#forced to answer a void wyrm question

[nrd-answers]

wings, how many void worms do you think one can fit on the tip of the needle? (The void worm in this scenario is a hypothetical form of existence that could theoretically exist within the void. Not an actual living thing. I am pretty sure there was an essay somewhere on if there was something adapted to the void but with mass ascension business I cannot be sure if it is still- [connection cut]

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[nonuggetshere]

Adding on to my previous ask as well as the hermit crab vessels, what if Ina's mask gets broken one way or another?

Do they frantically search for something suitable to contain their shade?

Do they make an panicked trip to the Mask Maker? If they do, does their shade get caught?

What if the White Palace is in shambles thinking they're dead?

Also with the hermit crab vessels and void growth, if their mask gets broken would they be unable to return to their original shape? Having accumulated more void over time? Enough so that they cannot force themselves into the same shape they once held?

Would they return after their mask having been broken entirely new? With none of their injuries and barely the same shape? Or would their injuries be one of the only things that let them be recognized?

-🕊️

(they're out of order, the first one was just easier to screenshot)

I LOVE ALL OF THESE QUESTIONS/IDEAS AND WILL DO MY BEST TO ANSWER BUT GOD AM I TIRED SO IT MIGHT NOT BE COMPREHENSIBLE

Personally, I think the knights think it's a battle scar. They don't think deeper on it and don't pry Ina about it.

Pale King would think similarly but with the added context of him knowing they're wyrm/root hybrid he figures it must be the result of sibling rivalry or they might have even got it from their own parent (wyrm families aren't known for their gentleness), or maybe they got it out in the wastelands. Again, he doesn't pry, especially when he knows asking about one's scars might bring up bad memories.

He might have proposed to have it fixed but Inanis would refuse.

But while the knights and the royals don't pry nor gossip, the rest of the court and the nobles are a different story. The most popular notion is that it's a battle scar, and yeah that does add to their mystery and some nobles do get weird about that.

If they ever break their mask, I think it'd depend a lot on the circumstances, but if it was just them around they'd probably just bline it to the mask maker and hope for the best. If it's done quickly enough and they're sneaky enough, the others might not even realise they're gone.

Personally, I see Inanis as fully grown so most of this doesn't apply to them, but even if they couldn't they probably wouldn't want their scars gone. It's a whole thing with their self-hatred and blame, and them seeing their scars and disability as proof of their failure; they wouldn't want to get rid of them, so they can always be reminded of what's on the line and that they can't fail again.

They eventually would grow out of this mindset, but still even if they could they wouldn't get rid of their scars, now seeing them as proof of what they went through, that they survived it and came out the other side better for it.

I think with the idea of vessels accumulating more void as they grow, I think they could regrow their arm with time (like a crab), if they were still growing. But Inanis is fully grown, so it wouldn't apply to them, for better or for worse.

[ganymedesclock]

Others write about Hollow Knight, you've got a way of making things make sense. Thank you for explaining about arena control with THK and Radi. Today's question: how many dream realms do you think exist? Radi is always called old Light, not Dream. In your read, does "expanse of dream,' 'one realm' 'the green children walked from dream' indicate that there are more than two dream realms out there? Also, WTF is up with that giant mushroom in the fungal core?

As best as I can tell from the lore, the feeling I get is less that there's a finite and discrete number of "realms" as much as that Radiance is a god of dreams, in the way that someone might be a god of war but not personally and singularly causing every single war.

The Seer mentions that Essence is fragments of dream, which she also calls old memories. This also ties in with what we understand of the ghosts- they appear to be echoes or memories of specific people. If Radiance had an actual ownership of dreams/cognition, then she'd have no reason to mind control anybody; she wouldn't be the antagonist, she'd be the setting. A more solid evidence of this is that since the White Palace is itself a very sealed dream, it seems to suggest PK fully expected to be able to hide from Radiance in a dream realm.

