(Green Plain — Tree — Branch — Fracture — Grip — Scalpel — Vessel — Stare)
~~~ are used for changing the perception of vision (POV)
••• denotes flashback
*** denotes time skip
** denotes background sounds
… denotes silence
-x-X-x-
Green.
The colour arrived before anything else did. Before shape, sound, or the dull familiar weight of damage. Just green, spreading across the inside of sight like dye through water. Unhurried.
They lay in grass.
Real grass, or the memory of it. The Hollow Knight could not say which and did not try. The blades pressed through the gaps between their plates and against the underside of their face-plate, thin and cool and faintly wet. Above them the sky held a pale grey light with no visible source.
They sat up.
The plain extended in every direction without feature. The grass ran to the horizon and the horizon ran to nothing and nothing continued past that, and this was fine, and the Hollow Knight accepted it the way they had learned to accept things that came with no explanation attached.
A tree stood some distance ahead.
White. All the way through—bark, branches, the few remaining leaves. The tree was large. Its crown spread wide and its roots pressed out of the earth around its base in long smooth arcs, and the earth around those roots was dark and wet, as though something beneath had been weeping for a very long time.
The Hollow Knight walked toward it.
Their body gave no pain. This was the first thing that told them something was wrong. The second was the textureless quiet, no distant sound.
They stopped beneath the tree.
A branch hung low on the right side. White, like the rest, smooth-barked. They looked at it. The branch looked back, the way inanimate things sometimes look back.
Then the branch cracked.
A small sound, like a joint popped in a closed grip. The split ran from the underside of the branch up through its length, and the wood at the split had darkened, gone soft at the edges. A single drop fell from the split and struck the grass below. Then another. Then a thin, steady line of liquid running from the crack, too dark for sap. It ran down the bark and dripped from the branch's lowest point, and the grass beneath it was already wet and going dark.
The Hollow Knight watched this.
They reached out and pressed two claw-tips against the bark near the split. The bark gave slightly. The wood beneath had gone hollow in a narrow band along the branch's length, the shell of it intact while the inside had already collapsed. The outside had simply kept its shape while the inside went.
They pressed harder and the branch gave and dropped, falling into the grass without the grace of noise. Where it had been, a raw wound in the trunk, weeping.
The liquid ran.
The Hollow Knight looked at their claw-tips. Dark at the ends. They pressed them together and pulled them apart, and the liquid drew a thin line between them before breaking.
They stood. Looked up through the remaining branches into the pale light that had no source and offered nothing.
Then—
A presence.
Felt low in the frame. The Hollow Knight turned. The figure stood at the edge of the plain.
Tall.
That alone told them this was not their Father. Not even themselves.
The long white cloak, yes. Shell similar to theirs. Several horns above the head, pale, but uneven, like the branches of the tree. The eyes—
Contained the Void.
The Hollow Knight knew it. Had been made of it and had lived inside a body of it longer than they could remember walking out of the Abyss. They knew the specific pressure of a Void presence the way a smith knows the weight of iron before lifting it.
This was the Void.
The figure did not move. The Hollow Knight did not move. The plain held them both in its colourless light, and the tree went on weeping behind them, wetting the Hollow Knight's foot.
Then the figure walked forward.
The walk was wrong. The motion too certain, too direct—carrying none of the small adjustments a living body makes crossing uneven ground. The grass did not bend beneath its feet.
The Hollow Knight held their ground.
The figure reached them. Stopped.
The deep dark eyes, more than two, looked up at them from below. The Hollow Knight looked down. No weapon in the figure's grip. No preparatory shift of weight. Nothing the body read as prelude to violence.
The blow came from nowhere.
A single strike—short, no wind-up, the full weight of whatever the figure was behind it, landing on the lower half of the Hollow Knight's mask, where the mouth would have been if the Pale King had seen fit to give them one. The shell shattered. Fragments. A fine spray of black from the split. The Hollow Knight's head rocked back. Their body sank into the grass.
The figure looked at them.
The Hollow Knight looked at the figure.
The figure set its foot on the Hollow Knight's head and pressed down.
Slow pressure, increasing, the shell at the crown giving by degrees, each degree announcing itself to the nerves with a fresh and specific report. The Hollow Knight felt each one and did not raise a claw to stop it and did not move. The crack deepened. The pale light above them went flat and far.
Then black.
The black of a ceiling above them, damp and low, a single lamp burning pale at the room's edge. The smell of unfamiliarity. Old wood. Something sharp and clean laid over something organic and close.
The Hollow Knight lay on their back.
Something was at their head.
Small claws. The scrape of metal against shell. They were at the crack, and the crack ran deep, and the deep body registered the proximity of anything near it.
They turned their head.
A figure beside them. Steel-shelled. Small. Working with something that caught the lamplight—a narrow instrument, a chitin rongeur, gripping and drawing a loose fragment free from the crown's split. They had the persistence of someone who had done this before, though not to a shell like this, working past the edge of their own skill. They continued anyway.
The rongeur found another fragment. Gripped. Drew it out.
Yellow. Orange.
The Hollow Knight's claw came up.
It covered most of the figure's face. The grip was not tight, but the claw was very large and the face was very small. The figure went rigid. The instrument clattered sideways. A sharp intake of breath, once. Then stillness.
A tray hit the floor.
