Chapter Text
It's impossible to tell how long you've been down here. Down in this.... pit. You don't know how you're able to see, because there's no light- no sun, no moon, no stars. Even with sight, there's not a lot to see- just rocks, and rocks, and rocks, and eggs.
Eggs like yours.
Yeah, that had been kind of a shocker! Waking up surrounded by darkness that even your weird darkvision couldn't see through, mostly because there really wasn't anything to see. Actually, that time, not just "monotony" like the pit. You'd been content to just exist in peaceful, encompassing darkness for a bit, until the part of you that feeds your screaming nightmares started to get twitchy about not being able to tell what was out there and you started moving around to try to find out what was going on- because you certainly weren't in your bed at home, though you couldn't muster up much care about that part for some reason. (Probably the depression.) Then you'd panicked for a wholly different reason, being that you couldn't move. Or, you could, but you were confined, unable to shift much from the fetal position you normally slept in. Moving as much as you could, you'd flailed at the hard surface keeping you captive, and felt something attached to your head bonk the inside of it. You'd felt more than heard the crack of the surface, and on sheer ancient dinosaur instinct you'd rammed your head back and up as hard as you could. Breaking free was primally satisfying, and climbing out of the shell of the- yes, the egg you'd found yourself in, soothed the part of you that had been shrieking about being imprisoned.
Unfortunately, your fear of the dark was not assuaged, because all that had greeted you on the outside was more darkness. Thankfully, the type you could see in, though somehow you could still tell that it was dark, that you shouldn't have been able to see, because there was no light to see by.
Turning on trembling feet, you had taken in your surroundings and had the faint, sardonic thought:
Shit, I sure ain't in Kansas anymore.
So.
Yeah.
The pit.
Lots of rocks. Lots of eggs. Lots of darkness. Not a lot of shit to entertain yourself with.
You sigh and sit down on one of the rocks, despite the lack of anything resembling fatigue, and examine your new body. You've done so a good several times since…. hatching…. because clearly, very clearly and obviously, you were not in your old one. No human hatches from a fucking egg, that's human biology 101. Or maybe 102. Whatever, college class numbers aren't relevant right now. What's relevant is that you're pretty sure you're a bug, which would definitely make sense with the hatching-from-an-egg thing, but is super weird to actually experience. Especially because you're not a normal bug. Bugs aren't bipedal. Bugs aren't made of stuff that would swallow light if there were any- your darkvision just seems to cut out as soon as your skin- er, body, comes into view, making you dizzy with vertigo every time you look at yourself. Like you've become a cutout in the fabric of the universe, the black between stars. It's pretty neat, if… deeply unsettling. You look at your hands: three fingers and a thumb, all stubby and jointed only once, which feels really clumsy compared to the two-per you're used to having. Each digit ends in a sharp little point, which you idly trace over the carapace of your arm, shivering as you taste-feel yourself, which tastes like nothing multiplied by one- still nothing, but a process having occurred. It's weird you can taste through your body, now, but at least nothing tastes bad; something about being a bug, or maybe this specific type of bug, means that the actual tastes of the dirt under your feet and your own carapace are detached entirely from opinions on those tastes. Maybe that'll change once you taste anything else, but for now, tastes are mercifully neutral.
You're clad in something that might be grey, might be blue, might be green- it's impossible to tell without light. Colors, you remember reading about somewhere, tend to become indistinct when light is too dim, with eyes only able to distinguish between shades. The maybe-blue-grey-green thing is attached to you at the neck, almost like a cape, but it feels the same way that your fingernails did as a human: sensitive to pressure, but not much else. Maybe it's made of keratin instead of whatever your carapace is made of, because it doesn't taste things the way your carapace does, which you find weird, but whatever. You've had some fun swishing it around your body and twirling to make it flare out, but that got old kind of fast, with nothing else to do down here.
Your head made you panic, the first time. It's awfully big compared to the rest of you, and dread had seeped in when you discovered you had no mouth, no mandibles, nothing at all that could serve as any kind of intake for food. For a moment, you'd thought gloomily that you've been incarnated as some odd bipedal type of moth that only lives for a few days, before your hands reached your horns and your figurative heart had stopped cold.
