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Lost Kin | Chapter XLV | One Thing More

Fandom: Hollow Knight Rating: Mature Characters: Hornet, Pure Vessel | Hollow Knight, Quirrel Category: Gen Content Warnings: self-harm, flashbacks, referenced child death AO3: Lost Kin | Chapter XLV | One Thing More First Chapter | Previous Chapter | Chronological Notes: Quirrel and Hornet have a difficult conversation. Hollow considers whether to intervene.

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Its sister tensed.

The vessel could feel every motion she made, every shiver, every stifled flinch. She was leaning against it, tucked into the crook of its injured shoulder with its legs drawn up on her other side. Its head was craned around to rest beside her, its single hand curled near her knee: the knee that she’d injured, that she’d been favoring as she ran to meet it. It knew the look of a bad strain or a break, knew the meaning of the massing heat it could sense through her cloak. That should be seen to.

It did not move. Neither did she.

No one had ordered it to do this—to hinder her movement, to come between her and the scholar, to keep them apart by threat or by distraction—but to its shame, instinct had taken hold of it again. The last hours had worn it down until it felt like nothing more than a ball of instinct and bare nerves; it could not have said what it feared as Quirrel stepped closer, only that it could not bear to see it happen.

He had been unwise to approach her. It had felt the winding tension in her limbs, the subtle quiver in her claws. The anger in Quirrel’s voice, clenched inside his fists, had nearly matched her own.

Its options were few. It refused to hiss or bare its teeth at Quirrel again—not after he had stayed by its side, spending hours in its company as the fear slowly, slowly left it.

Still, it was a monster. A construct of blade and spell, a creature of death and the endless dark, wielding the weapons that had formed it. Metal and void, tooth and claw. It could not disarm itself, could not make itself harmless, even for him.

But for him, for what he had done for it, it had tried. It had tried the only thing it could think of—putting itself in his way, warning him back, while pleading with its gaze, its curled shoulders, the tilt of its horns.

Do not.

Do not come closer.

Do not hurt her.

And, inexplicably—

Do not let her hurt you.

Even more baffling, he had listened.

He had heard, somehow, what it did not have the voice to say.

Something was humming inside of it, some uneasy note ringing through its void. Its sister was back, its world set right at last, destroyed and then restored within hours. She was here, her back pressed warm against it, so close that it could wrap itself around her, shielding her with its own shell.

…so close that it could pin her down, with just a shift of pressure. Could keep her here. Could keep her from leaving again.

Those thoughts were traitorous. Mutinous. Such a thing should never have entered its cursed mind.

But the fear—the fear was still there. Muted, nearly silenced, though ringing loud enough to clash with the relief of her return. Enough that it did not move, though the danger had passed.

It would move, if she wished. If she asked it to. It would let Quirrel approach. Both of them had calmed now, and he had asked to tend her injury. It saw no reason to warn him away.

“It’s fine,” she said, but it could tell she did not believe that. “It’s—I’ll live.”

“I’m sure you will,” Quirrel replied, somewhat drily. “But wrapping or splinting may help with the pain and prevent it from becoming worse.”

Her hand tightened on its horn. “I heal quickly. It’s not likely to last more than a day or two.”

“And I’m sure that fact has enabled you to develop any number of bad habits.” He tilted his head, staring, intent on her. “Just because your limits are higher than others’ does not mean you should attempt to ignore them. Let me see.”

Hornet slumped further, sighing. Then she extended her leg, setting her heel gingerly on the floor and pulling the hem of her wet cloak up.

Before it could do more than glance at the injury, Quirrel’s attention returned to it. “Hollow. May I come closer?”

That was—

That was strange.

He knew that it had not been ordered to do this. That was an action it had taken on its own, an expression of will, though the tattered remnants of its knight’s oath had guided its decision. It was meant to protect the weak, and as strong as its sister was—as strong as Quirrel was, to survive both the wilds and the mindless brutality of the decaying kingdom—they were weaker than it. By design. It had been built into something stronger than anything natural.

Its ultimate purpose had failed, but it was able to do this much. It could still protect her. Protect him. Protect this fragile peace that they had forged.

Hornet had not reprimanded it. She had not taken offense at the notion that she might need or want the service of a thing so broken. She even seemed to welcome it, if the way she leaned into it and stroked its face were any indication.

And more confusing still, rather than order it to move aside, or ask its wielder to do the same, Quirrel deferred to it, about what it might decide to do. As if its will were equal to his own, its actions as valid as another’s.

Nothing had happened when it spoke to him before. When it used the signs it had been taught for one specific purpose in another way entirely. Its hand was trapped beneath it, and it could not move without leaving its sister unshielded—and she wanted it there. When she bade it answer him, that was the only option it could think of.

So it answered again. Two taps. Its claw made no noise on the blanket, but his eyes dropped to follow the motion as it spoke.

Yes.

Yes, he could approach. Yes, he could assist her—he was able to do things it could not. She was hurt, weakened, and afraid, though it did not quite understand why. And he—

He had spoken kindly to it. To her. He had attempted to help it, to keep it from deepening the wounds that still throbbed beneath the dressing. He had not run, even when it threatened him, had not left it alone. He had not gone away, though its sister had ordered him to.

Beneath the still-settling unease that swirled in its breast, it was… glad.

He nodded back at it. “Thank you.”

That, too, served no purpose. It had never been thanked for performing its duty. But this was new territory, someplace uncharted. No one had ever behaved toward it like he did. Perhaps this was simply who he was: someone who gave of himself, always, even for those who did not deserve it.

He moved carefully, as if he half-expected that he might need to run. His steps were slow, his hands slower still, as he knelt and reached out to touch its sister’s leg.

Hornet sat stiffly, one hand clenched around her cooling cup, while he examined her knee, the swelling that had pushed her plates apart, the way the skin between had darkened with gathered fluid. When he pressed his thumb beneath the joint, she hissed, and it felt a tingling rush run up its spine and into its jaw, a sudden, compelling urge to bristle, to bite.

No. It must not, must not lose control—it was dangerous, deadly, a single strike could tear off a leg or an arm, it must stay still.

It was restraining itself so tightly, all its concentration focused onto holding itself back, that it nearly twitched when she spoke. Her voice was fractured, airless, as if the words were dragged out of her unwillingly. “Quirrel, I—”

“Later,” he muttered. She stiffened even further. He glanced up, met her eye, and looked down again. “When we both mean it.”

A breath broke from her throat, heavy and strained. Anger? Or something else? What had she been about to say to him? What was it he had not wanted to hear?

Quirrel’s fingers pressed somewhere new, and the next hitch of her lungs was undoubtedly pain. Her hand squeezed its horn more tightly, seemingly unaware she was doing so, using its presence to help her endure.

Did she need a distraction? Did she need it to help her in some way? It had never had anything to hold onto, aside from the desperate curl of its claws into its own palms. It did not know what she needed, what might aid her.

It hesitated, then bumped its face against her side, fighting the instinct to press itself still. This, too, was an action it had not been ordered to take, but she rewarded it by breathing out a troubled sigh through her teeth and relaxing.

Her head eased back, bit by bit. She let go of its horn to slide her hand down between its eyes, claws moving in tiny half-circles across its cracked shell. When she flinched again, it was half-hearted, smothered by exhaustion, and the humming note of its relief grew louder, its shade nearly purring within it.

Quirrel did not say anything. His hands were moving in tiny, shifting motions that its eyes could not interpret, not this close. There was a stony quietness about him, something its mind couldn’t help but worry at, like a beast with prey between its teeth. Was the injury worse than she had thought? Was he loath to speak of it, for fear she’d be displeased?

It shifted its head again, this time to get a better view—it did not need to see, it knew that, this was information it did not need but it wanted—and Quirrel halted, turning minutely to look it in the eye.

“Nothing is broken,” he said. To it. He had noticed its interest, and… and he was answering questions it could not even ask. It had only had to look. “I think it’s a sprain, though a fairly bad one. It should heal with no complications.”

“As I said,” Hornet mumbled without looking, sounding as if she could not quite get her mouth to work correctly. “It’ll heal quick enough.”

“Yes, it will.” The scholar sighed, resuming his inspection. It could see now that he was shifting the joint slowly side to side, watching the motion while applying only the barest pressure. “If she can manage to stay off of it for a few days, that is.”

Hornet raised her head at this, looking between it and the cricket, but whatever she found there, she did not comment on it. When she spoke again, it was softer. “I can manage that.”

“Good.” He set her foot back on the ground. “From what I recall, most spiders would prefer to sacrifice the limb and induce a molt rather than suffer through the healing process.”

“If you recall, I have fewer limbs than most spiders.”

Quirrel shrugged. “True enough.” He rose, tiredly, bracing one hand on his knee. “Stay put. I’m getting the bandages.”

Hornet half-tensed, uttering the beginning of a protest, then slumped again when he disappeared into the kitchen, ignoring her entirely. He should not do that—she was of much higher rank than he—but, strangely, it found that it did not mind, not if she continued to object to having her wounds cared for. She deserved that far more than it did, and it did not know why she would deny herself this, except to prove something that did not need proving.

Quirrel returned with several rolls of linen and set about wrapping the injury, saying nothing more as he did so. Hornet watched him with heavy-lidded eyes; her head was leaned back against its side, her hand falling still every few moments as her focus slipped. It had not seen her so tired since the last time she left the house, since the last time she left it alone.

It had not been alone, not this time. It had had Quirrel. He had listened. He had helped it. He—

He had apologized. He had seen it broken, utterly, had witnessed it losing hold of every scrap of its control, and still, he had said—

Oh, my friend. I’m so sorry.

And its sister’s voice echoed the words—

I’m here. I’m so, so sorry.

For what?

For what?

They spoke as though wrong had been done to it. How was that possible? Any distress it experienced must be a result of its own hidden flaws, its own weakness that it had failed to stamp out. From the moment the Temple opened to show it the one who would replace it, all the way back to watching its older sibling dwindle and fade before its eyes.

Dead. Its sibling, dead.

Not merely returned to the Sea, like so many others. Not merely a shade, a lingering imprint of instinct and will. Unmade. As if they had never been.

Its kin, its siblings. First and last. Dead and ever-living. And the vessel itself was somewhere in between, a shattered thing, fit for neither its duty nor the grave.

It was certainly not fit for the sympathy it had been given. For the desperate grief in Quirrel’s voice as he stayed near it while it cried, or the breathless sorrow in its sister’s as she begged forgiveness for leaving it behind.

And yet, something within it reached out toward the words. The same twisted, ravening thing that grasped and clung on to every scrap of praise, growing stronger each time the vessel failed to deny it what it wanted. Some lingering hunger that the void had instilled in it, a shameful need that had at last been its downfall.

It would not have retained the memory that the Radiance used to break it, otherwise. It would not have cared. That moment would not have mattered, any more than any other moment in its life.

A single glance had been enough to ruin it.

But still, the thing inside it dared to hunger.

It fed on soft touches, soft words. It sank its teeth into its sister’s guilt, into the fearful way she clung to it, into the broken desperation of her promise, that she would come back for it. That she would always come back for it.

What had it ever done, to be valued so? How did she see anything in it worth returning for? What purpose could she have for it—for she must have one—that would bring her back, exhausted and injured, fighting through the cold and the pain just to be here with it?

