boxfullofzeroes | there's so many things that you'll never understand

there's so many things that you'll never understand

MEMORIAL TO THE
HOLLOW KNIGHT
------------------------
In the Black Vault far above.
Through its sacrifice Hallownest lasts eternal.

There's a figure at the base of the fountain, bent double, yet still taller than most bugs that once wandered these streets.

The Hollow Knight was sealed before it was raised in the center of the City. In all their glimpses of the world through Infected eyes, they had never seen this--this figure of themselves, towering high above the Dreamers that protected them, sacrificed everything for them, only differentiated by the carving of each mask.

This should not matter.

The emotion that is their flaw screams it does. Why--?

--This figure of them should not have ever been here. The Pale King prioritized their image above the living. A memorial to a thing. A memorial to a failure, still standing tall, lie inscribed for the straggling remains to see.

They should not wonder why. They should not feel the wound in their chest throbbing with new pain. Do not think, do not feel, do not do not do not--

Gendered Child, sister, told them they may go, and they have gone.

And they are here, beneath the shadow of a false Purity, beneath pounding rain in an empty City.

Nothing about this spurs them to move. Their mask presses flat against fountain's base, hard enough to ache.

They empty their mind, and wait.

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Lemm gives a satisfied hum at the glance he is given, taking that to mean they understand.

It would be silly to prolong this any further. He's wasted enough of their time, and anyway they've outstayed their welcome. Knighthood or not, Lemm doesn't do visitors and company.

"...I should be getting back to the shop."

Reluctant? Him? Never. He also won't say anything like take care or don't be a stranger because it's none of his concern whether they come back or not.

He does, however, slow to a halt and say, "You don't need directions, do you?"

He stops, and they stop. He speaks, and they look.

...The Relic Seeker--Lemm--asked few questions.

They look up at the buildings that surround them. They aren't certain where they are, nor do they much care. They had no goal, and have barely one now. They can find their way back to the shop if they find relics; it is near the Fountain, and the location of that is seared into their mind as though She put it there. They will find their way.

--This is a question that needs an answer. They shake their head.

...Right, then.

"Pah. Of course not. You probably know this city better than I do." He makes a mild shooing motion with his hand. "Go on, then. I'm going home."

Without much ceremony and forgetting a proper goodbye, Lemm turns to head back the way they came. The fact he took a walk with the Hollow Knight notwithstanding, everything else about this situation is just reminding him why he moved into the city in the first place. He's made a royal mess of this interaction. This would be embarrassing enough if it were anyone else, but it had to be them!

Lemm is, privately, in a fairly bad mood.

Lemm has never bothered much with perfect timekeeping; in the City of Tears it's useless to think in terms of day and night, and though he suspects in its prime there was a cicadian rhythm to things, nowadays it's just him and his relics and he quite appreciates being able to keep to his own schedule.

But he knows it's been a week, give or take, because he has not stopped thinking about meeting the Hollow Knight since it happened. He very well might have dreamed the whole thing if it wasn't for the punctured cleaning cloth, which - just to prove to himself he isn't losing his grip on reality - now takes up a permanent residence on the shelf behind the ranked badges.

Right now, he is taking a tiny brush to the details on a King's Idol, delicately cleaning out the grooves and edges until it's as pale as the day it was made. Things might as well be as normal as they always have been.

...But they are not. Something has changed since a little while before he met the Hollow Knight, and Lemm is becoming so on edge wishing he knew what that when the elevator activates his hand slips and almost takes a chip out of the idol. Lemm goes very still and fixes his eyes on the corridor through the open door.

The Hollow Knight's massive mask looms from the dark.

They've returned, in what they--

(do not)

--in what they will soon discover whether it has or has not been an acceptable amount of time, with or without an acceptable array of objects to present.

They had gotten stuck enough that it all may be for naught.

They will hold no disappointment if this is the case.

They're confined to crawling again. Doing so through this building is...more optimal than some of the buildings and tunnels they've traversed; here, little debris can catch their cloak or wounds.

Before they can squirm in through the door, they lurch to a halt, settling their gaze on the Idol in his hand.

So very many symbols of the Pale King are scattered throughout Hallownest, weighing on them from every window and marker and sign, and yet there are so few depictions like this. Of a face.

Edited 2020-08-30 12:40 (UTC)

Lemm's eyes remain pinned on the Hollow Knight as they creep forwards towards his shop. He's about as motionless as the knight's own statue, holding onto the idol like an anchor. As much as he's sure he didn't imagine the whole thing, that doesn't mean he expected to ever see them again.

The moment passes. Lemm carefully sets the King's Idol on the desk and begins fiddling casually with the cleaning brush one-handed, masking his surprise behind a thin veneer of indifference.