Horns. The things attached to your head that had broken you free of the egg. Long, slender, pronged near the end, on the inside.
Familiar.
Your hands ghost over them now, your head bending to bring them in reach of your frustratingly stubby little arms. Yes, they're familiar, but not in a way your body would recognize as familiar to being- no, this was familiar to your memories, to your mind. You know these horns. They belong to someone you've seen and drawn and… pitied. They belong to the Pure Vessel- the Hollow Knight.
Except, you're not pure. Not in the way that the Pale King would want, even disregarding all of the other meanings of that word that you've definitely never fit. You're not his perfect tool to seal the Radiance, and that means that your time in this new world is limited. Either he'll kill you for being impure, or you'll be locked down here forever for being impure (at which point you'd probably kill yourself for lack of anything to DO), or you…. could pretend to be, and he'd mold you into something that could seal the Radiance, and you'd essentially be tortured by an angry goddess until such a time that your sibling returns from wherever they'd escaped to and mercy-kills you. Or…. whatever happens to the Hollow Knight at the end of the game. It's not clear, and you kind of really don't want to find out.
You really, really don't want to find out.
A plan begins to form.
Looking up, you examine the platforms above you. Just as in the game, they float, suspended by nothing you can see, and they spiral up, up, up, into the darkness, only distinguishable from the ceiling by the sharp silver spikes that line the bottoms. You get up and shuffle through the dust and dirt, looking for the one nearest to the ground.
Okay. Go time.
Jumping to the first platform is easier than you expected. It's the landing that fucks you up, making you wobble and overcorrect and fall on your face with a smack that vibrates through your whole body and hurts like nothing your human body ever experienced. It's not the ache of a bruise, or the sting of a scrape or cut; it's like your whole body becomes a tuning fork and the frequency it vibrates is "dull pain".
Again. Again, you jump, and again you fall, and again you jump once more. You climb and scramble up the platforms, determined to reach the top- only to fall right around what you believe to be the halfway point. Desperate not to die, you flail for the edge of one of the platforms, only to bounce painfully off of the spikes of one right below you, scoring deep gouges into your carapace and the flesh underneath and sending you spinning off into the abyss.
When you land, it's on your back, and thankfully, it seems like that part of you doesn't care much about the impact. Your head jars against the ground with a bone-sharp crack just after, and you curl up on the side that isn't mauled and start to cry.
Hey. Neat.
You didn't know the vessels could do that.
What are you even doing here? Why did you think you could effect any sort of meaningful change? You can't even make it to the top of this stupid bleeding pit. You're alone, you're in the dark, you're pretty sure making it home would never be an option even if you wanted to go back to your shitty parents and overpriced apartment and no friends and partner- the thought of him makes you cry harder, because what is he going to think? That you just ghosted him? That you've broken up? That you've died? You suppose you have, haven't you? You must have, if you've been flung into another world as something new, and God, you've fucking died and you're in another world and you're a bug and possibly the worst kind of bug because you're the Pure Vessel and you're meant to become a container for a goddess who doesn't want to be contained and you can't, you just can't, you can't you can't you can't- you're a stupid, trembling little coward, you just can't. You've never done anything important in your life, and you'll never do anything important in this one. It's better for everyone if you just curl up in a corner and let yourself bleed out and die.
Your spiral is stopped by the sudden realization that, while you're breathing more heavily and your body shudders and shakes, you're… not making any noise. You…. can't. You try to cry, to scream, to wail, and all that you succeed in doing is straining yourself and stretching your injuries open further. You lie there in mental exhaustion, if not physical, and try to just breathe.
That's…. that's. That's okay. You're… used to crying quietly. This is fine. It's fine.
Spiral broken, though, you push yourself up into a sitting position, fresh void tears falling down your cheeks and dripping away into wispy nothingness at the immediate and sharp complaint from your injuries. You hurt… quite a fucking lot! It's hard to maneuver your clunky, awkward head to look at your side; it's just too big and the section below your eyes is too large and in-the-way, so you can't see much of anything. Even if you could, would there be anything to see, given how your body looks?