(That, or he didn’t care if she caught up to him at this point, but she clearly didn’t get in; the only possible ‘intruding’ element in the White Palace is void from the kingsmoulds)

I think the domain of Dream seems to be a godly context, and Radiance having immense power there is in part because she seems to be an immensely powerful god- one aligned more strongly with her divinity than she is with any sort of mortal or quasi-mortal reality. We can know what PK is- he’s the modified adult form of some kind of giant wasteland-dwelling sandworm dragon. While he’s also a god, he has some kind of context. People can talk about the “ancient caste” and speak of wyrms categorically.

We can’t really know what Radiance is. She is barely spoken of, and when she is, only as herself, the Old Light. The Hunter’s Journal entry for her even describes her in extremely minimalist and absolute terms, and has the Hunter himself musing that he may never be able to understand the force that causes the plague.

Was Radiance ordinary once- or as close to ordinary as PK was, and presumably WL, that sprouted out of this “god-rich” land as Godseeker puts it? Or is she just that much stranger than everything around her? She’s immersed in the domain of dream, of memories and belief. The fact that a whole tier of kickstarter backers isn’t just slid into the game, but recorded in the Shrine of Believers inside a pocket dream realm of its own gives some fascinating metatextual implications. Not that I think Radiance has a direct connection to the “real world” besides being a character in a game- but that the pattern repeated is something about belief and communication and the way things can become distorted as they echo through this space.

To answer your question, I think that dream is the medium through which virtually all of the gods that we encounter and many powerful beings work their power; it’s very omnipresent. Grimm has a special relationship with it, but basically there seem to be emanating/light gods, that generate some kind of dream, and consuming/dark gods that draw extant/ambient dream to themselves, and then both parties are gods because they can then use those dreams to shape reality.

If Radiance’s relationship with dream is unique, it seems to be a layered topic in that she has some amount of an innate special relationship with it, but also, that she is a tyrant of it- that she wants to take all of it for herself and wither any other dream that encroaches on ‘her’ territory.

[shadowfluff]

HK Deer AU lore

Here is all I have on the Deer AU for now! Lots of spirits everywhere, fair warning! It’s a little bit confusing right now, once I have a better grasp on everything, I’ll make a prettier post!

So in this AU, the world of HK is a flat desert of ash, grey and lifeless. But the surface has been impacted by astral debris quite a lot in the past and it's littered with deep craters where life thrive. And those astral debris also brought some type of life with them, called Spirits, with very powerful spirits being called Higher Beings.

But even though it was not very hospitable, life still developped by itself on the planet, with two different species: the mighty Wyrms, and the frail humans. If Spirits are confined to craters, both wyrms and humans can traverse the ash deserts to travel from craters to craters. Anyway, the first Higher Being to live in the crater that would become Hallownest was Unn, who made her domain a lush forest. But time passed and she grew older and weaker, and let other Spirits take root in her territory, not that she minded because Grandma Unn is simply The Best and you can’t change my mind.

So, after a while, another Higher Being came here, with a slew of lesser spirits to worship Her: the Radiance. Radi was cool with other spirits, and tolerated them on her domain with no problem, but she thought humans lesser and forced them to live on the edges of the crater, away from the protection of the forest. She barely tolerated Unn's followers, but mostly because their worship made them almost more plant spirit than human in the end. During that time, in the cliffs that made the southern limit of Hallownest, a tribe of humans took residence in the dark caverns that littered the cliff face and allied themselves with the Spider Spirits that lived there, the Weavers, and called their new home Deepnest. Then some MORE time later, one of the last Wyrms came crashing through the eastern border and metamorphosed. He was a creature of Light too and Radi did not exactly like seeing him especially since technically wyrms weren't spirit, but she decided to leave him be for now.

MISTAKE since he saw the humans being forced out of the safety of the forest, left to suffer famine and sickness so close to the desert, and he rallied them, managed to convince the other spirits that he would make a much better king and almost killed her by taking her followers away from her. PK did not do that out of the kindness of his heart for humans though: Worship is a great source of power for Higher Beings and Wyrms alike and the humans were numerous, so lots of power, yeah! He unified the whole crater, or at least most of it, and created Hallownest: He also met a magnificient tree Spirit, almost as ancient as Unn and fell hopelessly in love, asking her to marry him after a long courtship, and she said yes! The White Lady wasn't a Higher Being yet, but when she became queen, she was worshipped as well, and thanks to that power elevated herself to Higher Being status.

