(Rescue — Contemplate — Disturbance — Incomplete — Departure)
~~~ are used for changing the perception of vision (POV)
••• denotes flashback
*** denotes time skip
… denotes silence
-x-X-x-
Down.
Down beneath the unbeing where no breath had ever stirred. The Abyss. There she lay. Whom they called The Gendered Kin.
The Knight gashed through like a nail moving through water. What the dark did in response to this type of passing was simply take the shape that was pressed into it. Pressing required no force. Presence required no intention.
The Shade Lord circled. It had always circled. It glimpsed, it suspected, and it was never fully seen, it was never fully absent. It was not a shadow.
The Void is an old machine, the Shade Lord said, its voice came from everywhere the Knight was not. It devours not from appetite but from nature. Do not mistake the two. Appetite implies the possibility of fullness. Nature implies none.
The Knight did not answer. It never did.
Ahead where the dark kept no geometry the eye could follow, she lay on nothing at all, surrounded by Void. Two arms. Two legs, long and jointed wrong for the shapes that stood upright in the world above, each one bending twice where a leg bends once. The rest of her was covered—a pale plate fitted seam to seam, chitin grown to the exact measure of the flesh beneath the face. Where the plate ended, the skin showed dark and wet-shined, and it was not skin exactly. The small vents along the underside of each forearm were not wounds, though they looked enough like wounds.
Her face wore no face. A mask instead, bone-white, its curve too smooth to have been born, its hollows shaped for a mouth and eyes. What lived beneath it did not elect itself to be announced.
The Knight stood over her. The Shade Lord stood closer. Its attention had the quality of a hand hovering above a candle.
She is strong, it said. She has walked through crooked lands and paid the toll those lands demand. Dost thou know her?
The Knight was silent.
Thou know her. By what has passed through and left a shape behind. That is kin enough.
The Void pressed close around her. It did not touch her. The Knight's presence stood between them as a law, the way cold is held back not by a thing but by a fire.
Raise her, the Shade Lord said, its voice dropped to something almost quiet. Lift her above the crawling things. What descends upon the broken will deal gently with her, or it will answer for the failing.
The Knight reached down. The Void pulled back from her, the way dark retreats from a candle. She rose. Beneath the mask something shifted, some small mechanism of jaw or joint recalibrating itself to the change in air, and then went still again.
…
Then the second presence.
The Knight felt her before she arrived. A sound like a needle drawn through cloth, and then the shape came out of the dark. Whom they called The Silk-born.
She was not made of flesh. Where flesh should have moved beneath her surface there was only more surface, thread laid over thread laid over a frame of something harder beneath, bone-white and jointed at the places joints are useful. Her limbs did not bend so much as they were repositioned, like how a thing is repositioned by a hand that has already decided where it will go next. Her black silk face had been given features—pale eyes made pale on purpose, the one deliberate lie in an otherwise unpretending construction. Everything else on her stayed thread and armature; only the eyes were built to counterfeit life.
She had been made, not born, and made was not the same as wanted. She moved through the world enacting gestures she had not chosen and could not account for, and small things fled from her before she understood why, and the not-knowing sat inside her like a stone sewn into a hem.
The Shade Lord had gone still. This was not comfort.
Her mother stitched her whole, it said finally. From a want to have made something, and having made it, to feel the accomplishment of the making, and having felt the accomplishment, to set the made thing down and attend to other business. This is not cruelty.
The Knight looked at her.
And yet, the Shade Lord continued, the Gendered One claims her. Look at that. A claim made not from evidence but from decision. Evidence changes. Decisions, if they are the right sort, do not.
The Knight moved. The tendrils of the deep receded from the doll-thing. She was lifted above the swallowing. She was held near. The Shade Lord made a sound as it acknowledged that an event had taken place.
The Knight turned. The remnant lights came when called.
Vessels.
The word moved through the dark and they answered it. They had once been root and pale, two expressions of one nature. One had consumed the other until none remained. But what did remain was unified in the manner of a field after burning—whole, yes, but also emptied. They moved without gesture or refusal. The Shade Lord watched them pass with its lidless attention.
Lesser, it said, In completion, as the Abyss perhaps never had the capacity to finish what it began in them. Perhaps never intended to. A millstone does not intend the grain it cannot grind.
