#kingsmoulds

[linterteatime]

more gijinkas for y'all, as a treat for uhhh good behavior in prison

#hollow knight #gijinka #humanization #grimm steed #distant villagers #massive moss charger #kingsmould #I was only going to make the more important NPC's at first #but I think I might also do the more uh #secondary NPC's? Common enemies? #Perhaps #probably #maybe #who knows #my art #fanart

[tonythr]

Here's some frames from an animatic/PMV project that I'm working on. They literally have a duration of only half a second but I decided to make them into full-fledged fanarts for some reason, so I just wanted to give them a little more appreciation. I'm actually kinda proud of how Isma and everything that comes after her turned out!

#hollow knight #pale king #white lady #mighty hegemol #fierce dryya #mysterious ze'mer #kindly isma #white defender #the radiance #kingsmould #soul master #lurien the watcher #monomon the teacher #herrah the beast #hornet #pure vessel #the hollow knight #hollow knight fanart

[whelkspares]

Guess who just. Finished the path of pain for the first time.

#I am shaking so badly you have no idea #This took me about 3 hours plus the ~5 hours I spent on it back when I was playing it on the xbox #I know it's not impressive but this has been a long term project for me #I died in the last room. The freakin. Kingsmoulds killed me the first time I got there. Had to start over. #They almost got me the next time too. Almost. #Anyway. Thought I would post here because why not #whelk's nonsense #ms paint #hollow knight

[weeklyxero]

bad news

#hollow knight #xero #hk xero #kingsmould #comic #flameshadowart #edited the wording because i am so sleepy and can't keep my stories straight

[nightwalking-fae]

Surprised they didn't have a not dead Kingsmould like this, would've been pretty cool

#art #my art #traditional art #kingsmould #hollow knight art #hollow knight #nightwalking fae

[magnapanther]

inktober day 11!! drew a kingsmould, standing guard at the entrance to the white palace! i sure hope the monarch whose protection is this fella's sole purpose hasn't been deceased on his throne for decades or anything!! :D

these goobers have such a cool design, but they're a bit tough to draw, especially in perspective (albeit very slight). still a fun time, although lighting was sorta tricky for this one, since light just sorta... exists in the white palace :)

#inktober #inktober 2023 #art #artists on tumblr #original art #my art #traditional art #hollow knight #kingsmould #white palace #hk fanart

[fungal-wastes-my-beloved]

one wonders how many times the pale king's experiments failed... countless, probably. but, these kingsmoulds seem to have been stable untill recently...

[| part 1 | part 2 | part 3 |]

#hollow knight #the pale king #kingsmould #voidbeings #comic #art #this is one of three(?) parts #lol he probably shouldn't be touching that #whatever hell be fine #for now #revoked au #*le mwah* #fwmb.png

[koritea]

Tin's beginnings

1/2 | 2/2

#//scribbles #hollow knight #hk #oc #tin #the pale king #pale king #pk #kingsmould #vessel #arachnid #crystal #comic

[zyraangel]

Boop!

#juice doobles #grimm #nightmare king grimm #hollow knight #kingsmould

[ersh-ova]

Day 14. Castle

castle palace etc

#ersh art #ersh hollow knight #hollow knight #hollow knight art #hollow knight fanart #hk art #hk fanart #the hollow knight #pale king #hk pale king #hk hollow knight #kingsmould #white palace #inktober #inktober 2023 #inktober day 14 #my art #art #artists on tumblr

[bluegekk0]

in your au what were the kingmoulds created for

Oh that's a very good question, I only mentioned this in passing before so I'd love to elaborate.

Contrary to the unfavorable light some people paint PK in, FPK didn't immediately jump to sacrificing his offspring to contain The Radiance. The Kingsmould were his previous focus, one that ultimately ended up failing.

Since Grimm is The Radiance's brother in the AU, it's actually he who mentioned that his sister was weak to void. Dream essence and void go against one another, and since it doesn't have the same interaction with the nightmare essence (dream and nightmare essences are similar, but their origin is a bit different so that carries over to how it reacts to void), he felt comfortable bringing it up to FPK when he was searching for ways to stop The Radiance.

Vyrm immediately latched onto the idea as it was the only clue, and began experimenting with it. But first, it required the Abyss door to open, which was an issue by itself - according to Grimm, the old Shade Lord that his father (the lord of the Dream Realm he and his sister shared befofe he got banished) sacrificed himself to seal away, was very likely still there. This is what the battle of Black Wyrm was in this AU - the old Shade Lord was more serpentine in form, thus it was dubbed the Black Wyrm by FPK's knights. Fortunately, it was weak and so it was successfully defeated, and the void that created its form scattered back into the depths of the Abyss until it was reformed again by Ghost.

