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grollow · 5 months

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watch you lose

Title: watch you lose Rating: M Characters: The Hollow Knight, The Radiance Warnings: Disturbing Content, Trauma Bonding, First Person POV, Prequel (sort of) Author's Notes: This is canon to White and Gray, technically, and was written as a gift for @astorichan for Elegies of Hallownest's Secret Santa. Happy holidays, my friend! <3

watch you lose on AO3. “At the rate that we are going, we will die here together like this, you and I,” she says.

I ignore her, drifting in a state somewhere between waking and the anguish of sleep. In this state, she cannot reach or touch me, but her words are an insidious whisper that brushes under my skin like the diminutive scales that so resemble fur. She would have the world think that she is soft, but I know better. She is the edges of claws that scrape and scratch, and she leaves everything bleeding underneath them.

I prefer this state. I can see the world around me, a witness through the windows to history unfolding, but never a participant. This has always been my role. Never a participant, always a spectator. I have watched Hallownest crumble around me, bits and pieces rotting away as proof of my flaws. I have watched my king’s palace vanish under the weight of his own failure, disappearing like a mirage; sometimes, I can even glimpse it in the distance, and she says that is because it is here, because he has joined us in this eternal prison.

Like us, he is a spectator.

Like us, he is dead without truly dying.

We are corpses that have forgotten what it means to be dead. We are animated not by the essence that inhabits our body but by the spite that drives us: emotions like blood strangling out whatever light might have remained in the two of them.

I have always been a dark thing. I suppose that is to my benefit.

“You could end the pain we are both enduring,” she tells me.

My reflection is a passive thing, void obscuring it on the shell that makes up the floor. The chains that bind us in the air have long lost their shine. Like my armour.

(Like me.)

She deludes herself, as I often do, that we might some day see freedom outside of these halls. Were I to be set free of my binds, I doubt my body would animate properly. There are great crevices in my carapace where infection has boiled over, eating away at tempered void. The most egregious of these is a great hulking furrow that jots along my shoulder where my missing arm should be. It drives down deep and is, at times, painful. I can see the illumination of pustules growing in place of where the void has been burned away. They unsettle me, raising bile in a stomach that I did not know that I possessed.

(I have a mouth. I have always had a mouth. Mouths are conducive to stomachs; they are used to consume food, though I have never needed any—

Hunger notwithstanding.

I have ever been starving.

The void within me longs to devour all that it sees. I hold it in check, as I always have.

Would it be void that came up, if I succumbed to the writhing in my guts, like invisible claws twisting them to-and-fro, tying what insides my third parent did not destroy into tense, tight little knots?)

I cannot feel my legs. I have not been able to in a very long time.

“Let me set us both free, my shadow,” she pleads, drawing me back. I can feel her wings like the soft of feathers wrapping around me. “It needn’t be one or the other. I would miss you—”

I do not answer her in words, but in a feeling: a hot rush of stubborn refusal that manifests like ice through me. I drown her light in my shadows, and she recoils, hissing shrilly.

“I will miss you,” she finishes.

There is nothing to miss, I say without words, pulling my void like a noose tighter around her throat. She struggles, fighting back, and the course of sunlight through me makes us both scream in mutual agony—her from my freezing darkness and me from the searing that rips through me, settling in welts that fill with fluid within my eye sockets.

It is a scream that reverberates through the void. All creatures of my kind can hear it, but none can answer. I am alone.

(I made that choice when I left them behind. I am selfish. I was willing to climb out of the Abyss over the corpses of my siblings, no matter the cost. And I was willing to sacrifice it all—

Hallownest. Myself. The lives of thousands of bugs.

I wanted his acknowledgment. I wanted to be seen.

I wanted to succeed—)

“You never could have. The fact that you wanted to is proof of that. But fine, fine. When death takes you, I will be free. I can be very patient when I need to be.”

The light of my eyes pulses in time with her heartbeat. The arteries that sprawl across the cavern ceiling are perfectly in sync with them.

She has never been patient in her life.

From the moment of my conception, I have been wed to her. The ties that bind us are far stronger than that of matrimony and impossible to break. I was molded to be her creature. Try as she might, she can never escape a shadow that bears her shape—and that is all that I will ever amount to.

Still, it is entertaining to listen to her wish that it be otherwise.

She would no more choose this than I, she claims. But she forgets.

