(The Temple — Cracks — Broken — Them is Convinced — Promises — Lies — Fallen)
~~~ are used for changing the perception of vision (POV)
••• denotes flashback
*** denotes time skip
** denotes background sounds
… denotes silence
xXx
~~~
…Hurts.
Pain. An old friend.
…
Dark held the temple. The Black Egg Temple, wherein no light had business remaining, and none remained. The chains that once bound the walls lay broken and scattered across the stone floor in rusted heaps, snapped at their roots, their links splayed outward like the bones of things that had been pulled apart slowly and with great patience. The floor had not been swept in what might have been decades. Grit and old shell-dust and the particular grey powder that gathered in places where living things had ceased to be living things lay in the cracks between the stones and along the edges of the walls where nothing moved anymore to disturb it.
The Hollow Knight lay flat upon their stomach.
Their pale shell pressed against the uneven stone and their tall, thin frame spread across the floor in the manner of something that had not chosen its position but had simply arrived there and been unable to continue past it. The edges of the broken stone pressed through their grey cloak into the skin beneath and the skin received this the way skin received most things now; with dull, generalised objection that had long since stopped carrying the urgency of novelty. Their head lay sideways. Their two pale horns, each cracked at some point and re-knitted at angles that were not quite right, caught no light because there was no light to catch.
The windows were somewhere. Their shards did not bleed anything anymore. The kingdom that had stood behind them, that had sent its light through them every morning for what had felt like always—
There was no kingdom.
They tried to stand.
Their one arm pressed against the stone and their body rose a fraction and then the weight came down again; not from outside but from within, distributed across every surface of them, deep into the places where strength had previously lived and had since vacated without leaving word of where it had gone. They fell back. Their chin struck the stone. They registered this. They did not make a sound because the Hollow Knight had been made without a voice and what they felt about this at present was too large for any sound they could have made.
…
How had it come to this.
The question moved through them slowly and without urgency because there was no urgency left in them for questions that did not lead anywhere. They had known since they were made that questions of this type resolved into nothing. Their Father had told them. Their Father had been very clear.
No. No attachment. No feeling. No self.
They had tried. O Pale Light, they had tried—
Their Father in white had promised nothing. The first promise had come from within them, from the part that had known before it was told. They were perfect. They were not. They had believed both simultaneously and the believing of both had been the crack that let everything in.
We would protect what remains.
They had said this to the Knight. Standing in the dark of the Abyss before the Knight whose pale bright eyes had looked at them the same way their own eyes looked when the water stood still in them. They had said it and then they had gone and now they lay on the floor of the temple where they had spent what might have been centuries as the Radiance's unwilling puppet and their ankle was twisted at an angle it had not been designed for and there were gaps through their body where void-made-solid ought to be.
But not small gaps. Each one a specific size, a specific angle, as if the same measure of force had been used to create every single one for the same specific purpose. They slid one finger into the nearest and pressed against the inner edge. Rock solid. The wound was not bleeding and was not leaking. It was simply there, as though it had always been part of the architecture of them, as though they had been built with holes in them from the start.
Perhaps they had.
Perhaps that was exactly the truth of it and they had only now reached a position from which the truth was visible.
…
They lay still for a time.
The temple breathed around them; not with life, but with the particular exhalation of structures that have housed catastrophe and have been changed by the housing of it. The air tasted of old iron and Void and the faint sweetness that Infection left behind when it had burned through a place and taken everything combustible. They knew that smell. They had been the vessel of the thing that produced it. Had sat with it inside them for longer than they could calculate and had felt it move through them and had been unable to stop it and had called themselves Pure Vessel and had known even then that the name was wrong.
They had loved their Father.
This was the specific ruin of it. All the training. All the years of instruction from the Five Great Knights, each in their manner; the Teacher, who was the White Lady's sword and the most serious of them and who had looked at the Hollow Knight during lessons with the expression of someone measuring the distance between a thing and what it was supposed to become; the Knight with hammer, who had been quiet beyond any of the others and who the Hollow Knight had barely accumulated enough encounter with to hold a clear image of; the Knight full of stunts, their Father's closest blade and the last to leave His side before the exile, the one whose departure the Hollow Knight had watched and had not known what to do with the watching. The others, assigned to distant corners of the kingdom, who had gone and not returned.
