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The difference is stark and it’s immediate: As soon as you’ve clipped on the charm your abdomen goes dense and heavy.
You have to struggle to categorize the sensations because this is nothing at all like putting your things away inside your body—those things might as well not exist anymore until you need them again, and it’s not like they bounce and rattle around while they’re in there either. You never used to question it, even when other bugs gave you odd looks to see you do it, even when you came up with the trick of putting them in your back instead so people would assume you were tucking them into a pack or something. Now you know more about your own origins you guess it’s the Void inside you that holds your stuff, though you still can’t guess how that works exactly.
This isn’t like eating either! Not even like when you’ve taken something so big into your body that you can’t osmose it all at once and it takes a couple minutes to properly break down. That’s more of an uncomfortable, awkward sensation that’s discouraged you from eating anything bigger than your claws if you can help it.
What you’re feeling right now is… Okay it’s uncomfortable but like not that sort of holy shit I am a thin coating around this huge thing and I’m going to split like rotten fruit euuueuueughghghhghhhghhhh feeling. Your middle is pressurized, it’s taut, and there’s such an extreme heat there you have to look down to make sure you’re not actually glowing like the aspid corpse you got this new charm from.
But you aren’t glowing. You don’t even look any different! This is kind of a relief because after all the blobby orange tumors you’ve seen on husks it would be pretty fucking freaky if a charm gave you an aspid’s blobby orange abdomen. But it’s also kinda not a relief not being able to see what feels like such a huge change.
Gingerly you rise from the bench. You’ve barely taken a few steps when your lower belly sort of… clenches, rippling all through your body, soft shell and void beneath it alike. You stop and look down at yourself. It happens again, the weird clunch, and you can see your underside twitch. It’s more uncomfortable than before, painful even, and you’re strongly considering sitting back down on the bench when there’s this loud truly nasty GLORP noise and then a POP and—
Something a little bigger than your forearm from elbow to claws wobbles into view, flapping still-wet gossamer wings that strongly resemble the new ones you got from the Ancient Basin. Your vision is still swimming from the frankly indescribable thing you just experienced and it takes a minute for you to really understand what you’re looking at: This tiny little thing with a white head that looks like your mask and eensy black limbs poking out from beneath a blue-gray cloak like yours.
Holy fucking shit?? Holy fucking shit??????????
Your soul has dropped a lot all at once, like using a spell; that’s why you’re dizzy, probably, besides the obvious. On wobbly claws you stagger back to the bench and sit.
The hatchling—the hatchling!!!!!!!! (?!?!?!?!??!!?!?!?!?!)—lowers itself down to the bench beside you and sits too.
Holy FUCKING shit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It’s so tiny!!!!!! It’s tinier than lightseeds and shrumelings and just about any living thing you’ve ever seen before!!! That’s a little confusing because like you can remember clearly enough at this point you’ve always been this size, from birth all the way to your adult self now.
(The handful of vessel corpses you’ve seen across the kingdom have all been bigger than you, though, even though you all hatched with the exact same stature; this is both not fair and not a tradeoff you’re happy with. You should be taller and also your siblings should all be alive.)
So what does this mean for this newborn creature you can probably fit in your claws if it curls up small enough? Is it only going to get to grow as big as you? You, who so many bugs assume must still be a grub because you’re still the size of one? That’s a hard thing to want for anybody when you know firsthand how much it sucks to get patronized so often by people you want to see you as an equal.
You super don’t want to spawn hatchlings your own size, though. That seems like it’d really hurt.
There’s so much—wow, there is so much you need to think about right now; don’t bugs usually, oh, you don’t know, spend a good while knowing they’re going to have kids before kids suddenly happen? As far as you’re aware a bug would normally need to have sex one or more times with a compatible partner or partners, and then spend some time gravid, and then have to look after the egg clutch after laying the things… They would be able to have things ready for hatchlings? Like a place to keep them and supplies to take care of them and ideas for names…
Maybe the fact that the giant aspid corpse you got this charm from was thinking BREED should’ve been some kind of forewarning, but in YOUR opinion that was super incredibly not warning enough. How the literal actual fuck were you supposed to know this charm was going to make you give live birth like an aspid within like five seconds of putting it on???