I did make this choice. I told myself it was for him. I told myself it was for the Pale Gift that I left behind. I told myself that I had enough strength within to succeed.

We are both fools and liars. I am, at least, aware of my failings.

They are all that make up what remains of me.

Failure. Failure. Failure.

NO.

There is another like me.

There is another and it has come for me; it has answered a scream from the two of us to set us free and I recognise it, I know those horns, I know, and I do not deserve, I do not want, I do not want to be saved—

There is another there is another there is another

Kill the empty one.

There is another like me there is another like me there is another

Kill the empty one.

It is her voice, I tell myself. It is her command issued to force her slaves, mindless as they are, animated by her power, to attack.

I would never.

(I want to. I want to rip it apart.

She is mine, she is mine, she is mine. This is my task, this is my burden, these are my shackles to bear, and I would not have her be taken from me, not like everything else, I have never had anything that is mine, I have never had anything, she is all that I have—

Go. Go. Go.

It should have died.

Like the rest of them.)

The frenzied feeling inside of me is a swelling thing. It shivers in my guts. It settles in as numbness at the tips of my fingers. He has cursed me. He has left me to watch the world, watch it die around me, watch my failure unfold on the stage, the curtain raised in a final act, Hallownest’s requiem in harmony with my screams. I cannot look away. I cannot stop myself from watching my sibling’s journey; I cannot tear my focus to something else, anything to ease the terror that surges through limbs that have long stopped aching because I no longer feel anything physically to begin with.

Run, I want to scream.

Leave, I want to beg.

(Save—

Save who? Me?

I don’t deserve it.

If it comes here, I will fail—

If it comes here, it will take my place and I do not want to—)

I cannot see her. I can feel her writhing within me, though. I can no longer tell where I end and she begins and that is for the better.

I think, perhaps, that I love her. She shaped me into something else; she moulded me into her creature, and she has always seen me. Where others bore witness to a monster in the shell of the king’s misbegotten offspring, she saw the writhing shadows and knew the potential that lay within. She sees me.

I think, perhaps, that I hate her for all of that, too. For how dare she look into my eyes and know my secrets—how dare she rummage through my mind to find where my scars are—how dare she reach out with tenderness.

“I know what it feels like to be abandoned by family,” she’d whispered one day, when we were newly acquainted, as if she could understand my pain.

She knew nothing about me.

She knows everything about me now.

She knows that I will bite every hand outstretched in kindness. She knows that mine are words edged in nails, that my heart is wrapped in razor wire and that to love me is to drown. She is caught in my maelstrom, as I am in hers. She burns everything that she touches. She convinces herself that she has been abandoned, but I know—for I know her secrets, surely as she knows mine.

One who burns down their house cannot complain about a lack of home.

But she loves me, she thinks, in the only way that she has ever known how to. She would break me into pieces to fit her shape and she would see nothing wrong with that. That tendency is why she is alone, I know.

But void is without form, and I can bend, I can twist, I can adapt.

I will never break.

This is the kind of love that I deserve.

For being a failure. For being selfish. For choosing to believe in a lie, to perpetuate it, to walk knowingly into a task I could never succeed at. My false faith has cost Hallownest everything. Who would dare love someone so wretched? Someone equally so.

We orbit one another. We will both kill the other given a chance. And then we will mourn the other’s absence horribly. We cannot exist without one another.

I would die with her. I want to die with her.

(I want to die. But not alone. No, never alone. Come with me. This is our tomb—together.)

Kind, gentle Isma falls first, of the Great Knights, and that is both heart wrenching and unsurprising. Ever has her nature been one of kindness, of compassion, of consideration; ever has she been the warmth that seeps through the Palace when none else could reach. As Hallownest withers beneath a rot so deep as to infect the very soil, its blossom turns her blooms to the ground, and she is consumed by the very vines that she once commanded.

I mourn her.

It is noble Hegemol who falls second, in the service of our king. The infection lays claim to him, ravaging his shell. He is buried in his armour high above the kingdom, to watch over from above; his is a sacrifice mourned by all.

I mourn him.

She tells me that she loves me as we watch my home fall apart. She tells me that this is not my fault; she reassures me that I am not to blame for failing, for no living thing could ever do what was commanded of me, and I do not respond. Her wings hold me tight, embrace warm, and the shadow within me surges, aching to devour.

Dreams are life essence, and the void will always long to smother out life, until nothing but itself remains.

