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sincerely-sofie · 5 months

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Thinking about the Hollow Knight time-travel fix-it fic I talked about in these tags and losing my mind. I dug through the old snippets I have for the AU and I’m so sorry but I need to yeet them into the great void of the interwebs so I don’t explode. Context indented below, but feel free to skip it and just read the snippets.

During the events of the Embrace the Void ending, Ghost has become the next Lord of Shades (a sort of inherited godhood in this fic). After defeating the Radiance she immediately sets to work remaking history, and after some finagling is able to erase the Radiance from existence past a certain point in the timeline. Once she's done so, she enters the timeline and starts manually fixing everything she couldn't correct by abruptly retconning an entire goddess— and this means starting by rescuing the surviving vessels who are still trapped in the Abyss.

TPK brings up the Hollow Knight as his daughter after the Radiance disappeared and he came to the worrying realization that the mindless weapon he'd been raising was actually, for all intents and purposes, a rather normal kid. He has issues with his past but shunts the guilt to the background so he can function as a king and father. But once Ghost enters the new timeline, he starts having visions of there being other vessels who survived in the Abyss— and he starts going on a wild goose chase through all of Hallownest looking for his kids as he's forced to face the impact of the Abyss head-on.

(Ghost searches for survivors after giving herself a mild concussion:)

The first thing Ghost did upon entering the new world was materialize into the Abyss and immediately knock herself out by banging her head on an overhang. She definitely misjudged the size of this form.

She woke with a headache, one of her horns snapped off and lying at her feet, and surrounded by too-tiny, too-empty shells.

She wanted to be sick.

But she was on a mission.

Ghost took in a deep breath and called out.

Silence was what met her at first, then a single, quiet cheep.

Ghost called back with a coaxing chirp.

A head popped up over a large mound of corpses. Just one horn on this one— just one nubby little horn that sat over their brow. Ghost would have thought they were cute if they didn’t look so horrified. She reached out to them, cooing softly, and their fear gave way to interest. They rushed over and hopped onto her back so they could scramble onto her head and pat near where her horn snapped off.

“Did you fall?” They asked through the Void, the question twisted with worry, and she could hear in their voice that they were a little boy.

“No, I didn’t fall. Just hit my head.”

“Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine.” She tilted her head forward to slide the sibling into her outstretched palm. A brother. She figured there must have been at least some boys among the hatchlings in the Abyss, but the only other vessel she knew was Holly. She had a little brother. The thought made her weirdly dizzy. “Where are the others?”

“Eating.”

Ghost froze. There was nothing down here but stone, Void, and corpses, and only one of those was remotely edible. She fought down the terrible memories that crawled up— she remembered the crunch of empty chitin in her own jaws, how it scraped her throat and did nothing to fill her belly— and she reached into her Void to find the supplies she’d been given by Mato before she ascended the Pantheon. Her claws closed around the bundle, and she didn’t even wait to see if they were still good before calling out a sharp, commanding chirp. Come, there’s food here.

The number of little vessels that peered over the mounds of carapace and raced over to her was overwhelming— There were eleven. Eleven survivors, including the one on her shoulder. She didn’t come too late after all. But then she saw what they were all gnawing on and fought the urge to be sick all over again.

“Don’t eat those,” she snapped, and several vessels looked down at the pieces of carapace clutched in their hands, confused. “They’re bad. Come here. I have something better.”

She undid the tie holding the bundle of preserves closed and set it on the ground in front of the other vessels, mentally thanking Mato for his parting gift. There were berries, crawlid jerky, bread, roots and mushrooms and vegetables she didn’t have the energy to name. The vessels eyed the food warily.

“It’s… bright?” One ventured.

“Colorful.”

“Smells weird,” another said.

“Where did you find it?” Asked the one with the single horn.

“Outside. Eat, eat.”

(Ghost is tunneling out of the Abyss with the surviving vessels:)

Ghost carved another stretch of path in the rock wall and swept the rubble out and away, over and over again, hoping she knew what direction she was digging. The vessels on her back questioned her relentlessly while she worked.

“What happened to your thingy?” Asked one, gesturing to her two curled-down horns.

“Horn,” Ghost corrected, and focused less on answering her question and more on ensuring that none of the vessels were swept away with the rubble or slipped from their places on her back while she dug upward.