Even as you’re thinking this your abdomen clunches again. Uh-oh.
From your seat on the bench you can actually see this new hatchling pop out of your nethers before it traces a wobbling flight path to the ground. (You bend carefully to pick it—them?—up and place them on the bench next to their sibling. Their tiny body is still sticky with birth and very warm. You can feel their pulse underneath your claws, so fast it’s like a hum, too quick to tell the beats apart. Your heart breaks.)
Nobody’s around to watch here all the way out in Greenpath, so you reach down and pat yourself between your legs, curious now. Nope: Still just flat flesh with no openings to speak of whatsoever. Even just exploring Hallownest you’ve observed a kaleidoscopic variety of genitals between all the different bug species that live or lived here, and it’s made you all the more interested in what it’s like to have and use them… seems like this charm is all about the spawning and doesn’t particularly care about sex, though. With a Void body you guess you don’t really need any sort of orifice to expel hatchlings through, they can just phase through like anything you want to store or consume.
(You hate that your featureless body makes sense to you now, with the context of how and why you were made. In your father’s eyes his children were just tools to be used and discarded, locked away like everything else he didn’t want to deal with—like he locked Markoth’s body away, like he locked your mother away. Like he used your sibling and the poor Dreamers to lock the grieving, raging Light away.
You weren’t ever supposed to be a person, to him. You were just supposed to be a thing. And you weren’t even good enough for him then. Of course you would never be allowed the option to make new life: That’s a privilege only living creatures get to have.
You have got to stop thinking about this. He’s dead and you’re alive and even if you hate being stuck cleaning up this mess he made and then abandoned, it’s what’s in front of you. There’s no way out for you now but to deal with it.)
More pangs through your stomach snap you out of your funk. Wow, that dead aspid’s dying thoughts were extremely not exaggerating about the breeding.
The hatchlings stop spawning once there are four, which is good news because it would be really difficult to get anywhere constantly popping out babies but also bad news because you don’t know if you’re gonna be able to handle one baby, let alone four.
You have to get your map out to doublecheck whether it’s worth trying to sprint through the Crossroads or whether it’d be better to take the long way to Greenpath’s Stag Station. There’s no question that you need to get back to Dirtmouth: First of all it’s going to be way too dangerous to cart babies around with you while you’re adventuring, but you can’t take too long a break because everyone from Hornet to the White Lady keeps impressing on you that the Hollow Knight is on the verge of death and you’re the only one who can do anything about the Infection. There’s still a Dreamer you have to track down before you can even get into the temple where your sibling is sealed. Now that you’ve managed to send Cornifer home to Iselda, maybe the two of them will be willing to watch the hatchlings when you can’t? You at least have plenty of Geo to pay them for their trouble, now…
Nobody in Dirtmouth has children that you know of but maybe Elderbug or Sly will have some idea of what hatchlings need? The two of them are older bugs, at least; they’ll have seen children raised even if neither has any of their own.
The problem is how to get to Dirtmouth. You think you can carry maybe two hatchlings in your arms at once, and taking the Crossroads will mean a lot of jumping around rickety platforms while running away from very aggressive enemies. But Greenpath will mean a lot of jumping around and running from enemies also, and some of the infected Mosskin explode, and then there’s the Fool Eaters to worry about… plus the acid… there’s no way to tell if Isma’s Tear will work on your hatchlings too if they’re close to you, and you don’t want to take that risk.
No, it’ll have to be the Crossroads path: Still dangerous but at least shorter. You pick up the youngest of your four hatchlings in both claws, considering; they turn their little face towards you and wiggle their wings but don’t try to squirm away. You can probably fit most or all of them in your cloak if you roll it up, you think, and hop off the bench.
As one all of the hatchlings sit up and take to the air, hovering around you expectantly like they’re raring to go wherever you lead. Umm… okay??? You guess you and your siblings were all pretty mobile too right after you were born… hopefully they’ll at least stay behind you if you run into anything too troublesome? You wish you could just tell them to ride in your cloak or on your head or something…
You draw your nail and head towards the bridge to the Crossroads—slowly, so you can be sure that the hatchlings can keep up. (They do.)
There’s a Mosskin in the way. You can put it down in one hit with your Pure Nail, before the babies can be exposed to any harm whatsoever, you decide, and you rush forward, and—
Almost before you can tell what’s even happening, your hatchlings zoom past you, charging the Mosskin head-on. The first impacts it so heavily it staggers backwards, and they burst into Void particles and disappear. The second strikes the Mosskin dead but explodes into Void and vanishes also.
You’re left standing frozen on the path, still gripping your nail’s hilt in numb claws. Your children’s shells, their masks are nowhere to be seen. The Void particles released when they died don’t coalesce into Shades. They’re just—gone, like they were never born in the first place.
The two remaining hatchlings circle around the Mosskin’s corpse and then return to fly lazily around you, not even seeming to care that their siblings are dead.
You don’t understand what’s happening. You just know something’s wrong, something is so wrong—
The weight in your abdomen pulses like an oversized heart and pain drops you to your knees. You hear that awful squelching noise again, and a fifth and then sixth hatchling emerge from your body as if to—to replace the ones that died.
You remember very suddenly the way that aspid mothers fight: By shooting out newborn hatchlings to fight and die for them—
Your whole body goes cold, so cold. Your shaking limbs can’t hold you up, and you drop your nail to support yourself on all fours. The rustling of foliage around you goes distant and tinny, so that all you can hear is the wind rushing around the hatchlings’ beating wings.
When you take the charm off, back at the bench, your surviving four children and the pressure in your belly all disappear as if they were nothing but constructs all along.
Well. You know what the charm does now, more or less. It uses the wearer’s soul to give them an aspid womb, to fight like an aspid fights—spawning an endless chain of dronelike children to attack foes, like some horrible nightmare version of the Hive’s patrolling bees.
No. Nightmare is a cruel way to put it. Grimm was, is, an opportunistic parasite but he still cared—cares—about his larva, no matter how odd you found the way he showed that affection.
Your children were not constructs. You gave birth to them and it hurt. They were little and perfect and warm. They had tiny hearts that thrummed beneath your claws when you picked them up.
It’s not like you’re prepared to be a parent. You don’t know if you could really be a good one, either, with your father-eaten memory and so few ways to communicate because of that. But for ten, fifteen minutes you were prepared to—to rearrange your life around this sudden parenthood.
Your children were supposed to be your children. Not this. Not little automatons, minuscule tools for you to use and throw away without a care.
You don’t want to be your father. This was an accident. You’d never have put the charm on in the first place if you knew that this is what would happen.
But you did put it on, and two of your hatchlings did die. And you erased four others from existence altogether. That’s far too close to what he did. It’s so close you want to rip your shell to pieces and let your Shade drift down to join the others in the Abyss, let your corpse join the pile of dead Vessels scattered across this wasted worthless kingdom.
It would be so selfish to, though. Who else is there who can put the Hollow Knight out of their misery before the Light boils all of Hallownest, boils all your friends, in her grief for her people?
You stretch out on the bench. Void is probably coming off your whole body like a smoke cloud and leaking from your mask but you don’t give a shit.
There’s still the Dreamgate to the Queen’s Gardens that you set right in front of the White Lady’s self-imposed, spouse-reinforced prison to make it easier to visit. If anyone in the world could understand what you’re feeling right now it would be her. You couldn’t tell her what’s happened but you could lay across her roots there in the colorless dark. You could run to her like any sad grub to its mother.
But, oh, you can’t do that. How could you possibly? You’d probably just remind her of what it felt like when her husband took her children away—children she told you herself she’d longed to have—and experimented on all of you before you even hatched, hollowed you out to fill with Void, to make into something not quite bug, to make into single-use tools and then discard.
You want to fucking scream, like the Light does, like your lost kin did with the Light’s voice. But the only way for you to do that is to cast Abyss Shriek and you don’t have the soul for that right now, so you guess you will just lay here on your face forever instead.
There’s no way for you to tell how long you’ve been lying on your face on the bench, but you can hear footsteps approaching—too careful and uneven to be the footsteps of a husk.
Cool. Awesome. Maybe whoever’s here will make your day and just fucking stab you so they can take a seat instead, and save you the trouble.
“What’s this?” says a voice you recognize. Despite yourself you shift. “Is that you there, my small friend?”
Half begrudging, you turn your head so you can look at something other than the bench slats. Even as you do, Quirrel kneels in the grass before the bench so he can peer at your face directly.
“As usual you’ve chosen quite the picturesque spot to rest—” you think that usually Quirrel’s the one who likes to find nice scenery to admire during his breaks and you’re the one who stumbles upon him by accident, but whatever “—but I seem to find you in an uncharacteristically sorry posture. Are you injured somewhere? Loath as I am to leave the comfort of a ceiling above me, I’d be more than happy to help you back to the surface, or at least accompany you to a stagway station. Your well-being matters more to me than such little discomforts.”
As he says this he reaches out with a careful claw to rest on your back, very gentle, stroking as if searching for a wound.
And it’s—it’s Quirrel. Quirrel who always has something kind to say to you, Quirrel who’s the only bug you don’t mind talking about your height because he doesn’t automatically jump from short to helpless or child. You turn over onto your side to face him, then sit up on the bench and catch his claw in both of yours.
Quirrel reaches up to touch at the edge of the overlarge mask he wears like a hat, then tugs at the tied corners of his kerchief. “Ah… forgive me if this is too forward,” he says, and reaches out with that same claw to touch at the side of your mask, “but… you look as though you’ve wept. Has something happened, dear friend?”
Your claws squeeze on his at the word dear. Quirrel’s free claw comes to rest on your forearm.
“You needn’t talk to me about it if it’s too painful a subject, of course,” he says, extra gentle, “but if you’d like the company I can stay with you a while.”
The look on Quirrel’s face is so earnest it makes your chest ache. But at the same time—
At the same time, with him knelt down in front of you like this you have a clearer view than usual of his pouch. It’s small and empty now because it’s not in use but it’s so, so easy to imagine it swelled and distended around a clutch of newly-hatched isopods, tiny and helpless, their shells still white and their eyes like dots of paint in tiny faces. It’s so easy to picture Quirrel showing the grandeur of the world to his children, taking them along with him on his travels.
It’s too fucking easy to imagine your hatchlings sitting in his pouch instead, him carrying your babies for you while you travel this ruined but beautiful world together. The dream is too perfect to ever come true and your broken heart will never be whole.
Your breath huffs out, as far from elegant and composed as a bug could be. Your claws are probably digging into Quirrel’s painfully but you can’t seem to loosen your grip. To his credit he doesn’t even flinch; that claw on your arm reaches up to softly cradle the back of your head, and he pulls you to his chest. He teases his other claw from between yours and you let him on a faint suspicion that proves true when he wraps both arms around your stunted body and holds you to himself. You work your claws against his front, scratching weakly.
“Oh, love,” Quirrel says, low and kind. “You’re all right. You’ll be all right.”
He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about, you have never in your entire life been all right and you never will be. But his touch is so gentle and the crooning note to his voice is so tender and even though it’s a lie, it’s such a sweet one. So you cling to him and you shake and you leak Void without caring how strange it must seem, and Quirrel holds you tight, Quirrel soothes you all the same.