(Rescue — Contemplate — Disturbance — Loneliness — Departure)
~~~ are used for changing the perception of vision (POV)
••• denotes flashback
*** denotes time skip
… denotes silence
xXx
Down.
Down beneath the unbeing where no breath had ever stirred. The Abyss. There she lay. Whom they called The Gendered Kin.
The Knight gashed through it the way a blade moves through water. What the dark did in response to this type of passing was not reverence, it was not fear. It simply took the shape that was pressed into it. The pressing required no force, only presence, and the presence required no intention, only being.
The Shade Lord circled. It had always circled. It glimpsed, it suspected, and it was never fully seen, it was never fully absent. It was not a shadow. A shadow is made by something blocking the light. This was the thing light failed to account for. It watched the Knight with something that was not affection, was not hunger. It shared the posture of both.
The Void is an old machine, the Shade Lord said, its voice came from everywhere the Knight was not, It devours not from appetite but from nature. Do not mistake the two. Appetite implies the possibility of fullness. Nature implies none.
The Knight did not answer. It rarely did.
Ahead where the dark that had no geometry the eye could follow, the woman lay. The Gendered Kin. She lay on nothing at all. Her arms rested on nothing, and her face turned toward nothing in particular. There were marks on her. Old ones, long-knitted. The kind that belongs to someone who has been struck so many times that the body has begun to incorporate the striking into its structure the way a tree incorporates the wire pressed into it young.
The Knight stood over her. The Shade Lord stood closer. Its attention had the quality of a hand hovering above a candle. It did not touch. It considered.
She is strong, it said, But not in the manner of those who declare it, but in the manner of those for whom it was never a choice. She has walked through crooked lands. She has been subject to the currencies that cruel places mint. Dost thou know her?
The Knight was silent.
Thou know her. But not by sight, but by what has moved through ye both like water through two separate stones in the same river. That is kin enough. Perhaps the only kind that holds.
The Void pressed close around her. It did not touch her. The Knight's presence was between them not as a wall but as a law the way cold is held back not by a thing but by a fire, and the fire needs no mind to hold it.
Raise her, the Shade Lord said, its voice had dropped to something almost quiet which was when it was most dangerous, Lift her above the crawling things. The epoch that descends upon the broken will deal gently with her, or it will answer for the failing.
The Knight reached down. The Void pulled back from her skin. But not quickly, but it did the way dark retreats from a candle. It did not flee, it did not drive. It was simply no longer there. She rose.
…
Then the second presence.
The Shade Lord went still. The Knight felt her before she arrived. Something fractured in its motion, something excessive in its being. She came out of the deep. Whom they called The Silk-born.
She was incomplete in her understanding but total in her commitment to the shape that incompleteness had made of her. The Void had taken her memories when she bathed in its blackness. Stripped them clean. And she moved now through the world enacting consequences she could not account for, and the little ones had fled before she learned why, and the not-knowing was its own architecture of ruin. The Shade Lord had gone still. This was not comfort.
She has done what she has done, it said finally, Not from malice considered and refined. From a vision already cracked before she looked through it. The Void stripped her and left her clean of the very thing that might have explained her to herself. This is not mercy. This is a different kind of damage.
The Knight looked at her.
And yet, the Shade Lord continued, the Gendered One has deemed her worth. Look at that. Worth extended not from evidence but from decision. This is the more consequential kind. Evidence changes. Decisions, if they are the right sort, do not.
The Knight moved. The tendrils of the deep receded from her, withdrawing the way a tide withdraws. The tide withdraws without hurry, without reluctance and without opinion. She was lifted above the swallowing. She was held near. The Shade Lord made a sound. It was not approval. It was something that acknowledged an event had occurred.
The Knight turned. There. The remnant lights came when called.
Vessels.
The word moved through the dark and they answered it the way a shape answers the mold it was poured into. They had once been root and pale, two expressions of one nature. One consumed the other. What remained was unified in the manner of a field after burning. Whole, yes, but also emptied. They moved without gesture, without refusal. They simply were. The Shade Lord watched them pass with its lidless attention.
Lesser, it said, But not in kind, but in completion. The Abyss perhaps never had the capacity to finish what it began in them. Perhaps never intended to. A millstone does not intend the grain it cannot grind. It simply is insufficient to it.
The Knight walked with them. Into the dark that had no floor, that kept no record. The Shade Lord followed.
***
What aileth thee?
The voice came from around the Knight, from the space the Knight occupied that the Shade Lord also occupied, that strange country of mutual residence and mutual separation. They were bound in the manner of predator and prey that have been bound so long that the predator has forgotten hunger, the prey has forgotten flight, and what remains between them is something that has no adequate name in any tongue that survived the dying of the old world.
The Knight was silent.
Thou have always been silent, but now thy silence has changed in its character. It is heavier. Something presses against the inside of thee that has not pressed before.
The Knight did not answer.
Call it. Name it, if thou can. Frustration. Sorrow. Envy, it stopped, No. Those are mortal garments cut for mortal bodies. Thou have no such body. Something else.