“Try not to move it.” Quirrel’s voice broke through its thoughts. He had finished his task, wrapping its sister’s knee in a layer of bandages, finished with a neat knot. “I can find you something to use as a crutch, if you like.”

“Fine.” Hornet sounded utterly flat, defeated, in a way. Though if it meant that she did not protest being cared for, perhaps that was for the best.

Quirrel went and rummaged in the shelves until he pulled out one of her spare cloaks. He placed it, wordlessly, in her lap, then busied himself elsewhere in the room. Hornet grumbled and hissed to herself as she peeled her soaked garment off and exchanged it, movements stiff and halting.

An awkwardly placed elbow caught the vessel in the face. Hornet mumbled an apology, but did not move away, toward her comfortable nest on the hearth. In fact, she burrowed in closer to it, tucking the dry fabric over her feet and resting her horns on its neck, breath coming in warm puffs against its throat.                                                                              

It did not stir, either, though its shoulder was beginning to burn. That was only one more pain to ignore, just like the phantom ache of its left arm, the pressure in its chest, the dull throb in its mask.

No, it would not move. To move would be to disturb something precious, something delicate, a moment of unutterable peace. She was so small, so light; the weight of her hardly added to its pain.

This… must be like dreaming, but it knew that it had not fallen asleep. It had never dreamed in all its long un-life; even its time spent trapped in that realm had been unnatural, twisted and manipulated by the goddess in order to hurt it however she could.

It had heard others speak of their dreams, including those that preceded the early stages of infection—sweet and warm and bright, filled with unutterable longing for something unfulfilled. A heart-deep wish, a need long unmet. The yearning hunger of someone deprived of what they needed most—of a goddess whose worshippers had fallen away.

They had sounded exactly like what it felt now. The soft-sharp ache in its chest, deeper than any of its wounds. The warmth spreading over its shell, centered where it held its sister close, as if she were a light and the vessel her clinging shadow.

It did not seem possible for this to be real.

But it was no longer with the Radiance. And vessels did not dream.

Quirrel finished tidying the room as the light waned, putting away his tea supplies and hanging its sister’s cloak to dry. He brought in more sticks of shellwood and piled them on the fire, then crouched down to nudge them into place with the iron. He took so long about it and accomplished so little that it began to question whether he was watching what he was doing.

Its sister stirred, then slowly turned her head. Her voice was rough. “You’re staying, then?”

The scholar half-turned his head, the gleam of one bluish eye just showing through his mask.

Four eyes. Eyes behind masks.

It blinked, attempting to clear the images away. The tightness in its chest was back, and it struggled to breathe quietly, to not betray that it was snared in its own past once more.

Would it ever stop seeing the emptiness of its sibling’s eyes? The void draining down the table to envelop its feet? The scholar standing over it, its father’s knife melting away in his hand?

It had smothered those memories. It had not even known that there were any to unearth from its brief time as a nymph. It was not the Radiance’s influence, or a mind broken by infection, that had prevented it from remembering; this had been sealed away before the vessel itself had been, and just as thoroughly.

Had its sister not left it here, it may never have remembered its missing sibling at all.

They had no relevance now. It ought not think of them.

It did. It would. It knew that.

Quirrel did not answer Hornet’s question directly. Instead, he let out a deep sigh and lowered the fire iron. “You’re sure you wish to have this conversation now?”

Its sister uncurled further, but still did not move away from it. Could she be drawing some kind of comfort from its touch, or was she merely trying to keep it calm? Either way, she did not seem inclined to leave.

She did tense again before she spoke. Pulling inward, spines beginning to bristle against its side. “Yes, I am.”

He nodded, but said nothing more. Not until he had jabbed at the fire a few more times, then hung the poker in its place by the hearth. “If you insist.”

After snagging a pillow from the pile in the corner, he approached the bed and lowered himself to the floor with another sigh and a muffled creak of chitin. He wrapped his arms around his knees, staring at the floor in front of his feet. He did that for a long minute, seeming to hunt for the words he wanted.

He must be tired. Nearly as tired as its sister. He had sung to it for hours, melodies and words it could barely remember now, except as a constant presence in its awareness: one song braiding into another, one verse into the next, giving it something to hold onto as it climbed out of panic’s maw. He had sung until his voice began to crack, and then he had kept singing still, pausing only to sip water from a bowl he’d placed at his side. He had sung until it lay still with rapt fascination, rather than frozen, trembling in terror that had made it hiss and snarl at him. He had sung until it could hardly hear him at all, and now every word that left his throat was rough, rasping, much like the sounds from its own.

It wished that she knew of that, somehow. She was still afraid, still staring him down as if he might strike out at her. But he had not tried to defend himself from it, or even retreated to safety. He had done something utterly unexpected—something that was able to guide it out of the dark.

It thought he might do the same for her, if she would let him. It thought that he might intend to try.

“They panicked when you left.”

Ah.

He—

He meant to tell her of its failures. Of how it could not help reacting when he came close. Of the way it had threatened him. A sliver of that panic pricked at it now, both at his words and at the shaky breath its sister took.

She should know. She should hear that it could not keep itself in check, that its fractured mind made it a danger to those around it. She should not even be here now, so close to it, so soon after it lost control. It could not be sure it wouldn’t do so again. It could not.

“Nothing I said could reassure them, though not through any fault of theirs.” His gaze shifted to meet its eyes. “I am not the one who saved them. I am not the one they trust. You are.”

Hornet didn’t reply, didn’t shift against its side, did not move at all except to breathe a little faster.

Quirrel clenched his hands tight around his wrists. “I don’t think I need to tell you what damage was done. Or that it could have been far worse.”

She shook her head minutely, whispering, “No.”

He…

He would not tell her, then? She deserved to know, and he—

Quirrel deserved to be safe from it. He was kind, and gentle, and had not in any way earned what it nearly did to him. Would it not be punished for that? Would it not have to hear the words that would make its sister lose faith in it?

It was unfit, in every way—unfit to live, to serve, to exist when so many others no longer did. Its fault, its fault. People had died. Many, many people. The infection had crushed its father’s kingdom like a landslide. Another sibling suffered now in its place. And before any of that, before it had known it was impure, before it had been proven faulty, it had stood before another, and watched their darkness drain away.

Many, many.

It had nearly added one more to that tally. Not one left to plunge into the Abyss, or driven mad by the whispers of the goddess. Merely too close at the wrong time, too fragile to survive a blow from its hand.

He knew that, surely. He knew what it had almost done. He feared it, and rightfully so.

And yet—

“I do not know you well, Hornet.” Quirrel lifted a shoulder, then let it fall. “I thought you would keep your word. But I could not say for sure.”

Hornet turned away, tucking her chin into her cloak collar. Her hands were moving under the fabric, twisting, claws scraping over chitin. “I didn’t—” she started, then scrapped it and started again. “I wouldn’t—I won’t—”

“Don’t tell me you will not leave again.” Quirrel’s voice was harsh, suddenly. The vessel suppressed the urge to curl more tightly around its sister, as if it could protect her from the things he said, the way they seemed to sink into her shell like drops of acid. “I promised the truth to them, and I promise the same to you. And if I’m to assist you, I must ask for the same. Do not lie to me.”

Hornet was shaking. Anger, fear—it could not tell the difference. The scholar did not flinch as she snarled at him, even when she bared a glint of fangs under her mask. “I swear it, cricket.” Her words were garbled, half-lost in a growl. “Do not call me a liar.”

Quirrel tilted his head to stare at her from another angle, his antennae twitching. “I will call you nothing you do not deserve. That, I can also promise.”

Its sister scoffed, turning aside again, shoulders hunched tightly. Offended, as she should be. Who was he to speak of her in this way? How could he imply this—and why was she allowing him to?

She had not disputed any of it. Not a word.

Was he being truthful? Was she…

Had she really lied to him? Had she really said—

You said you would not leave them.

You swore it.

The vessel was as lost now as it had been before, in the face of a new kind of pain it did not know how to bear. It felt… pulled, in tension between two extremes, though it lay there helpless, unable to interfere. Putting itself between them was not warranted; there was nothing it could do.

It should not interfere. It had no right. That was not its place.

“If,” she said finally, the word grinding out through her fangs. “You said if you’re to assist me.”

Quirrel sighed, tipping his head back. “You seem to recognize that you were in the wrong. That you should not have left the way you did.”

Silence.

“If so, you must also recognize that I have a right to feel wronged. Betrayed, even.” He waited, but when he got nothing more than the sound of Hornet’s claws scratching over her wrists, he sighed again. “I do, Hornet. I am hurt, and I’m angry with you. That is why I had decided to wait before I spoke to you about it, until you decided otherwise.”

Hurt. Wronged.

These were words that should have had no meaning to it. But—

It did hurt. Always, now. It felt its hand twitch, invisibly, felt its fingers start to move through the memory of the sign. Hurt.

The fear had hurt, deep within it, when it realized its sister was gone. The despair had hurt, when it thought she was not coming back. The memories of its sibling hurt, hurt, hurt, like a knife sinking void-deep into its shell.

Its claws had hurt when they pierced its chest. Its throat had hurt as it cried. Its whole body hurt now, an all-consuming ache that seemed to drag its limbs deep into the cushions.

I am hurt.

He said it like he had been wounded. Did his throat burn, too? Did his joints ache? Did the betrayal he spoke of sting like the point of a blade?

Surely, that was not what he meant. It did not understand. It could not know what that might feel like.

I’m sorry, she had told it once. I’m sorry. I know it hurts.

That hurt had been physical. That had been something it was well-equipped to endure.

If she had not left it now—if it had not been alone with Quirrel—if its memories had not ambushed it after she was gone—

It was hurt. It did hurt.

You were wrong—I am hurt—I’m sorry, sorry, sorry—

“What is the point of this,” Hornet snapped, jarring it out of its spiraling thoughts. “I know this. You’ve said enough.”

“Have I?” Quirrel’s forefinger tapped against his knee. “I still don’t think you understand.”

“I—you said—”

“What I said in anger was true.” He looked down, briefly. “But I believe you heard something more than I intended.”

Its sister choked out a sound. A splintered laugh, perhaps. “What does it matter?”

“It matters a great deal.” There was something else in his gaze now, a softness that looked almost wounded. “I am here because you asked me to be. Because I could see that you needed help. Because… when you found me, nothing else in my life seemed to matter.” His voice dropped to a murmur. “For the most part, those things are still true.”

When you found me.

The blue haze of the crossroads flashed before its eyes, its body growing heavy with the memory. Heavy with exhaustion, with infection, with the clinging, smothering certainty that there was no use going on. That it would be better served to fling itself into oblivion, to fail one final time and then no more.

She had saved it. The red of her cloak. The sound of her voice. The threads of her silk, binding it.

Had she saved Quirrel, too?

Hornet looked on in silence, still with tension quivering in her arms where her claws were clenched. It smelled a trace of blood, hot and sharp. Alarm kicked its heartbeat higher. It could not stop her—it did not know how. The only thing it could do, it had already done: offer itself as support, as something to hold onto, to lean on.

Oh, it wished she would stop.

It had once been a knight. A protector. If it must protect her from herself, put itself in the way of her anger, give her something else to sink her claws into, it would. It would.

Quirrel noticed, too. He stopped, mouth open to speak again, and seemed to reconsider what he’d been going to say. “Hornet, I… no, I am not leaving.”