Then Vyrm began studying the void. He realized it could be "injected" into a different form, and if done correctly, synergize with it. And so he began working on the Kingsmould, metal forms for the void that were to be used against The Radiance. Unfortunately, those Kingsmould proved to be too unstable - their form was prone to breaking down, which meant they would not successfuly seal away The Radiance. Vyrm made many iterations but all of them with the same result.

In desperation, he turned to using living forms as the vessel, but no matter which animal he used for testing, they all died soon after. The vessel had to be born connected to the void for the best result, but how would he even achieve that?

This is where WL's part of the guilt comes in. Desperate, she suggested they use their own offspring. They never planned to have children, but she was capable of producing thousands of eggs at once - they were similar to spores or seeds, very tiny. It took a lot of convincing to make Vyrm consider that possibility, he felt that was a step too far, but the clock was ticking and he knew he was running out of time. Eventually he agreed to the idea, as much as it went against everything he stood for. No cost too great to save the bugs he swore to protect.

The thousands of fertilized eggs were placed down in the Abyss, and the void quickly surrounded them, creating void eggs where they would continue to develop. The rest happens how it's portrayed in the game - the void eggs hatch, releasing many vessels at once. Many of them did not survive for long, the void proving to be too strong for their bodies, and those that did, began climbing up towards the light.

FPK knew he couldn't risk having unstable vessels around the palace, so he thought that a successful climb would prove the unity between the physical form and the void within. But watching them all fall and perish one by one was heartbreaking, doubts and guilt started clouding his mind from that very moment - he felt it was cruel from the point the plan was suggested, but there was still the hope that he wouldn't feel an attachment to the vessels. After all, they were just void beings, and the void didn't think or feel pain, right? They weren't his actual children. So why did he feel like a monster?

Eventually Holly ended up being the vessel to succeed, and to stop himself from giving in to his doubts, he turned around, sealed the door to the Abyss, and returned to the palace with the vessel.

The Kingsmould, while unstable, would make for decent guards for the palace, so that was what their new purpose was to become, though worth noting that there were only a few of them - he didn't want to risk it, void was dangerous and the last thing he wanted was for it to harm someone. This is also why Hornet was never allowed anywhere near them, for her own safety.

I'll end the ramble here since I already went way off topic, but since these two topics are so tightly connected in the AU, I thought it was still worth talking about.

#ask stuff #feral pk au #save #fpk #vyrm #void #kingsmould #vessels #wl

[mantisgodsart]

With the @bug-oc tournament still ongoing, Round 2 drawing to an end in favour of Round 3, another handful of bugs are knocked out of the competition, who will of course arrive home safe and...

Well, differently-shaped. Marigold's been busy! An unusually fast round, here, we got a decent burst of inspiration while procrastinating on packing chatting with some friends and - what? Other contestants? What other contestants? You must be mistaken, of course there were only seven bugs lost this round. It's not like we would lie about that, right? Clearly, if anyone else was transmuted, you'd see them right here. With the rest of Marigold's successful experiments. It's not like we've got any more to do... right?

(Names and owners of transmuted OCs below the cut, in order of pictures here - no group picture for this one, sadly, since we still have more to do here. Hopefully, we pass Round 3 - we really want to draw some transmutations for the other bugs in this round, and the narrowed competition means we can bring out some of the fancier paper we'e got rattling around! Vote for Marigold so we can do more of these - and, of course, for her many natural good qualities.)

First up is Fahris from @tetraterantula, as a Kingsmould! Though tampering with Void isn't precisely advisable, and going from a normal bug to an artificial one is jarring at the best of times, he at least has hands - better than most of this batch can say! This one was fun to do, and we tinkered with a lot of things - the side effects being, of course, that we're tinkering with things we don't already know how to do well. We did make some mistakes here - we are not, admittedly, an expert in humanoids, and long straight lines are the absolute bane of us, but we did our best!

The dark gray used here is starting to fray, which we can unfortunately do little about, as we're out of replacement nibs for our pens at the moment, but which might have caused some interesting texture. We defined the boundary between the lighter cape and the darker one with a white gel pen because our black and dark gray proved to be a bit too close in color to tell at a glance - the pains of traditional art, we suppose. Still turned out fairly well! We wonder if the color palette would interfere with his ability to stroll into the White Palace...

Next up is Cici from @mimicspider, as a Giraffe Weevil. Probably not doing anything for her clumsiness, and definitely not doing anything for her number of hands - the neck is a lot to get used to, even without getting into the whole set of bauplan changes going on here. At least she's probably faster like this? Once she gets used to the legs, at least.