All that instruction toward the single purpose of becoming nothing.
And then their Father had looked at them and they had loved Him and the love had been the end of nothing and the beginning of everything wrong.
They had not told anyone. They had carried it inside them along with the Radiance and the weight of the title and the knowledge that the title was a lie and they had sealed themselves in the temple and they had held for as long as they could and then they had stopped holding and Hallownest had fallen.
Their fault.
They did not reach for another explanation. There was no other explanation that survived honest examination and they were very practiced at honest examination of their own failures. The Infection had passed through them into the kingdom as water passed through a cracked vessel; the crack was in them, had always been in them, and every life that had fallen to the Radiance's dream had fallen through the specific crack of their specific loving of one specific white-robed figure who had told them not to love and had not understood that the telling was already too late.
Every shell they had cracked beneath their feet in the Abyss to reach the summit. Every sibling left behind. They had looked back once; had seen the Knight below, struggling, and had turned away. Had followed their Father. Had not known, then, what the turning would cost.
They knew now.
The Knight had pale bright eyes. Same as theirs. And before that and before the final battle and during it, those eyes had been pitch black and empty, same as theirs had been in the long dark years of containment. And then at the end the Knight had freed them and they had looked at each other in the Abyss and the Knight's eyes had been pale and bright again and they had said We would protect what remains and left.
The Knight was hollow. Completely. That was what had made the Knight capable of doing what they themselves had not been capable of. Finishing what the Hollow Knight had been made to finish. No love. No crack. Nothing that let anything in. They dismissed the thought of whether the Knight could feel anything at all. They dismissed it the way they dismissed things that had no useful answer, quickly and carelessly.
But it did not stop the thought from returning.
…
They resumed with their remaining claw.
The claw dragged across the stone with a harsh grinding scrape and the sound opened through the temple and came back wrong, the way all sounds came back wrong in hollow places. They felt the claw dulling and roughing against the stone and continued regardless because there was no alternative to continuing and because alternatives had always been a luxury that did not apply to them.
Pain stopped them. A sudden signal of it from the hand, transmitted upward through the arm and into the shoulders where other pain already lived. They dug their claw into the stone to subdue it. Stared at the cracks. Thought of other things.
Baldurs. Tik-tiks. Gruzzers rolling in the midday warmth of the City's market roads. Vengeflies in their humming patterns above the Forgotten Crossroads. The Teacher and the particular quality of her silence when she was displeased, the way it carried more weight than any rebuke. The flower giver and the smell of those flowers, strange and alive in a way most things in Hallownest were not, a smell that did not belong to the underground and had therefore seemed like a message from some other, kinder world. The tearful one, acid running from her in her grief, and the feeling they had had watching her, they still had no name for it, had left it away unanswered in the long row of things they had felt and had no names for. Their sister, half-remembered, red silk, a crimson cloak, laughter in a high corridor they had not thought of in so long the memory had gone blurry at its edges. All that remained was the red. The specific red.
Their mother.
Her love toward thee is the exact same toward everyone else. Such is her nature. Nothing in particular, their Father had said, and they had heard this and had believed it and had not been able to make believing it stop the feeling that came with it, which was perhaps the earliest evidence of the crack.
They resumed moving.
…
The Pure Nail lay ahead.
They could feel the stand of it before they could see it in the dark, could feel the particular quality of its stillness, the way objects remembered by the hands were present to the hands before they were present to the eyes. They had used that nail in uncountable battles for the Eternal Kingdom, against every manner of thing that had moved against the peace their Father had built in the stone dark beneath the world. Every blacksmith in the kingdom had spoken of it. When it was displayed they had watched others press their hands toward it without touching and they had not understood the gesture and now understood it less than ever.
Their Father had made it.