She twitched, briefly, halfway to flinching. It fought not to respond, fought not to break from its stillness. Every breath she took was high and fast, and with the tang of her blood in the air and her smothered shudders against its shell, its every instinct called for it to shield her, to pull her away somehow, to take her pain upon itself, as it was meant to.

“Do you need some time?” Quirrel asked, gently. “I don’t have to—”

“Say what you need to say,” she interrupted.

For a moment, it thought he might protest. When he resumed speaking, it was slow and halting, as if he worried he might put a foot wrong. “What I said before was this. If I’m to assist you, I must ask you to tell me the truth. To tell me what I need to know. If you cannot do that, I will find it hard to help you.” He sighed, and it sounded world-weary, full of exhaustion that a single day had done very little to add to. “It did not mean that I am looking for an opportunity to leave. Or that what you did, or what you are, or what you think you are, has given me reason to.”

Hornet swallowed, and it felt the barest amount of her tension release, her spines creeping downward an inch.

“I don’t understand why you left,” Quirrel continued. “But I understand that you felt you needed to. I am hurt, and I am angry with you. I do not need an explanation, but I do need you to listen to what I’m saying, and only that. Not what you think you might hear.”

Hurt. I am—

Hurt, hurt, hurt.

A moment ticked by, measured in the rattle of the raindrops. Then its sister nodded stiffly. Her voice was a mere whisper. “Agreed.”

“Good.” Quirrel shifted, crossing his legs and leaning forward, hands laced together before him. He was silent for a moment. “I cannot promise that I will always be here. There may come a time when our paths diverge, when I can no longer stay, for one reason or another. But if that happens, I will tell you. And I will tell you why.”

Its sister looked at him. Stared at him, really, as if there were more to him than a single cricket scholar with an earnest gaze and the warm glow of firelight spread behind him.

“This is what I’m asking.” He lifted one finger for emphasis. “The next time you need to leave, you will tell me first. You will tell me where you’re going, and how long you’ll be gone. No argument. And, if you can, I’d like an hour’s notice.”

A long exhale, which seemed to leave its sister smaller than she had been. “Agreed,” she said again. “I—I swear it.”

She spoke with a slump to her shoulders and a tilt of her horns that it recognized. Much like its own, a feeling it was faintly surprised that she shared with it.

Shame.

You were wrong.

Did she agree with him? Did she believe, too, that she had done wrong?

Even if her actions constituted a failure, she could never fail as thoroughly as it had. It should hurt. It should burn for what it did. It would never wish such punishment on her. Never, never.

She did not seem to wish that for it, either. She did not want it to hurt. She had said so, over and over.

I know it hurts.

I’m sorry.

Its next thought was feather-light, a whisper. Weak. Cringing. The shade, the void, at the core of it, corrupt. Impure.

Desperate.

It… did not want to hurt again.

���One thing more,” Quirrel said, before it could turn this concept over. “You will do the same for them. They deserve to know, as much as I do.”

For—

For it?

Its tired mind filled with static. It—

Surely it had not heard that correctly. It blinked, waiting to understand, to piece together what he had really meant.

Hornet turned to look down at it. It found itself tense, suddenly, painfully so, and its breath had snagged somewhere around the hook in its guts. It had done nothing to draw her attention, there was no reason for her to regard it now, unless…

It had heard right?

They deserve to know.

She had already made it one promise it did not understand. She had already given it far more than it had ever dared to want. Without reservation, though she had little to give, and without condemnation for what it needed.

It wished it did not need this at all. What it would not do to be what she once thought it was, to be the perfect void that its father had intended. That she had told it of her plans before was generous, to be sure, but it could not expect—

They deserve to know.

Quirrel was looking at it, with a tired softness in his gaze.

Deserve. It did not deserve anything. It had earned nothing but a traitor’s fate. He had no right to ask this of her, especially not on the vessel’s behalf. He was mistaken.

He—

He had called it friend. Sat with it. Sang to it.

It had never met anyone like him.

A gentle hand touched its face. It smelled the fresh blood on her talons, the scratches she had opened on her wrist. “Hollow?”

It had not been breathing. It was worrying her.

It made an effort, though its first attempt was too short, shaky, doing no good to reassure anyone at all. It was spent, mind and body, frame aching in ways that it had not felt since the very first days in the mansion, muscles sore and throat rubbed raw with sobbing. But it tried, tried to please her—nudging its muzzle into her palm, into the firm touch that seemed to send warmth racing down to its very core.

Hornet gazed into its eyes, into the lightless void there, and did not flinch. Without looking away, without so much as a quiver in her voice, she whispered, “I swear it.”

○

Taglist: @slimeshade @moss-tombstone @gamergenia @crustysoapbubbles @botslayer9000 Send an ask or reply to this post to be added to (or removed from) the taglist!

[conconpasta]

au

everything is a mess here..

[demgozellegs]

MANY Hollow Knight doodles ive done in the past few days :3

[universe-xlll]

This is how the Pale sibs met Quirrel when they reached Hallownest, even tho they have seen eachother before, this is just a reencounter in the Pale Wanderers AU.

I had this scene for a while inside my head and because I am writting the fic my brain is al scrambled with ideas lmao. (Also yes, Brook's color is orange, it's not a foreshadowing to something bad srs)

[ghostsbroadcast]

HII omg help I actually suck at getting art done sorry for another little doodle dump 🙇 I’ve been getting so many notifications it’s scary I LOVE YOU ALL HAHA some of these are oc related!! I also really suck at keeping a consistent art style so sorry if everything looks incredibly different

[theanonymousmystery]

*Breaks down the door* MA LOOK I MADE MORE HK ART!!

So @voidsiblings updated their Lost Kin fanfic and I read it while listening to Three Days Grace. Then this happened. Oh my god, the FEELS I have for these two thanks to this fanfic UGH. My HEART.

Part of me wants to gush and the other part wants to keep it in for people who haven’t read it because BY GOD it’s good! Y’all ever read something on your lunch break at work and it’s physically painful to rip yourself away from it because it’s THAT good? Yeah that was literally me.

If you haven’t read it, WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE?! GO READ IT NOW!

(Lyrics are from “Animal I Have Become” and “Fallen Angel” both by Three Days Grace)

[mostlydeadallday]

Lost Kin | Chapter XLIII | To Pass The Time

Fandom: Hollow Knight Rating: Mature Characters: Hornet, Pure Vessel | Hollow Knight, Quirrel Category: Gen Content Warnings:  referenced child death, panic attacks, body horror, self-harm, suicidal ideation, attempted suicide, flashbacks AO3: Lost Kin | Chapter XLIII | To Pass The Time First Chapter | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter | Chronological Notes: Hollow's control snaps. Quirrel finds a desperate solution. Art Credit: commission by @slimeshade (ko-fi/commissions)

Mind the chapter warnings, please. If you need more details to decide whether to read this one, please visit the ao3 page—I've included them in the beginning chapter notes there.

○

Dead.

Its sibling was dead.

It had not even remembered them. It had buried them, erased them, so that it would not have to—

To keep seeing those eyes, the open gaping too-still stare that they had given it, as their consciousness faded from existence. To feel the void-link go silent and slack, to feel the anger—

No. It was more than anger: no mere spark, no quick-burning thing. The last thing its sibling felt had been all-consuming fury, a flash flood of horror and betrayal and wrath lashing through them, sweeping all else away in its path.

That was a feeling it had never allowed itself, even in its weakest moments, even after it could no longer remember why.

Even after it had excised all memory of them.

Even after the numb, cold horror of that day blended into all the numb, cold days that followed.

The void was willful. The void was angry. The void would ruin it, if its control slipped for an instant, if it allowed such a thing to happen. It had not remembered how it knew that, but it did, it did.

The void would ruin it. As the void had ruined them. As it had shaped them into something impure, unfit, a wretched, terrified, desperate thing that had not even dared to lash out in their last moments.

They had held—held tight—to the hope that they could be useful, that their resolve would save them, even when every gasping plea said otherwise.

Despite all its efforts, the vessel itself was no different. It could not help but see the similarity.

Ruined. Ruined, both of them.

And all for nothing, its sibling had died for nothing, and it had stood by and watched—

Thinking itself pure. Thinking itself somehow better than they were, when it had begged, had pleaded, just as desperately as they had, the first time the goddess sunk her claws in and pierced it through to its foul, rotten core.

It sucked in a breath, as much air as it could hold, before another sob rose from deep within and seized it, shook it, mercilessly.

Its throat burned. As it had when the infection surged and poured from it, every guttering breath drowned in liquid fire. As it had when her screams ripped it in two, the pliant shadows of its form no match for her brilliant fury, soft structures of void shriveling away until she made of it something to cry her suffering, something that she could use.

The goddess—she was anger incarnate. She was fury undimmed, wrath burst aflame, all the brighter for having been smothered so long. She had learned that that was one of her best weapons against it, that her rages terrified it, and she had pushed that advantage with every endless, terrible hour. She had known how to reduce it to a cringing, cowering thing, withholding the worst of her power, withholding the pain, until the moment she could see the cracks forming. Until the moment she brought down the full force of her fury.

Fury that it shrank from, fury that it refused to counter with its own. It could not. It could not do that; it was not capable. It could not, it could never.

Beneath the façade, beyond the vast distance that it placed between itself and the world, it had been terrified. Terrified that—

That it might be as corrupted as its discarded sibling. That it might ever have the urge to lash out against its masters, that it might wish to rend and tear like a beast loosed from its leash.

This was all it remembered from them, all that it took from their example. It must never, never let itself be angry.

That feeling had been locked away from it, far too deep for its conscious mind to recognize, even after it had grown wild with grief and fear and agony. Even when it realized that it was over, that she had won, that she was right, that it had become everything it feared—even that could not make it feel this thing that it had forbidden itself. This thing that its sibling had died feeling, that had signified failure as clearly as a glyph chiseled into stone.

No good no good it was no good, it was just as flawed as they were, except that it had been compliant to the very end. Holding its hands out for the shackles, baring its neck for the blade. Deceiving even itself with its charade of purity, until it could deny its own weakness no more.

No more, no more no more—

Its lungs squeezed tight again, its throat constricting, and from its slack jaw came a long, grating keen, silent as it always was, save for the grinding of the air over its damaged, light-lanced flesh. For a wild, terrible instant, it thought that it might wish to have her back, if only it could scream again with the voice that she had forced upon it. It was not meant for that, but something in it wanted, wanted to unleash its grief upon the world, and only the Radiance had seen fit to give it what it was never meant to have.

No. No, its sister had given it far more. Far, far more—

Before she left it.

○

There was nothing he could do. There was likely nothing anyone could have done. He had pictured this clearly: Hornet’s absence stretching from minutes into hours; Hollow growing frantic, panicked, without her—

And there’d been nothing, not a single thing, he could do to prevent it.

They were choking now, nearly gagging with the force of their sobs, taking in only sharp, stabbing gasps in between. They would have to calm, eventually, he knew hysterics could not last forever—and yet he still winced every time their breath stopped, and then every time it ground to life again, another sob tearing free with a sound like it should leave a raw, bloody hole in them.

“It’s all right.” His mandibles twitched. He couldn’t stop talking; a nervous habit, one which, like the knuckle-biting, he’d identified but been unable to break. “It’s all right. It’s all right. I promise.”

