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She was not certain why she kept up her patrols. Why she tried to keep out outsiders. Why she kept going, and going, and going, and going. She was princess-protector, her visage known if only from a distance by most of the things in Hallownest that will had their own minds.
Princess of a dead kingdom. Protector of a decaying corpse.
Sometimes, curled in a tree or under a bush or in the ruins of someone’s home, she wondered what it would be like to just be Hornet. To be a bug among so many others. Sometimes, usually when she sat beside her mother’s eternally sleeping form, she thought she knew why. Sometimes, usually injured and stifling her cries while hiding from an attacker, she wondered who would even notice if she left.
But then, from time to time, she would come across those tiny vessels. She had no idea where they had come from, how they had clawed their way to the surface and back towards Hallownest. She did not know if it was the Hollow Knight or the Pale King or the Radiance herself who had called for them. Most of them were broken, little more than void tendrils held in place by a shattered mask. A few were intact enough, willing, and able to put up a fight when she tested them.
Eventually, all of them fell to her needle or to Hallownest itself.
She had spent enough time – for what was there in Hallownest but time these days? – digging through the Pale King’s notes to know that a new vessel could replace the old one. That a vessel, sufficiently pure, sufficiently hollow, sufficiently… nothing, could cut down her eldest sibling and take its place as a container for the infection.
Hallownest’s time was peculiar, to put it mildly, but she suspected from plant growth and infections and new births and what little she heard from the few travellers that did manage to get into the ruins that several centuries had passed since Hallownest’s fall. Possibly more. Enough time that Hallownest had managed to not just collapse and bring the surroundings down with it, but enough time that it had faded into nothing more than myth and legends.
She remembered when the Hollow Knight, had taken its place within the Black Egg. When her mother had laid down to sleep for the last time, and when bug and beast alike began turning their eyes to the light they once more heard whisper in their dreams. A new vessel, even temporary as it would be, could perhaps hold long enough for the world to forget them all entirely, or long enough that some better, more permanent way of containing the light could be devised.
But still, the new vessel had to be strong enough to hold for that long. Had to be strong enough to defeat whatever remained of the current vessel, and shape itself into the prison and prisoner of the light. If they could not defeat her, princess-protector, heir to Hallownest and Deepnest, daughter of Herrah the Beast and the Pale King, then what chance would they stand against the full might of the Pure Vessel and the old light combined?
At least, that was what she kept telling herself.
The new vessel had to be strong of body and mind alike. And yet, sitting in the remnants of the Beast’s Den, watching her mother continue that endless sleep that she would never wake from, Hornet would admit that it was fear that motivated her. A new vessel would need to break the seals; would need kill the Dreamers. And thus, they would by necessity take away that one remnant of her family. She had lost her siblings – countless of them, in quantities that could only be produced by Root and Wyrm. She had lost her father to his self-imposed exile. She had lost her kin, either fleeing from the infection or succumbing to it. She had lost her home, her caretakers, her family. All that remained, trapped within that deep, eternal sleep, was her mother.
Perhaps that was why.
She had no idea what would happen if a new vessel ever succeeded. What would happen to her, if her vigil and defence of the rotting corpse of a long-dead kingdom was suddenly no longer needed. Would she travel? Would she take up the mantle of ruler and remake Hallownest? Or would she simply fade away, becoming but one of the many myths that filled the old kingdoms?
She did not let those thoughts fester, for they brought with them whispers of light and strength. Instead, she threaded her needle and maintained her guard, and tried to ignore the odd chill running under her chitin as she watched yet another of those small vessels stumble in from the wastelands and begin the long descent down to Hallownest.
… And every time, watching those small figures making their way through sand and ash and grass and fungi, she could not help the little voice of pure darkness, pure freedom, that hummed to her: Perhaps this would be the one to finally free her from her duty as eternal as the Dreamers’?