(Waken — Target — Find — Rope — Stuck — Walk Back — Temple — Red — Shut Off)
~~~ are used for changing the perception of vision (POV)
••• denotes flashback
*** denotes time skip
** denotes background sounds
… denotes silence
-x-X-x-
Pale robes. Paler skin.
A figure stood at the edge of sight and no further. The crown's edge showed. Hands folded behind, or perhaps gone. Behind that figure stood others, all of them white, all of them blurred at their edges, giving off a warmth that carried no heat. The glow reached the Hollow Knight where they lay and what it produced in them had no word attached to it.
The figure seemed to lower its gaze. Its expression is that of the slow bewilderment of something that had not expected to find what it found. The dark lines near the eyes spoke age. Old.
It drew a breath that stirred no air in any chamber they were actually lying in.
Wake.
UP.
…
Black.
Then grey spreading inward from the edges. Vision assembled piece by piece. Rubble settled after shaking stopped. Nothing fitting quite as it had. They tried lifting the head. The plates at its base ground, a wet click on the left side. The whole neck answered half a breath late. Ceiling above: rock, dripstone weeping. One drop fell and struck the shell. A second found the split and ran into it, down toward the eye. The eyes do not move.
The Nail was still in their claw.
The grip had held through whatever happened and however long the happening took. Broken tip fixed in a hole it had made in the stone beside them. Claw locked past pain into the dumb instinctive contract of not letting go.
They arched their back. Turned front-down. Lay against the floor and waited for the throbbing in the limb-root to ease.
It deepened. The right limb-root had separated; the joint ground plate on plate when they shifted. A coarse internal sound, something between grinding and a wet scrape. Black welled fresh at the pauldron's seam and pattered underneath them in slow drops.
They had not let go of the Nail.
They turned back. Bent the legs. Dragged toward the Nail's position with what remained in them. Not much. What there was.
Crouching. The crouch cost the legs—shell at the joints clicked hard. They looked left. Nothing. Right. Nothing. Ahead and slightly left: a shape in the dark, too dim to name. Rocks, perhaps. Or not rocks.
Target. The only word that fit the shape of the problem.
They stood. Frame bent. Grip held at the rim of holding. The broken tip tore free of the hole it had made in the floor with a sound like a nail drawn from green wood. One leg forward, flat, then pushing up with the Nail's haft as the legs threatened their own failure, something in them seizing, a hard bright cramp bolting up through the twisted leg-joint and into the leg-root, sharp enough that the edges of sight went white. They lifted the head toward the ceiling during the effort. The ceiling offered nothing. They had not expected it to.
Walk.
One step. Two. Three.
Not rocks.
A face. Pale, still. Blue cloth wound at the waist and falling below the legs. The rest bare. The figure lay front-down, head tilted left, one cheek against stone. Eyes shut. Not sleeping.
Not living.
The shell had begun its quiet work: a waxy sheen across the back plates, the fluid settled to the underside so the back looked emptied. From beneath the hips a pool had built, finding the seams in the floor and moving toward lower ground. One claw lay open near the head, claw-tips curled. The joint above it was thin.
The Hollow Knight looked at this.
Then stepped past. Their foot came down in the pool. It was thicker than water and colder than it had any right to be, and it climbed the grooves of the sole and seeped into the greave's cracks. Dark in this light. The fluid was present. That was the sum of what they needed to know. They walked through it.
*Tap. Tap. Tap.*
The wall came before they expected it. Stone, fallen and stacked, sealing the path they knew had once been open. They pressed their claw against it. Stone did not move. The limb-root woke white and bright and black ran fresh down the inner limb and off the limb-joint.
They turned.
Stairs to the left, descending. A landing below. Another passage beyond. The Nail's broken tip struck stone on each step. They did not fall. They had ensured this by the grim arithmetic of damage: the limb-root, the leg-joint, the leak under the plates. A fall on stairs compounded what was already compounded. On the fourth step the leg-joint folded a fraction past its limit and the sound inside it was wet cloth tearing. They locked it with will and kept going.
At the bottom: headless signs, posts buried in the earth, faces gone. A lamp with its glass smashed, the pale things that once lit it now smeared across the broken glass. The lamp had been bright once. It was not now. They knew the condition without naming it. Their own eyes still refused full travel. The world arrived in a tunnel.
Their horns scraped the low platform overhead as they shouldered through a tight passage. Dust and grit fell into the split of the shell. Each grain landed along the exposed seam. More stairs. Several steps crumbled to rubble. They drove the Nail into the ceiling for balance and hauled through, the broken tip screaming a groove into the rock, limbs shaking hard enough that the vibration ran into the separated limb-root and pulsed the leak there.
They stopped.
Light.
Above. A shaft in the ceiling where the surface broke open. Pale, not burning. A rope or lead hanging thin from it.