“She hit her head,” said the one-horned vessel.

“And it broke?” The curled-down horns vessel was aghast. “I didn’t know that could happen! Did it hurt?”

“I was alright.”

“But your thi— your horn!”

“It’s okay. I brought it with me, see? We can find a cloak to tie it back on.”

“But she said there weren’t any old shells outside,” said a bored-sounding vessel with horns that stuck out rather than up or down. “How are we supposed to find a way to tie it?”

While the vessels debated how to reattach her horn, which the one-horned vessel apparently brought with him without her realizing, Ghost made a mental note to check all of their hands when she had the chance. She was so concerned with getting them to drop their siblings' carapace they were gnawing on that she hadn’t looked twice at the wicked-sharp horn in that vessel’s eager grasp. She needed to confiscate it.

But when she broke through the other side of the stone wall and stepped out into Greenpath, only to be met by the Hunter looming with claws at the ready, she knew she had bigger things to worry about.

(The Pale King is able to track down and reunite with the vessels while Ghost is away hunting... at least at first:)

The vessels all crept forward in their own time, until he was able to hand them the rest of the loaf to pick at to their content. He counted them— eleven in total, ranging in height from his knee to his waist. Eleven survivors. Eleven children to take home and ensure they’d recover from their early years.

Oran felt a small weight lift from his chest.

And then he heard a blood-chilling shriek, shot to place himself between the sound and the children, and he was slammed into the cavern wall with a resounding crack.

Oran was not an idiot. He heard that shriek start as a growl that sounded like a blade dragging across ice, like an echo of the language of wyrms, and he knew it meant get away. He was not an idiot. But by the gods was he stupid sometimes.

He snapped to his feet, ready to fight a vengefly king and lead it away from where his children stood on unsteady legs, hungry and weak— easy pickings. His stomach dropped when he saw not an apex predator, but a bug with a pitch black shell rushing towards them. A lance of light sprung into his hands without a thought, but he couldn’t move fast enough, it had already closed the distance—

—And looped its wyrm-like tail in careful coils around the children, then roared at him in a primal rumble he understood on instinct: If you draw any closer to my young, I’ll kill you.

A god— no, a goddess. A goddess with a shell like midnight, eyes like suns, claws like scythes, horns like castle spires. And she was hunched low to the ground, terrified, trembling as she bared her teeth at him. The Lord of Shades, reborn.

(Ghost threatens the Pale King for a good few paragraphs when he thanks her for protecting the vessels before he could rescue them.)

A pale-shelled head popped up from over the coils, shortly followed by all of its fellows. One small vessel chirped— chirped— at the goddess, who simply rumbled tightly and nudged them back down with her cheek, keeping her eyes on Oran. For every wide-eyed vessel that she hid away, two popped back up, intent to watch what was happening outside their guardian’s coils. It was difficult to reconcile the fact that his life was being threatened by the newly reborn Lord of Shades with the sight of his children peering up at him excitedly from where they perched in her coils. Adorable, the father within him remarked when one of them pointed and waved. Horrifying, the survivor within him said when the Lord of Shades fixed a vicious glare upon him as he reached out to them.

The one-horned vessel raised the loaf of bread he gave them and prodded the Lord’s cheek with it. She bared her teeth at Oran, eyes still trained on him, until the vessel tapped her top-most coil and trilled irritably at her. She pouted at them, no longer wearing the face of a feral beast ready to rip him limb from limb, but rather an exhausted elder sibling being pestered by their junior. “What?”

The one-horned vessel held the loaf of bread over their head excitedly.

“Where did y—?” She glanced at Oran narrowly. “And it didn’t make you sick?”

The vessel shook their head, patting her coil happily. They pointed to Oran and bounced up and down, and the bewilderment in her face deepened.

He took the opportunity to speak. “They’re starving. I brought them food. Please, I intend to take them home to my palace to be cared for. I don’t know why you’ve decided that they belong to you—” She bristled, growling at him once more. “— but it’s clear that they recognize me as their kin. They deserve to be with their family. Be reasonable.”