Until it is whole again.

It can never be. Too many fragments have been broken away, stolen, thieved in the night—

I am one of those pieces.

I want to rend her with my maw. I want to bury my face in her feathers and sob.

The whole world knows that I have failed now. The whole world knows that I am flawed. Only death comes for them now.

She hates me, she tells me, whenever I refuse her. She reminds me of my failures, of the things that I have wrought upon Hallownest. “Your fault,” she reminds me. “You chose this. You could have done something different.” Never the same argument but it is the same thought in essence, and it needn’t really be voiced. She is right. I chose this. I caused this.

Failure. Failure. Failure. Failure.

I do not long for freedom. My sibling comes. My sibling means to set me free, regardless of what I feel—or it means to join me in endless torment, a storm of shadow to drown out the world.

What would I do if it succeeded? What will I do, when inevitably it breaks through the seals?

(Teacher, I have failed. All of your studies on void with the king have amounted to nothing. I am a craven thing, desperate. All the knowledge in the world cannot save you from that which you wilfully ignore.)

…kill it.

(Watcher, forgive me; you will never be given the chance to reunite with your Knight and it will be for naught—for I chose my own whims over your sacrifice; I chose to let you die for nothing. Noble Hegemol, forgive me; I have taken the person most dear to you from you, and for what?)

I would kill it.

(Beast. Oh, Beast. We have both left the Gendered Child behind in our ruins, to mourn us, and when we both are dead, she will be alone.

For I have failed. I have failed. All of this has availed us nothing.)

I tremble.

(Leave, sibling, I beg.

Leave, because you cannot withstand this. I see in you something alive. I see in you something with potential to survive.

Leave, because if you come here, I will kill you—and it will not be her command that makes me do it.

I have never been a good loser.)

Dryya falls third, far later than her other two companions.

Some of the honourable Mantis Tribe willingly take in the infection—their strength of will is too great to be consumed on their own, but their pride is their downfall, and they would do anything for strength. They do not understand that in bargaining with her, they seal their own fate. They do not understand that in choosing this path, they are condemning themselves to torment.

The fiercest of the knights falls to their blades in service of her queen, but she does not go alone. Her grave is composed of the bodies of the infected, her armour stained in orange. She goes down fighting, claws, and blades.

I do not think the White Lady is even aware of the moment that she dies.

Perhaps that is for the better. This torment should not be anyone’s to bear but my own. It is my fault, after all.

My captive no longer attempts to convince me otherwise. She is not cruel to me, but she need not be; I am vicious enough for us both. We are a shattered, tangled thing, and she regrets nothing of her choices.

Will they all die? I ask her, voice strangled from the pain that paralyses me, like the chains that hold us fast in the air, higher still.

This is an ascent with a great fall at the end.

Our shared body will break before we hit the ground.

“Yes,” she answers. “They all deserve to die.”

I do not agree, but my ability to stop her is hindered by the fatality of my flaw.

I do not want them all to die, but I do not care if they live, either.

Who among them mourned for me?

Leave, I command. It both is, and is not, my voice. Hers lays over it, a second skin, resonant and clear. My own is a rattling thing, hoarse to my ears, for so little do I bother to make words. I sound like a thing dead. I am a thing dead. The command holds force, though it goes ignored by the smaller figure circling me, its nail raised to shatter the old, rotting chains. Metal shouldn’t decay, but the passage of time is a brutal thing, and void corrodes what it encounters. This place is thick with it.

It jumps over the cracked, charcoal gray shell that was once my arm. The black stain around the discarded limb is a pool, rendering it unrecognizable. I can identify spots of mottled brown where infection has dripped from my rotting carcass. I am a sick thing. Perhaps it means to grant me a merciful death, but—

I am also a possessive thing. I have ever-been. I do not share well. So few things have ever truly been mine. But she is.

Leave, I reiterate. This time it is my voice, hers having faded back. I can feel her contemplating in the back of our shared mind, analyzing the threat it poses. She thinks in its small form, she might yet find salvation; perhaps it will set me free, and she can use me, macabre puppet that my wretched body has become, to enact her own terrible fury.

She is hope. She has yet to give it up.

I will never her go. This is my burden to bear, and she is mine. She is only mine.

Leave.

Its nail clashes into one of the blades. Metal screams in agony as it is shattered—or maybe that is the sound of the voice that I am not meant to have.

It circles. It means to release me from my bindings.

(It means to set me free. It means to shoulder my task on its own.)

My binds shatter one-by-one. The void within it purrs, melodious, through my own. I can feel it like blood beneath the shell, testing the waters, touching me, verifying that I am still here—that I am still alive.

I do not answer. I am not alive.

My chains fall away and I collapse to the ground, a pathetic caricature of the noble grace that I once possessed, and the infernal light of my eyes reflects back at me.

It probes again, gentle and reassuring, as though to remind me that it will stop at nothing to see me set free. It knows not that there is nothing left within me to save.

Very well. It will learn through pain, if it must.

Kill the empty one.

(We will.)

#ashe writes #one shots #hollow knight #hk fanfic #hk thk #hk hollow #the hollow knight #w&g #posting this on main and then reblogging to my writing blog dw about it

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ashyronfire · 11 months

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mourning

Title: mourning

Rating: T

Characters: Grimm, Hornet, mentioned the Radiance, mentioned the Hollow Knight, mentioned the Knight

Warnings: POV Second Person, Dream No More spoilers, References to Abuse, References to Gaslighting, It/Its Pronouns for the vessels, Drabble

Summary:

“The King is dead. Long live the King.” A conversation within the Temple of the Black Egg.

Author’s Notes: For @voidsiblings who has been poking me to write Hornet. This is me doing it without doing it. You never said it had to be her point of view.

(Unedited, we do it live)

White and Gray & Red Sky adjacent, by the way.

Read on Ao3 or Tumblr below the cut.

“The world is at its end, sister, and we have lived to see it – together. Separate. But both of us yet live. Both of us are alive and by this time tomorrow, neither of us will be.”

Hallownest.

That is the name of the kingdom you stand within. You visited it once, before the fall; you remember keenly the clamoring of people bustling about their day-to-day life, the sounds of commerce, of trade, of civility, of falling rain and armored guards, clank-clank-clank –

It was beautiful once. Beautiful in the way that the skeletal remains of a carcass left behind by predators was: alluring, a little off-putting, both natural and not, and an unmistakable reminder of the passage of time. You find it poetic, then, that that same reminder festers within the bloated belly of the corpse. Decay has set in, brought with it a stench and the putrid release of gasses, and within the ‘last and eternal civilization,’ the rot comes in hues of molten gold.

Caverns will never be a comfortable thing for you. Your sordid history paints them as an agonizing reminder – of water leaking from limestone, of stalactites reflecting the unnatural light of your eyes – and you usually avoid them. When pushed, though, you can summon up the façade of courage to face the things that you fear. You can paint your face beautiful with a mask of bravery and you might even convince yourself, if you pretend hard enough.

This will be the last time that you ever have to.

You stare at the great egg. It is an architectural marvel, magic breathing through the seals that line the floor, the walls, the door, as if it is alive. On the other side of that barrier lay a creature born specifically for the purpose of containing her – bred, created, the god they would have been ripped from their shell as they and the others like them were sacrificed to the pooling mass beneath the world, the end of all things.

An end.

A beginning.

“I wonder if you can hear me?”

No answer comes. The seals on the door draw your attention. Three crevices rest over it, the black stone polished where they once stood: cleaner and less faded from age, the Dreamers’ symbols acting as a bulwark against the creeping passage of time. The inky color of the egg was probably magnificent once, polished to a perfect sheen, but the ages have stolen it away, faded it to a mottled, uncomfortable gray. The wyrm’s magic has not changed, though. It is still impressive, luminescent, and bright: the white seals glow a brilliant contrast and they hold.

As much as they can, anyway.

Infection blooms in spiderweb vines, pulsing with amber blood, trailing out to pustulant growths that shiver in the cool air.

Her prison is fading.

Her prison is a person and they are losing the fight. As they always would have, really. Nothing alive could ever truly hold an immortal being forever. You are proof of that. Bodies in the waking world are not designed to hold creatures of essence. The two of you exist outside of their sphere and it is your nature to raze to the ground anything in your wake. Harsh is the sun.

There is a spell outside of the door and a letter. The letter is written in scrawl that you recognize well as the wyrm’s handwriting and it is painful to read, his last testament to his progeny cursed with a responsibility to his unnatural kingdom.

For it is unnatural. It is a perversion of the order between life and death. You have never beheld so terrible a spectacle as Hallownest is – and it is not your sister’s ruinous path, carved golden in her wake, that makes it horrifying to you. It is his. It was always his.