Things to consider: sight-based diagnosis of injuries is going to be a bitch.
Your fingers tenderly explore the ruined carapace, and if you were physically capable anymore, you would wince. It hurts! Not much else to say about that, really. Pulling your hand away, you try to think. Ghost could heal themself with Soul, but how? There's no button to push that could fix this easily, and it's not like you have any prior experience with using magic as a human, since magic wasn't real. (Maybe it was? How else would you have ended up here? You're pretty sure you're never going to solve that mystery, so you don't bother keeping the question around, discarding it probably forever.) You vaguely remember reading something in the Soul Sanctum about… focus?
Deep breaths. Okay. Focus. That's something you can do. You've been meditating since you were a kid so you could quiet your mind and actually fall asleep, pretending your breath was sweeping energy up and down your body. Now you do the same, breathing (out of your sides, that shit is SO weird) deep and turning your mind inward. In…. and out.
In…
Out.
In………
there.
Deep in the Void of your body there's a glimmer. Not a real one, not of light, but of feeling. Like bubbles on your skin, like soda fizz up your nose, almost-pleasant but stinging just enough to make you careful. It sparkles to your mental touch, and you stop to admire it in awe. It's…. real. Magic is real, here, and you can do it.
Your bleeding side wound reminds you of its existence, lighting a fire under your ass.
Nothing for it but to do it, right?
You plunge your mental "hand" into the feeling of sparkling white and if you could, you would yelp. You have the distinct feeling of being set on fire, but it doesn't hurt, you're just hot all over and before the feeling can fade you urge it towards your side. The feeling concentrates, and fuck, that does hurt, like a brand has been set to the wound, cauterizing it, and it itches, it itches so bad like ants are sewing your body back together and crawling all over-under you to do it. You squirm and cry more Void, breath whistling out of your spiracles in the closest you can get to a whimper.
The wake of the healing leaves you exhausted in body for the first time since hatching, and your mind isn't doing so hot either. You lay on your back in the dirt and find that you can't even close your eyes because you don't have any god damn eyelids.
How are you going to sleep?
…. Do you even need to sleep?
Either way, staring up at the platforms is kind of boring. You roll over, gladdened by the lack of pain, and sluggishly push yourself up into a sitting position again. You cross your legs and lean over to draw in the dirt.
The Pale King and his many-pronged crown-head. The Pale Fork, a couple people called him in fanfiction. The thought makes you laugh, breath silently huffing out of your sides and making your cloak flutter.
Ghost. Your sibling. None of your siblings have hatched yet, made obvious by the lack of awful Baby-Skull Mountain, and you have to wonder why. Why are you the first? Why, out of all of them, were you put into the body of the Pure Vessel? Divine intervention? If so, what does that divinity want from you?
(You doodle a little picture of yourself- your new self- next to Ghost, holding hands with them.)
Hornet. Has she been born yet? If you've hatched, that means the Dreamer plan is in progress. Maybe you'll get to see what she's like as a baby. The thought fills you with warmth and bubbly giddiness. You bet she's adorable. If nothing else, getting to see her as a baby would make all of this worth it. You draw Hornets of various sizes, scooting around in the dirt to give yourself more space to work with. Hornet with you, holding her up on your shoulders. Hornet with Ghost, crossing nail and needle. Hornet with the both of you, showing you how to weave.
The Root. The White Lady. The Queen. You enjoy drawing her in her bindings, wrapped up like a burrito with a little face peeking out. You wish you had paint, or colored pencils, to color her pretty pale blue eyes.
Over and over, you draw figures, a tapestry of finger-doodles of people that maybe you'll see, here. You draw until you get bored of it- by that time, thankfully, you feel much better than when you started.
Again you look up at the platforms.
Maybe you won't be able to change anything. Maybe you're not going to amount to anything. But you can try. You have a body that can't get tired, removing your biggest complaint about exercise as a human. You have magic. You can heal yourself when you get hurt, even if the process sucks almost as much as receiving the injury in the first place. You have time, even if it's finite.
You start the climb.