If only he could ask them what they feared. If only they felt safe enough to answer. He had half an idea that they might be nearly as terrified of their own reaction as they were of what had caused it. The frantic pace of their lungs when they clawed out a moment to breathe, the frenzied fits of void in their eyes—they seemed almost manic, each painfully long minute only heaping fuel on the flames, rather than allowing them to die down.

Oh, what should he do?

“I know,” he whispered, crouching down and clenching his hands on his knees. Eye level—there was no other way he knew of to connect with them, to attempt to break them free of whatever it was that was dragging them down. “I know, it’s… it’s awful.” He swallowed, his own throat aching in sympathy. “But it’s all right. You’ll be all right.”

Should he try to calm them down? Nothing he did was working. Did they need to exhaust themselves? He thought that might take hours at this rate, if they did not faint from lack of air first. Was this likely to actually hurt them?

Crying was one thing. Outright hysteria was another. This was the latter.

He slipped his knuckle between his mandibles, clenching, twisting it. If this was anyone else, he would suggest moving—from the room, from the house entirely. Even briefly going out into the rain might shock them out of it, but they were nowhere near able to stand on their own, and he’d never be able to coax them anywhere like this. It would be the easiest solution, but even that was denied to them.

Out of the house might have helped, if they were able. Out of the kingdom would be better. If only he could take them away from here. Somewhere else. Anywhere other than this haunted ruin, where fear and guilt and shame must follow their every step. If he felt the burden of it, minor as his role had been, he could only imagine what a crushing weight it must be on their shoulders.

And yet all he could manage to do was sit and wait with them, repeating the few weak promises he felt sure he could safely make. Trying to find new ways to phrase it all, in hopes that something would sink in past the fear.

Only a short time had passed, and he was already running short.

And his promises might mean nothing at all to them. Nothing that mattered, nothing that could cut through the fear that entangled them. He did not like to accept that he was powerless, but—

Hollow choked again, shoulders hunching, and dragged their limbs inward even tighter, clutching weakly at their chest as it refused to rise. He winced, his own breath hissing. “Breathe,” he whispered. “Breathe, please. Please.”

A gasp rocked them, then another. But their claws only clenched tighter, grasping, bearing down on—

On the silk that filled their chest. That filled the wound, still open, where their shell had rotted away.

○

Its claws spasmed, their tips sinking into silk.

Silk that she had placed there, to keep it from harm. Silk that she had spun from her own close-guarded soul, that she had bound into its palm and its chest, with every squeezing, scraping breath a reminder of her claim on it.

It… kept on disappointing her. It could offer her nothing but the fractured pieces of itself, of a mind and body too broken to be useful. It was a liar. It had stolen its place in the world; it had stood by and allowed others to suffer, to die; it had damned its kin, damned the entire kingdom to a never-ending nightmare.

Whatever it was now, it could never be what she wanted.

There was nothing left for it, then. Truly nothing. It deserved—it deserved the fate its sibling had received. It deserved to die.

It did not realize its claws had shifted, from grasping emptily to bearing down on its own shell, until it felt void well, cold and sluggish, to the surface. Felt the pain, fresh and new and sharp, sharp amidst the haze. Its hand was clenched over the wound in its chest, silk sliding over silk, except for where its foreclaw had pierced the edge of the dressing, cutting through to the scarred black flesh beneath.

Could it claw the bandage free, rip its sister’s silk from its body? Did it dare?

“Stop. Please.” Quirrel, his voice barely audible beneath its hideous, scraping sobs. “Please, don’t do that.” He sounded—desperate, almost, with a waver in his throat that nearly matched its own.

Desperate? Why was he—what did it matter—

It blinked, eyelids fluttering shut twice over before it could discern the cricket’s blurry shape.

It had nearly forgotten he was there. Nearly forgotten that he existed entirely, with its world awash in pain, what was left of its mind drowning in its own misery. He stood halfway between its bed and the fireplace with his hands stretched out, as if he had lurched toward it when he noticed what it was doing. His breath was harsh, unsteady. His mandibles gaped, then clicked emptily, and he glanced again toward the door, as if he expected its sister to rush in and save him.

Afraid of it. As he very well should be.

“I—I swore I would not allow harm come to you,” he whispered, repeating his words from before. He swallowed, glanced at its hand, and spoke again, stronger this time. “Any harm.”

It shivered, caught between dread and despair like two halves of a vise, grinding tighter, crushing it. It was not beholden to obey him. He was not its wielder or master, nor had he been given any authority over it. It wanted—which did not matter, of course, nothing that it wanted mattered­—to listen, to believe him. To forget what it knew: that it was alone, and that it deserved to be.

But that was the reality of it. Perhaps he did not understand the full extent of its disgrace, or the reason for its downfall. He knew of vessels, its sister had said—he should know why it was created, then, and what purpose it was meant to serve. He should know that it was damned now, just like the others.

It had damned its older sibling by its very existence. By being judged pure, when neither one of them had been.

And now it had damned a second, by failing to live up to what it was meant for. As impure as the rest of its kin, the lie of its existence unexposed until far too late.

Far, far too late.

It choked again, the scratching heave of its breath going silent for an instant. The sobs were unrelenting, inescapable—no sooner would it attempt to regain its breath than yet another would wrench loose and deny it. Would it never stop? Having let its control slip, it was helpless, swept away by the storm that raged within it.

It had allowed itself to break, given itself over to the whims of the godless dark. Its shade had always been the weakest part of it, its desires instinctual and profane: its hunger was the hunger of an open pit, its silence the rotten silence of a grave.

Its shade wanted. Wanted release. Wanted relief from the pain. Wanted to break loose from its body, to surge outward in a headlong rush, to draw and draw upon itself until it was whole again, until it was free to rejoin the shadows it was birthed from.

That desire could not be granted. If it bled out now, its shade would seep away into nothingness, into dead stillness like a lakebed drained dry. Those seals that its father had placed on its sibling’s mask now marked its own as well. To keep the Radiance from killing it, to keep its void where it belonged, wrapped round her in an eternal embrace.

It had no function, now. It was a danger to its sister, and even more so to her mortal ally.

If it was dead, it could not hurt them.

Its lifeblood was a toxin, yes, a creeping poison that would wring the warmth from his veins—but he had the sense not to touch it. As soon as it drained enough of its void to lose consciousness, he and its sister would be safe. There would be no returning, no shade to merge with its shattered shell. And there was no goddess to remake it. It would—

It would be free.

He should let. He should let it tear itself open, ruin its failing shell with its own claws. He had no cause to stop it.

But when it trembled and forced its claws deeper, curling, tearing through silk and skin alike, he stepped forward hastily, heedlessly, reaching out toward it with a frantic cry. “Please, don’t—your wound—”

A flash of terror tore through it, a bolt of electricity. please please nonono—

His mask flickered in its vision, eyeholes doubling, wrapped with the blue of a scholar’s kerchief. His hands reached for its throat, holding a blade of its father’s make. And it flinched away, cowering, back hunched, horns laid flat, with a sound coming from its throat—a long, ugly, gurgling hiss.

He froze. It froze in turn, even its convulsive sobs ceasing for the span of a moment. Its entire mask was throbbing, from the crack through its eye out to the tips of its horns. Its chest ached and stung, from its talons, from the lump of silk caught between its ribs.

This was—this was not then. Its memories were deceiving it again. This was not the Palace, and he was not that long-ago scholar with its sibling’s void drying on his hands.

This… this was its sister’s ally. This was Quirrel, who had only ever been kind to it. Quirrel, who had stroked its horns and spoken softly and told it to breathe through the pain.

Even if he had intended to end it—if he was the one who would punish it, his blade the one that would finish it—had it not just wished for the same?

Your sister has entrusted you to me.

Perhaps this was what was meant to be. Perhaps this was what its sister wanted. She should not have to strike the blow herself—she had surely seen enough of violence, living in such a world as its flaws had brought about. She, like her father, need not sully her shell with its lifeblood, need not burden herself with the thankless task of a vessel’s final death.

Was it too much to hope? That being the one to strike it down might bring her sorrow?

Leaving its fate in the hands of her ally, in hands that had proven so capable with it… that was only fitting. A scholar had disposed of its sibling. Another could dispose of it now.

It should let him. It should banish this faithless urge to punish itself, to bring about its own inevitable downfall. It should make itself submit, let go of the willful scrap of itself that still desired to fight, as it had fought against the Radiance, as it had fought against its own damnable impurity.

It should let go. Loosen its claws. Bare its throat to the blade, one last time.

Its back was still curled. Its teeth were still bristling. Like something feral. Like a beast, loosed from its leash.

Let go.

It… did not know if it could.

○

Leave.

Leave, now.

Quirrel had cultivated a careful awareness of his instincts. Refined his understanding of them, over years and decades spent alone. He had learned, early on, that the spellwork on the mask he wore would protect him from much that he encountered, though not from poor decisions made in ignorance, exhaustion, or plain stupidity.

Instincts filled the gap. They hadn’t failed him yet, if his continued existence was any measure of success.

He no longer wore the mask. His nail was out of reach. And his instincts were screaming to be anywhere but here.

It had been all he could do not to run at the sound Hollow had made. A sound he had not known they could make. Every heaving breath was threaded with that rumbling hiss, emerging from deep in their throat and buzzing in their dense, fractured chest-plates. They had curled tight on the bed, legs drawn in and horns pressing down against their back, and their open mouth was a glaring threat, each spiny tooth needle-sharp and glistening black as oil.

Those were the teeth of a deep-sea thing, teeth to sink in, to hold fast, to never let go.

And their eyes—

Their eyes were a storm. A cyclone churning through a darkened sky. Violent. Volatile. Merciless.

This—this was terror, not the wariness that they had previously regarded him with. He’d been a fool to assume otherwise.

He might also be a fool for other reasons.

His legs were shaking and his hands were shaking and his empty stomach turned over like a bad egg dropped into water. He did not move.

Hollow was equally motionless, still panting through their gaping, thorny mouth, still staring at him, wild-eyed. The expression was literal; he could see that their vision was focused on him, but only because the point of greatest turbulence was fastened in his direction, every writhing motion spiraling outward from that origin.

He had no idea what they might do. He wasn’t sure they knew either. They were enthralled, somehow, by his presence, as someone might stand petrified in front of a charging beast, unable to move even to step out of its path.

Oh, he very much did not want that. He did not want to stay here, far too close for his own safety, taking advantage of their fear to keep them distracted from something much worse.

But he did not see that he had much choice.

They had not unlatched their claws from the bandage. But they had also not tightened them further. There was already void soaking into the silk, tiny motes of it rolling up their knuckle and wicking away into the air.

They could do serious damage, if they continued. He had no doubt they knew that.

He should move. He should do the smart thing and step back, out of their reach, away from those bristling teeth.

He did not do that.

“I’m sorry.” His voice seemed thin and watery. Hardly enough to startle anyone, and yet they twitched, another rumble sputtering to life in their chest. “I-I’m sorry. I did not wish to frighten you—truly.”

No reply. No reaction. A cut-off gasp interrupted the burgeoning hiss, halfway to becoming another sob. Pity sank through his gut, alongside the nausea.

He couldn’t move. He couldn’t. Not if it kept them from tearing their chest open while he watched. Not if it kept their attention off of whatever it was that made them wish to hurt so badly.