Surrender to fear. Fail.

Live on as a dying thing, clinging with crooked claws, gouging great scratches into the metaphorical clock, that it might stop, that death never come. Hallownest is eternal. And it can never rise from its ashes, something beautiful and new in its place. No, it is embalmed as it is, preserved as a mockery of life. As is the wyrm’s way.

He has never understood you.

“You have a chance to greatly inconvenience me, should you win,” you tell her. You think, through his final spell on the cursed prison that he has created for her, that he has given her eyes to watch the land rot and decay. You also think that in doing so, he has spelled his destruction, and its inevitable failure. For how can a creature condemned to a fate of pain resist the allure of something else, something different? And how can she, ever the embodiment of hope (and despair – always despair), not chase glimpses of freedom when offered them?

She hears you, but she cannot respond. The seals prevent it and, you think, for once she is probably grateful for that.

How strange, to be the one reaching out to speak. How strange, to be the one awaiting an answer and have none come. How strange, to be the one free.

She’d beg you to help her. She would scream and plead. You can almost hear her voice, piteously crying, “You are my brother, Fear, how can you allow this to continue? Help me, help me, as I would have you,” and it wounds your heart. There is nothing left for her in this world; there is no one left to mourn the light of dawn rising over the horizon.

There is no one left to remember the Radiance.

Except you. Always you.

The Nightmare King cannot die, after all. There will ever be fear – and the courage to overcome it – and so you are forever: a flame without end. Eternal.

You raise one hand and brush the tips of your claws over the front of the shell. This Temple is built inside of one of the great beasts that the butterflies who worshipped the void also revered. Fitting that her tomb would be within the husk of a creature that she herself struck down in her prime. There is poetic irony in that. She feared the dark and it is the dark that yet comes for her.

There are footsteps, light as a feather, behind you. She has more legs than you’d think, the Protector of Hallownest, but you know the cadence of her steps. She steps in her own prints when she needs to not be bipedal and she hides the rest beneath her cloak, but a spider will always be a spider.

“You should not be here.” She does not come into the Temple proper. She stays at the door. Your eyes lift to see her reflection in the dust and you raise one hand to swipe it off; your hand comes away with a filmy residue that you brush off with the second one. Scarlet meets black. You do not retreat, and she does not draw her needle, though the ever-so-subtle twitch of her fingers lends credence to the idea that she wants to.

The Princess of Hallownest does not enjoy you.

It is, at least partially, mutual.

“Should I not?” You settle your arms beneath your wings and shift, so that they fall to cover your entire body like a shroud.

The spider moves, the fabric cloak that she wears pulling taut on the extra limbs that it hides. Her fingers give another twitch, claws curling into themselves. “This is a place of mourning and –”

“And I am here to mourn.” Your interruption earns you a scoff, and so you finally turn toward her. Your gaze has to drift down in order to meet hers, even with her several paces away, hiding by the exit as if she needs to make a hasty getaway. Her fear is a thing with wings, but it is not your sister’s. No, hers has a distinctly pale light, and it surrounds her; it hides the shadows of regret that paint her black to your vision – you, who see feelings as colors.

The Pale Gift is black and gray over the crimson of her cape. She is drowning in a pain that she cannot let go.

Isn’t that familiar?

“What of you, Princess-Protector? What brings you to this place, forgotten by time?” You know the answer. The masks are gone and the door is ready to open, to fall before your summoner – the reason you are here at all. She knows, too. She can sense that the hands of fate are moving again, tugging on time and destiny like the threads of a tapestry, to rework and weave anew.

Will it be enough to save this dying land? No. But perhaps it will peel aside the second shell that locks it away and refuses to allow it to fade properly.

Burn.

“…I am also mourning,” she answers, her tone even and her stare flat. “It is my sibling in that prison, a sacrifice to keep this land from the clutches of the likes of you as long as possible.”

You smile beneath your mask; she cannot see it. Your hands fold under your cape and loll your head to the side to look at an angle back up at the seals.

“And it is my sibling that will deliver it unto me.”

There is delicious irony in that fact. Your sister does not want Hallownest to die. She wants to own it and its people. Death is counter to her goals and yet –

That is exactly what she is causing.

