Chapter Text
Though bound, they knew the state of the world.
They knew the palace faded and curdled, bitter. They knew the queen returned and walked the same halls as their king, cold and lost, like a divide was carved between them.
They knew they were replaced. By the one they had let fall, too. They survived. And came to fill whatever shadow their absence might have left.
They knew that there was too much occurring at all times out there.
They knew that bugs dreamed and essence burned and the infection would get out.
They knew the king left flowers outside the Black Egg’s door one time and one time only. Their petals shriveled and died.
They knew he learned that they were a liar and a fraud and they had not even begun to slip and give the plague a way out yet.
They knew that the world was not theirs to touch anymore.
Though it would have meant remaining bound without any distraction at all, sometimes they wished they did not have to know the state of the world.
She was sealed in their dream.
They should have been an empty vessel. Their dream would be equally empty. If so, she would sink into that void forever and never be able to escape its pull.
They wouldn’t have ever felt a thing from her, if she’d been so swallowed by an empty dream.
That would have been better. It would have been better for them. Her presence burned. They could not physically get far enough away from the sun for her not to.
When they were put into their dream, it was not empty. It was nearly so. It was pure just as it was dark with void.
Chains crawled down its walls. Seals glowed on its floors. It was not an empty dream.
They did not pay attention to it, then. They tried to only hang there and then it grew painful and painfully understimulating, so they caved to using the spell and looking at the world more and more often. There were few thoughts. One was too many.
She didn’t make her presence known with words to start with.
She didn’t have a form to them. She was a burning light inside their hollow body. It could increase in intensity. It could shift about. It prodded curiously. It raged. It was a being and she became far too real months before they ever had to hear a word from her.
Instead her thoughts spread like suggestions, needling and subtle until they were not. She was loud. They had been quiet. They were not quiet after her.
The world was visible and completely untouchable.
Out of reach.
Forever and ever.
They could watch their own obscurity.
When the palace opened its gates to another vessel, their choices were to see or to hide in a dream away from such stimulation.
They saw.
Dreams were a type of agonizing slow death, a place and thing that sapped energy away.
But watching hurt.
The queen returned to the palace that they wished was their home. She left when they were small, because of their presence. She returned because of a vessel that was not them.
The kingdom was told their monarchs had a successor, now, though one sickly that could not yet be seen.
A child. Their child.
All the while, the impure vessel felt itself ache every moment of every day, from the suspension, from the fire, from it all.
Out of reach.
Out of reach.
Petals wilted into powder outside the door to their hell.
They could watch that large room, so often empty rather than visited. They could look out beyond the dark temple and stare at a rebuilding, happy kingdom instead.
They could burn.
There was no choice to stop.
Thoughts were as poison.
No mind to think, they were born to believe. No mind at all. Not as a pure vessel. Not as what we wish you to be.
They had but one role and one role only, that lay as a possibility in front of them.
The pure vessel. The Hollow Knight.
Not a child, nor an heir, nor anything that belonged in the palace let alone the world.
Yet they saw out.
Saw another.
Saw that life.
And they grew upset. They even grew angry at the parents that never were, each time they watched them sit at dinners with a shade.
And what familiar anger it was. What familiar fears.
They are forgetting me. Replacing me. Like I was nothing.
It came from her. They did not always know. Hers was theirs and theirs was hers and they could not separate, sealed together like this. Her feelings bled into them and left them contaminated. It would have been easy to think that it was their feelings all along.
Poison. Poisoned.
They were no pure vessel, to be without thoughts.
They would not be without her thoughts in their own now-private mind either, though. Even if she was dead and gone, they feared it was too late. The bleed over too strong. The poison took root.
It wound around their mind and bloomed in feelings unasked for and they could not tear it away. They could only dream that she would wilt, until they could shed her presence like a molt.
The same, forever and ever.
The same, forever and ever.
The same
The flowers were dying.
They were surrounded by a field that stretched tall in each direction. But its flowers were dying. They were blackened and shriveling, turning into soot that disintegrated. The wave of death followed the steps of long legs, shadowed under the sweep of a wind blown cape. It snapped in one direction. Then the other.
