.

 

Even with the Radiance gone, it would remain undeniable that eternity is promised to no one, but come what may, it would always count for something that the three of them at least got to have this, despite all the odds against it.

Notes:

So Ghost gets the Head Honcho Top God Capitalization in the end, but is also… totally casual about it, because apotheosis is usually a metaphor for self-actualization & enlightenment, and some of the most enlightened ppl get that you still chop wood & carry water afterwards, except that you you have some inner power or insight that makes you free.
It would look different for different people (like how different plants different flowers in full bloom), but one option is that you might decide, like at the end of “everything everywhere at once”, that you just wanna do laundry & taxes with your family (if that is your thing), & to land that note I wanted the epilogue to be relatively simple.

Also, I couldn’t get Godseeker to make another appearance due to it not working with the PoV gimmick, but rest assured that wherever she is now, she’s soo adorably confounded with that choice (But probably filing it under “The Gods work in mysterious ways”)