That is what she always causes, you’ve found. In an effort to keep a vice grip of control on the things that she considers to be hers, she rips them apart. And, unapologetically, she holds them responsible rather than admit her role in their demise. You are sure that even now, to the one within whom she is imprisoned, she must be insisting that she has been wronged – that she is suffering for another’s actions and not her own. For she will never learn and she will never change.

Knowing all of that, why then do you feel guilty, standing before what will soon become her tomb?

Knowing all of that, why then do you blame yourself for not interfering sooner? Or now?

It is your way to hold yourself accountable for things beyond your control. You know that her actions are not your own. You could not have stopped her and you could not have saved Hallownest without first sentencing it to a worse fate. Those thoughts should bring you comfort but here, at the end of your days, when tomorrow you know not if you will live at all, you cannot find it within yourself to be assuaged.

The spider steps away toward you. Each individual movement is measured, cautious and quiet, with an intensity in her glare that would have made a lesser bug cower in fear. When a predator approaches with that kind of stance, it is usually a good idea to step aside. But, butterfly or not, you are not afraid of any natural predator – not even a half-god like she is.

The Princess looks up at the door.

“It is coming back, the little ghost, and when it does, she will die. Do you intend to interfere? Or will you stand by and watch?”

You look down at her over your shoulder and shift your weight purposefully; it puts you on your heels, ready to backstep if she decides to attack. You do not expect her to, but you have never trusted strangers well, and she –

She is wyrmkin. She knows what you are and, if she is anything like her sire, she will seek to stand in your way.

“I would ask you the same thing,” you offer.

Her head bows. “I will not endanger myself in its attempt to put right the trials of time. I have a duty to Hallownest – a responsibility, a charge left to me by our King and –”

You interrupt her rant with a scoff and she freezes. Your idle hand motion earns you a withering, expectant glare, her shoulders tense, and you think you hear her chelicerae click in agitation.

“The King is dead. Long live the King.”

“Hallownest—” she begins.

You hold one hand up to stop her, then move to circle her in interest. “Hallownest is also dead, Princess. You cannot breathe life into its corpse by hope alone. Hope rests in a prison built to contain her. Learn the lesson of her mistakes.” Can she hear you, your sister, you wonder again? Does she know what you are saying? You can envision her seething in response. “I came to say goodbye. If the vessel accomplishes what it means to, there will be no tomorrow. If I intended to provide her with aid, I would have done it long ago. This kingdom is far past its prime. It is time to lay it in the ground and let it fade.”

If it succeeds in its goal, you will die. You have thought many times about what that would be like for you – you, who cannot, who will never fade from existence. Once, you sought the peace of the end, but now? Presented with its very real possibility? Now, you are frightened. You will not let it show, though. Not in front of the Princess of this long forgotten land, and certainly not in front of your sister, if she is watching with stolen eyes through the door.

Be brave, Fear.

The spider looks down. She is considering your words, you think, though her mask does not belie any emotion.

You are afraid. So is she. The little ghost intends to unspool time, to undo the pains of the past. It seeks to change fate from the very onset and you – you wish it luck. You have become fond of it in the time since your summoning, as you always do with those who give you a fragment of themselves by calling your Troupe to their lands. You want to see it succeed. But if it does – you will cease to be.

Perhaps another version of you will remain.

You step away from the egg, yet sealed, and one claw reaches out. The tip of it brushes along the underside of one of the throbbing arteries of infection. It splits under the sharp point and you leave little droplets of gold in your wake; you do not turn around to watch them fall.

“But you will stand idle, will you not?” you ask as you reach the door. “Ever the loyal soldier to your father, to your king. Ever a slave to your duty.” You turn around to look at her and the spider has her back to you. “What if you were not, though? What if, for once in your life… you made the choice to help the family that you clearly mourn? Be brave, Princess. Your time to decide the difference between who you are and who you want to be is running out.”

You hear the needle collide with the wall of the Temple. The resounding echo of the metal splitting through shell is loud in the silence. You do not turn around, nor do you flinch – which you suspect will incense her.

You leave her to her thoughts instead.

None of this will matter tomorrow, if the little ghost wins, and that is both comforting and depressing at the same time. If it fails, you will be trapped in your ailing, dying body, until the Ritual can be completed.

You would rather it win…

…but the end of the world is as bleak as it should be.

#ashe writes #red sky #w&g #hollow knight fanfic #hk fanfic #one shots #drabbles #gift fic

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