Chapter Text
Pain. For a long time, that is all the hollow knight knew. Not like bumping a hard surface or scraping a knee, but liquid fire and acid in your veins, flesh rotting pain.
They deserved this, didn’t they? They had tried, and failed to be pure. Their life’s mission gone down the drain, all because of one mistake that was all their fault.
They tried to be pure.
They tried to make their father proud.
In between these long bursts of searing, stinging pain, they had dreams. Dreams that took place in a pale arena, with a single, masked watcher wrapped in golden wrappings on a tall chair. This figure reminded them of their father.
On the opposite side of the arena, there was a single, small bug with a white mask, and two large black eyes. Did they recognize this bug? They seemed both so familiar yet unfamiliar at the same time. This bug used to fail to them, yet as time passed, and their dreams became more common, the hollow knight started to fail to this bug. When they failed to this bug, they felt a single, solitary moment of bliss, before getting ripped back out into the painful, grisly present. They hated this.
One day, after failing to the smaller bug and getting ripped back to the present, the burning that they have felt for so long, and the sickly sweet feeling in their throat started to fade. Was this some sort of trick? Was the vessel hallucinating? What is going on? Before they realized it, their chains started to loosen, and they fell to the ground.
The ground was cool, solid, comforting almost. They could have stayed there, they should have stayed there, nobody needed them anyway after how much they failed, but something in them forced them to get up, and start walking out of the temple.
As they began to take steps by using their nail as a cane, their vision started to become ever increasingly blurry. As they moved through the hallway of the temple a splitting headache started to develop as well. They could barely hear themself think “keep going, you can make it to the end.” How they were thinking that they had no idea, for they were pure, right? Weren’t they?
As soon as they managed to get outside of the temple doors, the pain was too much to bear. They ever so slightly felt themself hip on to their nail to try and stay up, and all they saw was a blurry blob of red, before everything went dark.
Hornet was tending to her nail inside the hut located by the lake of unn. It felt calm here, albeit humid, thick, and slightly sickly sweet du to the infection still raging on. As she was just about to exit her hut and try to find some source of food, she felt a shift.
The air became ever so slightly thinner.
The the fragrant, earthy smell became slightly stronger.
She almost didn’t notice this, but when she did, she began to panic.
”What is going on? Is the infection gone? Did the little ghost do something? Am I imagining or going delusional? What is happening?”
Before she knew it, she was quickly zip lining through the greenpath trying to get to the black egg as fast as she could.
As she arrived into the crossroads, she was in complete awe in the sight before her.
“No,” she said aloud to herself. “This can’t be. How- why…”
As she got to the black egg, she immediately saw The Hollow Knight, The Hollow Knight, walking out of the black egg, chains still attached to their limbs, using their nail as a cane.
She grabbed her nail and got into her battle position, when suddenly, there was a booming thud, and the hollow knight was out cold.
Hornet began to panic at the sight. She proceeded to quickly scoop the hollow knight up, and run hours of the temple. She only had one thought racing through her mind, and that was to get the knight to a hot spring as fast as possible.