Chapter Text
Their little hands scramble for purchase against the ledge as they dangle, fighting the gravity that attempts to drag them down. They didn’t quite make the last jump, instead slamming down hard on the ledge with a clumsy force that left their chest aching. It’s hardly their fault, the light beckoning calling COME had blinded them at the last second when they took the leap and they ended up faltering midair. Their twin was much more lucky, having made it on the platform without any issue.
They can see their sibling from their precarious position now. Their back is turned to them, facing the lightsource. They themselves can barely see into it, but they catch a glimpse of spotless, white robes and a tall, gleaming crown, all glowing and pale. The light recedes and they can better see their sibling, who moves after it. Determined not to be left behind again, they try to heave themselves upward as their arms strain under the pressure. So close and yet so far, their twin pauses and turns—only to watch as their grip begins to slip.
Their younger half looks so much like them, albeit thicker horns then they have, but it’s almost like they don’t recognize the one with whom they shared an egg with. Their last sight of their sibling is them walking into the awaiting light beyond the open door, before it is closed with a resounding boom that shakes the last of their grip loose and they start to plummet down
down
d o w n
d o w n.
It was dead quiet.
It was the type of quiet that hung thickly in the air after something terrible was witnessed—stunned disbelief almost. Bated breath, held in fear of breaking the fragile yet heavy calm that settled after a tragedy committed. Muted grief at a funeral, all dressed in black and lovingly tracing the coffin lid of the beloved lost.
The last body had fallen, plummeting from above to hell below like a dying star. It crumpled hard against the carpet of corpses with a loud clatter, and lay still and unresponsive for a long time.
Then a twitch of the fingers. Then a full body convulse. Flailing and twisting unnaturally like a bug possessed, the body spasmed. It’s limbs contorted before the body bulged and exploded. The shell cracked in two straight down the middle and at last the void was free to rush forth uncontained. It pooled and pooled and grew to the size of a small pond.
Two massive hands, and then two more stretched themselves up from the depths of the shallows to plant themselves firmly against the ground, fingers digging in the cracked shells for structure. A dark, wicked crown of horns broke the surface, giving way to a head and broad shoulders. Grotesque and infinite, the void solidified and the Lord and God of Void walked free in their domain.
The Voidlord slumps suddenly, like a puppet with its strings cut, and barely manages to catch themselves from falling face first into the ground by bracing an arm. They blink open their many eyes only to immediately squeeze them shut again, under assault by intense essence that blinds their vision. After they tentatively crack them open again, their gaze sharpens and hones in on the blurry picture of their own cracked shell, blending in near perfect with its background.
A very familiar background.
They stare in stunned disbelief at the floor of the Abyss—made solely of the abandoned carcasses of their innumerable siblings—before they hastily push themselves up on all four arms to survey their environment. Little has changed since the last time they ventured down here. It's still a rank pit of misery, with black blanketing the surroundings like a mourning shroud and bleached, broken bodies stacked so high they form hills and valleys. The view makes them as sick as the first time they saw it.
Their head spins as they struggle to make any sense of it. Not even a breath ago, they had been fighting in the golden colosseum that was Godhome, and now they sit in the one place they never wanted to see again. They think hard until their brain hurts, but can't remember how they found themselves to be here. They feel as though they're standing over the fountain in the basin again, watching as their offered geo swirls through the murky water, glittery as they clog the drain. Any attempts to catch them only disturbs them father away, pushing them into little currents. Sometimes your fingers will brush against them, but by the time you realize you end up grasping filthy water.
If they try hard enough, they can seize a slippery snatch of a memory before it slides from their hands. Like the geo slimed by an age's worth of scum buildup.
What they recall isn't pleasant. There's pain.
Hurt.
Anger.
Light.
Fury builds in their chest with all the weight of a mountain as they clench their hands and narrow their eyes.
The Radiance.
It comes back slowly. Their almost victory, and then her flipping the script as she tears the dream top to bottom as easily as they did paper. That strange happening in the sky, that portal, it drew them in even as they tried to resist and must've deposited them here of all places.
How, they cannot explain. A defeat in any of the pantheons keeps them in Godhome, but unconscious on the ground outside the doorway. To bend the rules and repel them into the waking world must've taken a propulsion of epic magnitude, something they didn't know The Radiance was capable of at her worst.