They measured the distance. The limb would fail at the lip. The limb-root would shift clean. The fall would finish what the floor had started.
They looked at the light a while.
Then looked away. Went straight ahead.
A hole in the floor arrived without warning. They stopped at the rim, threw the Nail sideways against the wall for purchase, the tip shrieking against stone, sparks of grit, the jar of it driving into the ruined limb-root until the limb went numb from limb-joint to claw-tip. The locked grip held. They looked at the other edge.
They lowered themselves in. Fixed the Nail on the far lip and used it the way you used a rope. Feet walked the opposite wall, the leg-joint screaming through each planted sole, black running down the inner leg from some seam opened higher, making the shell slick. They hauled. The limb-root gave a single, wet shift, its socket no longer reliable, and the whole limb went dead for a breath, hanging. They hauled with the other limb. The broken tip held. They rolled onto the upper surface and lay there. A casket with the lid left open.
They stood.
A snail-carriage sat idle in the passage ahead. No trader. They moved past it. A lamp above, this one still lit: pale glow stuttering against stone. It was not blind. Yet.
The elevators.
Something shifted in the thorax at the sight. A heaviness. The platforms were too narrow. Built for smaller shapes. Cleaner shapes. Shapes that had not spent an age cracking open. The platforms were waiting for the right moment to give out. The Hollow Knight had outlasted several such moments like these before. Outlasting was not trusting.
They stood before the elevators.
Then turned back.
The lamp. The hole. The carriage. The corpse.
Still there. The pool had widened. The edges had begun to dry into a ring. They stepped onto the still claw. They kept walking. The sound attached to the foot, and the foot attached to the next step.
They found a chamber. Working lamps above. Their ruined outline fell long and bent across the floor. The Hollow Knight moved toward the center, raised the Nail, drove the broken tip into the stone with full body behind it. The limb-root howled. The impact jarred every crack in the shell. Vision shattered white at the borders again. They tried to pull it back—
Garama!
The voice came from no direction and every direction.
Turning before thought arrived. The Nail came up. Stance dropped, legs bent, weight back, blade-limb forward.
A figure before them. Small. Crouched low. Weapon up. Weight on the balls of both feet. Some bug who had trained long and trained well and was presently furious at something.
They attacked.
The leg-joint sent up a white report. Something had shifted and would not shift back.
Their first swing came as a dropping diagonal, the claw angled to carry the Nail's weight through the descent and spare the lower limb at contact. The small figure stepped inside it, crossed their weapon upward to meet the Nail near the hilt-end at its weakest point of leverage, and used the redirect to throw the force sideways. The impact slammed up the Hollow Knight's limb hard enough to grind plate on plate at the limb-joint. Something in the joint popped wet and kept working.
Good deflection. Not an amateur.
Black welled at the bracer's seam and ran a line down into the glove. They did not wipe it.
The Nail swung through. They used the momentum to turn the body and bring it back in a tight horizontal arc from the opposite side.
The figure ducked.
Fast.
And while ducking, spoke. The syllables lost their shape before reaching anywhere the Hollow Knight could use. What arrived instead was the sound beneath the words. A voice raised in warning or appeal.
The sound of infection.
The sound the Radiance's puppets made when something in their ruined minds drove them to try speech before driving them to try violence.
At the edges of their sight: blooms of yellow. Orange. Spreading from the figure's mask like the Infection spreading from the eyes of the fallen—thick and wet light pushing through cracks, the flesh behind the mask seeming to soften and run. The precise shades the Hollow Knight had spent decades watching bleed through the cracks of the temple while the thing inside them fed and fed and never finished feeding.
Infected.
Something answered with heat under the plates of the thorax.
They pressed the attack.
A short jab with the Nail's pommel toward the figure's head, meant to disorient, to open the gap for what followed. The figure slipped it. Barely. Their off-limb came up to redirect the pommel's path, used the contact to push back and create distance. In creating distance they also spoke again.
Still wrong.
The figure's weapon came in—a short raking slash at the inner joint of the Nail claw, a disarming strike with the turn of the whole body generating the power and not the limb alone. The Hollow Knight pulled the claw back. The blade fell short. They stepped in immediately after the extension to close before the figure could recover the angle. The blade kissed the gauntlet seam hard enough to score it. A hairline split opened. Black beaded along the cut and dripped once onto the stone between them.
Body check. Limb-root to torso.
Shell met shell with a dull, meaty report. The figure was small and the check drove them backward. They did not fall. The Hollow Knight felt the plate over the figure's torso give—a soft wrong flex, the shell there thinner than it looked. Something wet clicked in the figure's torso on the rebound. Neither of them stopped for it.