She paused, expression crossed with grief, and sat back on her haunches while relaxing the coils of her tail. The vessels clambered out and gathered around her legs to chirrup gently at her. She stooped down to sweep them into her arms and stand at her full height, towering over Oran as she spoke to them. “Are you sure?” She asked the larger one as they shrugged and moved to perch on her shoulder. “He’s not… he isn’t…” One nudged her jaw with their brow, and she returned the gesture of affection. “No,” she sighed. “No. I don’t like him. He hurt me. He hurt us.”

One small vessel hopped down from her arms and cautiously stepped toward Oran, holding something that didn’t quite fit under their cloak. They held it out, revealing a long, jagged, midnight-colored horn, snapped off near the base— and pointed to the goddess, posture hesitant in its silent question. He furrowed his brow. The tinier vessel pointed again, more insistently this time. It was then that Oran noticed the goddess, who still stood speaking to the vessels perched atop her, was missing a horn on the left side of her head. The dots connected.

He accepted the horn from the vessel, then turned to the goddess. “I am able to repair your horn, if you’d like.”

She gaped at him, silent for a moment. “You… really?”

Motioning for her to kneel, he wove Soul around his fingers in a spell of mending. She shrugged the vessels off and slowly bowed her head into reach. He held the broken-off horn in place with one hand and traced the break with the fingertips of the other, murmuring the incantation to fuse it together under his breath. The carapace snapped back into place, and the goddess flinched away.

"That was a seal of binding," she said.

He quirked a brow. "I suppose one could describe it as such."

Baring her fangs, she hissed, "If you ever work those spells near any of us, I'll swallow you whole."

(Ghost accidentally reveals that she is related to the Pale King during her explanation of how she stitched together time in a way that would mend the damage he did. The Pale King awkwardly changes the subject.)

The vessels finished their game and stood up to cluster around the god’s legs, tugging on her cloak and asking to be picked up.

“What are their names?” He found himself asking. If what she said were true, perhaps the goddess had picked up his own tendency to dodge questions.

She knelt down to let the vessels climb onto her back and shoulders, perch between her horns and crawl into her many arms. When she stood, her expression was dark. “They have none.”

“And yours?”

The goddess leveled him with an icy glare. “I am the Forsaken, Failure, Refuse and Regret, Master of Dreams, She Who Swallowed the Sun, Lord of Shades, God of Gods. I knew no name until the Daughter of the Beast branded me with one. I am the monument to my sire’s sins. I am the Ghost of Hallownest.”

Oran buried the dread that bubbled up at that damnation of a name and waved over a servant to ready the royal tram.

A child named after the things he’d done in another life. Things he would have done in this life, had she not swallowed the sun. A child who had slain his greatest enemy, and would not hesitate to cut him down as well should he prove himself anything other than tolerable.

He had so much to explain to his Root when he returned.

(Ghost + TPK + the vessels travel to the White Palace and meet the White Lady, who is confused by TPK introducing Ghost as Hollow's twin)

The White Lady’s brow furrowed. She idly rubbed the back of her knuckles over the branching-horns vessel’s cheek as she spoke. “Dear one, Calla’s not even a quarter of this bug’s size, nor do they look remotely alike. Forgive me my skepticism.”

Ghost looked down at herself. It hadn’t occurred to her how different she looked now— she’d actually been enjoying her new height and shell. But maybe…

Ghost shrugged the vessels perched on her back onto the ground. The King and Lady snapped to look at her when she abruptly burst into Void, leaving scattered pieces of carapace in her wake, only to reform as her old self. It hurt, being in this ill-fitting shell again, but she stayed in it long enough for recognition to dawn on both of their faces, then snapped her new shell’s pieces back into place over her Void.

“Oh, stars,” the Lady gasped. “She looks just like she said.”

The King had gone paler than normal, if that were possible, and stood in silence, shaking.

“Dear Life, Calla needs to hear this. My Wyrm, you’ve sent for her, haven’t you?”

“Not… yet?” He choked out, remarkably undignified.

“Go, then, Oran, she deserves to know.” She watched him until he staggered out of the chamber, nodding once he left. And then those sapphire eyes were back on Ghost. “Is something the matter, child?”

“You… have arms,” she blurted out, recalling the White Lady’s bindings in the old world.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“You can see us? And— and the room?”

“I’m not blind, little one. And I’d be rather disappointed if I were. I’m beyond relieved to see your faces.”

“And you know I’m impure?”

The Lady’s eyes widened, brows drawing up in concern, lips pressed into a thin line. “Oh, child,” she breathed. She reached out to Ghost, cupping the side of her mask with a gentle hand. “Child, you’re no less pure than I am.”

(The White Lady didn’t care much for Ghost’s presence beyond reminding her of the King. Ghost had gone through so much, traveled so far, fought so hard to be nothing like him, and the White Lady mistook her for her father the second that she entered the dusty chamber. The White Lady looked down on the Grimmchild with open disdain, told him that the very earth rejected him with good reason, and told Ghost to destroy the charm that gave him life while she still could. The White Lady didn’t see Ghost, she saw a vessel, and she told her to cut down Hollow and take the failure’s place.)

Yeah. Yeah, that was a wonderful compliment. Ghost took the branching-horned vessel out of her arms a little too snappishly to be subtle, and the vessel voiced his protests through the Void. Ghost ignored them. “Where will we be staying?”

“There’s a guest chamber in my and my Wyrm’s wing of the Palace. Though we’ll have to build more rooms so each of you have your own in the future, I’m afraid.”

“We’d prefer to stay together,” Ghost scoffed. Was it really not obvious with how the other vessels clung to her and each other?

The White Lady led them to a chamber that had obviously been tidied recently— everything inside glittering with cleanliness— and Ghost slammed the door in the Lady’s face.

(TPK ruminates on Hollow describing a sibling making the climb to reach him alongside her:)

Oran took the long elevator ride up the Watcher’s Spire in stride. He was handling this with inexplicable grace and majesty. And by that, he meant he was pacing circles in the narrow space and fighting off a panic attack.

Calla had spoken of a twin when she was younger and still learning to sign. It was difficult to understand what she was attempting to get across with such frantic, disjointed signs and spotty grammar, and in the years following she seemed to have either forgotten about the issue or given up on trying to explain it.

(But Oran wouldn’t�� couldn’t— forget. Not the way the grub phrased it. “Calla-Two stop climb. Down. Big crunch. Quiet.” Confusing as it was, it settled like ice in his stomach. Something horrible had happened. He knew it. He found Calla drawing the next week, several pages of vessel-shaped blobs of colors scattered across the floor, and the room spun around him when he spotted a page showing a vessel very much like Calla clinging to the lip of the final overhang, Calla standing above them, and Oran himself off to the side. He was there when it happened. There was a vessel that nearly finished the climb with Calla, that he could have taken home, and he hadn’t noticed.

(And now that vessel had returned, and she hated him. Poetic justice, he supposed.)

The elevator stopped. He stepped into the Watcher’s office.

(The vessels explore the room they're staying in at the White Palace:)

The vessels took one look at the massive, fluffy bed in the guest chamber and decided they didn’t like it. The chorus of sleepy confusion that tumbled through the Void was as hilarious as it was exhausting.

“Why is it squishy?”

“It feels weird.”

“Why does it smell like that?”

“What’s it for?”

“I’m tired.”

“Can we go to the Abyss? I wanna sleep.”

“We are not going to the Abyss.”

“But I’m tired!”

“Me too.”

After watching her siblings toss and turn in a struggle for comfort, Ghost tore off the sheets and untucked the downy comforter and pillows so she could stuff them under the bed. When the comforter in particular brushed up against the weary group of vessels, she could hear them gasp in awe at how nice it felt. They chirped excitedly as they tangled themselves up in the blanket, squishing it in their hands as they marveled at how something this soft could exist. And then one of them touched the silk sheets and they all lost every last one of their collective marbles.

“It’s too bright in here.” Ah. That was a fair point. Even with the curtains drawn and the lights out, the Palace managed to be significantly lighter than the Abyss. She blamed it on everything being white. The vessels wandered the room for a while longer before deciding that the only logical place to sleep was on the floor beneath the bed itself.

(Ghost saves Tiso from an unexpected strike, and Tiso has no filter, much to Quirrel's exasperation:)

Ghost lowered her outstretched arm, waiting until the vengefly skewered on her claws stopped squirming to uncurl herself from around a stunned Tiso.

He looked from the vengefly, to Ghost, to the arm still wrapped around his middle, and back again. “Not gonna lie, that was pretty hot.”

“Tiso!” Came Quirrel’s exasperated shriek.

