boxfullofzeroes | voicetest the voiceless

voicetest the voiceless

They're not dead.

Less dead than they'd felt, at least. Their shell doesn't normally take so long to reform.

Then again. Their shell doesn't usually break of their own violation as they ascended in a boiling rage, ate at least one realm, a god, and all the Godseekers.

(That last point is debatable, actually. There's some odd sense, deep under their...shell? Void? Wherever they once stored things like Isma's Tear, much deeper now...that the sea-mind is still there, sluggish and held in a stasis. They're already adjusting enough, and they don't seem to be dying or trying to kill them, so that problem is neatly sorted as 'for later'.)

They push their body to stand. Their horn clangs uncomfortably loudly against the grate they've apparently woken up beneath. They're somewhere in the Royal Waterways. A quick check of the map--or, not so quick, as it takes time to locate where it had been--shows they've risen about halfway through, closer to the City of Tears than the White Palace. They'll go to the Stag Station in the City Storerooms next.

So they think. Complications arise on the way.

The Infection is gone, leaving dead Flukes, Pilflips, and Hwurmps in piles enough it takes time to force their way past. Their body seems too small. No, their body is fine--there's something wrong with perception itself. That will take time to adjust to.

Then, they discover the Monarch Wings now stretch and warp when used, twisting around the nearest pipes after landing before the Knight forcibly calls them back. Shade Wings, they decide to call these.

Once they're high enough to hear the rain above, they realize a noise they'd ascribed to water running in the distance is, in fact, something swirling behind their mask. Many somethings. All the fragments of Siblings with enough self left, staring out from their eyes. It's disconcerting.

By the time they actually get out of the Waterways, they're using their Shade Wings to grip ledges and drag themselves up, with those holding onto things better than their own arms are with the Mantis Claw.

The Knight faceplants awkwardly onto the floor of the building Lemm's shop is in. If the City is the same as below, there's little left to try killing them in the area.

They'll just take a moment here, thanks.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

They're pleased to have ended the Infection, certainly, with all the sickening suffering Hallownest fell from, and more the Dreamnail revealed to them.

Knowing they set these ruins to a proper rest is set alongside the realization the many husks that crushed their shell dozens of times in the past now cannot. That brings a different sort of satisfaction.

Through the haze of rain, the Hollow Knight's statue looms above all the distant corpses. This Knight should go up and see if they survived. Even more reason to go to Dirtmouth.

The Infected Crossroads should no longer be Infected.

Lemm says nothing changes. They tug out their nail again--carefully, nowhere near hitting him--to tap the edge against the glass, once. Things have changed, they both can tell. Things will continue to change. They've wandered through other dead places, and dead places need rotting before they can hold life again. There's plenty to rot in Hallownest.

Too, they bring out the Dreamnail and sweep it through him to pry at his deeper considerations. He seems shaken. They'd like to have a better idea why.

Things will continue to change... Of course he gets this much. It's implied. Heavily.

Lemm-

"Perhaps that terrible fever sweated itself out at last.
What a convenience it was to have predictable neighbours."

-stares at the little Knight with their strange woven hilt a moment longer, and then turns back to the city view.

"Enough talk," he says, like he always does, though the Knight has never said a word, and he gestures to the door with finality. "If you find anything further of value, you know where to find me." A beat. Then, nerves getting the best of him: "For now."

They doubt he'll find many neighbors after this, predictable or not. The Radiance seemed particularly enraged in the end, as most things are when faced with inevitable death. Survivors are unlikely.

...They should check Myla, as well. Killing her would have been a mercy. They'd nearly done so several times. Their nerve, steady against halls of thorns and swarms of diseased intent on their destruction, failed on the way each time with memories of her song.

They glance up to Lemm in acknowledgement, mildly hoping they won't need to chase him down somewhere else. There are plenty of areas he could extract relics on his own now. Many could be dangerous to him. Several would be inconvenient for them.

This would just have to be seen. Steadier after a bit of rest, the Knight leaves as they always have, with no glance back, hitting the elevator switch with their Nail.