Metal instruments scattered across the stone in a loud, ringing sound that climbed the walls. Small tools rolled into corners. She found a scalpel and dug it into the back of the Hollow Knight's claw. Nothing at first, then a stinging burn. The grip went loose.
The figure fell backward as her turban slipped, and breathed. Without hesitating, she went for the door, her disheveled cloak forgotten, bare skin showing beneath it.
Opened the door in a reckless manner.
The figure was gone. The door was left open. Footsteps receding.
The Hollow Knight lay still. Looked at the claw. Looked at the lamp.
The lamp burned, the instruments lay scattered across the floor. A fragment of their own shell sat on the stone—pale, dark at some edges, curved. One edge clean where the rongeur had worked it free. The other, raw Void.
They looked at the ceiling.
Pain reported from the frame and from the limb-root and from the twisted leg-joint, from the places along the thorax where the Void-gaps sat solid and unhealed, and from the crown where the rongeur had been working.
They reached up. Touched the lower half of their face. Found it present. Took the claw away. Looked at it again, at the thin blade lodged in it.
They did not have a second limb. They could not pull the blade free without using a leg or a piece of furniture. They could not move enough to try either.
The door opened.
They turned the head. Slowly. The neck ground.
Another figure in the doorway. Taller than the last, and much thinner—the leanness of something built along a wyrm's frame rather than a beetle's. Two eyes, dark and steady. A red cloak. A needle at her hip, a fine white thread drawn from the low curve of the abdomen where she kept her silk.
She stood at the threshold and looked at the floor—scattered instruments, fragments of shell, small dark drops spread across the stone.
Her eyes travelled to the bed, to the sheets darkened where the Void had leaked from the legs beneath them, then to the Hollow Knight.
A cut sat on her shoulder, wrapped, recent. Her thorax held itself carefully with each breath, as though the carapace beneath it had been cracked and mended too soon.
She crossed the room. Bent and picked up the tray, set it on the table. Picked up the instruments one by one and placed them back without looking at what she was doing, her eyes on the Hollow Knight the whole time.
Without warning, she pulled the scalpel free. The Hollow Knight did not react. Only stared at the small gap left behind, and the dark liquid welling from it. It should have closed by now.
She set the scalpel down last. Its tip disintegrated on contact with the Void.
Then she pulled a stool to the side of the pallet and sat.
Yellow. Orange—
Vessel.
…
You frightened her.
Her voice was level, a statement offered to the air between them.
The Hollow Knight looked at her.
She held the look without flinching. The eyes below the mask were steady and tired.
She was not going to harm you, Hornet said. Whatever you thought.
The Hollow Knight said nothing. Their eyes moved to the doorway. Back to Hornet. To the doorway again.
There is no one else here, she said.
She reached down, picked up a fragment of shell from the floor near her foot, turned it once between her claws, and set it on the tray with the instruments.
You cannot keep attacking everything that comes near you.
The Hollow Knight looked at her shoulder. At the careful way she held her thorax.
She noticed them looking. Said nothing about it.
The town is called Dirtmouth, she said instead, flattening her claws on her knees. What remains of it. There are perhaps six left. Merchants, mostly. A few who had nowhere else to go. She paused. They are not infected.
The Hollow Knight looked at her face.
She did not look away.
None of what remains here are, she said. The Infection is gone. Has been gone since—
She stopped. Reset her breath.
Since the Knight, she said.
The lamp guttered once and steadied.
The Hollow Knight turned their eyes to the ceiling. The damp stone. The single pale source of light.
Their claw lay open at their side. The joints were dark where the shell had split and not yet closed.
You said, Hornet began. Stopped. Began again. You wanted to protect the kingdom.
…
I remember it.
The lamp burned. A thin line of dark ran from her shoulder down the pallet's edge and dripped once, twice, onto the fabric. The Hollow Knight watched it drip and stay intact.
So did I, Hornet said, quiet, with edges to it. She looked at the lamp instead of at them when she said it.
The Hollow Knight did not move.
Their thorax rose and fell in the shallow way it had been rising and falling since they woke—each breath a negotiation with plates that had cracked and now rode incorrectly, each exhale slightly shorter than the one before it.
Hornet's claws rested on her knees. One closed into a loose fist. She opened it. Closed it again.
You need to let the Confessor finish, she said.
The Hollow Knight looked at her.
She looked back.
I know, she said. I know what you are thinking.
She reached up and pulled the mask aside, briefly, enough to press two of her claw-tips against her face. Put it back.
She uses Void-touched methods for her work. She will not make it worse. A pause. Much worse.
Somewhere above, through the stone, the faint sound of wind. The surface. The dead town with its six remaining lives going about the business of being alive in a place where almost nothing else was.
The Hollow Knight's eyes had not left her face.
What? she said.
Nothing.
She exhaled. Stood. Moved to the tray and straightened the instruments with the precise, unnecessary attention of someone who needed something to do with their hands.
I was five, she said, to the instruments. The last time I saw you.
She picked up the fragment of shell from the tray. Set it down in a different place. Picked it up again.
You were taller even then.
She put the fragment down and did not pick it up again.
Turned back.
The Hollow Knight's eyes were still on her. The dim eyes in the cracked shell.
She looked at them for a long moment.
Then she sat back down on the stool.
Rest, she said. While you still can.