(Waken — Target — Find — Rope — Stuck — Walk Back — Temple — Red — Shut Off)
~~~ are used for changing the perception of vision (POV)
••• denotes flashback
*** denotes time skip
** denotes background sounds
… denotes silence
-x-X-x-
Pale ropes. Paler skin.
The figure stood at the brim of sight and no further. The crown's edge was visible. The hands were folded behind, or perhaps simply gone. Behind the figure stood many others, all of them white, all of them blurred at their edges while giving off a type of warmth that was not warm at all. The glow reached the Hollow Knight and the warmth of it was not heat but the memory of heat. They had no word for what it produced in them. They had very few words for anything that was not a directive or a wound.
The figure at the front seemed to lower its gaze. Confusion in the posture. Not the kind of confusion that spoke alarmed, but only the slow bewilderment of something that had not expected to find what it had found. The dark lines near the eyes spoke exhaustion. Ancient, almost.
It drew a deep breath.
Wake.
UP.
…
Black.
Then grey at the edges, spreading inward. Vision assembled itself piece by piece the way rubble settled after the shaking stopped. Nothing fitting quite as it had before. They tried lifting their neck and found the machinery of it uncooperative. The ceiling above: rock, dripstone hanging loose and weeping. One drop fell and struck their shell. Then a second. Their eyes did not move, could not move.
The Nail was in their hand.
The grip had held through whatever had happened and however long it had taken for whatever had happened to finish. The Nail sat tilted hard to one side, its broken tip fixed in the hole it had made in the stone beside them. They arched their back, turned themselves chest-down, and lay against the floor and waited for the throbbing in their shoulders to ease.
It did not ease.
They had not let go of the Nail.
They turned back. Bent their knees. Dragged along the floor toward the Nail's position with what remained in them. Not much. What there was.
Crouching now. They looked left. Nothing. Right. Nothing. Ahead and slightly left. Something. Too dark to resolve. Rocks, perhaps, arranged in the idiotic configuration that rubble preferred. Or not rocks.
Target. The only word that fit the shape of the problem.
They stood. Frame bent and uneven, grip on the Nail held at the threshold between holding and straining. One knee forward. Flat. Then pushing up from the floor with the Nail's haft as the trembling legs threatened their own collapse. They lifted their head toward the ceiling during the effort and the ceiling offered nothing. They had not expected it to.
Walk.
One step. Two. Three.
Not rocks.
A face. Pale and still. Blue cloth wound about the waist, falling below the knees. The rest bare. The figure lay stomach-down, head tilted left, one cheek against the stone. Eyes shut. Not sleeping.
Not living.
The Hollow Knight looked at this.
Then stepped past. Their foot came down in the liquid spreading from beneath the body. Dark in this light, which told them nothing useful. Colour had never told them much. The liquid was present. That was the extent of what they needed to know.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The wall arrived before they expected it. Stone, fallen and stacked, sealing the path they knew had once been open, and had walked in some prior age of themselves when walking was not this haggard negotiation between will and wreckage. They put their hand against it. The stone did not move. The strength required was not in them and would not be recovered by standing here regarding the stonework.
They turned.
Stairs to the left, descending. A landing visible below, another passage beyond it. Anywhere but near the Temple. The Nail's broken tip stabbed into stone and the foot lifted and struck and the sound of it echoed up through the stairwell. Six steps to the head of the stairs.
The dark below did not resolve from the top.
They went anyway.
Each stair twice the labour it had been. They did not fall. They had ensured this with the same grim industry they brought to everything, not from pride but from the calculus of injury, which said that a fall on stairs compounded what was already compounded, and compounding had limits they were close to.
At the bottom: headless signs, their posts buried in the earth and their faces gone. A lamp with its glass eyes smashed, the pale-winged things that had once lit it no longer lighting anything. The lamp had been bright-eyed once. It was not anymore. They knew the feeling without having the feeling.
Their horns scraped the low platform overhead as they shouldered through a tight passage and the scraping was loud and the stone offered no apology. More stairs. Several steps crumbled to rubble. They gashed the Nail into the ceiling for balance and hauled themselves through. Something that should have taken one stride took considerably longer and they noticed this and did not dwell on it.
They stopped.
Light.
Directly above. A shaft in the ceiling where the surface broke open: pale, unburning, the kind that did not wound but sat in the eyes like something half-remembered. A rope or lead. Thin.
They looked at it. Measured with the part of their mind still doing mathematics. Their weight. One arm. The height. The edge at the top that would have to be caught and held.
They looked at the light a while longer.
Then looked away and went straight ahead.
A hole in the floor arrived without warning and they stopped themselves at its rim with the Nail thrown sideways against the wall for purchase, the tip screeling loud against the stone. No walls on either side of the gap. They looked at the other edge.
They lowered themselves in. Fixed the Nail on the far lip. Used it the way one used a rope. Their feet walked the opposite wall and they hauled themselves up and rolled onto the upper surface and lay there before the lying became too much like stopping and they stood again.
A snail-carriage sat idle in the passage ahead. No trader. They moved past it without attention. A lamp above, this one still lit: pale glow stuttering in irregular intervals against the stone. Not blind. Not yet.
The elevators.
The sight produced something they recognised by its location in the body, a heaviness in the chest with no accompanying pain, which was in certain ways worse than pain because pain announced itself and departed and this did not. The elevators were too narrow. Even the widest of them. The platforms had the look of things waiting for the correct moment to give out. They knew that look. They had outlasted several such moments themselves.
They stood before the elevators.
Then turned back.
The lamp. The hole. The carriage. The corpse.
Still there. They stepped onto the still hand as they passed. The crack of it was heard and they kept walking. Their foot came down again in the dark liquid. The same liquid, spreading wider now, the way spilled things spread when left long enough.
They found a chamber. Working lamps above: pale and spaced and persistent. They moved toward the center and raised the Nail and drove the broken tip into the stone and tried to pull it back—
Garama!
The voice came from nowhere and was everywhere at once.
Before the Hollow Knight could resolve the direction of it, they were already turning. The training was older than thought and ran beneath it and did not require it. The Nail came up. Their stance dropped, knees bent, weight on the back heel, blade-arm forward.
The figure before them was small. Crouched low in an attack posture, weapon up, weight distributed across the balls of both feet in the manner of someone who had trained long and trained well and was presently furious about something. Furious, they thought.
The Hollow Knight saw it and saw what mattered: the posture.
The posture was aggression.
They attacked.
Their first swing was a dropping diagonal, wrist angled to carry the Nail's weight through the descent and reduce the strain on the forearm at the point of contact. The small figure stepped inside it, crossed their weapon upward to meet the Nail at its weakest point of leverage near the hilt-end, and used the redirect to throw the force sideways rather than absorb it. Good deflection. Not an amateur.
The Hollow Knight felt the redirection and did not resist it, let the Nail swing through and used the momentum to turn the body and bring the weapon back across in a tight horizontal arc from the opposite side.
The figure ducked.
Fast. Faster than they had expected.
And while they ducked, the Hollow Knight heard them speak. The words arrived without meaning, blurred at the edges, the syllables losing their shape before they reached anywhere intelligible. What reached the Hollow Knight instead was the sound beneath the words, the particular resonance of a voice raised in warning or appeal, both of which registered in the body as the sound of infection, the sound the Radiance's puppets made when something in their ruined minds drove them to try speech before driving them to try violence.
At the edges of their vision, there. Blooms of yellow. Orange. Spreading from the figure's mask the same way Infection spread from the eyes of the fallen, the precise colours and shapes the Hollow Knight had spent decades watching bleed through every crack of the temple while the thing inside them fed.
Infected.
The thought arrived not as a conclusion but as a certainty already present when they looked, the way the body knew the edge of a wound before the mind had time to examine it. They knew this. They had been made to know this. Their purpose and their prison and the source of every ruin they had ever caused had worn exactly these colours and moved in exactly this way and they would not allow it to continue.
They pressed the attack.
A short jab with the Nail's pommel toward the figure's head, the kind of strike meant to disorient rather than destroy, to open a gap for the finishing blow that followed. The figure slipped it. Barely. Their off-hand came up to redirect the pommel's path and they used the contact to push back and create distance, and in creating distance they also spoke again.
Still muffled. Still wrong.
The figure's weapon came in: a short, raking slash aimed at the inner wrist of the Nail hand, a disarming strike executed with the hip rotation of someone who had been taught to generate power from the core rather than the arm. The Hollow Knight pulled the wrist back and let the slash fall short, then stepped in immediately after the blade's extension to close the gap before the figure could recover the weapon's angle.
Body check. Shoulder to sternum.
The figure was small and the check drove them backward but they did not fall. They absorbed the impact by stepping through it, one foot back and then the other, using the momentum to transfer into a pivot and come back around from the side. Their foot caught the Hollow Knight at the outer thigh. Not the knee. The thigh, which was the correct target for someone their size hitting someone the Hollow Knight's size, not to break but to compromise the stance.
It stung more than it should have.
They did not process this. They were past processing anything that was not the fight.