PK had a beatiful city build into one of the cliffs that litters the crater, diverting away a whole river for that, and it would be the future City Of Tears, once the Infection sets in and the barrage that kept the river away breaks Life is not bad in Hallownest at that time, even though there is a clear discrimination between Humans and Spirits: humans are on the lower rung of the social ladder and it's very hard to climb higher: only the nobles can pretend to live more comfortable lives, but most of them are asshole.

So after a while the Infection happens and everyone turns toward PK for help and answers but unfortunately he has neither of those things. But he knows of the Void below and the great deer spirit who is supposed to rule it, the only Higher Being that was born from this planet, not brought to it, so powerful they could legit devour every other Spirit in the land, Higher beings or not, as well as any living things, really. But PK understands that only the Void could stop the Infection, and the existence of the Shade Lord is just a rumour so why not try it? So he get the Baby Murder Pit idea and convince his wife to have seeds he infused with his own power (as spirits can't have babies the same way humans do), starts treatises with the current queen of deepness for 1) having her as a Dreamer and 2) having the Weavers weave a spell strong enough to contain the Infection, go say hello to the Owl spirit in charge of his capital city, Lurien, so he gets another Dreamer, and hey! isn't that Monomon the jellyfish spirit, please help.

So PK disperses the seeds into the Abyss below, and wait two months before something tries to get out. Now, when he metamorphosed, he obtained an humanoid form, even if his skin is more chitin plate than skin, and his lovely lady is somewhat humanoid too, even if she has more branches than strictly necessary But what come out of the dark is not humanoid. It's a deer. He is horrified both by what happened (technically this... creature could be called his child) and because that somewhat validate the rumour of a Deer Shade Lord living somewhere down here, and have enough influence to force the vessels to adopt a form closer to their own. But at the same time, it can only mean there is indeed lot of void in the Vessels so yeah..? Most of the little ones that comes out of the Abyss show emotions, trying to get petted or seeking comfort from him so he breaks their necks and send them stumbling back into the pit, until one comes that doesn't show any reaction. Not when he inspect it, not even when he pets it, so he says Yeah! Empty Vessel Plan worked! And we all know how it goes from here.

PK trains his pure vessel, discovers than it fed off light so gives it a lot of his own light to eat and it grows MASSIVE (Hollow is much bigger than what a normal adult deer vessel is supposed to be) even use it as a mount the rare times he travels in his kingdom.

Herrah, Lurien and Monomon agree to become Dreamer, with Herrah asking to have a child with him in compensation (because if Spirits can't reproduce the human way between themselves, they can have children with humans, even if hybrids were heavily frowned upon) and thus Hornet is born!

And that’s all I have for now! Don’t hesitate to ask questions, it helps devellop the world even more!!

[lost-kinn]

on page 156 of the fangamer wanderer’s journal, ellina the wanderer writes that she can see “mysterious, colourless spheres” in the abyss, “most of them appear[ing] to have been broken open from the inside with tremendous force.” she goes on to ask “what sort of creature lays eggs like these?” to answer her question, these colourless eggs are pretty pointedly juxtaposed with the “pale, broken egg” that the pale king himself was implied to have been reborn from (111). it’s lovely that “pale” and “colourless” are almost-the-same-but-not-quite, with pale implying an off-white sheen and colourless implying a literal lack of color (reference to void, an absence of something), this lack being similar to pale but not the same as pale. ultimately, this word choice nicely ties together the implication that the vessels are the pale king’s biological offspring; the pale king was born from an egg, and so were his children. therefore, wyrms are confirmed to reproduce and reincarnate themselves through the usage of eggs; on the other hand the white lady is implied to be a pollinating fungus/pollinating rooted plant (hence the bindings to prevent pollination). as such, the pale king is the person in this couple who appears to lay any eggs. in this essay i have demonstrated that the pale king gets pegged.