“I will not touch you,” he said, low, fervent. “I’ll come no closer, I swear. Here—”

Quirrel bent his knees, lowering himself to the floor. Squatting on his heels, folding one leg under, then the other. Still with his hands spread, in plain view.

The stone was cold beneath him. He suppressed the urge to shiver. “I’m staying right here,” he assured them. “Right where you can see me, see?”

They could see him. Their eyes followed him down. The next hiss was quieter, and interrupted again by a silent hitch of their shoulders, their sobs not yet burned out completely.

His shell crawled, cold tingles skittering down his back. He might not have been able to rise again even if he’d wanted to. Even his composure had limits, when facing the fixed gaze of a creature who could easily tear him apart.

Not just a creature. Not a beast. This was someone who could kill him, yes, but who would almost undoubtedly regret it.

This frozen silence would not last forever—it couldn’t. They would likely slip back into their despair, into the pit where he could not reach them.

He needed something, anything, to occupy their attention. To fill time, to keep them here with him, instead of lost in their own mind. Talking had not worked. What else was there? What else did he know to do?

He had often volunteered to entertain when other wayfarers shared his fire, on clear nights when the smoke drifted clear up to join the stars, or when they huddled beneath a hanging tree or cavern roof to escape the pouring rain. Stories had not seemed to soothe Hollow, but he wished, firecely, that he could show them the way the world could fall away, the way tales and song had filled those hours until nothing else seemed to matter.

Quirrel paused, on the cusp of an idea. He could not give them that, not in full. One cricket was a poor substitute for a camp full of cheer and laughter. There was no fire, he had no cards, and they could not answer riddles.

But he could offer something else, if they would take it.

The first lines of a melody twined through his thoughts, summoned by a turn of phrase he had almost forgotten. A chorus only, though he guessed that the rest would fall into place once he began.

Part of him recognized that this was a desperate venture, grasping in the darkness when his lantern had gone out. He had no clue whether this would make a difference—but, if they reacted badly, he could always stop.

Watch them. Closely, yet not too closely, while he hummed the first bars. Their eyes followed the motion of his hand as it tapped on his knee, their gaze transfixed somewhere between fear and fascination.

Nothing else changed, for better or worse.

Desperate as this was, he might as well try.

“March no more, my weary soldier,” he began. “There is peace where once was war. Sleep in peace, my weary soldier… sleep in peace, now battle’s o’er…”

It was a lilting, far-flung melody: rousing if sung loudly, but just as suited to the quiet, gentle way he sang it now, the words growing wistful and pleading, as tender as a breeze at dusk.

“I returned to fields of glory, where flowers and green grasses grow. Where the wind still tells the story, of those brave souls long ago…”

Hollow wheezed through a long exhale, nearly drowning out his voice. Still, that was a breath, and not a sob. He would take it.

“March no more, my weary soldier… there is peace where once was war…”

He had been to kingdoms where there was magic in the music, where sung spells cast enchantments both beautiful and strange. It was a feat he’d never performed, a closely guarded secret and difficult for an outsider to learn.

“Some returned from fields of glory, to their friends who held them dear. But some fell in that hour of glory, and were left to their resting here…”

If his voice could weave a spell, he thought, let it be a spell of peace. Let it be the peace that they so desperately needed.

“March no more, my weary soldier…”

They did not stir when the first song ended. And so he sang a second, a pretty tune of longing for a lover to return, the words falling miraculously into place as he felt his way forward through the dark. And then, as he thought he saw the whirling of their void grow a fraction slower, a third: a travel ballad that guided the singer over miles of sprawling countryside, pointing back toward a half-remembered home.

There were tales woven through these songs, tales that he had never heard the whole of—battles he had not fought, people he had not met, native lands he had never known. The places named were unfamiliar, every long-lost love a stranger. Victory and defeat, grief and joy, despair and hope alike were all swept away by time, by distance, until all that remained was a core of shared memory, bright and smooth as a piece of polished stone, flashing as it passed from hand to hand.

“Keep right on to the end of the road… keep right on to the end.” He swayed gently, caught in the melody, steady gaze still meeting Hollow’s turbulent one. Trying to seem welcoming, to invite them to join him, in spirit if not in reality. “Though you’re tired and weary, still journey on, ‘til you come to your happy abode… all the love you’ve been dreaming of will be there, at the end of the road…”

He chose songs of peace, of happiness, of deep winter passing and spring dawning again. He chose songs that he’d clung to on long, dark nights, when his exhaustion threatened to pull him down like a current under the sea. When the hole in his memory seemed ready to swallow him whole, when he could not find a reason to take one more step, save for heeding the spell that drew him always on.

He felt his voice and his resolve both strengthen as he went, shored up by fond memories that did not hurt as much as they once had, and by a yearning he could not quite shake—not for the simplicity of who he’d been then, or for the knowledge that he’d lost when he stepped into the Wastes, but for something indefinable, something that never could have been, that he mourned the loss of regardless. Someone who knew who he was, and where he’d come from. Someone who knew that, one day, he’d have something to return to.

This was nothing like what he’d imagined, in the times when he’d dared to imagine such things.

But was there not significance in this all the same? In the thought that there was some use to be found, even after the end of his usefulness? Even if it had to be scraped up from the dirt, sifted through stiff fingers? Even if it was only singing, to pass the time?

He was rewarded, somewhere in the middle of the fifth ballad, by Hollow’s mouth creeping closed, hiding away the thorn-patch shadows of their teeth. He very carefully did not react to this, only a faint quiver in his voice betraying him before it steadied of its own accord. Their breathing was more regular now, less strained, though still interrupted by stray hiccups and weak heaves of their shoulders as their sobbing calmed and faded.

Much as he wanted to praise them, or even to cry a little, himself, out of relief, he did neither. He moved on into a simple love song, changing the lyrics a touch as he went—he’d rather not give the wrong impression. “The half-moon westers low, my dear, and the wind brings up the rain. And wide apart we lie, my dear, with seas between the twain…”

Their eyes were spinning far more slowly now, that wire-tight tension in their limbs relaxing bit by bit. The void had stopped dripping from their wound. Quirrel had been told that he had a pleasant voice, nothing special, nothing that should have made them seemed almost… enchanted, their gaze going lax and faraway. His voice, the music, something was pulling them free from whatever horror—real or imagined—had them in its thrall.

He hadn’t dared to hope that his desperate gambit would be this successful. He almost didn’t dare to hope now.

Until their claws unlatched from the wound in their chest, hand falling half-open on the blankets.

Quirrel nearly forgot the next verse of the hymn he was singing. Nearly faltered, nearly stopped, the very thing he should not do.

He didn’t flinch. Didn’t even drop his gaze to the void-stained bandages, or to the feeble twitching of their fingers—likely cramped from the tension in their grip. He kept his focus on their eyes, on the occasional erratic motion that still seemed half-fearful, weak, frantic jerks fading out to slow, steady whirling.

Calming, but not calm. They still wavered on the edge, unable to back away—every breath was slight and thin, threaded through the tautness of their throat. There was still a tremor in their shoulders, a tightness to their spine. They likely could not relax completely—not until their sister came home.

He could only hope that she returned before his voice gave out.

○

Taglist: @botslayer9000@moss-tombstone@slimeshade@gamergenia Send an ask or reply to this post to be added to (or removed from) the taglist!

[eagledrawsandvibes]

Me when someone hollows a knight

[girlkisserr]

hello!! i just found your 'child of void' skin for hollow knight, and it's AMAZING (like genuinely the coolest skin i've ever seen wtf) but also i wanted to ask - is it something like your oc or a character from a show, or was it just designed specifically to be a skin? thanks:)

hi! honestly i'll start with saying i never thought anyone would ever actually reach out to tell me they like my self indulgence of a creation and to that i say thank you so much! like, so so much genuinely (we ignore my potential cringe of said self indulgence in those in game dialogue changes.)

to answer your question though, its my personal gijinka of Ghost (ignoring the horns, i actually dont know how it got to that point stylistically) and a few other characters including BV/LK, Hornet, and Quirrel? i think?

THK was simply too big for me to draw (and did you know thk + pv has probably over 200 folders of animations lol) and greenpath vessel we just couldnt change it

i havent posted in a long, long time due to heavy art block + interest shifts but my dedicated HK sideblog (@little--ghost) has pretty much every gijinka piece i've created

and for fun, heres some extra skin creation memes/images below

this was getting the original sprites to dump

heres how tiny ghost is

i had one more but i cannot find it and im so sad

[demgozellegs]

got some Hollow Knight stuff as a very very very VERY late birthday gift for myself!

[rayshiram]

hk doodles I found while digging through old-ish art ^_^

[mostlydeadallday]

Lost Kin | Chapter XXXVII | Fear and Resolve

Fandom: Hollow Knight Rating: Mature Characters: Hornet, Pure Vessel | Hollow Knight, Quirrel Category: Gen Content Warnings: panic attacks, discussion of self-harm, intrusive thoughts, abuse, discussion of suicide AO3: Lost Kin | Chapter XXXVI | Fear and Resolve First Chapter | Previous Chapter | Chronological Notes: Quirrel smooths things over. Hornet dreads the inevitable.

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There was nothing Quirrel could do but wait.

Hornet had placed herself between him and her sibling, spreading out her cloak to block him from their sight, and he could not dispute the wisdom of this choice. The possibility that the sight of him would make anything better was so distant as to be absent altogether.

They were terrified. Terrified of him.

This was so far outside of what he had expected that he was momentarily paralyzed by the feeling welling up within him. It was not a pleasant one, shock and hurt and heart-twisting pity all melted into one, and it was a long, turbulent moment before it drained away. This would not help—not him, or Hollow, or anyone.

Terror might not be the whole of it, but it must be contributing. Their very first reaction to him had been fear, fear that had only grown stronger when Hornet introduced him as a scholar, and they’d objected vehemently to his approach while in a vulnerable position. There was a pattern there, and an ugly one.

In hindsight, perhaps observing their pulse being taken was a little intimate for a second meeting—although they had endured his scrutiny of their wounds from a much closer distance. Hornet seemed as stunned as he was by their reaction. By her account, she had handled them much more harshly before he arrived, with very little indication that they might wish otherwise.

They had seemed so willing, stretched out across her lap, tilting their horns back and baring their soft throat, but he’d barely had time to step closer before they snatched their head out of reach.

There might be hope in the fact that they had chosen to shrink back, rather than strike out. Hope that he would be safe enough around them to attempt to convey that he was no threat. That, given enough time, they might learn that he wished only to help.

Hornet had not asked him to leave, even when Hollow spiraled into panic—although, granted, she had good reason to be distracted—so he settled in to wait.

He had nothing to go by but the sound of their breath, harsh and irregular at first but smoothing out gradually now, and the tone of Hornet’s voice as she spoke to them, stringing together more words than he had heard from her yet. She assured them they had done no wrong, that they did not need to be afraid, that no one had cause to hurt them. And when she reached the end of this list of promises, she began again, repeating them over in the same tight, level voice, until her sibling started to finally, visibly relax, the awful rattle in their throat dwindling to a breezy hiss and then dying out altogether.

It took long enough that his shell began to ache, that he unfolded and rearranged his limbs more times than he cared to recall. The fire waned and went out. Hornet’s voice grew rough, cracked and ashen. But all the while Hollow’s shaking diminished, their desperate grip on her hand loosening inch by inch.