An intrusive and horrid thought has ice plunging down their back like a glacier. If she was capable of removing them physically from the confinement of dreams and into the waking world then who’s to say that she couldn't escape herself? The seals of the Black Egg have all been broken, so the only thing keeping her prisoner is the Hollow Knight itself, who was so very close to death.
They now know, the purpose of the vortex. A jailbreak.
The God of Void surges forward, following the path they once took to the top where they know the entryway to the Ancient Basin is. Horror is a thick clog weighing heavy in their throat and all they can think of is Hallownest, Hallownest, Hallownest.
Hallownest, with neon pustules of sweltering infection seeping and spewing from every crack and crevice, a disgusting and morbid duplication of the Forgotten Crossroads. Not even the dark reaches of Deepnest is spared the bright wrath. Every corner is alight, the world painted a searing orange that glows and burns.
Hallownest, and her few surviving citizens—so small in number and all dear to their heart—overrun by the blight that sweeps the land unstoppable. It spills frothing from the mouths of any poor soul that still lived, bubbling down their neck in rivers of molten as they staggered mindlessly. In their mind Hornet is still faithfully clutching her needle, even as she gargles through the painful, hot bulges of infection that swell like cysts in her throat and limps under the weight of the heavy tumors growing on her small body. She is unidentifiable from the other groaning husks pacing the crossroads.
But most of all they think of their twin and erstwhile sibling, the Hollow Knight. Their body is the prison that holds the moth back from infecting everything completely, and they are her hated, unwanted warden. She will spare them no mercy.
They can imagine her rebirth from their ruined body, breaking them open like an egg from the inside out as she spills forth into the unprepared world. Orange fluids dribble from her wings as they unfurl from their black, fragile cocoon. The thought makes them sick with fear.
Oh Void, please let them make it in time.
The world rushes by in unintelligible shades of black as they scan for the light that cascades through the open door. They have half a finished thought about how they should have been there by now when they slam hard and painfully into the jagged ceiling of the cavern. Cracks break out on impact, and sharp stalactites come loose to crash down on the ground far below as the roof tremors. They scrunch like a roll of fabric before springing off the surface, recoiling hard. Pain starbursts across their face, and they are grateful that they no longer have a mask to break as the headache from before returns with a vengeance.
One hand cradles their blessedly not broken face as they blindly grope the walls around them. They suppose they missed the entrance. Each attempt to open their eyes sends a lance of pain through their metaphorical brain and all they can see is painful white when they try, so they give up to paw blindly grope at each groove they find. Each wasted second searching is an eternity spent and the longer it takes to find the opening the more wild and desperate their scrambling hands become.
The void roils unpleasantly, agitated greatly by the Voidlord's steadily mounting stress. Motes of darkness dance erratically as the shadows waver like smoke and seethe. The low temperature rapidly drops to beyond sub zero and frost swirls on everything they touch. Wickedly sharp, black icicles replace the stalactites that fell. Too involved in their one minded pursuit, they take no notice.
At last their hands touch the metal of the platform and they trace upwards to the open door. They press their fingers against a wall for a single second when something cuts through the protection of the darkness to sear their very being. It's like cold fire, lancing down their fingers and up their arm as they jerk it back hard. They grasp at their hand as they yelp soundlessly, it feels like they've just been electrocuted, and their limb pulses sharply with pain as they try to squeeze the hurt away. It numbs slowly, but they can still feel the residue tingle of pain crawling up their arm, dully aching and sore as they roll their tense shoulder experimentally.
With a hurting head and arm, they round on the last place they touched.
And their heart drops in shock.
Bold as brass blocking the exit is the King's Brand. It emits faint, pale light amidst the darkness and the Voidlord can scarcely believe their own many eyes. They scrutinize it top to bottom, but the loss of feeling in their arms assures them it's no illusion. Which is impossible, because they themselves broke the seal that kept the gate closed tightly shut. And no one in Hallownest had the power to lock it again, especially with the power of the King's Brand.
Only one had the ability to do so, the original caster, and they knocked his dusty corpse off his own throne.
So how and why was it here again?
Unlike before there is no grand conclusion, they truly have not the faintest inkling of its sudden, impossible existence.
But it should've reacted to their presence—not including shocking them. If they were the holder of the brand then why didn't it open like before? They reach a hand up to brush their forehead where they know it sits, but when their fingers dip the soft void they understand the problem. The brand did not imprint on the vulnerable material of their body, but instead emblazoned itself onto their hard, pale shell. Which was currently broken and lost on the floor far below and indistinguishable from the others.
Oh fuck.
They dive like a stone, down to the ground that they just left and the cracked expanse of millions and millions of shattered masks rushes upward to greet them like a mocking welcome party.
The Voidlord despairs at the mountainous task before them. Their shell could be anywhere, and the longer they take to find it the longer Hallownest suffers. They can only pray they get lucky.
Each vessel's head has a difference to set them apart from their countless siblings with some more subtle than others, but to the naked eyes all the blank masks look like a blur of monochrome. Each shell has two half formed halos. Every hull's horns end in split points. They see their mask everywhere they look, and they feel the beginnings of another panic attack.
They try to be gentle, out of respect for the dead and out of fear that they might accidentally bury their mask deeper, but with each mistake they can feel themselves starting to slip. Their claws pick up one, two, a few at a time before all four hands are scooping hundreds of the fragile husks in a crazed desperation. They clatter like the pieces of geo they once poured onto Sly's counter, and not one of them is the one they've been hunting.
Reflecting its master’s turmoil, the void bubbles and writhes. The entire Abyss pulses as the darkness shudders and breathes like a living being as they madly scour the floor. The blackened walls come alive to gurgle and gasp like the suckling, wet mouths of a newborn and the shadows twist themselves into horrors beyond a bugs comprehension.
A thousand mouths furiously gnash a thousand teeth, and a thousand eyes open to glare at nothing. Tar condenses into oily, slick tendrils that thrash and flail as they creep along the chamber, joining in their Lord's search to swipe futilely at their surroundings.
In the next room the lighthouse groans under the assault of thick coils tightening around the building. It’s structure crumbles and shakes ominously its light flickers behind a three inch wide protective glass dome. The sea that was once docile under the subjugating illumination rises to shatter the observatory with a resounding crash and glass sprinkles like twinkling gemstones into the gloom. The void descends onto the hapless, petrified lights keeper, and wallops an appendage deep and brutal across their chest, sending them flying. They hit the broken glass on the floor with a hard, sickening crunch and it sends their body sliding back a few feet, but they feel nothing of this having been dead before impact. They lie broken and bleeding, as the darkness advances onto the lantern they swore to watch over.
The glass breaks under pummeling fists, releasing the lumaflys that kept the deceased retainer company. Their short, little lives are mercilessly plucked from them by hungry shadows as they try to flutter away, and they fall grey and lifeless to join their fellow carcass.
Job well done, the tide retreats.
Oblivious to the carnage they unintentionally wrought, The Voidlord is on the cusp of a breakdown when across the bridge and expanse of the void, eight little somethings flicker in fear, stopping them dead in their tracks. It's as if eight, lax strings that they weren't aware they were holding suddenly go taught as the people on the other end tug at them frantically. They've only felt something like this once before, when they wandered the wastelands without purpose before they suddenly felt a pull that flared like a bonfire in the distance.
That pull they had later discovered to be the desperate call of their trapped twin, covering the bond that formed while they still floated in the syrupy plasma of their shared egg. And now against all odds they can feel several more terrified calls, close and nearby.
They abandon their fruitless scavenger hunt—they know deep down that it was all hopeless anyways—to chase down the source and follow it slithering through the low tunnels that lead to another chamber in the Abyss.
They emerge to a room in disarray. The inky water is high and even wilder then the first time they encountered it, with a noticeable absence of light keeping it tranquil. That may be because the lighthouse is suspiciously missing its top. If they didn't know any better they would've thought an explosion wrecked the building, but the state of the sea clues them in.
The air here is absolutely saturated in murk that seeps from the large, liquid source. It is heavy enough to weigh something on their shoulders, but it is easily swished away with a wave of their hand. It parts like a stage curtain, teasing and slow to entice excitement, to show the dock that branches out into the sea. Upon this moor huddled together, are eight tiny vessels clinging to each other in terror as the pitch licks at their horns and tugs at their cloaks.
For the third time today they cannot believe their own sight. They had assumed that all other vessels besides themselves and their twin were dead and gone, or at least alive and far away from Hallownest. Here is the proof that more yet live, trapped in their tortured place of birth. The Abyss is so immense that it makes sense that a few stragglers never made it out to the surfaces above, somehow surviving against the violent shades that roam the mass grave.
But if this continues, they won't live for much longer. The only reason they have not died yet is because self recognizes self, even compressed behind pale material. The soft luster given from the shivering horns sparks a yearning hunger in the emptiness, and it won't be long until it devourers them whole despite the familiarity.
The Voidlord will not stand idly by as the darkness takes the last of their family away from them. All four arms spread out in the universal command to cease as they reach out and forcefully command the void to stop.
The darkness wavers at the order of its God. Then the misty shadows retreat over the surface of the lake to the relief of the vessels, who watch them go. They are oblivious to the goliath of a God that looms behind them, who guiltily understands that this is their fault. The void mirrors their distress like a cheap phonograph copy, replaying to them their grief and anxiety that unintentionally caused all this mess.
On the dock, the vessels slowly relax at the lack of danger. They all brush each other off with tiny, concerned hands that dust horns and ruffle cloaks. In the worried way that someone who almost lost the one thing they had left, they tend to one another with gentleness and reverence. One breaks away from the grooming, a self obligated leader that the others turn to follow only to immediately bump into the paralyzed form of their sibling. Seven little heads follow the gaze of the first, tilting up and up and up to the equally still monolith staring back at them.
Everyone is frozen.
No one is brave enough to break the tense stalemate, the huddle and the God all anxiously wait for someone to make a move as they stand stiff. The air is dead between them as nobody breathes for fear of provoking the other. The Voidlord isn't eager to sit around forever, so they hesitantly raise a slow arm, prepared for panic.
The reaction is instantaneous, all of them flinch and tumble backwards as they trip over one another's clumsy limbs. They try to inch closer as non-threateningly as possible but aborts when a vessel flinches hard enough to nearly splash off the edge of the pier and into the lake. None of the children can scream, but they swear they try hard to.
Sensing the frenzy bound to happen, they back off their siblings to watch a little ways afar. Not too far, but close enough to close the distance easily. The gang shrinks back to the edge of the moor until they are all in danger of falling off, clutching to each other again in face of the new threat.
...And it's back to waiting in silence.
In the uneasy calm, something sparks between them, a knowing that slides into place.
That connection, shared over time and space over something as infinite as the void that drew these little children together with the understanding that this was family, solidifies as their eyes meet and hold. It's spoken without words and heard loud and clear in the unbroken peace that suddenly descends. In that fateful moment, one and eight and eight and one become nine beating hearts in tune.
The flimsy but firm strings that were yanked in the Voidlord's hand go taut and sturdy as the receiver tugs them back.
And they know.
Where once the gaggle saw a monster they see now beyond the scope of eyes that this behemoth is family. An errant sibling that had found its way to them.
When the Voidlord moves again, their siblings do not wince away, scrambling to get closer instead of fighting to flee. As they approach with tiny, pattering feet they crouch low, belly down and beckon with wide open and welcoming arms for a hug. One, two, four, seven, and eight microscopic bodies smash harmlessly against their face and sixteen excited, exploring hands paw at the malleable void. They crawl over the clawed fingers that are five times their size in length without trepidation while sending little bursts of happiness and infectious joy over the strengthened loop. The Voidlord nuzzles and kisses each head, heart close to bursting, and tries to keep up with the demand.
In the mesh of minds, their grief and shock meets with the overwhelming crest of jubilation and the type of instantaneous love that sparks when meeting the newest member of your family. It is nourishing and plentiful in a way they didn't know they needed or missed.
All at once it starts to become too much. The weight of the events and surprises of today drags them down to press deeper into the vessels who anxiously crowd closer, eager to cuddle their much bigger sibling. They are exhausted, the Voidlord realizes, but they cradle their excited, newly found siblings closer to their face nonetheless.
They are incapable of crying, but they swear something leaks from their eyes regardless. Clutching the last remnants of their broken family tight, they weep and weep.