The darkness held.
Loneliness.
The word came from the Shade Lord with the precision of a blade finding the seam between plates of armor.
Curious fracture, it said. Most curious of all in a thing such as thine. There are presences everywhere. Things that orbit, yield, press and recede. Yet thou are bereft of the one thing that lies beneath company. That mutual recognition. That turning of two faces toward each other and finding the other face turned back.
The Knight stood motionless.
Loneliness is not the absence of bodies. It is the absence of being witnessed by something that also witnesses itself. A fire does not burn alone because no other fire burns near it. It burns alone because it cannot know that it burns, and so its burning is seen by none, not even by itself. Everything that orbits thee bends. None of it looks back.
The Shade Lord moved closer. This was unusual.
Thou are not hollow, it stated, Thou are flawed. That is worse and better at once. A hollow thing contains nothing and lacks nothing. A flawed thing has been shaped toward something and fallen short, and in that shortfall is the record of what it was meant to be. The flaw is the only proof of the original intention. Dost thou understand that? Thy imperfection is the evidence that something intended thee.
The Knight made no movement.
We see thee, the Shade Lord said.
This ache thou carry. The sting of abandonment worn so long into the grain of thine that it has become a manner of standing in the world. Yet this time it was thine own doing. One word. One refusal. Thou have will. Will has always been sufficient. Yet thou stood silent. The silence had weight. Something was made from it. Thou did not intend the making. Even when nothing was meant to be nothing.
The Knight's stillness deepened.
Will thou remain thus, the Shade Lord said, and now the question had an edge in it, while all things alter and decay around thee? Will thou persist in unmaking?
…No.
Good. That is what We—
…
Sounds.
The sounds came from somewhere above. Tunes. Rehearsed cadences and polished syllables arranged into the shape of calling. They came from those who had built their ceremonies around the deity that won their violent hearts, who had watched gods fight to death and chosen the one that killed best and built altars to its manner of killing. They knew not what they summoned, they knew not what was happening in the place from which they expected an answer. Mortal desire is not instructed by understanding. It is instructed by wanting, and wanting is sufficient to itself.
The Shade Lord was already moving. It pressed the Void outward from its sides, opening it the way a wound is opened. The dark parted. A path formed.
Let them have form for their desire, the Shade Lord said, or their insistence will rot into chaos, and chaos devours its maker first.
Godhome.
•••
Light withdrawn.
The kingdom above breathed but did not live. The king had seen the plague move through his people with the patience of something that has nowhere else to be. He stood at the edge of what remained. He counted.
He had learned to count endings where other shapes counted days. He fed them into the dark, bodies, names, the accumulated faith of generations. He bought hours with the currency of other shapes. The dark accepted every payment the way the sea accepts the drowned. It did so without record, without the alteration of a single wave. Nothing offered changed the deep in the smallest portion. The deep simply was. It received, and it did not transform what it received. It only made it indistinguishable from itself the way earth makes indistinguishable what it receives if given enough time.
He bound his name to the going-down of everything he had built, and when it went, it took him entire. There was no cruelty in it, but only the inability to cease.
No Cost Too Great.
…
Then the other one came.
The Knight did not turn. The Void shifted around it, reshaping perception, and the acknowledgment came before the arrival the way a shape that has stood long in one place knows the approach of something before it has seen it.
He Who Sinned By Love.
Whom they called The Hollow Knight.
They stood before the Knight. They had the look of things that have outlasted the meaning of what they do yet continue doing it regardless. Faithfulness and damnation wearing the same face as they so often do.
We would protect what remains.
The Knight was still. The Shade Lord had gone to the outer edge of the dark. It watched from there. Its attention had the quality of a blade hovering above flesh. It was not touching, it was patient.
What remained was not much, and the protection of it had cost more than it was worth. They knew this. The Knight knew this. And they spoke regardless and then they departed. But not in defiance, but in duty that had outlasted its own meaning. They walked into what lay ahead. There was no shelter. They walked anyway.
The Knight watched. The Hollow Knight looked back once. The Knight inclined its head. Then they were gone.
…
Thou could have ended them, the Shade Lord said, its voice distant now, nearly quiet, The thought passed through thee. I felt it pass.
No.
No, the Shade Lord agreed, and there was something in its voice that was not admiration and was not warmth, but shared the location of both, Ye are both issued from the same dark. But only one of ye has learned desire, and desire is the great curriculum by which suffering educates past all other instruction. They have learned to want what cannot be kept, and in that wanting they have become something even the Abyss cannot fully account for.
…
The Shade Lord returned to its circling. Long silence held between them, the Knight and the Shade Lord, the Void and the thing that moved within it.
…?
At last something arose from the Knight. Something without shape and without name, pressing against the inside of it the way water presses through stone. It pressed not in violence, it pressed not in hurry. It pressed in the patient way that eventually proves devastating.
What are we, the Knight asked, it was not a question. It was a wound turned outward.
The Shade Lord did not pause.
Nothing.
But you.