They were going to head upward, as they recall as they exit that elevator on the bottom floor. King's Station isn't far. They can take a moment to examine the bodies in the open space on the off chance some do yet live and rage.

This is where they miscalculate.

Without a second thought, the Knight charges the Crystal Heart.

Lacking their attention, the Shade Wings reach and wrap around the crystals it leaves behind, as well as parts of the floor again.

They blast forward, and where their wings grow from beneath their mask rips, the Shade Cloak and Shade Wings and the Shade Lord all together, sending a massive serpentine facsimile of a body roaring forward across the fountain's plaza with all the force of an entirely-panicked Garpede.

Lemm hears the shatter of crystal through the open door. He's perhaps not familiar with the Crystal Heart, but he's heard the thing go off before, distantly, and he thinks little of it - at least until something huge and dark rockets out through the city while he is still very much looking out of his window.

"Good grief," he says without thinking, as though witnessing this was a minor inconvenience, and not an event that rattles his strange unease all the way up to full-on anxiety. He retreats from the window, his hand finding the edge of his desk and anchoring him there, and attempts to gather his wits.

His first conscious action, reasonably, is to cross the room in a hurry and close the door tight, muttering venomously. The Knight never answered his question. The thing that left the warrior so out of sorts is clearly still out there. Perhaps that was what left the darkness on their cloak. None of his concern to go running around after them, though, not when they're the one with the nail.

Lemm fidgets.

The city's silence is coincidental, obviously. But something about recent events has Lemm feeling that something is off, nonetheless. He finds himself beginning to dig through piles of yet-untranslated texts - at the very least it will be a welcome distraction between bouts of peering restlessly out of the window.

They make their way across the plaza and into the wealthy district before they can stop. Fortunate void is similar to liquid, or they would've lost some bits hurtling through doorways.

They pack their body back to its correct size before heading properly into the Station. Best not to terrorize the Old Stag.

They call him and listen to words about how everything has gone quiet, and how parts of Hallownest seems to have gone dark. They go first to the Hidden Station, then, just to check the Abyss, and find the pit now full of such black fog they shouldn't be able to see. It settles when they coax it down.

Then they travel to Dirtmouth. Elderbug has similar sentiment to share, about the quietness and the sickly-sweet smell disappearing.

After getting their last charm from Divine (before they leave and forget again, or perhaps lose their new hoard of Geo), they drop down to the Temple and find it wide open.

Inside, they find a long hallway, a World Sense, and a scratched floor beneath broken chains. Their sibling is not present.

If they're dead, they're at peace. Those marks on the floor are similar to the Pure Vessel's weapon, of which they're intimately familiar with its method of cutting, and the Knight does not feel a hint of them in their collective, so that's unlikely.

Most of the Infection is entirely gone. Some of it pulses with Void in its place where it grew the most wildly. They drain the worst of it, taking some into themselves and leaving some to drown any of the the Radiance's light that could linger.

And then, they search.

Myla, too, is missing. The other miners are dead where they had been when working they investigate. A potential good sign.

With the Shade Wings often catching and reluctant to use the Crystal Heart, the Knight's speed is less than they'd like. The Old Stag is helpful, as always, but at one time they gesture absently to end up at the City Storerooms rather than where they'd planned.

And they fall upon the spikes as soon as they leave. Nothing to do with the Wings, at that point, but their own preoccupation staring at a guard that had fallen at a strange angle.

As always, it cracks their shell. They react instinctively with what they previously theorized was a Void-based teleportation, and discover that this was correct when they find themselves much, much further than they expected. Not even upwards.

Into the Soul Sanctum.

The Soul Sanctum, where they had not been since before they found the way into their birthplace.

The Soul Sanctum, full of bodies that heap into high piles, attached to equipment designed to remove their life.

The Knight's body has no time to fully reform. All the horror and upset and memories of the collective lashes out with the force of the Void itself.

A large part of the City of Tears will find itself beneath a temporary rain of glass.

The journals begin to pile up, before too long. Lemm's collection has grown rapidly in recent times, with no lack of credit to the Knight in particular, and the backlog was starting to bother him even before he found himself needing a lengthy distraction.