There was a maelstrom in the distance. Silent, where it should have roared. It provided the wind.
They were on their knees in flowers that died under their touch and his approach both. They did not rise to escape, to prevent their touch from poisoning more. The same did not go for him who strode nearer.
There were pauldrons on their shoulders and chains hooked to them and they were so so so heavy.
The essence in the distance was growing coated with darkness. Oh how she had feared that. They could not hear her screams. They received no reaction from her while her essence grew stained or wilted like the flowers did. Most of it did. Only some of those that were red did not.
They knew who he was from her. They knew that the seals made her rage, her hurt, her desperation all silent to the strange god who visited this temple with their father. Only they heard her as she screamed at him for answering a single call from a worm while having ignored a million from her. Only they could actually notice when she asked him to save her.
Those outside would not have heard.
The flowers left before the door of the Black Egg died and decomposed before their vision.
It seemed a fearful thing.
Elsewhere, a maelstrom had the means to kill the most important lights in their life. They had no power in this matter. Their time was over, their purpose null, their existence unneeded. If one was to erase all that had defined them twice, then they would be left with nothing. Maybe it would not hurt. They wouldn’t mind that.
He reached them eventually, even as the field behind his path was nothing but char and soot. When he tried to help them up, they failed. The harness weighed more than they could manage. The chains were all very long where they hid under flowers here. Their body ached and shook. Weak. Weak. Too weak, under such weights.
If words were shared, they could not remember. It had not been a real place or meeting. It was a dream. Just a dream.
The storm would have come to swallow that quiet field too. They didn’t have the will to flee that fate. No will? No will to break. It was broken, then?
The world outside has not changed nearly enough. It had not truly been long. They were not so much of a failure that they would completely break in such little time.
They stopped shying away and let the terror touch them.
They recalled little.
The dream in its entirety was unclear.
They left the field of death. That much they could envision. They left it and they were not yet dead. All of the flowers left for their grave, peace, peace, their presence only made offerings of such wither and go dark.
Go dark, as the lights had. As if dead. Their father dead. And they would kill any flower they tried to take to his own memorial.
Even with as weak as they had been on the floor of the prison, weighed down in chains, dark eyes and white roots pulling them up instead of red arms, they…They wanted to find him. To confirm the death they had felt.
Let these arms puppet them as they pleased after that. They would be too empty to care.
They watched him offering room and time and gifts to the new vessel.
When they dared dream of rescue, it was a wish to be offered such too.
They watched him live, up until the day when their own life was freed into a world in which he was no longer capable of offering them anything.
Sometimes, dreams were not so unpleasant.
What an ingrate they were.
They couldn’t remember too much of the return journey. The queen appeared with the void by her side and they were carried back gingerly, as if they were wounded. They would have been unable to walk. Nothing bled, no cuts marred them, but they were still immobile without the excuse of wounds.
There was a doorway of essence that made them writhe in the branches’ hold. Her, her, her. They’d felt her die. They’d seen her essence swallowed into darkness. Their body went limp again after coming out the other side of the light (helpless to stop themself from being carried into such a terrifying gateway).
From there, their head rolled and they saw figures. It was bright. The Black Egg was almost completely dark. The light here hurt. It was too much. Too much. All too much, to have actually seen the knight that held what was left of their father. These were things they put together after, through context and comments.
The light hurt. The noise hurt. It all hurt.
Pain made time wash into a strange mush that dragged on too long and ended mercifully faster than reality.
After so long- too long- such little time- too little time to have broken- of them helplessly seeing outside of their prison, they were completely blind to the state of the world on that return journey.
They were supposedly a part of it afterwards, though. Did they not have what the other vessel did? Vessel. Maelstrom. Home. Killer. Everything that they were not and more so. Terrifying, lovely, loving, but they had failed, they had turned their back on the Abyss, they knew not how to accept such attention.
Attention came from others as well. They did not know how to accept it either. But it did not feel important in the way that their hiding away from the Other One here did.