"Waiting for me to invite you in?" he asks, though he has a feeling he knows what they're looking at. "The shop's open." He watches them like a hawk.

Their head follows the King's Idol, unable to tear their eye away until addressed.

Once the Hollow Knight had been left to their mission, it had been--a challenge. They had failed more than once, digging through the remains of ruined lives they were tasked to protect. Paralyzed with grief until they crushed it with their eternal mantra, do not think, do not feel, do not, do not, do not think beyond the perimeters given.

Setbacks. Temporary.

The Idol--along with a living being, seen again--cracks through their hard-won detachment. Their head jerks up, and there is a terrible urge to retreat.

They do not. Leaving their Nail outside, as before, they shuffle into the room. Their hand dips beneath their cloak.

They draw out a journal, setting it on the desk away from the Idol. Another. And another.

Scientific journals, plucked from the Soul Sanctum.

(There had been more. Many more. Only the three were recovered before cowardice and horror overcame them, once they stumbled over the bodies.)

Lemm is worried for a second that they've made a mistake somehow - but he perks up a little as they appear to proceed as if they're just another traveller bringing him things for geo. Business as usual. That's easy enough.

"What have we here?" he says, shifting in his seat and reaching for the first journal - then hesitating with an odd look on his face as the knight pulls out more. There's only one other person he's seen pull things from nowhere quite like that, and something clicks.

And then he catches sight of what's on these journals, and holds one up to the light. There's etched nacreous symbols in some places for emphasis, and he catches the word for soul at least twice just on the one he's holding. His gaze flicks up from the journal to the Hollow Knight, and after a long pause he asks a question he definitely already knows the answer to.

"Where did you get these?"

They're already reaching for more. Their hand is hidden, so they can't point or write; they lift their head to point straight upward, holding until it strains their neck. Upward, almost directly.

They...are less certain of the next items. When they began in earnest, the Holllow Knight went through the categories of what the Relic Seeker appeared to have the most interest in. The massive pile of Journals by the door, the awards with unusual etchings to communicate their purpose, directly giving them ink to write-- they took, simply, items with writing.

Most silk scrolls are terribly damaged by the rain and dampness, they discovered quickly, but the Pleasure House held the highest luxury, and withstood the fall better than other buildings.

They found four. For the first, they did not read past the first few lines, detailing a noble considering devouring a fellow locked in with him, comparing himself to the horrid beasts of Deepnest. Another is a list of rules relating to the Hot Spring within, and the last two are odd rhymes penned by the Marissa whose poster was nearly the first thing they saw. (They nearly took it. They aren't sure why they did not. They stop thinking about it at all.)

Lemm stares at the journal without reading it, as if he's just been handed a live aspid. He knows what's up there, more or less - the specifics have escaped him, or rather he's escaped the specifics. Lemm visited exactly one time and after two steps towards the entrance he learned a valuable lesson about curiosity killing the beetle and had no interest in returning, not for all the Hallownest lore in the world.

By the looks of it, he is holding a journal from well within the Sanctum. The Hollow Knight must be mighty indeed.

Lemm's business acumen kicks into hyperdrive. Setting the journal aside with no indication that it's worth its weight in pale ore, he turns to the next couple. Then to the scrolls - and my, but he should be using gloves for these.

"Two," he mutters under his breath, and his hand dances over the buttons on the antique register. "four, six hundred." For Soul Sanctum texts. And he's about to do worse for scripts so well-preserved. This might be blatant shortchanging, if he wasn't the only interested buyer in Hallownest. "And five for the set of silkworks. I'll pay one thousand one hundred geo for all of this." He gestures, and waits expectantly for a response.

...They'd forgotten this part. Not only retrieval, but trade. Or...selling.

This situation seems incorrect. Bugs behind counters gave items, and the ones that came in gave geo. Unless one was stealing. None stole in the Capital, none but fools, and those fools would be skewered two steps from the door by any Sentry that was tired of listening to the nobles yet wary of causing--

They reel in their mind back to the shop. As backwards as this is, this shop is Lemm's, and they have no reason to question him.

But first, they take another item out.

A chunk of stone, larger than their hand, heavy. The noise it makes hitting the desk makes them twitch.

There's a name scrawled on it, an age, a tiny eulogy. A piece of gravestone from someone who passed long before Hallownest fell. This may be a disrespectful act, but venturing upward to the lowest level of the Resting Grounds left them stumbling over the wreckage of dozens of ruined tombstones and small memorial statues. This was one that was intact enough to decipher, and leaving it...

Well. They did not leave it.

Lemm, for all his scholarly-adjacent wit, has not cracked a great many realisations about the Hollow Knight. To him, the pause and the introduction of a new bargaining chip looks like haggling.

"What's that?" He reaches out with both hands, and it's still heavier than he expects. The thing slides towards him against the table a short distance before he manages to lift it up with a slight grunt. "This isn't..."