Though we've technically already made her into a Lightseed, double transmutation is fair play... probably? Lightseed Cici was less than a centimeter of our paper, so obviously we had to do something bigger. We modelled this one in particular after the Grimm Troupe steeds - the clown theme fits, and we wanted to toy with the... cloak-looking bits? The polka-dots were a fun challenge, and we definitely think the abdomen came out well. One of the more successful transmutations here, we'd say!

Next are Willow and Lily from @razs-archetype, with Willow as a Moss Knight and Lily as a Belfly. Y'know when you take just a few seconds to yourself, take just a quick nap, and next thing you know you've woken up and the moss has grown over you and your hands have been turned to strange talons reminiscent of a god's dream? Yeah, happened to us too. Awful time. At least their partner's here to- ah, shit. At least this one comes with flight? Probably a damn hard sell of a consolation prize, but...

Not as much to say with the choices here - the Moss Knight felt like a natural choice, and the Belfly just... clicked? We had fun with Willow's moss - the highlights here actually use the same white gel pen as was used with Fahris, since it's got a nice semitransparent thing that we particularly like. We think the style conversion for Lily's face worked out particularly nicely, here. The piece as a whole turned out as one of the best of the batch, as far as we're concerned. Was nice to draw them!

Next, of course, are Drya and Tel from @enbeemerang, with Drya as a Tiktik and Tel as a Nosk - we predict strange waters ahead for them, relationship-wise. Two bugs, and not a single pair of opposable thumbs. The economy is clearly in shambles. At least they've still got each other?

Tel here specifically is actually inspired by a fic that Cog himself wrote - would it surprise you to know that we know them outside of this tournament? They've actually been handed over to us for transformation practice once before, in a sequence that we... might post as propaganda, later. Drya, we deliberated on a few options before settling on a Tiktik - it just seems to fit!

Last but not least, Sehra from @shiningnightstars as a Hive Soldier. It's probably better than it could be, here - at least bees are a bit familiar to Bugaria! This particular variant, admittedly, might not be. Again with the hands, and this time with the looking like an unawakened bee - it might mean a bit of trouble for her, but we're sure she can power through.

The wings here were particularly fun to do - again, we're doing blending tricks here, and we think that the purples turned out particularly well! Sehra's palette is quite pretty, and the gel pen on the eyes wound up looking amazing. Though "soldier" probably doesn't fit too much for what Sehra... is, it felt like the closest to her as far as aesthetics go. The Hive Guardian is a bit too big for a moth like her, the Hiveling feels a bit too far in the other direction, and the Hive Knight... we're actually avoiding bosses and more sapient-looking folk here when possible. Hopefully, it's to your liking!

#our art #finished #bug fables #hollow knight #ocs #other peoples ocs #kingsmould #troupe steed #giraffe weevil #moss knight #belfly #nosk #tiktik #bee #hive soldier #the two left are To Be Seen for... well. youll see :)

[void-rainbow]

It's 6 am and I haven't slept; time for some Collector headcanons

Mostly about the workings of its mind

(let's see if I complete this or sleep first)

The kingsmoulds are made from void and spells. The void itself, as the sea in the Abyss, has something like mind, but fragmented. Echoes of thought, ununified, from the original sources of that void, and any subsequent influences upon it. When the Pale King molded void into a body, there was nothing in particular to make the void a single coherent mind. Such a thing was part of the spells put upon it.

The spells were never meant to give it a true mind. The Pale King didn't expect such a thing from void. He only expected for it to function according to orders, and that took some doing. Spells to make it able to process language, understand orders, have a base knowledge of things it might need to know, the ability to fight and other functions of a guard, etc. All things for an unthinking construct.

At first this would be the dominant part of it, just a bundle of spells for a mind, leaving it aware but pretty blank. But the void was always capable of thought. With the spells as a helpful scaffold, the void of its being could form a more coherent, unified mind.

The kingsmould who would become the Collector has always had adult-level cognitive ability. But it's still not like a "normal" adult. Adulthood would typically imply having a childhood beforehand...something not really available for a construct. It does not have anywhere near the level of experience of an adult, and is lacking a lot of knowledge of the world too.

It gained some experience in the palace, in a limited fashion. Mostly in observation.

It did a fair amount of thinking too, as it gained experience. Even though my Collector doesn't....doesn't really reflect as much as it should XD It had the time to think. Time to think that its role as a kingsmould was not well-suited for what was most important to it.

My Collector was something of an experiment by the Pale King in kingsmould design. (Thought at first to make it the first kingsmould, but for my fic at least...fits better in the timeline to be some later design modification). Rather than being made with "SERVE" as the most primary command on it, imparted in the spells at its creation, it was imbued with "PROTECT"...and thus, it assesses everything around it with this in mind.

It left the palace. No great deliberation on consequences--the moment it decided the palace could not fit its role as protector, it just left.

I've wondered if perhaps other kingsmoulds could do so. Could they ever break away from their role? With "SERVE" imprinted on them, it would be very hard to do so. Perhaps only if their role became impossible for some reason. And even then, they may try to fall into a similar role if possible.

The Collector was able to leave and gain more experiences. But it had never really had to make any choices or figure things out. It. Makes a lot of mistakes. Still. It's able to learn.

And more than that, it's able to develop as a person. It always had emotions. But emotions confused it. Unlike someone like hollow though, it never had any reason to suppress emotions. So it will learn.

In all this, the Collector is rather lucky when compared to the other kingsmoulds. The kingsmoulds have minds and emotions. But with such limited life experience (and again, the overwhelming drive to serve)...they are a bit mentally weaker in some senses. Not for lacking a mind, but...mmm.

The spells never leave the Collector. It is always driven to protect. But the more experiences it gets, the stronger its mind becomes. It does not fight the great drive it has. But it's able to choose how to go about it. Go beyond whatever simple form of protection someone without choices would make, or what kind of protection the Pale King had in mind for it in the first place. Even if the Collector makes some really questionable choices. It also learns about what others need, and learns to...understand its own needs better. As a person. Learns about emotions. Learns what love means. It becomes able to incorporate these things into what protection means to it and alter its outlook.

All that is not something afforded the other kingsmoulds. Their lives are not conducive to learning other ways to serve. They are not given room to develop themselves.

I've wondered if perhaps the spells could ever be removed from the Collector. Though I don't think so. Even if its mind became strong enough to persist, its body could not. It would likely just die. And modification of the spells would take a lot of knowledge on someone's part with high risk of failure.

It will always be driven to protect. But that's okay to it.

I've been developing my fic, which has. Uh. Inadvertently become a bit of a fix-it au. But for something more canon...

The world is still falling apart, with the infection. It's bad for anyone's mental health. For the Collector, in some ways it never has to become more "normal", as society is crumbling around it. It doesn't have to worry about fitting in. It also doesn't have to rein in some of its worse impulses.

And yes...by the time we see Collector in the game, it's been a very very long time. It's had to deal with death, and isolation, and betrayal (being locked in the Tower of Love ._.), and failure. It's not doing so well. It's not coping. It doesn't know how to fix things.

It tries to stay strong, in its own way. It tries to keep loving. And it does. But it doesn't really have anyone else to help with its emotions. And it's just slowly breaking down. Just laugh away all the stress. (It can't ever laugh enough for that)

Even when the world and its life were in better times, it would always come off as weird and obsessed. Mmm, still seeing how my fic will turn out in the end. But some things are consistent.

(but as far as endings....hey, I did make it without falling asleep) (now to succumb)

#collector #hollow knight #kingsmould

[ruthlesslistener]

It is admittedly kind of funny how I accidentally seemed to have set off the trend of butterfly Lurien (which feels self-centered to say, but most of the designs I've seen about have the fluff and 3 eyes I went for, and I openly said the design was free to use, so) and people drawing him as pretty as they can make him bc the whole central reason I chose a butterfly for him- apart from the fact that they were rare- was bc I headcanon him to have intense scopophobia, and wanted an excuse for him to wear full-length clothing 24/7 that no other bugs seem to do. When you're a rare species of bug with intensely flashy wings and iridescent markings made to catch the light, but being stared at for too long makes you physically itch and nearly sends you into a panic attack, there's not much that you can do other than completely cover up. Like I've now built his whole character around him being a butterfly based on entirely noncanon information I have about them, so I'm Invested at this point, but legit the whole point was 'hmm Lurien hates being stared at almost worse than awkward small talk...butterflies are flashy...and the only butterfly in Hollow Knight is a famous singer...and bc butters and moths are nearly the same, some are fluffy enough to mimic his body shape...excellent'. I love all interpretations of Lurien that have actual thought and love for the character put into them, but lemme tell you that it did NOT start out that way

#only one I dont vibe with is escaped kingsmould and thats bc of how i write the void #lurien the watcher #hollow knight #other lurien interpretations...esquisite. eating them up

[bonon-bobani]

void void yay yay

#gijinka #hollow knight #collector #kingsmould

[mudkirby]

I love all my children equally. (Lie)

I made Mould at the height of my Hollow Knight phase. This stupid ant thing likes to consume g r a s s mushrooms. The Rainworld ones? Maybe :>

#oc posting #this is actually good looking for digital art from me #mould #hollow knight #oc art #oc mould #name inspo from the Kingsmould