The figure's weapon came at their mask in a quick underhanded throw. Not released. Thrown. Thrown in the sense of using the wrist to angle the blade's trajectory upward while the grip stayed. A feint. They saw it as a feint and did not flinch but tracked the hand that made the gesture of pulling back, the same hand movement they had seen—
Seen before.
Not here. Somewhere else. In some other chamber in some other age of themselves when such things had been demonstrated to them not as threat but as instruction.
Their head shifted upward toward the shaking lamps. Something in the chest loosened and tightened in the same moment, like a knot pulled from both ends. They turned. Repositioned.
Their Void would not answer.
They reached for it—the deep dark pooled beneath them that they had called upon through the long decades of imprisonment to sustain what could not otherwise be sustained, the void-tendrils that had been their one capacity for offense when the Nail was sealed from them. It did not rise. The destabilization was in the root of it, in the place where will became action, and the place was damaged and would not respond.
They pressed anyway.
The figure moved left as they drove toward them. Stepped right. The Hollow Knight swung wide, compensating too much, overcorrecting for the twisting ankle that now dragged on every lateral step, and the figure went up and over entirely, clearing them in an aerial vault that put both feet briefly on the Hollow Knight's shoulder before pushing off.
The figure came down behind them. A slash across the back, flat of the blade, not the edge, which the Hollow Knight noted somewhere below conscious thought and which did not help them because the impact was sufficient regardless.
They turned. One horizontal swing with the Nail, full rotation of the torso driving the shoulder through, the kind of swing that cost something to generate and was intended to end the conversation.
It caught the figure beneath the left shoulder. Shallow. A scratch. They had moved far enough back that the tip was the only part that found them.
Distance again.
Then the figure came up.
Not toward them. Above them. A vertical leap, weapon angling down toward the Hollow Knight's head, the weight of the fall driving the blade's descent the way hammers drove nails. The Hollow Knight did not step back. They stepped in, tucked their head sideways, took the flat of the blade across the upper shell rather than the crown, and brought their own forehead into the figure's chest on the way through.
The figure landed. On the Hollow Knight's head, briefly, which was not a place anything survived for long. The Hollow Knight shook. Hard. The figure's grip on their Nail thread held and they used it to swing clear.
Then the thread caught on something.
A fine white line. The Hollow Knight had seen it before during the fight, had clocked it and not pursued the information because the information was not the priority and the figure was the priority. The thread was thin enough to be invisible at speed. They had not tracked where it went.
They tracked it now.
Too late.
The trap had been laid in the movement they had not watched, in the moment they had been focused solely on the figure and not on the space surrounding the figure, which was the same error the Knight with hammer had tried for two full seasons to break them of.
The thread caught them mid-step. Ankle. The twisted one. It pulled.
They went down.
Not sideways. Forward, straight, with all their height contributing to the impact, the floor arriving with the particular indifference of floors, which did not adjust themselves for the one falling and had never been asked to. The Nail went from their hand. Their head struck: the split in their skull widening that final fraction, the gap between sight and mind yawning open wider than before, and through the gap poured nothing, not darkness but the particular nothing that preceded unconsciousness, the absence of the next thought that the mind had not produced because the mind had stopped producing.
They lay.
Above them, movement. The figure approaching. Their vision had contracted to a dim circle of what lay directly ahead: the cracked stone, close and specific, the grain of it visible in a way that things became visible when the eyes could no longer manage the middle distance. They felt their side. The figure's hand on them. One hand. The contact was—
Soft.
They turned what remained of their sight upward.
A face above them. Looking down. Small features and wide eyes and an expression they had no immediate category for—not triumph, not contempt, not the flat evaluation of one combatant over a downed opponent. Something else. Something that had no clean name in the vocabulary they had been given for knowing things. The figure's hair moved slightly in a draft from somewhere above.
Red cloak.
Dark in this light, nearly black at the edges but in the failing ring of their vision it held a particular shade that produced in the oldest part of them something that was not recognition and was not memory but occupied the same country as both.
A child.
Somewhere behind it, further back, in a corridor of themselves they had not walked in a very long time: laughter. High. Brief. The smell of something that did not belong underground. A cloak of the same shade caught in motion at the edge of a lit corridor, already going away.
Then pain arrived to conclude the inventory.
It came from the side of their head with the weight of a small, clenched fist, solid and accurate, and the dark that followed was not the dark of the Abyss and not the dark of the Temple but the small, ordinary dark of a body that had reached the end of what it could sustain and had simply stopped.
The figure's face, above them. Still there.
Still that expression.
The Hollow Knight could not finalise what they were looking at. Could not hold the thought long enough to complete it. The thought dissolved.
No more thoughts.
No more will.
No more cries.
The stone received them. Cold and indifferent.