The figure absorbed the impact by stepping through it, one foot back then the other, transferring into a pivot and coming back from the side. Their foot caught the Hollow Knight at the outer leg, the flesh of it rather than the joint. The correct target for that size against this size. It found the seam between plates and drove into the flesh underneath. Fluid welled dark along the leg-root's seam.
The Hollow Knight did not process this. They were past processing anything that was not the fight.
The figure's weapon came at the mask in a quick underhanded throw. Thrown in the sense of using the claw to angle the blade's trajectory upward while the grip stayed. A feint. They tracked the movement that followed through, the same movement they had seen—
Seen before.
Not here. In some other chamber. In some other age of themselves, when such things had been shown to them not as threat but as instruction.
Their head shifted toward the shaking lamps. For a moment the lamps doubled, then tripled, then smeared. Something in the thorax loosened and tightened at once, like a knot pulled from both ends. They repositioned.
Their Void would not answer.
They reached for it—the deep dark pooled beneath them that had sustained what could not otherwise be sustained through the long decades of confinement. What answered instead was a dry click behind the breastplate, like a bolt thrown on an empty room. Then a thin seep of black from the cracks already living in the shell. The Void had tried. The root of it was damaged.
They pressed anyway.
The figure moved left as they drove forward. Stepped right. The Hollow Knight swung wide, overcorrecting for the leg-joint that now dragged on every lateral step, and the figure went up and over entirely, both feet briefly on the Hollow Knight's limb-root, then pushed off.
Came down behind.
A slash across the back, flat of the blade. The blow landed between plates. Something in the mid-shell cracked with a wet internal note, a plate hairlining, and for one step the vision stuttered white again while black fluid ran warm down the back.
They turned.
One horizontal swing with the Nail, full rotation of the body, the limb-root driving through. It caught the figure beneath the left limb-root. Shallow, they had moved far enough that only the tip found them, enough to part the cloak and score the hide and open a bright wet line that darkened immediately. A thin spray hit the Hollow Knight's lower limb, warm. Both parties ignored it. The figure's limb-root kept working. The fluid kept coming.
Distance again.
Then the figure came up.
Not toward them. Above them. A vertical leap, weapon angling down, the weight of the fall driving the blade's descent. The Hollow Knight did not step back. They stepped in, tucked the head sideways, took the flat of the blade across the upper shell rather than the crown, and brought their own head into the figure's torso on the way through.
Contact.
The figure folded around the point of impact with a sound half breath and half something soft giving way against hard shell, then landed briefly on the Hollow Knight's head. The Hollow Knight shook. Plates ground. The split in the shell tore another fraction wider with a bright wet flare behind the eyes. Black ran into the eye-slits of the mask and smeared the world at the edges. The figure's grip on the Nail thread held and they swung clear, boots scraping shell, leaving a smear of their own blood across the Hollow Knight's crown.
Then the thread caught on something.
A fine white line. The Hollow Knight had clocked it earlier in the fight and had not followed the information. They had not tracked where the thread went.
They tracked it now.
Too late.
The thread caught them mid-step. The leg-joint. The twisted one. It pulled.
They went forward, straight, with all their height behind the fall. The Nail left their claw. Their head struck. The split in the shell widened that final fraction with a sound felt more than heard and through the gap poured the empty grey of a mind that had stopped producing its next thought.
Something dark ran along the inside of the mask in a thick sheet and found the edge and ran out over the chin in a slow rope that pattered on the stone under their cheek. One tip of the horn snapped on impact. It lay beside their face.
They lay.
Above them, movement. The figure approaching. Vision had contracted to the dim circle of what lay directly ahead. The stone darkened where the head was draining itself onto it in a slow, widening spread.
The figure's claw touched their side.
One claw. Soft.
They turned what remained of their sight upward. A face above them. Small features. Wide eyes. An expression the Hollow Knight had no immediate answer for.
Red cloak.
Dark in this light, nearly black at the edges, but in the failing ring of their sight it held a specific shade. A thread of that same red had once been knotted around a small joint. The detail came and left.
A child.
Somewhere further back, in a corridor of themselves. Laughter. High. Brief. Dust and warm stone. A cloak of the same shade, going around a corner they were not allowed to follow.
Then the claw moved.
It came at the side of their head where the shell was already compromised. Small and clenched and accurate. The split accepted the argument without debate. Something gave with a final and collapsing sound, and light folded in from the edges all at once. Black poured freely now, running from the side of the head in a dark fan across the stone.
The dark that followed was not the dark of the Abyss. Not the dark of the temple. Only the small and ordinary dark of a body that had held as long as it could.
The figure's face still above them.
Still that expression.
The Hollow Knight's thought frayed on the broken edge of the shell and dissolved into the black running out of them and then was not a thought at all.
No more will. No more thoughts. No more cries.
The claw flexed once against the floor. Claw-tips dragged a short arc through their own fluid. Found nothing that needed holding.
Went still.