He reads.

"...Where'd you find this?" he asks gruffly, and taps a finger against the stone. "Did you break this?"

They point diagonally out the rainy window, upward and eastward, where the sizable elevator they rode leads to the graveyard.

The Hollow Knight shakes their head sharply. Why--?

--disturbing the resting dead without purpose--

--they would nev--

They shake their head again. In their chest, they find a spark of something that is quickly doused.

Lemm narrows his eyes suspiciously, and it's not because he's suspicious, it's because that expression tends to wring the truth out of someone regardless. Nothing personal. He's not good with people, but he's got a shopkeeper's bluff detection. Lemm nods slowly and studies the eulogy more carefully.

...This is worth little, academically speaking. It's the context that would make this valuable, and as far as he knows this is just someone whose name he's never heard, someone non-famous, unimportant. It's no one.

Lemm keeps his eyes fixed on the grave marker as he thinks about why on earth the Hollow Knight might have picked this up. His thumbs smooth over the writing, brushing some grit from the stonework, and he frowns.

"One thousand, two..." He puts the thing down, rapping the stone loudly against the table, and folds his hands on top of it, fidgeting. Lemm runs a hand through his beard and scratches. "...The rest is one thousand one hundred geo. I ca- won't buy someone's gravestone. It should stay where it was put."

His stare is returned, albeit with their characteristic nothing.

They did wrong. Not on what they had braced for, but still, wrong. They will adjust their criteria for later. They have some items yet, but the geo is already being offered, and that is meant at the end of exchanges.

The price means nothing to them, with nothing to buy, having never used geo, and without going out of their way to find potential shopkeepers who might want some. They don't react to the offer at all.

Instead, they lift the gravestone.

They should have left it. They should return it to where it was put. But it had been put on the middle of the path, which is not where gravestones should be, either.

They should listen to Lemm. He is speaking straightforwardly as to what to do. They have no right to hesitate.

And yet.

They look down at the stone in their hand. (The paleness of the Idol gleams on the edge of their vision.)

The word beloved stands out. An age that is not old, but not young.

He can't fidget outwardly, because this is a transaction, but his focus is so intently zeroed in on the Hollow Knight right now that he could win a staring contest with a statue.

The statue-- the Hollow Knight - takes back that final bargaining chip, and Lemm stalls.

They're just so still. Nothing they do betrays any emotion at all - and he was lost on their first meeting, but now they've met again Lemm reckons they're either a master barterer or they're simply lost.

Curiosity is why he's a Relic Seeker. It's also why he leans back in his chair, folds his arms, and says, "Honestly. What made you pick it up?"

He doesn't mean to glance at the inkwell and note-scrawled paper to his left, and maybe he doesn't even notice himself doing it.

A question. To be answered, as decreed. The glance is nearly unnecessary; that inkwell is the only way they can respond to something that is not yes, no, or which way.

They place the marker back in their void carefully, as though it's become twice as delicate as the quill and paper they pull to rest in front of them.

The Hollow Knight stares down at the paper as they did the gravestone, as they did the King's Idol.

The writing is crooked, terribly slow, with a bit of Fungal flare instead of Mosskin this time, and, of course, purely factual.

Relic.
History / writing of Hallownest History upon it. Carved,
lasting.

When he tilts his head to read, Lemm takes a little longer to parse this one. It's not that Fungal is any more complicated than Mosskin, but it's old in the way Arcane Eggs are old. He might posit that most other languages borrowed the word lasting, which only emphasises the knight's point.

"Feh. Of course it's lasting. Someone wanted them to be remembered." Even as the words come out of his mouth he frowns and gives the Hollow Knight a strange look, just for a second. "But that's not of historical importance, not unless that bug was... was someone."

He doesn't like that they made him say it. His fingers drum restlessly on the counter.

"'S not the same thing," he concludes, annoyed, and opens the register and begins counting geo. "But if you want to know who they were, maybe I can find out a few things..." He's not sure why he's offering. "Did you know them or something?"

The Hollow Knight, again, does not understand. All bugs were someone. With desires, struggles, hopes, dreams, families. Names.

They...want nothing. They do not know anyone of before their creation. And the dead of Hallownest have been disturbed for so long. They know little of spirits, but know much how being a wandering dead is agony. Merely knowing of one should not be enough, to trap one in the nightmare of Her--the Infection is gone!--but. But. If there is the slightest chance...

They cannot do that.

It is against their purpose.

They shake their head.

The quill stays pinched in their claws. If they could tell him--all bugs are someone-- but he has not asked this, and they do not speak, do not, do not, do not.

Edited 2020-08-31 09:36 (UTC)

"No," Lemm concludes tentatively from their response.