He's especially glad of the work, now. Even if he's so engrossed in it that the pile of cross-reference material grows so hefty that pieces of it threaten to slide off the desk and clunk to the floor. It would be excellent if he could make some kind of breakthrough, though no sensible scholar sets to work expecting one. It's just that he has this feeling...

Lemm is halfway through comparing a couple of particularly dense texts about fossil records (that, honestly, he isn't sure are still extant, even if he knew where to look) when a nearby building explodes.

He jumps so hard that the two journals are lurched out of his hands - he lunges to catch them, fumbles, and drops both - before hissing a string of interesting curses and darting out from behind the desk, finding himself at the window even before the last of the glass hits the streets. There is a small avalanche of disturbed relics from the desk behind him, but Lemm is too busy identifying the source of the noise to bother gathering them up.

It's primarily only glass, the force of a thousand-odd Shrieks and tendrils slamming against the Sanctum's many windows. Some of them are bodies the many, many bodies the Sanctum used.

The Knight manages to wrestle their terrified siblings and their own horror back part of the way down.

They twist all their thrashing tendrils and dash to avoid smashing into the memorial fountain, landing in an ungainly heap at the edge of a canal.

They briefly consider staying there a moment. The mess they've landed on pokes into their shell uncomfortably enough they can't.

The Knight stands, pulling their tendrils fully in, and surveys the countless shards the incident left across the area.

There are presumably few bugs who have yet seen the Knight's current state of shade in all its unified, thrashing glory. Fewer still who have seen them pull everything back together into that small, familiar masked shape afterwards.

Relic Seeker Lemm watches everything. Unwittingly, he winds up slowly leaning forwards to see better until he's close enough that his longer horn very gently bumps the glass, at which point he jerks back from it like he's been burned.

He forgets to grab his umbrella on the way out. He realises this when he is about to step out into the rain towards Fountain Square, which sets off a chain reaction of evaluating what he's actually doing.

Lemm stops short of the rain just in time, though now it has less to do with getting wet and more to do with reason catching up to him. He lurks just shy of it instead and stares out from under the building as a mortified spectator. Leaving his shop was an incredibly foolish thing to do - and those elevators are so loud! - but he feels rooted to the spot, now, and he can't bring himself to turn back.

His gaze traces from the little Knight to the scattered glass shards, to the statue, to the bodies - he looks sharply away from those and back at the culprit, and for now he just stares.

Ah. Lemm's here again. They suppose they'd made a fairly loud mess.

The Knight stares back, not entirely certain what to do next. Lemm isn't in his shop, so there's nothing to offer. Neither does waiting seem to prompt him into speech this time.

After some moments of deliberation, they point upwards, towards the blown-out windows and walls of the Sanctum.

A thrill of fear runs through him when the Knight acknowledges that he's there. And instinctively, he looks. Just for a second. As if there were anything else to glean by following the Knight's gesture.

His stare returns to the Knight again shortly, as if magnetised.

"Yes," he murmurs, far too quietly for it to be audible from so far away. "I know. I saw you."

He realises the futility of this a moment later, and offers a slow, cautious nod instead.

"What was that?" he asks, and this time it's just about loud enough for his voice to carry through the rain. There's none of his usual irascibility in it. Just a plain question from a bug almost too concerned for his safety to be curious - but not quite.

Edited 2022-11-02 16:22 (UTC)

...

They're not particularly emotional. This is not due to the Pale King's attempts somehow being correct, as they briefly considered in the depths of rediscovering their own history; if that were the case, the shattered remains made almost entirely of Void would not have hated seeing the Kingslight so much as to chase and attack, nor would have panicked at the sight of the bodies stacked atop each other.

(They won't be going to Kingdom's Edge for some time.)

Lemm's fear is not desirable. The Knight did not intend to frighten, or make the streets into such a disaster. They're discomfited.

No, now that they're paying better attention, they...find it quietly distressing. He's no enemy to intimidate, and he does not need to be concerned about what they are, as nightmarish as it would appear--and be, truthfully.

They don't know how to answer. They have no voice to speak with, even now.

The Knight bows in apology.