The Knight walked with them into the dark that kept no floor and no record. The Shade Lord followed.
***
What aileth thee?
The Knight was silent.
Thou have always been silent. But now the silence carries a different weight. We have felt it pass.
The Knight did not answer.
She is dead. The moth. The rot that ran beneath through the kingdom, that entered through the eye and made puppets of what it touched, is scoured. Thou did this. Thou are finished. Name what troubles thee, if a name exists for it.
The darkness held.
We have no name for it.
It is not a wound then, for every wound has a name, given by whoever inflicts it or whoever survives it. This is something without a giver.
Nothing moved, for there was nothing to move. What had always been there only now made itself known.
We have seen completion. We have watched things finish and lie still after. Thou had finished. And yet thou are not still.
The Knight's claw-tips flexed.
Perhaps completion was never the promise. Perhaps thou were told a war would end thee, one way or the other, and now the war has ended, and thou remained.
The Knight made no movement.
Or perhaps the emptiness was beneath your own plate the entire while, older than the war, the purpose. The task obscured it. The task is finished. What is left is what was always there.
Speak if thou have a refutation. We will wait.
The Knight had none.
Then hear this and be done with waiting on it. Nothing that was made whole announces itself as whole. It simply proceeds, uninterrupted by the question. Thou have asked the question. That is the only evidence required. Ask it again if thou must. It will not answer differently.
…
Sounds.
They came from above.
Tunes, rehearsed cadences, syllables arranged into the shape of calling by mouths that had built rituals around whatever god had proven best at killing. They did not know what they summoned. Wanting does not require understanding to sustain itself. It only requires wanting, and that supply is inexhaustible in a way nothing else is.
The Shade Lord was already moving, pressing the Void outward from its sides, opening it like how a wound is opened by necessity.
Let them have a shape for their desire, it said, or the insistence will rot into chaos, and chaos devours its maker first.
Godhome.
•••
Light withdrawn.
The kingdom above breathed yet did not live. The king had watched the plague move through his subjects with the patience of a thing that has nowhere else to be and no reason to hurry to nowhere. He stood at the edge of what remained.
He counted.
He had learned to count endings while other shapes counted days. He fed them to the dark —bodies, names, faith of generations who had not been asked whether their faith was for spending. The dark accepted every payment like how the sea accepts the drowned.
He had bound his name to the going-down of everything he built, and when it went, it took him whole. There was no cruelty in this. There was only the incapacity to stop.
No Cost Too Great.
Then the other one came.
The Knight did not turn. The Void reshaped itself around the new arrival.
He Who Sinned By Love.
Whom they called The Hollow Knight.
They stood before the Knight with the look of a thing that has outlasted the meaning of its task and continues the task regardless. Faithfulness and ruin wear the same face more often than either would admit, if either were built to admit anything.
We would protect what remains.
The Knight was still. The Shade Lord had withdrawn to the outer dark, watching from there, its attention the quality of a nail held above neck.
Then they spoke—
We would protect what remains.
—and they departed, in a purpose that had gone on past the point where purpose required a reason. They walked into what lay ahead. There was no shelter there. They walked anyway.
The Knight watched. The Hollow Knight looked back once. The Knight inclined its head.
Then they were gone.
The Knight's claw-tips had curled, at some point in the passing. They had curled the exact width a hilt would have filled, had one been in reach. Now they opened again, a hand unlearning a shape it had already half-taken.
Thou could have ended them, the Shade Lord said, its voice distant now, nearly quiet. We felt it pass.
Ye are issued from the same dark. Only one of ye has learned desire. They have learned to want what cannot be kept. In the wanting they have become something neither of ye started as.
The Shade Lord returned to what it had been doing, which was nothing and had always been nothing, dressed up in circling. A long silence held between them, the Knight and the Shade Lord.
At last the Knight moved first. The Shade Lord stopped, not surprised, for it also moved first, and hovered close, a shifting mass of black with no face to turn and no need of one.
What are we.
The Shade Lord's mass had drawn in around itself as it spoke, tightening, like smoke tightening when it is about to be pulled through a narrow place. It did not pause before answering.
Nothing.
The Knight's claw, still open from before, closed now.
But you.