(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
-x-X-x-
~~~
…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, links splayed outward. The floor had not been swept in what might have been decades. Grit and old shell-dust and the particular grey powder that gathers in places where living things have ceased to be living things.
The Hollow Knight lay flat, front-plate pressed to the uneven stone, their tall thin frame spread across the floor. The broken edges of stone pressed through their grey cloak into the shell beneath. Their head lay sideways. Their two pale horns, each cracked at some point and re-knitted at angles not quite right, caught no light. There was none.
The windows were somewhere. Their shards bled nothing anymore. The kingdom that had once sent its light through them at anytime—
The kingdom was nevermore.
They tried to stand.
One limb pressed against the stone, the joint bending wrong at the middle where plate met plate, and their body rose a fraction before the weight came down again—from within, distributed across every surface of them, deep into the interior kingdom where strength had once lived. They fell back. Their face-plate struck the stone. They made no sound, having been made without a voice, and what they felt about it now was too large for any sound they could have produced with a voice.
…
How had it come to this.
The question moved through them slowly without urgency. They had known since they were made that questions of this kind resolved into nothing. Their Father had told them so. Their Father had been very clear.
No attachment. No feeling. No self.
They had tried. O Light, they had tried.
Their Father in white had promised nothing. The first promise had come from within themselves. They were perfect. They were not. They had believed both at once, 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 one whose pale bright eyes had looked at them the way their own eyes looked when the dark water stood still in them. They had said it and 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 instrument, one leg-joint twisted at an angle it had not been built for, gaps through their body where void-made-solid ought to have stood instead.
Each gap the same size. The same angle. As if one measure of force had made every one of them, and made them on purpose and intention.
They slid a claw-tip into the nearest and pressed the inner edge. Solid. The wound neither bled nor leaked. The gaps were simply there, as though they had been built with holes from the start, pierced clean through the lattice of dark that stood in for flesh.
Perhaps they had been.
Perhaps that was the truth of it and they had only now reached a position from which the truth could be seen.
…
They lay still for a time.
The temple breathed around them. The air held old rotted iron and Void and the faint sweetness the Infection left behind. They knew that smell. They had carried the thing that made it, sat with it inside them longer than they could count, felt it move through them and been unable to stop it, and had called themselves Pure Vessel while knowing even then the name was false.
They had loved their Father.
This was the ruin of it. All the training. All the years under the Five Great Knights, each in their manner—the Teacher, the White Lady's sword, who had watched the Hollow Knight during lessons with the look of someone measuring the distance between a thing and what it was meant to become; the Knight with the hammer, barely enough encountered to hold a clear shape in memory; the Knight full of stunts, closest blade to their Father, last to leave His side before the exile. The rest, sent to distant corners of the kingdom, who had gone and not returned.
All that instruction toward a single purpose: 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 told no one. They had carried it inside them beside 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 held for as long as they could, and then they had stopped holding, and Hallownest had fallen.
Their fault.
They reached for no other explanations. None survived honest examinations, and they were well practiced in the examinations of their own stagnations.
The Infection had passed through them into the kingdom like water passing through a cracked vessel. The crack had always been in them. Every life the Radiance's dream had taken had fallen through it—the one crack a white-robed god had told them to seal, too late, because it was already unsealed: they had loved him.
Every shell they had cracked beneath their feet in the Abyss to reach the summit. Every sibling left behind. They had looked back once, seen the Knight below, struggling, and turned away. Had followed their Father. Had not known, then, what turning would cost.
They knew now.
The Knight had pale bright eyes. Same as theirs. And before that, during the final battle and the long dark years before it, those eyes had been pitch black and empty, same as theirs had been through the long years of containment. At the end the Knight had freed them, and they had looked at each other in the Abyss, and the Knight's eyes had gone pale and bright again, and they had said We would protect what remains and left.
The Knight was hollow. Completely. That was what let them finish what the Hollow Knight had been made to finish and could not. No love. No crack. Nothing that let anything in.
A question came. They set the question aside. The answer was of no use.
Yet it did not stay set aside.
…
They resumed, dragging their remaining claw across the stone. The grinding scrape opened through the temple, sound coming back different in such places. The claw dulled and roughened against the stone and they continued regardless. No alternative to continuing.
Pain stopped them.
A signal from the hand-claw, transmitted up through the limb and into the joint of the thorax where other pain already lived. They dug the claw into the stone. 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.
The flower giver, and the smell of those flowers, strange and alive in a way most things underground were not.
The tearful one, acid running from her, and the feeling watching her had produced in them, still unnamed.
Their sister, half-remembered. Silk. A crimson cloak, laughter in a high corridor. The memory had blurred at its edges. Only the red remained clear. The 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 it and believed it and had failed to make the believing stop the feeling that came with it.
They resumed moving.
…
The Pure Nail lay ahead.
They felt the stand of it before they saw it in the dark, felt the stillness of it. An object present to the hands before it is present to the eyes. They had used that nail through uncountable battles for the Eternal Kingdom, against everything that had moved against the peace their Father had built in pale light amidst the dark of the world. Every blacksmith in the kingdom had spoken of it. When it stood displayed, others had reached toward it without touching, and the Hollow Knight had not understood it then and understood it less now.
Their Father had made it.
They reached it. Felt its shape with a worn claw. The tip was broken, duller than themselves. They moved the nail against the floor to find the tip's orientation, pressed it into a crack in the stone, and used its fixed position, and what remained in their body, to push themselves upright.
They stood.
Both feet on the floor. The Nail upright beside them. Their head throbbed. Their thorax ached since their own claw had driven the nail through themselves at the end—trying to weaken what lived inside them, accomplishing only the worsening of what they meant to end. The wrong leg-joint sat at its wrong angle.
They stood regardless.
One step. Two. Three. Four.
They fell. The front-plate struck the floor. Their grip on the Nail held. Their head did not strike.
They got up.
Again.
They fell again, flat this time, the Nail going sideways with them, and the injury in their head split wider in its own fashion—the gap between where sight lived and where mind lived widening another fraction.
They struck the floor with the Nail. Once. Hard. No reason behind the force, or one that was not a reason but the thing that lives in the place reasons come from—My Father would not want to see me like this—and—I cannot disappoint more than I have—occupying the same breath, 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, without looking directly at any of it for long. There was only one direction available, and it was forward. Forward would have to be enough.
The first blood had been shed in the Abyss. None of their own. Their siblings, cracked beneath every movement, shells splitting from horn to face, grounded to dust under the weight of the climbing. They had felt each one and continued climbing. The massacres after that had names they would not think now. They would think of the floor instead. The tiles. One tile, two. The Nail's tip caught the grout between the stones. Three tiles, four.
…
Cold.
The temperature dropped. Wind moved through and lifted the neck of their cloak and they stopped.
Outside.
They were outside the temple. The cold was real, came from the open dark in the kingdom rather than the sealed dark in the temple. Their body knew the difference. They stood in the entrance. No light. The lanterns on either side had shattered, their iron brackets holding nothing. The path ahead existed only in memory, and it was unreliable now, yet it was what they had. 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 it. Things given purpose, had failed their purpose, and left where they fell.
The wrong leg-joint dragged. They moved.
*Tap. Tap. Tap.*
Oi, who goes there—!
The Nail lifted.
Instinct. Training was older than thought. The Nail swung through the dark and connected, imperfectly, and there was a sound.
F-fuck! Fuck! Wha—who in hell is you—?!
Pain came immediately through the swing—the claw, the limb, the joint that had not sat right since the nail went through. 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. Above them the dark held steady. The throbbing in their head dropped from its former register into a quieter register.
They lay still.
The wind moved through the entrance behind them, lifted the cloak's neck again, set it down.
Somewhere ahead: breathing that was not their own.
They did not move.
There was no more moving left in them, for now.
They lay on the cold stone outside the temple that had been their grave, and thought—
Forward. Forward.
And then nothing. Then dark. Then the long, unasked-for mercy of unconsciousness. The stone received them without complaints. The kingdom breathed not around them without grace.
Fallen.