Until, finally, Hornet went quiet and reached forward, tentative. Then—having come to some decision with what she found—she leaned down and rested her head between their horns, the taut slope of her shoulders falling slack.

Quirrel looked away, overcome by an odd sort of embarrassment. He thought Hornet might regret, later, being so unguarded in front of him—doubly so if he interrupted her now, when she almost seemed to have forgotten that he was there.

What he wanted was not important, not in the least, but he wished that he could apologize. A vague nausea settled in his stomach at the thought of causing so much distress, unavoidable though it seemed. Perhaps if he had been more careful, not so caught up in his own curiosity, more attentive to their mood, perhaps—

Ah, but that was pointless, mere wishful thinking. He knew better than most that grief, guilt, and fear were unpredictable, that memory came in shattered shards more often than a colorful pane.

This same guilt was something he had recognized in Hornet. She would sheathe her claws for her sibling, but turn them upon her own shell at a moment’s notice, tearing into herself for failing to anticipate the impossible.

“I should have known,” she had said. “I should have seen it.”

He wondered if there was anything he could say that would help. Anything that she would not reject, for implying that she deserved forgiveness.

For now, he was quiet, watching as unobtrusively as he knew how, as Hornet stroked her sibling’s face, humming low and tuneless, occasionally whispering something he could not make out. From what he could see, Hollow was all but leaning into the contact, every line of their body achingly drawn toward the point at which Hornet’s forehead rested on their own.

It hurt to see, hurt to know even the little that he did. That this was possibly one of the first times in their life they had shown their need for this, desperate as it was.

It was perhaps five minutes before Hornet raised her head, still hunched close over her sibling, still holding their face between her hands. Stiffly, she turned to glance at him. “Would you bring me some water, please?”

“Of course.”

He was careful to move slowly, to make as little noise as possible. When he returned from the kitchen, he strayed close to the Hollow Knight for only as long as it took to hand Hornet the cup, without looking down at them or paying them any attention whatsoever. He remembered too well the wretched grating of their sobs, sounds of agony forced through a throat that had never been intended to make any sound whatsoever.

Task finished, he returned to the still-warm hearth, affording the pale siblings some semblance of privacy.

Hornet nursed the cup for a long time, staring into the empty shadows in the corners of the room. One hand still lay between Hollow’s horns, idly tracing the deep crack where their mask split unevenly in two. The rain filled the silence, a silence gone so long that it had ceased to be awkward and become merely unavoidable.

Quirrel stared down at his own handwriting. Those words and shapes really ought to make sense. Too many thoughts crowded in between, too much fog on the lens. He had plenty to pass the time, but instead he found himself picking up a sheet of smudged paper and writing out a single sentence across the top.

Is it always this bad?

He passed the paper and pencil to Hornet, who stared at him for longer than she really needed to, looking for something he could not fathom, before glancing down to read what he had written.

She stared at him again when she finished. He met her gaze levelly. She could refuse to reply, but he had a feeling that she would not. With the way she had poured out the entire story the night before, albeit not without prompting, he suspected that she needed to speak of this, however much she might wish otherwise.

Sure enough, she set down the empty cup and scratched out one short sentence before she slid the paper back to him.

Her handwriting was a scrawl. Perhaps it should surprise him that his own was still so neat, after having gone so long neglecting it. But those revelations were distant, out of focus behind the sharp, cutting lines of Hornet’s script.

Sometimes it’s worse.

Worse. Worse than cowering before their own sister, worse than near-silent sobbing that shook their whole body? Worse than mutely crying out in pain greater than they had ever been built to express?

He would be hard-pressed to imagine a terror more complete than what he had already witnessed. But he recalled the fraught conversation in lantern-light the night before, remembered Hornet’s claws clamping down on her own arms, her voice catching as she told him that Hollow was inclined to harm themselves if she was not quick enough to stop them.

Had anyone tried to stop them when they carved their own chest open?

Hornet did not look at him as he lowered the paper, but the hand on her sibling’s face fell still for a moment before she returned to petting them, shakily, her breathing gone harsh and tight in the meantime.

Quirrel unclenched his jaws, deliberately. Her insistent grip on their hand made a dreadful sort of sense, now.

As did her exhaustion, and her ragged appearance. If she had been fighting this battle for a week, alone, uncertain each night if her sibling would even be alive come morning, waiting for every action to be the one that sprung a hidden tripline… well. It was no wonder she had come to him looking like she’d been caught in one of her own traps.

 He knew reassurance would not likely be taken well, but he could not help offering.

You’re doing well with them, he wrote. They trust you.

As much as they could, he thought. For a sapient creature used as a tool, for a living being denied even the dignity of a name. Hollow, she still said, having nothing else to call them by.

Some missteps are inevitable, he began, and then stopped. The attempt seemed weak already, against the opposition he expected.

All he could do was try. As with Hollow, she deserved that much, at least.

Their mind is likely as scarred as their body. You cannot hope to heal either without causing further pain.

Hornet was already staring balefully at the paper before he even handed it over, which did not help his attempt at eloquence in the slightest. He tried not to fidget with his pencil while she read, or after she finished, when she laid the paper on the floor and did not move to reply. The silence was almost worse than the argument that he’d expected, especially when the back of her collar began to prickle.

Stymied, he went back to the assorted sheets in front of him, deciding to copy Hornet’s sketched signs rather than sort out his notes. His mind was full of further attempts to reach her, encouragement that she would not accept and one-sided debates that they would never have. He knew better than to try to think through all that noise.

It was the better part of an hour before—

“Would you pass me those vengeflies?”

He muffled a surprised grunt, dropping his pencil and then scrambling to snatch it up before it rolled into the hot ashes.

Her voice dragged him out of the reverie he had sunk into—which, when he stared at the page, came into focus as a list of vocabulary for further communication of intangible concepts, alongside a new set of hand-signs to match.

Hornet did not comment on his obvious lapse in attention, nor did she say anything besides a mumbled thanks as he handed her what she’d asked for, as well as a fresh cup of water.

She reached up to touch his wrist as he turned away, and, startled again, he couldn’t quite swallow the noise in his throat. It was perhaps forgivable to be on edge, given earlier events, but he still expected a biting comment, a stern glance—something.

Instead, she stiffly lowered her hand, as if she couldn’t quite believe she had reached out. Her fangs worked, chewing over a concept that evidently vexed her.

In the end, she said nothing, only grasped one of the vengeflies between her fists and wrenched it in two, then held out a cracked abdomen that sluggishly dripped hemolymph from its severed segments.

Quirrel blanked. He’d eaten that morning: stunted fruit from the greenhouse he’d found, belfly eggs scooped out of a nest he’d baited the parent from. Freshly dismembered vengefly would not be his first choice of meal, even if he was hungry. He had caught them for Hornet.

And that was what gave him pause, what stopped him from politely, but immediately, refusing. She must know he had foraged for himself earlier; it had been one of the principal reasons to send him out into the City. There was another reason behind this, and an important one.

Deepnest tradition? Reciprocating his gesture of goodwill in bringing her prey the day before? Offer dinner to the hunter, he had heard, but nothing in his piecemeal memory suggested what he should do if the hunter offered it back.

Or this could be something simpler. An invitation. An apology. An attempt at bridging the gap they both sensed between them. And—he realized, as he reached to accept it—a visible gesture of friendship. Not merely for his benefit, but for the vessel who lay, exhausted and silent, but watchful, ever watchful, beside them.

“Thank you,” he said, quietly.

Hornet was already eating the other half of the vengefly, thin shell and all. She tapped the stone with one claw, sending a meaningful glance at the floor beneath his feet, so with a slow nod, he sat, keeping a decent distance from Hollow, but angling himself so that he faced both siblings.

Hollow did not move, eyes half-lidded, the restless void beneath their mask partly sheathed by an opaque scale of opalescent black.

Should he speak to them? Attempt to reassure them in his own words? He could hardly improve on what Hornet had accomplished, yet he felt it might be helpful if they heard it from him, too.

He met their gaze, flicking his antennae downward in a pacifying gesture that likely meant nothing to them. “I do apologize for having startled you, my friend. It was not my intent.”

Nothing in their aspect changed, not a single claw stirring, except that the scale across their eye slid back, retracting beneath the mask and widening their gaze to survey him fully.

Unsettling, but intriguing nonetheless. Eyelids of any sort were rare enough in Hallownest’s species; for both siblings to share them, the trait had likely been present in their sire. Practical knowledge of wyrms was so scant as to be useless, though legends of their might ran through the kingdom’s history like a gleaming vein of ore. Some were likely fabricated, as a tool to garner worship and obedience, but the common themes were easy enough to trace, if one had the experience to chip away the excess.

None of them, however, lingered on the details, the small discrepancies of form and habit that he might begin to piece together now. A thrill of discovery raced through him, interrupted only by Hornet coughing sharply.

His gaze snapped to her face. She shook her head, once, before she laid her hand atop her sibling’s mask and returned to her meal.

“These are well cleaned,” she said, and he was briefly baffled at the compliment before he realized it was an attempt to redirect not only his attention, but Hollow’s. “You must have… hunted many strange things in your travels.”

 Ah, she already knew him too well. “I have indeed,” he said, rocking back a little and staring upward in recollection, willing to let her lead him astray. “I remember one particular creature—a delicious one, mind you, or I would not have taken the trouble—that was in the habit of arranging canes of briars to defend its burrow…”

○

As Quirrel launched into a hunting tale, Hornet listened with half her attention, devoting the remainder to her meal—and to her sibling, who had not so much as stirred since she invited Quirrel to join them. She was not fool enough to assume this was disinterest. They were watching him, as intently as they had when he first arrived. Whether for signs that he would turn upon her, or clues as to his true motives, or merely out of self-preservation, she could not say.

She couldn’t deny that she wished she knew his motives, too, but staring would not wring them out of him. Unfortunately.

The guilt of having frightened them so badly gnawed at her. She knew it was pointless to regret it, that she was only tearing her own shell by struggling, but instincts were unforgiving things.

She could no more forgive herself than she could change her black shell to white or stifle her hunger at the taste of fresh meat. She was not built for it.

Hollow, at least, did not panic again at his presence. That had been a risk, and she knew it, but it was one she couldn’t afford not to take. She needed to know if they would refuse to let Quirrel help her, preferably before something bad happened.

Something in her had felt relief when Hollow finally panicked. Something in her had known this was too good to be true.

The thought of trusting in this coincidence, of coming to rely on someone she had nearly never met, sent a pang of fear through her gut. The world was not kind enough to send her blessings unlooked for. Life did not give without taking, and taking, and taking.

But hadn’t she had her share already? After everything, could she not steal a moment to breathe? Did she not deserve it?

Deserved or undeserved had never changed her circumstances before.

Perhaps that was why this moment, this uncanny peace after the storm, felt so much like a dream.

Quirrel’s hunting tale had devolved into an academic lecture by the time she returned to herself. She hadn’t stopped stroking Hollow’s mask, even far away as she’d been: skirting round the crack above their eye, brushing down over their brow and back up again, circling her fingertips in the shallow well between their horns. They were calm, or at least too tired to panic, and the motion in their gaze had taken on the slow, languid quality she associated with drowsiness. Despite that, their eyes refused to close, their wide stare fixed on the cricket as if he might suddenly disappear.

Something eased inside her, unexpectedly soft. The thought of her sibling staring blankly out at the room like a tired grub too stubborn to sleep roused an uncanny fondness, an aching warmth she had never thought to feel again.

And another thought, just as quickly, smothered it.

The heft of that scalpel in her hand. Gleaming point and silver edges, small and sharp and bright, too bright, set against black velvet, against her sibling’s skin, against the already-tattered ruin of their shell.

Tomorrow, she had said, and she had rarely wished so hard for a day to never dawn.

They were in so much pain, had endured more than she could imagine, and to be the one to perpetuate it, to make them suffer more, even for the sake of healing them—

Quirrel could not do it, though she knew that he would have volunteered. It seemed there was very little he would not do if she asked, but they would never let him; if they had objected to him merely being nearby while she took their pulse, she shuddered to think what they would do if he tried to take a knife to their shell. It had to be her, they trusted her, and the very notion made her sick.

It had to be her.

And it had to be done.

When had she ever shied away from her duty, ugly as it was? How could she be squeamish now, when she was only adding yet another entry to the list of things she could never atone for?

She needed a plan.

Fragile as it was, this tired, wary submission was likely the best that she would get from Hollow. So far, they did not object to Quirrel’s presence alone, only the particular action of approaching them with their throat bared.

This was just another way that she had failed them, another way she had stripped their agency away: assuming that their compliance was consent, that their willingness to go where she led was borne of anything but fear.

But—

They trust you, Quirrel had written.

They spoke when she asked them to. They were still when she ordered it. They crawled to her side to protect her from the rain. They pushed against her hands, begged for her touch like they would for nothing else, melted into her arms when she held them…

No. That was something more than trust. That was devotion, devotion she had done nothing to earn.

Their loyalty to the Pale King had been absolute. She had never seen them so much as hesitate when acting upon his orders. He had loved them, she thought. But that love had been a cold and barren thing, without a single kind touch or tender word, at least as far as she had seen.

Had they shifted that allegiance to her? Had she somehow earned the same pure, unquestioning fealty they’d given their father, simply by the act of saving their life?

She did not want it. She wanted nothing to do with it. That they would regard her with the same reverence that they regarded the god who’d bound their shade to their shell, who’d failed to see that they were anything but a well-forged tool—

She wanted to believe better of herself. She wanted to believe better of them.

How could they find it in themselves to trust her? To surrender to her so utterly, when she had been nothing more than the latest weapon used to hurt them?

She could not ask. She could only continue to use it, ruthless as it was to leverage something they seemed so desperate for.

Quirrel had fallen silent, somewhere in the space between her thoughts, and was now picking at the vengefly she’d offered him, neatly removing the shell bands from the exterior until he could tip his mask back and consume it in several neat, precise bites.

Hornet watched him blankly, shuffling possibilities like playing cards. The surgical tools would need to be tested, sharpened, heated in the hearth, and she had to brief Quirrel on what to do if Hollow began to panic—she might not always be in time to push him out of the way.

Having a mortal under her protection changed things. She could not expect Hollow not to react to the pain, and she had no way to diminish it, no numbing herbs or tinctures, and no assurances that they would even be effective on a vessel. Likewise, she could not count on Hollow to tell her if it became too much to bear—they had told her plainly that they did not know if they could.

She would have to tie them down.

Though she had not intended to visibly flinch at the thought, she was not entirely successful in stifling it. Quirrel shot her a questioning look.

“Nothing,” she muttered, ignoring the fact that she knew she could not fool him. Hopefully, he would take it as a warning not to pry.

Whether Hollow made use of it or not, she would offer them a way to signal to her, even after she had secured them. A way to communicate without compromising her safety, or Quirrel’s. If that was the only difference from the pain they had endured until now—the ability to ask for it to stop—then so be it. She would be as cruel as she needed to be, and not a bit more.

Whatever must be done to save them. Whatever she must do to earn them this chance at a life.

She owed it to all of the siblings who, thanks to her, would never have one.

○

Hornet sat in silence for long enough that Quirrel began to worry.

He took scant comfort in the restless motion of her hand, caressing Hollow’s mask with the same distant distraction that she might pick at her cloak seams or chew her own claws. Still, it had its intended effect, as Hollow drifted further and further from their tense vigil, like a leaf atop a lake, floating away so slowly that they never seemed to notice it at all.

It was one more indication of their poor condition, he guessed, that they nodded off so often and so easily. An attempt to conserve and rebuild energy when there was little to be had. He’d seen it most often in those recovering from serious illness, or those who would never recover at all.

And it gave him pause to contemplate how tense they must be, that they began to doze the very moment they relaxed. They likely needed more sleep than they were getting, but were wound too tightly to allow themselves to rest.

Both he and Hornet noticed the moment their eyelids dropped. Their head sagged slightly to the side to rest against her thigh, claws going lax where their hand lay upturned in her lap. Quirrel, wrestling down a sudden lump in his throat, had not been about to move, but Hornet shot him a dagger-edged glance anyway.

He nodded, still, to reassure her. Far be it from him to interrupt what little peace they’d managed to steal. Between Hornet’s questions, his poking and prodding, and the panic both had provoked, it was no wonder they were exhausted.

Privately, he acknowledged that they had cause to be far more than that. He had tried to be hopeful about their chances of recovery, though. Judging from the scars of what they had already survived, they were nearly impossible to kill.

He doubted they would be grateful for that.

When a quarter hour had passed with no sign of the vessel stirring, Hornet sighed silently and nodded back at him. He rose, intending to go back to the hearth and continue his work, when his gaze landed on the blanket at the end of the bed, where he had pulled it down to examine the injuries to Hollow’s legs.

He caught Hornet’s eye, leaned down, and touched it. When she did not object, he pulled it up over them, hiding the splits and notches in their chitin, the cracked claws and broken spurs and stamped imprints of soul-spells. They looked almost peaceful, with their face tucked against their sister’s side, all the tension and mistrust dissolved away into slumber. With some of their scars out of sight beneath the blanket, its forgiving lines smoothing out their edges.

If, the night before, he had been enthralled by the mystery of them, that was only the half of it now. Glimpsing the truth behind that imperfect mask, the depth of both their fear and resolve, their wariness of him and the blind devotion they placed in their sister, had only snared him further.

He wanted to help. He wanted to do whatever he could, for someone who’d been wronged so badly, someone who had no reason to expect anything from the world but pain.

Although the world, it seemed, still had more pain to give.

○

He hunched over his work for another hour or two before Hornet shifted. He turned his head to watch as she slowly, carefully extricated herself, lifting Hollow’s hand and laying it beside them on the mattress, supporting their head to be sure it did not fall when she edged aside. They looked nearly doll-like, offering no response or resistance whatsoever, not even stirring when Hornet gingerly removed her weight from the bed. Whether that was their natural state or a result of pure exhaustion, Quirrel could not deny that it worked in everyone’s favor.

Hornet didn’t speak, merely grabbed the lantern and jerked her head toward the kitchen. Stuffing down a gathering dread, he picked up his work and followed her.

He'd have to reveal, soon, what he suspected.

She dropped into the same chair she had taken the night before, leaving him to occupy the other end of the table. It was passing strange to even have this much of a routine, when he had so rarely stayed more than one night in a place for most of his memory.

“Tell me,” Hornet demanded. “You’re thinking something, I can hear it.”

“I wasn’t aware my thoughts were so loud,” he said, and winced. She was not in the mood for teasing, even less so than was usual, and he moved on quickly, hoping she would overlook it. “I would prefer to have more time to observe them, but…” He paused a moment, tapping his fingers on the counter, as he collected thoughts scattered by that afternoon’s upset. “I can be fairly sure that some of their physical symptoms—the dizziness, exhaustion, shortness of breath—are due in part to a severe lack of blood volume.”

Hornet half-laughed: a brittle, ugly sound. She still had not stopped moving, even now that she no longer had Hollow’s mask to touch; one knee was bouncing, and she kept flicking the end of her clawed thumb with her forefinger, an endless tick-tick-tick that seemed to bounce like hailstones off the windows. “That’s no surprise.”

“I suspected it would not be.” Quirrel halted again, unsure if he could convey this next revelation with anything like the delicacy it deserved. He waited long enough that she turned her head to glare at him, and he gave up on the effort, reasoning that if she had lived this long in what amounted to a kingdom-wide catastrophe, she could handle a little bluntness. “You said that, after leaving the temple, you found their nail and brought it back with you?”

A curt nod.

“Can you recall its shape?”

The look she was giving him sharpened into suspicion. “It was a one-handed longnail. Sloped guard, no pommel. Diamond grind. Why?”

There was no easy way to say this. He let out a hoarse sigh, halfway to a groan of frustration, of dread. “Hornet, I… suspect…” No, it was stronger than suspicion, he knew, somehow, in a way that defied reason, a way that could only be his own experience whispering in the back of his mind.

He knew what it was to outlive one’s purpose. He knew what it was to wish for a fitting end.

So he met her eyes, steady, and let her see his certainty. “At least some of their wounds are self-inflicted.”

The information took a moment to sink in, staining her expression with a slow-spreading horror like blood seeping into bandages.

She hadn’t known, then. He hadn’t been sure. He watched her wrestle with the knowledge, her hand clenching tight on the counter’s edge.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I… could not think of another way to tell you.”

Hornet’s eyes were open wide beneath her mask. Her whole body had gone frightfully still. Quirrel felt a chill on his shell, climbing higher, like a snowbank closing over his head.

It should not matter to him what she said next. Not as much as it did. She was adrift, overwhelmed, burdened with more grief and misery than he could imagine, and he would not blame her for refusing to shoulder more.

 But something in him hoped to hear—

“What do I do?” she whispered. “What am I—” One hand lifted, then fell back to the counter. She looked away, chelicerae clenched tight enough to tremble. “What should I say to them?”

His fingers were digging into his empty palms, he realized. He let go, tried to lean back, tried to relax. “I wish there was an easy answer to that,” he said, as softly as he could. “I wish that I could tell you.”

She scoffed, but it sounded small, broken. “The answers are never easy.”

“Perhaps not.” He hesitated, scraping his mandibles together, watching her. He risked causing her to withdraw if he continued. He risked losing what little ground he’d gained, but—

He thought of Hollow’s claws, the wicked-sharp scythes of them. He thought of the terror in their eyes.

They were capable of it. Whether they could truly die made little difference if they damaged themselves badly enough that magic could not heal them.

“Be mindful of what you say to them. And what you don’t say,” he said finally. “They rely on you. Your word matters to them, likely more than you know. You may need to prepare for this to be… more difficult than you thought.”

Hornet had started to fidget again while he spoke. Pulling away again, away from the shock, away from the numbing dread of it. And there was nothing he could do but watch her go. He could not give her the bravery to confront it, even had he had an excess of it himself.

She would need to face it, but it was not his place to dictate when. Hollow did not seem to actively be a danger to themselves; he had very little else to suggest besides what she was already trying to do.

“We should plan for tomorrow,” he offered.

She nodded, once, and he watched her pull herself together, grasping at what threads she could reach. It was almost amusing—darkly so—that the concept of planning for surgery was more bearable than what they’d just been discussing.

But only just. She seemed off-balance, her voice choked back, her hands tightening back into fists on the counter as she began to speak.

“I… I will need to tie them down.”

Quirrel’s stomach turned. It was the right decision, he knew at once. But—understandably—she did not seem pleased at having come to it.

“I should have them test their strength against my silk, though I believe I can spin it thick enough. I can also place anchors wherever they are needed.”

“Will they be able to take it?” he interrupted. “You said that they were bound in the temple—”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head, hard. “I don’t see that we have a choice. I also intend to offer them a way to ask for respite, but after today I doubt they will take it.” One hand ran up her horn, too quickly, as if brushing something away. “Perhaps if I can work slower than before, or stop at regular intervals. Or perhaps they will tell me if I ask outright. I-I do not know.”

“Hornet—”

“And you should not touch them, if at all possible. They don’t—” A break in her voice, hastily smoothed over. “They might panic. I hope that they’ll allow you to be near enough to help me. But if they do not, you must step back. I do not need two injured bugs to care for.”

“I will. Of course.” He held both hands out, alarmed at her breakneck pace. “But Hornet—”

“Perhaps you should be watching for their signs, too.” She would not look him in the eye. “I may not—last time, I—it was difficult—”

Quirrel raised his voice. “I may have been mistaken.”

Hornet’s eyes snapped to him. Wide. Hunted. “Mistaken?”

He leaned forward again, holding her gaze. “You need not do this now.” Then, when she opened her mouth to protest, he reached out toward her, heading her off. “You… perhaps you should leave.”

The room fell silent.

Hornet gaped at him. Quite literally, in fact: he could see her fangs hanging open, crooked.

“Now.” Before she could decide what to say, he continued, calmly. “While your sibling sleeps.”

“I am not leaving,” she said. Flat. Blank.

“Just for a few hours.” He sat forward, laying his hands on the table. “Pardon my forwardness, but it might help if you could—”

“I will not leave,” she repeated, her fangs flashing—more out of displeasure than open threat, he thought, but his instincts still thrilled with unease. Her voice had risen enough that he glanced nervously at the doorway, though he detected no sign that Hollow had heard.

“Very well.” He sat back, putting more distance between them, for her comfort as well as his own. “Tell me you will sleep, then. You need it as much as they do.”

He knew she wouldn’t. Not when she was practically vibrating at the other end of the table, looking as if she needed to take something apart. Hopefully not him, though he was the nearest possibility.

“I apologize.” He ducked his head. “I didn’t mean to imply—”

“Don’t.” The word was a cut stone, gritty and sharp, dragged up from deep within her. He remembered, too late, the open depths of guilt that she had plumbed the night before, the fresh scratches glaring chalk-white in the marble countertop.

“I suppose I cannot convince you to discuss this in the morning.” He did not look up as he said it.

“While they are awake? While they can hear me planning their own surgery?” Her voice was as rigid, as biting, as a nail’s edge. He could hear the dismissal in it. “Test the tools that you brought. Sharpen and oil them.” She finally broke off the disturbing stare in favor of directing it at the countertop, with roughly the same intensity. “You should go find more shellwood. We have little to spare.”

“Now?”

“I don’t know. Yes.” She grasped the key at her neck, then let her fist loosen. “Do not tarry. I’ll keep watch and leave the door unlocked.”

“You’ll—ah. So I won’t wake them with my knocking?”

A terse nod. She held a hand out, with a pointed look at the papers he had pushed aside. He slid them across the table, ignoring the part of him that wanted to bristle—if not as visibly as she could, at least in spirit. He had developed these notes for her; there was no sense in not handing them over.

She glanced them over hurriedly, then pulled out an empty sheet. The stare she directed at the blank page seemed fit to burn a hole in it. Better at it than at him, at least.

It was clear he was no longer welcome, but he lingered under the pretext of slowly emptying the rest of his satchel onto the counter. By the time he left, she had not written a single word, claws clenched gracelessly around the pencil, fangs working under her mask, a faint, scraping click, click that set his shell on edge.

He had not thought it would be a relief to step back out into the rain so soon.

○

When he returned, dripping wet, exhausted, dark had fallen in the caverns. The house was as cold and lightless as ever, and even the smoldering wick of his frustration had burned out in the deluge.

He stacked the shellwood in the entryway, quietly, building a wall of broken crates and table legs. It would need to be rearranged to dry properly, but that could wait until the morning.

After locking the door, he reentered the kitchen, steps dragging despite himself. The day had caught up with him; although he had walked further and worked harder, the turmoil had drained his energy like nothing else could.

“We should have enough fuel now to last several days,” he told Hornet, laying a few extra sticks beside the stove to start a pot of tea in the morning, if there was time. “I will sharpen tools tomorrow. That work is better done in brighter light.”

Hornet, still hunched over her paper, staring at a few scratchy sentences and even more crossed-out lines, hummed distantly in acknowledgement. Not so much upset, now, as defeated. Worn down, the same as he felt.

Quirrel resisted the urge to touch her, to lay a hand on her shoulder in attempted solace. Strange that that impulse remained after spending so much time alone.

He did pause nearby, though, and she looked up, eyes flashing dully. She knew what he wanted to ask her, he could see it—and she shook her head. “I need to think of what to tell them. I need—”

Her hand clenched. Breath hissed in her throat, strangled.

He understood. It was unthinkable to go into this unprepared, and yet there was never enough that one could possibly do to prepare for it. He understood.

Much as he wished he didn’t.

“I need to think,” she finished, lamely, in a stifled growl. Stifled for his benefit, he guessed, but he was too tired to appreciate it.

He bowed his head. “I will leave you to it, then.”

The halting scratch of lead on paper followed him out of the kitchen and up the long, dark staircase.

○

Hornet knew she was dreaming.

She knew she had left herself behind, slumped over the cold countertop, a pile of paper, and a handful of useless sentences. She knew her hand should be gripping a pencil, not empty at her side.

But more than that, she knew because this place only now existed in dreams.

If she had her choice, she would never return here, not even in her sleep. If she had a choice, she would never see her face reflected in these cold white walls again, would never battle the ache in her head from their stark, chilly glow. She would nevermore walk these halls or inhale the perfume of the Root’s flowers, trailing from the fragile, lustrous blooms that were somehow even more colorless than the marble.

 She had so many dreams about this place. More than she ever had about her home, or anywhere else in Hallownest. It was as though its disappearance from the physical world had rooted it more firmly in her mind, as though her very distaste for the place was what allowed it to plague her in her sleep.

Hornet clenched her fists and stared down the halls of the White Palace.

It was empty, this time. Not always. Often the corridors were crowded with retainers and nobles, all staring, all whispering, sometimes with a golden-white gleam in every pair of eyes, sometimes with the garbled hissing of throats scorched by welling light.

But now it was empty, truly empty of everything but her. And the only things that looked on were the walls themselves, their blank white faces turned towards her in an expanse of impossible angles, glowing so brightly that she almost expected her chitin to bleach pale under the force of it.

She took a step, her tarsals falling silent, muffled, on the stone, when she knew they should have made a sound. She did not know where to go, what she was meant to accomplish, and the familiar crawling claws of tension and shame touched the back of her neck. There must be some purpose for her here—something she had to do—

At first the sound seemed foreign. Stifled in the same way her claws had been, nearly too far away to hear, whispered back and forth by the tilted planes of the walls until it reached her. And even when she did hear it, she did not immediately know it for what it was.

It went on, and on, growing louder and more strident, until it cracked the haze around her mind and spilled over her like floodwaters.

Screaming.

Not a scream she had ever heard. Not a scream that existed in the normal reaches of the world. It should not exist. It was not a sound that could be made. It was impossible.

A horrible, rasping, aching shriek, tearing through the air like a serrated blade. There were echoes within it, voices upon voices, each one breaking and shredding apart with the violence of that cry, a cry that was destroying the thing that made it and could not be stopped all the same. It rebounded from the unforgiving walls, begging, seeking, searching for relief it would never find.

And she knew, with the same impossible logic that allowed that scream to exist, where it came from.

She began to run.

It was Hollow. It was Hollow screaming like that, like they were being torn apart body, soul, and shade, and she knew by the desperate pitch of their pain that she was already too late; whatever had been done to them was something she could never undo. It was a hopeless cry, a plea not for help, but for mercy—for a killing blow to end suffering so great that, even with reserves of strength and resolve that far surpassed her own, they could no longer bear it.

Her feet pounded on the stone, arms pumping, her cloak a garish flash of red in every compound facet of the walls. The palace was a fractured prism, a maze of mirrors, and every panting breath and skidding turn meant less than nothing, but she could not stop. Not with that scream ringing through the air; not with her sibling howling, wailing, with utter abandon, in agony so complete they had not stopped to breathe.

The sound hurt to hear—her head was throbbing, her fangs clenched together, jarring with each footfall—but it must hurt even more to make. Every instant that the cry went on, she could hear it tearing farther into them, a terrible, unnatural sound forced through a throat that had been built to hold only silence.

She nearly missed the door that had appeared, as featureless as the walls, between one turn and another. Far down the corridor, almost unreachable, but that must be where they were, it must be.

Hornet stumbled, righted herself, pelted toward it.

As she did, the scream broke. Cracked apart, into sobs, into whimpering cries so lost and so desolate that an answering sob rose in her own throat, hot and aching, pain calling to pain across the emptiness.

She was close now. Close enough for them to hear her, almost, and their name was in the shadow of every heaving exhale, stamped into every beat of her heart. She could not call out to them, could barely breathe, her limbs threatening to fold beneath her like a doll’s joints, but she was coming. She was almost—almost—

Hornet flung herself at the door. Scrabbled at the knob, with unfeeling hands and claws grown heavy, clumsy. There was silence behind it now, more dreadful even than the screaming had been, and she had to—she had to get in—

The door opened, spilling light into the room.

She turned to face it.

The knife in her hand dripped black, black, black.

“Hornet?”

Something touched her. A hand. Grabbing at her wrist. At the arm that held the knife. She squeezed, felt chitin creak.

“Hornet. It’s only—it’s me. Hornet!”

She woke up.

Quirrel’s face was inches from her own. She held his arm in one fist, her knuckles burning from the pressure of her grip, and his other hand was clamped over her own, fingers wedged into every gap he could find, in an attempt to pry her free.

And—oh, she was shaking all over, as if she really had been running, her heart pumping, her breath coming in long, quivering heaves, as effortful as dragging her whole weight higher, hand over hand.

The cricket was frozen in place, antennae pinned back, tugging at her hand with an increasingly desperate grasp.

With a shudder, she let go.

Quirrel fell back, clutching his wrist. She hunched over, in an attempt to spare her burning lungs, and stared at the space between his fingers, then at her own claws, half-expecting blood, half-expecting a void-drenched scalpel.

Neither.

“I’m sorry,” Quirrel said, catching his breath before she could. “Terribly sorry. I—you wouldn’t stir, and—”

He cut off.

She turned towards him, too rattled to even glare, but dreading, dreading, with all the clinging weight of the nightmare still pressing against her.

He swallowed, spoke again more quietly.

“Your sibling is awake.”

○

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[xneoncrayon]

💖 The world is not so scary when I’m cuddled against you 💖

My Hollow with @metakit ‘s Quirrel :]

[noctisvixen]

For funsies, let's post my really old Hollow Knight art.

I had a funky AU that changed pretty much the whole story of Hollow Knight but I don't remember all the details. I just know it was called Hollow War, the Pale King and the Radiance still wanted to outclass each other, and somehow the Pale King has a functioning, healthy family.