Yes, yes, they're done. Of course they are, there's glass all over the square. Bowing like a theatre bug, at the end of the act, really.

He'd like to be this sarcastic. He's a little shaken. Give him a minute to try, though, because it's the only way out he's got.

"...Fine," he barely scrapes out, "and I suppose all this is something I'll get used to, is it...?"

Lemm is emboldened, perhaps, by the bow and the fact the little shadow hasn't come roaring at him like something mindless and orange. They have a businesslike rapport, and the bow proves the Knight still thinks so. It's the only thing keeping him from running.

Lemm smooths down his beard with a similar finality to someone straightening a sheaf of notes, and wishes his legs would carry him further back into the hall.

"That was quite a fall," he calls, voice echoing a bit from the damp passage.

As out-of-sorts as he still sounds, they do believe he will get used to it. They can't be that much more terrifying than the wandering, burning dead, and Lemm adjusted to those enough he'll partly miss them.

They look back up. Yes, that was quite a fall, for a normal bug. Not as far as dropping from King's Pass. They're uninjured from the landing, though some of where they landed on glass lightly stings.

...Albeit less and less by the moment. While their mask is an unknown, it appears they needn't Focus to heal bodily injuries anymore.

While they could stand out in the rain forever, Lemm might not fare so well with the now-dangerous ground. He doesn't seem to want to be waiting there as much as he seems he'd rather not leave.

The Knight's Wings brush over the glass. A few twinkling shards scatter over the edge, disappearing beneath the water. They make an effort to avoid activating them further in a long hop across, landing just steadily enough not to tip at the very edge of the doorway. It appears their perception is off again.

Lemm stays very still as the Knight approaches. There's still a barely-perceptible tension in the way he's staring, but the longer it is since the roiling shade fell from the tower, the more it seems to ebb. It is definitely helping that the Knight seems to be acting more or less the same as ever towards him.

He underestimated. Lemm thought them small and relatively insignificant, a simple wanderer with strange habits and skill with a nail - unusual, yes, but not massively so. What he just observed was... pushing it, a bit. Should have asked more questions.

"Don't think I'm not seeing patterns, little secret keeper," he tells them once they're close enough. Whatever that means. "I told you I was studying this wreck. Now you've made me wonder what your purpose is here."

Little secret keeper. Another title granted in Hallownest. They accept this one far better than King.

Has he? They wonder what might yet be left. Most of the kingdom didn't seem to know of the Radiance. Even fewer knew of Vessels.

Part peace offering, part of a start of an answer--it resonates with the Void's non-hum, has meaning older than Hallownest they are newly aware of, even if incapable of deciphering untested--they produce a third Arcane Egg.

Oh, that's just not fair.

"Don't think you can distract me with relics," he scolds, even as he eagerly reaches out to take it with absolutely no hesitation whatsoever...

...Though before his fingers can connect, he quickly withdraws and pats himself down. With an annoyed huff he shakes his head.

"I didn't bring my spyglass. Or any Geo to pay you with," he adds, trying not to let that sound too much like an afterthought. "Will you be breaking my window, too, or are you feeling tame enough to do business properly? I've made myself clear how I feel about carelessness in my shop."

Yes, he still feels slightly uneasy inviting them back in after what he just witnessed, but - well - look at what they're offering.

Not that they need that Geo, really. Unless Sly restocks, or Iselda makes more pins.

Which isn't impossible, knowing both shopkeepers. And they would like a better variety of map markers...

The Knight shakes their head and gives another bow. No, they will not. They will not, they emphasize to their siblings' more aware fragments, who have mostly settled. Unless things have changed drastically incredibly quickly, there shouldn't be corpses in Lemm's shop.

Edited 2022-11-03 15:03 (UTC)

It's a good thing Lemm can't magically see how much Geo they have already, or there'd be some serious price slashing going on.

"If you say so." He half-turns to go back to the elevator, pausing midway to glance back out over the square.

Shame for there to be such a mess there now. The mystery knight may not have much of a legacy as far as Lemm is concerned, but the statue still counts as a relic, and it's near enough his shop that it's going to bother him.