More quiet was given- still loud, in the hums of the palace, in the footsteps hallways away, in the distant opening and shutting of doors, in any and all little creaks- still loud, compared to the silence of the last five years.
The brightness was dulled. They thought that one of the knights was responsible for closing curtains.
They were put under blankets and they did nothing, all the while. Nothing for days, perhaps. Time was a difficult concept in captivity and its state wasn’t more clear now. The world, if anything, was even less so.
The room they were placed in was that which they kept. It was theirs. They supposedly had a room. Property. Possession. As if they deserved what the living did.
It looked like many of the bedchambers of the palace. The size was the same as that which their kin here owned. Its walls were white. The silks on the bed were white. The lantern let out the white light of contained soul.
It was clean, but not untouched. There were robes in its closet. Most were plain, similar to what they always had. There were books in one drawer. They were varied. There were ‘cards’ from each of the Five Knights. One of Ze’mer’s flowers was laid atop a note that gave instructions for care and disposal. They recalled an arrangement of flowers, tied together, left to wilt and die at the foot of the Black Egg’s entrance. The window had curtains that they could control. If they wished them open, to be a reminder that they were not trapped, they could. If they did not want any more visions of the world outside, let alone it seeing in to them, they could shut them.
Darkness lay like a blanket over this hall. An embrace. A promise. They didn’t have to be alone. If the room was too bright or too crowded or too empty…They could have another in here to calm all the noise and fire. The Other One was just a door down. It was a meaningless distance for a storm.
They were awake.
This room was all too real around them.
It didn’t feel real. They picked at the blankets. They felt the cold of the glass window. They wrapped themself in the closet’s robes, under their shoulders, around their chest, rolling their arms until the fabric ate their wrists and they were able to slump to the floor and see if it all pulled. It did. Their body strained. It was already in ruined condition. They struggled to stand and walk anymore. Their actions made their back hurt so much worse. But it also made their shoulders ache like they were being hung and it was real, then. The room was real. The robes were real. The pain was real. For the Black Egg was real. As much as they’d wanted it to be a nightmare, it was always real. Every time they became aware of their body suspended there in darkness: real real real.
Waking hours could still be nightmares and nightmares could be dreams. The cool window was truly glass, truly cold. The texture of the sheets came in varieties and the threads they rubbed free were truly out, now, instead of tight in their intended lines (ruined) (their touch ru-). Instantly claustrophobic, they struggled upright again and ignored the pain of their strained back while extricating themselves from makeshift chains. It was as if they were on the floor of the Black Egg, but this time, this time they were awake. This time, they were alert. Their mind was capable of functioning outside of a confused fog. If the queen came in through shining light now, they would be able to make out what the light appeared as, where their sibling stood, what the knights on the other side of the portal were doing. They would have stayed alert for the whole walk back to this room (walk, not carry, not helpless and trapped) and seen each piece of it then, not days later.
This was their prison. Their Black Egg. It could so easily be seen. The bricks beneath them were the color of soot. The air was crowded in the electric magic of seals and a humid sweetness. The locked door in front of them was familiar: they had stared at it for five years.
And the strain in their body was the harness, still weighing down. They had to fight to stand and walk on their own strength. But they did, while the black walls opened for them. They stood instead of needing roots to crawl around them and a stranger to carry them not through familiar walls but instead into light, bright bright light. Light that was known to them in two parts. Bright and golden and silver pale, essence, dream, soul, all things from gods they didn’t sense in the world anymore. That light was not a door. It had been unreal to be carried through. Their mind was left in the Black Egg.
They walked out of the closet and shut it with an initial feeling that they’d never open it again. Of what need had they of its cloaks?
They were alert. They were alert.
They were finally awake.
Dream was a prison and it wrapped around them like the vines of the queen did to the palace. Each thorn caught in their shell and made it more impossible to shake them off through walking alone.
Real. Awake.
Dream. Asleep.
Alert.
No…rarely. They saw silver light turn to a sky of gold. Their knees were tickled by dying flowers. Fires burned, low and pink and paling. Dying, not growing.
This room was called their room.
They did not know this white palace.
How long would it take them before the vertigo ended? Until they were no longer sick at every second passing?