He does not want to think the Hollow Knight had ill intent when they took a gravestone, and maybe that's bias talking, but they also don't seem like they have much intent at all.

He sighs. "They'll be wanting it back, then. I'll admit to buying a lot of clutter, but I won't pillage the Resting Grounds."

But they didn't break the thing; he's content with that at the very least. Lemm slides the geo for their other finds across the counter fair and square... and eyes the quill they're holding.

"Not that I'm interested, but I'm thinking you either don't talk or you can't. Makes no difference to me, and I don't care." Brusque, isn't he? "But if you're not going to be disappearing into the mists of time again too soon, you might want to practice some modern dialect. You were lucky to find me, but bugs who aren't tarsus-deep in the past won't be able to read any of that scrawl. Communication is important. Someone might think you're infected."

There's a very short pause.

"Not that it's any of my business."

Then the stone will be returned, right where they had found it, among the rest of the shattered gravestones. To be left, as it has no place in even this place of relics.

Modern dialect. They have no--

The word Infected spills into their mind.

The quill snaps.

They don't feel it.

They are not Infected. The Infection is gone. They felt Her shredded by Sibling beneath their claws, Sister disappeared and reappeared, telling them things they do not need to know but wanted, wanted, such as the Crossroads are clear, Greenpath is near empty but the diseased thorns are falling off, Crystal Peak is quiet, it is gone, it is gone, She is gone, She is dead, if She was not dead they would be dead, they would be rotting still, they are not, they should be, She is gone, She is, She they are aching, rotting, arm gone burning whispering stories grinding thoughts howling screams tearing their throat open for Her own Voice--

Their face is pressed down against the counter. The crack along their mask stings.

They do not remember falling.

Edited 2020-08-31 19:08 (UTC)

Lemm flinches, hands lifting off the counter instinctively as he leans back.

"-Eh?" he says helpfully.

They're unresponsive. Lemm glances over their bowed mask at the corridor beyond, as if half-expecting to see something there that has launched a spear or thrust a sword. There's nothing, and he stares back down at the Hollow Knight with his heart in his throat.

Maybe, he thinks, maybe they are infected, and this period of silence and the dead staying dead has been a trick, and now there's a long-dead shambler in his shop, maybe they're getting cleverer, and...

...But he already knows that's not it. He knows what the infected looked like. They've been his nigh-only company for a long time, give or take a few stragglers. The Hollow Knight doesn't, hasn't, fit the bill.

So what does a well-adjusted social bug do in this situation?

What Lemm does is slowly push his chair back and rise from the desk, gingerly plucking the broken quill pen from their hand while being very careful not to touch them directly. Just because they're not infected doesn't mean they won't react violently, and Lemm knows he'd lose that fight.

He's about to speak. Doesn't.

Relic Seeker Lemm's palm rests itself unprompted on the Hollow Knight's good shoulder. He's got no idea what he expects to happen.

Void is not warm. Void is not cold. Void is nothing, unaffected by anything but the most powerful and purposefully-concentrated of Light.

The Hollow Knight is cold, soaked through by the rain they've been walking through nonstop for days.

Lemm's hand is warm.

Their frame shudders. Warmth is a terrible thing...

...but they are, suddenly, too exhausted to attempt to struggle, fight.

And they do not have to. Lemm is not Infected. They are not, truly.

If he wants to thrust a dagger into their back to be certain, is steadying them to be certain his aim is true, then so be it.

They lift their aching head enough to settle their chin on the counter instead of their face.

(They may have scattered their own finds with their horns.)

Lemm shifts his foot to avoid as priceless things roll off the counter, thud to the floor on old carpeting and carapacian tiles. His hand is as still as he can make it, but not quite still, as he's stressed and overthinking every little micro-movement and so he makes more of them than he would if he were relaxed and resting on a table.

His hand is on the cloaked shoulder of the Hollow Knight, which is cold, and damp, and unsettlingly still.

Lemm considers for the first time that the mighty memorialised impossible knight may in fact have hypothermia or something.

"I'm not a hotel," Lemm complains, mostly to himself. They are a cold and damp and delirious stranger. This complaint has nothing to do with him leaning down and trying to put their faces on level with each other, seeking some kind of reaction or recognition. "Hey. How many?" He holds up three fingers, in what he hopes is their view. Some buried thought is that he would be well within his rights to toss them out onto the street.

They don't understand his comment. Unless bugs often pass out in hotels--this is information beyond them. Dipping into knowledge of the other Infected would be a terrible error now, and so they do not.

He may or may not notice the darkness in the space where their eyes should be beneath their mask. The one without the crack is sheer black, utter Void, something Monomon herself said was unsettling. The other is bubbling with motes, contained behind the white, but ever-moving and utterly blind.

Their response is sluggish, but their hand only shakes a little when they hold up three fingers in reflection.

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