They reached it. They felt its shape with their worn claw. The tip was broken. Duller than themselves. They did not mourn this. They moved the nail against the floor to find the orientation of the tip and then pressed it into a crack in the stone and used its fixed position and what remained in their body to push themselves upward.
They stood.
Both feet on the floor. The Nail upright beside them. Their head throbbing in the specific deep way it had throbbed since the crack had opened in it, since their own hand had put the nail through themselves at the end, trying to weaken what lived inside them, accomplishing only the worsening of what they intended to end. Their chest ached. Their ankle sat at its wrong angle.
They stood regardless.
They took one step. Two. Three. Four.
They fell. Shoulder hit the floor. The grip on the Nail held. Their head did not strike. They had managed that much, had kept it still in the falling, because a head injury worsened upon itself in ways they could no longer afford.
They got up.
Again.
They fell again; this time flat, the Nail going sideways with them, and the injury in their head split wider in its fashion, the gap between where sight was and where the mind was widening another fraction, like a seam under load.
They struck the floor with the Nail. Once. Hard. No reason for the force. Or one that was not a reason but was the thing that lived in the place reasons came from – My Father would not want to see me like this and I cannot disappoint more than I have occupying the same breath and neither cancelling the other.
They got up.
They walked.
The chains on the floor slid under their feet and caught against the broken tip of the Nail and they navigated around them as they navigated around the rest of the ruin, without looking directly at any of it for long, because looking directly at the broken chains was the same as looking directly at the broken promise and there was only one direction available to them and it was forward and forward had to be enough.
The first blood was shed in the Abyss. Not their own. Their siblings, cracked beneath every movement, shells splitting from horn to face, ground to dust by the weight of the climbing. They had felt each one and had continued climbing. The second and third massacres had names attached to them that they would not think now. They would think of the floor. The tiles. One tile, two tiles. The way the Nail's tip caught the grout between the stones. Three tiles, four.
…
Cold.
The temperature dropped and wind moved through and lifted the neck of their cloak and they stopped.
Outside.
They were outside the temple. The cold was real and it came from the open dark of the kingdom and not from the specific dark of the sealed place and the distinction was one their body knew before their mind arrived at it. They stood in the entrance. There was no light. The lanterns on either side had shattered and left their iron brackets holding nothing. The path ahead existed only in memory, and memory was unreliable now in the specific way of things that had been compressed too long and had taken damage in the compression, but memory was all they had and they would follow it.
Your sacrifice will be known. You will not be forgotten.
Forgotten, they thought. The floor unswept. The lanterns unlit. The signs fallen from their nails. Perhaps they were kin to all of that; things given purposes, things that had failed their purposes, things left where they fell.
Their twisted ankle dragged. They moved.
*Tap. Tap. Tap.*
Oi, who goes there—!
The Nail lifted.
It was instinct. The training was older than the thought and the thought did not arrive in time to intervene. The Nail swung through the dark and connected and the connection was imperfect and there was a sound.
F-fuck! Wh-who the hell is you—?!
Pain came immediately through the swing, from their hand, their shoulder, the wrist that had not been right since the nail went through it. The effort was too much for the body and the body said so without ambiguity.
The Nail went down.
The Hollow Knight went down with it.
The cold stone received them as it had before, without opinion, without adjustment. Above them the dark held steady. The throbbing in their head went from its former register into something quieter, which was not improvement but the first stage of something that might become improvement or might not, and which could not be told apart from the beginning of the other thing.
They lay still.
The wind moved through the entrance behind them and lifted the cloak again at the neck and set it down.
Somewhere ahead: the sound of breathing that was not their own.
They did not move.
They had no more moving in them for now.
They lay on the cold stone outside the temple that had been their grave and that was no longer their grave and thought with the last piece of their mind that was still operating clearly:
Forward. Forward.
And then nothing. And then dark. And then the long, unasked-for mercy of unconsciousness arriving at last like a debt finally paid, and the cold stone beneath them receiving the weight without complaint, and the broken kingdom breathing around them in the dark.
Fallen.