(Ghost stumbles across Hollow and TPK while walking around the White Palace, and Ghost has some emotions about the sudden reunion with Hollow and a revelation about TPK's character:)

The King halted abruptly when Ghost rounded a corner and nearly bowled him over, and she was so busy glaring at him that she hadn’t noticed the Hollow Knight in his shadow.

There she was.

Hollow— no, Calla. She was alive, and safe, and she had paint and charcoal smeared on her mask. Ghost hunched in on herself to be closer to her sister’s height (how weird it was, to be the tall one all of a sudden) and reached out shakily.

Then the Pale King stepped between them, and she was tempted to take off his head for that, until she saw his face. His jaw was set, and he tilted his head in such a way that showed… something. She couldn’t figure out what he was trying to communicate. But then a small hand took hold of his, and it became clear.

Calla had tucked herself behind him, peering out from his side, tightly gripping his hand, obviously frightened.

Ghost had scared her.

Ghost was scaring her.

She decided at that moment that she hated being the tall one.

She dropped into a shadow on the wall, mind alight with shame and anger at herself, shaking.

The Pale King said something to Calla. She nodded and left down the corridor on her own, a little too quickly to be at ease with her surroundings. And then the King turned to the shadow Ghost had tucked herself into. Apparently she wasn’t being as subtle as she thought with her shadow-travel if he knew exactly where she was then.

“I need some time to break the news,” he murmured. “She has a lot on her mind at the moment. I don’t want to overwhelm her.”

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t.”

“If you wouldn’t show your smaller form, I believe it would be easier on…”

“It hurts to stuff myself back in there anyway.”

“Thank you.”

Silence.

“Is that all, or—?”

“You won’t show her that vision,” he said, voice suddenly sharp and clear and indisputable. Ghost hadn’t ever heard him speak as a king before, never heard him announce decrees and demands, but she could see him doing so in that tone.

“That vision,” she echoed.

“The one that I cannot sponge from my mind no matter how I try. The one that has haunted every last one of my waking hours. You will never show it to her, you will never discuss it with her, you will never so much as allude to it around her. If you feel so inclined to be cruel enough to touch on what happened in that gods-forsaken moment, you will choose me as your victim. Not her, nor her mother, nor the other children.”

“It affected you,” Ghost observed.

His glare was icy. “And how did you expect I would react, if not by being affected?”

“To shrug it off. To brush it aside. To ignore it.”

“She’s my daughter. My flesh and blood, pride and joy, and you thought I would ignore seeing her do that?”

Ghost let the light of her eyes shine through the shadow. “Forgive me, I should have spoken more clearly— I expected you to look me in the face and say there was no cost too great.”

He fell silent.

“I wouldn’t dream of doing what you described. I swallowed the sun, yes, but I didn’t inherit her cruelty, Pale King. I stitched this world together so my sister could be happy. Void swallow me whole if I’m the one to ruin that.”

He sighed, long and heavy, and strode away. Ghost slipped into his shadow as he passed.

“… I scared her.”

“You did.”

“I didn’t want to.”

He didn’t reply.

“If I can’t use my old shell, how am I supposed to not scare her?”

“Don’t approach her.”

“She’s my twin.” Ghost barely kept from wailing indignantly. “I can’t just sit here and… The last time I saw her, she was barely clinging to life, and not willingly. I want to talk to her!”

He paused at that. “She survived the…” He swallowed dryly. “The attempt?”

“We weren’t going to let her die before she ever had the chance to live. I channeled all the Soul in the area into healing her, and Hornet—”

“Hornet?”

“You might know her as the Gendered Child, depending how far along we are in this world.”

“No. Nettie— Hornet was with you when that happened?”

Oh. His voice was tighter than she realized. The clipped element of his tone wasn’t anger. It was fear.

Ghost squirmed. The shadows felt claustrophobic all of a sudden. “… She didn’t stay away. She said she would,” Ghost murmured. “She didn’t want to stand by like she did when her mother…”

The Pale King took a sharp left as he walked, locked himself in an empty council room, and sobbed.

Ghost began to understand, seeing his glow brighten and brighten until the whole room was nothing but white light as he choked on his tears, that this wasn’t her sire. He was a sire, yes, but also a father. One who wept at the thought of his children suffering and being abandoned, let alone dying or witnessing each other’s deaths. He was a sire so unlike hers. She’d been placing her grudges and burdens onto someone who didn’t deserve it.

(And that is why she was so like him. So like him that when she visited her mother that’s all she saw. So like him that his enemy thought her a disguise he’d taken on. So like him that she was following his every step.)

Ghost left him to weep.

(Ghost gets into a scuffle with the Nightmare King and wakes up with the same injuries she gained during her dream:)

Promptly expelled from the Nightmare Realm, Ghost jerked awake on the floor under a massive bed and curled around her little siblings as they snored softly. She reluctantly rose and walked the castle grounds, staring at the gashes, gouges, and burns running all the way up her arm. She’d have to explain this to someone at some point. How would she phrase it? Would she just bluntly state that her tendency to pick fights had risen to threatening gods now? Yeah, that wouldn’t send anyone panicking.

She was so numb with exhaustion that she didn’t notice the Pale King in the corridor across from her. They locked eyes. Neither moved until he glanced down at the arm she was favoring. He wordlessly reached out a hand in offering.

Silence.

She drew over to him and knelt closer to his height, then placed her arm in his reach. His brow knit together in worry as he traced his fingers over the wounds, never touching, just hovering over them. He reached for another pair of arms, and it was then that Ghost realized the palms of this pair were badly burned from when she strangled Nightmare. She hadn’t even noticed.

He spun Soul around his hand in a luminescent glove. The Pale King didn’t lift his head all the way to ask if he could help, simply glanced up warily. Questioningly. Ghost nodded.

He healed the wounds in silence. It was obvious what had inflicted them, and he couldn’t erase scars made by a god. They both knew that. But it was painfully clear that he was trying. He passed over the mended burns several times, and Ghost recognized the words he mouthed as a spell to change something’s colors. Nothing returned the singed-white claw marks in her shell to their original black. He tried so many times, but the spell bounced off the scars uselessly with each attempt. Finally, long after Ghost had accepted his efforts were futile, he tucked his arms back into his robes, shaking his head slowly, mouthparts working in frustration.

Ghost was the one to walk away. She could feel the King's eyes on her until she passed the corner, and it was only then that she heard him turning away.

(TPK and Ghost have a chat, and Sofie has a favorite trope that is totally not used here at all:)

“How old are you?” The Pale King asked.

That gave Ghost pause. “Strange thing to ask a god, don’t you think?”

“Perhaps if the god in question had ascended more than a few months ago, but not in this situation, no.” He looked her up and down. “This form looks significantly older than you behave, and it’s also the form every Lord of Shades would take while walking among mortals. It’s not clear what age you truly are.”

Ghost had to consider that. “I must be an adult by now. As for numbered years, though, I don’t know.”

“You don’t—? What do you mean?”

“Hallownest was in stasis when I entered it. There was no way to mark the passage of time, and it seemed like most things were… blurry. They could age, but not correctly. Some didn't age at all. And before I set foot in the kingdom, I was in the Wastes outside it. That lends itself even less to a good estimate of how old I am”

“If you had a caretaker, I’m certain they would have an estimate.”

“I was on my own until halfway through Hallownest.”

“Gods,” he hissed under his breath. “What world did you live in where a child was left to fend for themself and fight wars on their parents’ behalf?”

“Same world where a child cut down every last member of the Pantheons.” She gave him a narrow look. “I wasn’t an ordinary grub—”

“No, because you never had the chance to be one. I’ve heard of children being forced to mature too soon, but to ascend to godhood because of the pressure heaped on you…”

“I got the job done.”

“And what did you pay for it?”

“My life for the kingdom. It wasn’t very much.”

“I’d think that’s far too great a cost to pay from any child’s purse, even one capable of swallowing the sun.”

She froze.

“You were a child,” he murmured, “no matter how old that stasis made you. You were meant to laugh and play, and to be swaddled and doted on— not to kill a primeval goddess simply so others could have that basic right you’d been deprived of.”

#guys i SWEAR i'm not becoming an exclusively Hollow Knight-centric blog but the brain worms are looping the Mantis Lords Theme 24/7 rn #hollow knight #hk #hollow knight fanfic #hollow knight fic #hk fanfic #hk fic #stuff by sofie

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