It wasn’t right. It wasn’t right.
They’d been able to watch the world outside.
They saw their father alive with another vessel.
If they really were awake, this time, then that was the palace they should be inside of, and it should not be a passive storm engulfing every shadow instead of a simple vessel replacing them, and it should not be that he was not their father.
Wants were difficult but they knew a few things with unwavering understanding. That he was their father was one of them.
(That they had done everything for him went without saying.)
‘Their room’ meant nothing.
It was ash. It was dust. Blackened, fragile speckles, breakable and cast away, to fly out into the wind and vanish.
(It should stay meaning nothing)
(Everything they touched was ruined)
They tried the pale halls and found them without meaning too, when his light was not there with them. They stared over the courtyards. It wasn’t there either. They didn’t know what it was.
It felt like dreaming far too often. The clarity from the closet did not last long. Since being saved, they were dazed. They were dazed and it made it hard to comprehend that they were saved from a nightmare at all.
She wasn’t here.
She wasn’t a heat inside of them where they should be without temperature.
No feathers. No fur. And no thoughts. No thoughts. No words shared without permission. No feelings sickeningly felt in double, the vessel not hollow enough for such to find no purchase. All that she felt stretched out and clung into their faulty shadows instead of being rejected. They could feel. Not much. They were not emotional- before. They had no literal heart. Most sensations should have been too alien to them to ever comprehend if they were shared.
But they could feel.
And so her feelings were barbs clinging to shadows where they found those faults, those impurities, that could decipher through relating.
They hated her.
(She’d taught them hate.)
They wanted her gone, out of them.
(She’d wanted out.)
They hated her. They wondered if it had hurt. They thought she would hate having her realm so easily used by the darkness she so feared.
They thought about finding out where she was now. The answer was kept from them. Good.
He wasn’t here and he was.
It felt strange.
Too like a dream.
His was a presence they couldn’t touch as they once could.
It was good that he hadn’t been consumed completely. They clung to what remained while the world cast his memory away. He grew and they were careful while responsible for him. He was here, but he also wasn’t.
There were other parts of this palace that surely hadn’t been able to shake his memory like the people had.
There might be information of use within them. Some glimpse at what and who he was, thus what they needed to help him, what would make him most comfortable, maybe even traits of himself that he might find again in this new life.
Those might be the last locations holding onto, protecting, who he was.
His safe havens. His retreats of choice.
They knew where some of his workplaces were located. Once, they might have felt a crushed desire to go inside some. To see what stole his time, what he found purpose in.
For months, they avoided them despite knowing the locations.
When they entered, it was to a fresh wave of guilt.
The lab was dark. It did not compare to the rest of the palace. The walls were grooved and ridged instead of bricks and shining metal. Black streaks ran down them. The soul lanterns were dim.
Tables and desks and molds were all a mess. Armor for the other void constructs was present and recognizable.
They should not have been there.
He left them little to understand. What a funny thought they were thinking. As if he had left any of this for them. Wishful. Hopeful. Empty.
Their fingers reached to graze one tall mounted stand of armor, a table-top, silk. It left them aching. They could so easily see him in here. The presence was an electricity against their fingertips.
They pulled out a too-small seat and fit themself against one desk. The papers on top were covered in scrawls, grids, dots, lines, drawings. Blueprints. Plans.
In the drawer below, they found more of the same. And others. Writing. Glyphs tiny, a scrawl. A poem of some kind. One repeated. Written on multiple separate papers. Notes for the room they had been given. Sketches of a lantern that looked like a claw. Sketches of a statue, the true one located on the crown of Hallownest, that made them sick to stare upon. The Black Egg Temple, the seals of binding, the Dreamers. The vessel that had come after them.
They did not look for long.
They feared their father had gone insane and they felt all the worse for having been gone while he did.
None of this was for their eyes.
They’d not been allowed in his workplaces.
Guilt drove them away.
They thought they had known the state of the world while bound. They could not even understand it while inside it once more.
They were still dreaming.
Some sketches from this chapter (+ two just general IBIMM ones)