He tears himself away with an unreadable hm and keeps walking, keeping that thought extremely to himself.

When the elevator stops, he remembers how much of a hurry he was in when he left. He picks up the pace and power-walks ahead just enough to begin hurriedly clearing away the avalanche of texts to make some counter space.

...He doesn't have any bodies in his shop, correct? They slow just enough to scan when Lemm hurries ahead, in case there's trouble. Or in case he decides to grab a journal and heft it at their face. Unwise, as fearful bugs tend to be.

No, only a small mess for him to clear up. They hop to sit on the tipped furniture again as he does that, turning the Arcane Egg over in their tiny claws.

They haven't stopped to look at it before. They found this in the Abyss, as well as the one prior. The first was from Seer, which only now strikes them as strange.

...It looks like the Black Egg high above in miniscule form.

Suddenly, they're glad to be rid of it.

No, no bodies! Just a strange antisocial bug clamouring to tidy the untidy before anyone sees it, though of course he's too late by the time the Knight pats through the door.

Both hands occupied by a dropped journal, Lemm pauses to nod it in their direction. (The heft is obvious, but with his experience it doesn't slip from his fingers.) "I'm sure you think you're clever for dangling that in front of me, but you don't know the gravity of it. Most sellers don't."

More room is cleared, until he at least has counter space, and then he swiftly sidles behind the desk and pats open the register to indicate he's ready to make the trade.

"The truth is, we Relic Seekers don't know the half of what we buy. All that layered information..." He gestures flaggingly at the thing with a larger denomination of Geo. "They must have had some simpler method of accessing the inward layers, unknown to us. With modern tools, we can only pry so deep before the whole delicate thing fractures."

He taps the Geo against the till, giving shape to his frustration when his actual voice stays more or less at his baseline. "Twelve hundred."

His fingers twiddle an eyeglass restlessly.

The Knight wasn't intending to be clever. Lemm sounds back to his old self far more now.

They glance at him and the Geo they might not need. The Geo--

An epiphany jolts them, full-body, as though just reawakening. The Geo that appeared from nowhere. The Geo that disappeared after their unruly Shade swallowed it when they didn't make it in time before being struck down too quickly first.

They can reach deeper than they ever have before in ways they haven't thought to document.

...They wonder.

The Knight stares fixedly down into their hands, tracing along the edges of the shape imprinted on the outer shell.

He waits. Not for too long, though, his patience is notoriously limited.

"...Your skill is with a nail, not a chisel," he points out, hoping that might jog them into handing it over. He may be blunt, but he doesn't snatch things. "Ah. Maybe you're curious about how it's done, eh? As much as I enjoy the work, I can only imagine it to be unspeakably dull to watch. These things take time. Of which most bugs don't have infinite reserves."

Lemm taps his fingers on the counter.

"Myself included. What are you doing?"

They wouldn't mind watching a tedious process. They can be restless, but it can be curbed if they believe there's something worthwhile to find or learn at the end of it.

But they might not need to.

They don't look up. Tracing. Reaching, feeling the darkness inside stir beneath. In layers, as Lemm said. They're hardly an expert on this, so they keep from tearing in from the core outward.

Splitting gently around the shape, it unfurls the top layer of itself like petals.

He's almost about to get out his tools, in case the prospect of watching might actually hurry this exchange along. He doesn't like others hanging around in his shop, but arrangements can be made for an Arcane Egg.

His hands freeze halfway to the drawer.

Lemm considers that he might be seeing things, or perhaps he's actually fast asleep over his translation work, and he'll wake up to the sound of the wandering plague shuffling outside.

He knows this isn't the case, though, sure as he knows this:

"You have been keeping secrets! What - easy, now, careful with that, you..." His hands lift awkwardly over the counter like he means to take the egg from them, but he doesn't dare close the gap, ineffectually hover-handsing and trying not to sputter like a dying candle. "You little sneak, you... You're one of them. All this time, you - how are you doing that?"

no subject

no subject

warning for like. body horror ig. as if ghost isnt always body horror on some level

natch

1/2

2/2

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

replying from email on mobile like oooh you wanna make a new thread so bad for no reason

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject