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Chapter Text

And so, it was done.

Of all the ends she might have anticipated, never had she foreseen herself taking active part to bring it about. Never had she thought there would be an end to fight for, not a true one. Never had Hornet thought that she would regret that the Infection was done away with, if only for the cost it exacted as it went.

And yet here she lay, covered horn-tips to claws in that coldest substance, dipping icy blades into the unhealed cuts and memories of brutal cracks littering her shell and drawing out her lifeblood like pus from a wound, like it sought to replace her hemolymph and soul with itself instead.

Yet if it hurt, Hornet couldn’t tell. It was far too cold for that, and far too insistent, far too close to living, like a long-dead corpse shifting in the dark, slowly and intentionally curling its hands into claws and settling its limbs into quietude. It was curling into her, killing her by degrees of warmth lost to its barbed, searching chill, but Hornet found herself unable to move.

Which was curious, she thought slowly, drawing the sentence out long enough to taste every unsaid syllable behind her cold-tensed chelicerae. For she wasn’t restrained at all, and she still lived. Hornet had never considered that she might not want to move, that there might be a dark so deep she could look into it and never surface.

But no, that wasn’t quite right. Hornet wanted very much to stand up and throw herself back into the fight, that was not the issue.

There was something important that she was missing, lying still first because she’d struck the ground hard enough for all sound to turn to a barely-audible hiss where the roar of battle had before run skittering nail-edges over her soul and quickened her heart, and then because that which she had fallen into had consumed her. Hornet had something affixed to her very soul, some terrible, worthwhile purpose that had become all that she cared for. It had had time to grow as part of her, or rather, to cut into her like wire wrapped around a root as it swells with age, biting deep until it couldn’t be cut without making her bleed alongside it.

Something she’d fought for. Something she’d killed for.

But what was it, again?

That was what she could not care for, here in the dark. She was making an awful mistake, laying here, and yet her regrets opened like a yawning glacier moulin, that if only she would allow the void to sap the last of her life would welcome her to its depths and its cold and its numbing pain.

And would she deserve any better? She’d felt the void’s touch before, after all. Stolen it with her needle and her duty, felt it drip over her hands and leave them numb with aching joints that took hours to warm again, even in the heat and humidity of Greenpath, stained just that little bit darker, that the black of her chitin would not reflect back the light until the chill lifted.

And the void remembered as she lay submerged in it, enclosing her on all sides such that even if Hornet’s mask hadn’t throbbed with the force she’d hit the ground with, matching time with her slowing heartbeat, she would not have been able to tell where to push herself away from, which way to recoil that wouldn’t press her to the void-saturated stone she could no longer feel. It recalled all she’d done to it, or maybe it could only feel her own bone-deep memory as it began to worm icy tendrils into her chest where the regret and hatred for all the atrocities she’d ever committed were shoved away, condensed and heavy and just as icy, lying somewhere between her lungs.

Her duty was no more, the void allowed her to know. All that was left was the dark, and the quiet, and the time that Hornet would have to remember each and every dark little sibling that had fallen at her hand. To look into pleading or desperate or crying eyes and feel what she’d never allowed herself to; remorse.

Yes, Hornet thought tediously against the tide. It would be a kindness to succumb to the call of the void now, wouldn’t it? Before she could outlive her purpose and find herself newly alone in an empty world. Before she had to face the last two siblings’ broken masks, their fallen nails should the little Ghost succeed, those last two who had survived her relentless, thorough protection by absence or by their own weighty duty.

It would be far kinder, and she deserved less than to sleep in the chilling dark. But Hornet had not deserved to survive Hallownest, or to live while her mother slept, or walk free while her sibling stayed caught in the Black Egg and pinned beneath the force of the resentful Light, and if death at last was a kindness then it was one she’d fought against so long that it was a punishment in itself, if only out of personal, secret spite of her own.

Hornet closed her eyes.

The void reached within her and her heart flickered, too tired to beat.

And then it stopped, just short of her life. Its eyes, many and none, turned away from her and the void was only cold, not consuming and welcoming and sympathetic but only jarringly watchful all at once. With many silences it looked to something, and then its embrace was no longer hers.

It dripped away quicker than water, thinner than air, and in a slow heartbeat Hornet was left alone to her concussion.

Her heart beat. Once, then again. Her head swam and though her eyes were still closed, Hornet felt a trickle of warmth return to her, if only seeming so by the sudden absence of cold.

When the warmth spread to her stilled lungs she jerked, spasming as her chest recalled that it was starved of air. Hornet hauled in a great heaving breath that tore at her throat and rattled hoarsely as she forced it out to replace it with a second, and the air that she’d have sworn was somehow as cold as the rushing wind carving through Dirtmouth above felt like fire, now.

The second breath came out as an echoing, horrified half-sob, more low noise than cry as her voice struggled to recall how to function, as her mind sputtered and fought to pull itself free of that hazy peace that the moment she regained even a spark of soul the void did not immediately sap felt more and more like a trap, snapped shut a hair’s breadth from her mask. All the terrible regrets she had denied, all dredged up and brought to freeze her so thoroughly they were all she could see, began to fade with the cold, as memories do.

She’d never wholly forgotten them, though, and it was only the spasming of her chest that let her force them away again. Hornet’s lungs burned like they were dusted in needle-shards of bitter ice, a vengeful flare she only felt when contrasted with the tepid air, and she sucked in a third breath for a split instant before coughing with all her might.

It came out wetter than she’d expected, sparking alarm in her foggy thoughts, the ringing in her head stilling enough that she could hear the uneven scrape as she got her hands under herself and enough space between her face and the ground, as dry as ever she’d seen it, that Hornet could lurch with each ragged hacking cough until something that numbed her throat and raised blinking stars behind her eyes dripped from her mouth.

It was void, and it was cold enough that she couldn’t feel her face until the last drop soundlessly impacted the grey-dusted, cracked stone she stared at. When her eyes had opened, she couldn’t have said, but the deadly chill was creeping out of her, down the shaking arms and unfeeling hands she could see but not clearly feel clenched their claws deep into the branching cracks, the unmistakable clean furrows of a nail’s deflected edge carved deep enough that she could hook half her hand into its angled rut in the floor, cool but not frigid against her palm.

Hornet crouched there on hands and knees, breathing heavily and deeply and feeling in every inch how near she had come to succumbing, to allowing herself to succumb, before some awareness twitched at her, some nagging thought she could hardly parse.

But Hornet had not lived in Hallownest as long as she had only to ignore the instincts that survival had won her. Yet this was an awareness deeper than that; a cognizance of absence as opposed to warning. In Deepnest, if all was truly quiet, then there was very good reason for it to be.

Though she had not thought of that lesson in a long time.

Hornet forced herself to stand with shaking legs, as weak as if she’d run the span of Hallownest without rest or food. And now, as the ringing she heard was replaced with only a pounding, deep-seated headache, Hornet felt trickling fury to realize that she’d been huddled gasping for breath on the floor for long enough to be vulnerable to any fool with a nail that might have passed by the open Egg.

The nothing of void was still fresh in her mind, so she gave a hoarse, irritated sigh just to feel herself warmed by the anger (not regret, not remorse, something useful in their place), holding it close to fuel her faltering limbs as she raised her aching head to look for her needle.

It shouldn’t have fallen so far at all; the Black Egg was only so large. And last she’d seen it, the orange-dripping point had been very securely wedged into the deep crack spanning the-

Hornet stilled with the thought even as her eyes fell upon the Hollow Knight’s remains.

Yes, her needle was exactly where she’d left it.

And how cruel an end, Hornet thought as her balance shifted, the scrape of her claws on the floor uncertain as she found it again. For the Vessel to find their death not at the hands of the god they had fought for long enough that the world they sought to protect crumbled to ash and empty bodies around them, but with the sibling who had fought right alongside them for just as long.

For it had to have been her doing, Hornet thought as she steadied herself and forced back the shakiness and some awful weakness that welled in her stinging throat like blood might, threatening now that she was at her feeblest to overwhelm and betray her. For the Hollow Knight’s mask was shattered to pieces, with her needle fallen among them like it had been the fulcrum to pry the shards apart at last.

How had it felt, Hornet suddenly tried to recall, to have her needle fixed between the halves of their skull? How deeply had she driven it, in those last moments her sibling had lived? Had it been only the rush and narrow focus of combat, burning bright in her veins like life itself, or had she felt the wrongness inherent in their mask’s gritted edges against her blade’s jolting up her tensed arms, even then?

Always, always Hornet had regretted the part she had to play, but it was different this time. Had she thought often enough of the Hollow Knight, the only constant that she knew at her core remained fighting as hard as she? And when had those thoughts, that comfort she took in that she was not the only one to resist, turned to camaraderie? When had she begun to think of them as a friend again, if only in action and never in word?

She’d loved her sibling once, perhaps, but that had been the misperception of a child. How ironic that she’d had it right the first time.

She wanted to cry, and rage, and though she’d never deluded herself to think that any other outcome than this might ever have come to pass, Hornet wanted to demand that it had. And she found she could not do any of those things.

It all caught in her throat, and even as she knew now, with the headache receded to a slow, throbbing pound out of sync with her fast heartbeat, that there wouldn’t be anyone brave enough to venture here of all places, no one left curious enough to seek the source of the terrible screams and no one foolish enough to try the same, that she was utterly alone (more so now than ever, perhaps), Hornet could not cry.

For once in the entire span of her life she had both the cause and the privacy and, truly, nowhere else to be just yet, no time precious enough anymore to be considered wasted, and yet Hornet could only stand in silence and stare down at the Hollow Knight’s massive mask in pieces before her, somehow emptier in death like the splinters of an old carapace, as her chest felt empty in a way not at all like void, or perhaps far too close to it. Even as she kept expecting it to move, because it wasn’t right that they struggle so long and be broken for it (when she still survived), waiting for the Hollow Knight she hadn’t seen before an hour ago (or two, or five, her head still throbbed and time was difficult to guess in the quiet) since she was very young (when they’d been her friend only for her misunderstanding, or so she’d once thought) to congeal back out of the damned void before her eyes.

Like the little Ghost.

Oh, no.

Hornet left her needle, at once violently on edge for the absence of its weight in her hand or at her back and yet unable to think of the crackle of dry, snapping bone that pulling it free would make, and the conflict making her rage tick higher all over again, rage that had no true cause and nowhere to go, for her purpose was gone and so was her enemy.

That was good, though. Anger was better than sorrow, and more suitable, even if it was a useless anger at best. If she was angry, she was not hollowed.

She found little Ghost only feet away, such that she might have turned her head and seen them if she hadn’t been forcing back the lingering chill and mourning the sibling she’d known longest.

They were still so small. Just like all the others, but they’d been stronger. Or had she only been desperate, to allow them the time to grow strong that she hadn’t given any before them?

It didn’t matter. She’d done what she’d had to do, and Ghost had done the same.

But their mask, too, Hornet saw and thought it nearly unreal that it was so still, though at least of their like (the small ones, with rounded faces and eyes and faltering little hands) she’d seen dozens similarly broken.

How cruel she’d been to them all. It had been necessary, every time, but oh, how cruel she’d been to allow this one to care for her. How foolish she’d been to care for them in turn.

And now she had all that she’d fought for, without any she’d cared to save. Hallownest lay quiet again, ready for those few stragglers and travelers to file in and claim their places within it. In time it would be a kingdom once more. Never would it be as it was, but it would live. Deeply scarred, haunted by its past and its culling, but it would live.

Hornet supposed she should be glad for this; she had inherited a kingdom. She had the beginnings of a people to protect, the remnants of those who had been and the sparks of those who had come anew, both. They would need her, for her guidance and her protection. She knew the many better than she knew the gods, and Hornet doubted the White Lady would deign to care if they all ate. She would not be purposeless, as the void had soothed her to sleep to say. It would be hard, thankless work, but that was the kind Hornet felt she did best at; she did not appreciate thanks.

And in a way, she was glad. She’d never wanted to have to fight her war of attrition so long. The future was the burden she bore now, the regrowth of a kingdom long burned to the quick, and Hornet could only grimly hope her cruelty had all been spent, that she might protect it still as it needed her now more than ever. That there wouldn’t be a need to be so anymore, ever again.

Hornet looked over Ghost’s opened little mask, and thought that, even so, the cost had been too great.

The room grew colder then, a deep and clawing chill that made her shiver against her will. She knew the coldest reaches of the Kingdom, and this did not feel like them. Hornet kept carefully still, irritation plucking at her such that her claws twitched to reach for her needle, still feet away and buried in the Hollow Knight’s skull. Of course, there would be something else. She’d nearly expected something, in the quiet that was left.

The chill deepened, and she felt herself watched. It felt just like the void had, though dampened by the air and distance. Pointed in a way, like a stare.

Hope sparked in Hornet’s chest, and she brutally ground it back down. The masks were ruined, shattered, and Ghost had never taken so long to find their way back. The memory, as obtrusive and unwanted as it was hurtful and stinging all the sharper in wake of the Void, caused her to give a wounded hiss and jerk her head the way that felt the coldest, like a heavy fog just this side of giving way to icy sleet had settled there. It was void, it had to be void, come to defile her cursed, broken siblings a final time.

Could that dreaded emptiness take her siblings’ masks with it, too, dissolve them like their bodies into so much formless black to drip down to the bottom of the world, where the Abyss pooled and lurked with its closed eyes turned ever upward? Could it take the only siblings’ masks she’d ever the chance to truly mourn, the ones she’d nearly fallen to care for in spite of it all?

That thought sparked cornered fury in the hope’s place, and Hornet had no need to fight down such a thing. She turned her back to Ghost’s corpse with bared claws and pitiless warnings in her mouth, and both fell unused.

It was void, yes, but not only void. It was a shade, a Vessel-remnant, and it was huge.

It towered before her, dark and grim, and looked down with white eyes and a fracture just as white crawling back over its nearly-formless head, pointed into two serrated horns arching toward the Black Egg’s high roof. It stood straight though it had no legs to speak of, unpained and steady, and as Hornet stood missing her needle before its chill and its watchful gaze, it never glanced away from her.

They stared at each other as Hornet didn’t dare breathe, recalling the despair and resignation the drawing of her soul from her body had inspired, feeling the quickened pounding of her heart in her chest like it was fearful of the same happening once more.

But Hornet was not an easily frightened bug.

So, she rallied. “What below the earth do you think to do here?” She barked up at it, her voice loud and demanding in the hushed, unnatural voidborn-silence.

The shade reeled back, sharp-edged tendrils silhouetted for only a moment against the grey stone where they flicked, disquieted, and Hornet pressed the advantage. “Gods-damned revenant, can I not mourn my dead? Must I strike you down too, to protect them from this final indignity, at least?”

She snarled, striding to the Hollow Knight’s cracked-open mask to pull her needle free, pretending she hadn’t heard the exact crunch of bone she’d anticipated under the growing rage, that even if she’d never had the option or ability to be kind to her siblings, never been able to protect them, too, and still fulfill her purpose, that another would dare to touch what remained before she had even the time to bury them, before she’d even the time to grieve.

The shade retreated, folding its mass into itself as she ranted at it, raising her needle to strike should it come closer. Dripping red with fury her vision might have been, but Hornet was not one to put her mother’s gift at jeopardy for naught, and if she was to fend off some long-dead specter then she would have it make the first blow.

That did not stop her from calling it every name she could first call to mind, though. All the helpless anger came to a boil within her, and that it was not true anger but, instead, fueled by something eerily similar to anguish did not escape her notice. She did not care for the difference.

“How dare you, you rot-gutted, stag-dung bastard!” Hornet screamed at it. “Did I kill you? Is that why you’ve come? I do not need you to tell me to regret! Is that what you want?” She demanded, leveling the point of her needle up at its face, between its widened eyes. “You won’t touch them! Piece of-“

“Sister!” Someone exclaimed very quietly from nowhere she could pin, with a voice like a thought and somehow still faintly admonishing.

“What?!” Hornet called back, exasperation harsh in her raised voice.

Then she drew up short, her anger doused as a flame beneath a heavy cloak. She froze where she stood, and knew there was no one else in the Black Egg but they two, and the corpses.

“What?” Hornet whispered.

“It is only me, there is no need to curse.” The shade spoke again. “I’ve not come to make you regret.”

Hornet hardened, brushing aside the shock, and raised her needle where its tip had fallen only an inch. “Then why are you here?”

The shade was silent then, tilting its angular head down some so that its blinding eyes were not trained on hers, as though in thought. She waited impatiently, stubbornly not feeling how her arm began to shake from the weight of her needle held aloft. Of course, the effects of the near-snuffing of one’s life by void could not be shaken off as easily as she’d hoped.

She would hold out. She knew herself well.

When the shade spoke again, it was quieter still. “I don’t know. I did not come to make you regret, but I can feel you do. It is strange. It is very strange, but I do not hurt, so I suppose it’s better.”

“That’s not a reason.” Hornet told it sternly.

The shade, bafflingly, looked up and made what felt like a short, fond chuckle then, soundless as it was. “No, I suppose it is not. I’ve missed you, though. If I’m not to know what draws me back from sleep, I may as well ascribe my own meaning. If you must have a cause, which I should have expected you would, let us say I am here for you.”

“For me?” Hornet picked out, refusing to consider what else the shade had said. It made too little sense, it sparked too many old memories that could not be related to the remnant before her. Threat was understandable, and more familiar than all else.

“I never spoke in life, not to you, but surely you remember me?” The shade asked, a note of despair in their distant-close voice.

“… Tell me your name.” Hornet commanded them.

“Would you believe that I hadn’t had one? I will give you my title, in its place. I was the Hollow Knight.” The Hollow Knight’s shade told her. “And however glad I am to speak to someone without madness or fear at last, I worry for what it means for you.”

Hornet wanted to disbelieve them, yet the crown of their horns was as striking as it was familiar.

She was willing to blame the lingering headache growing again behind her eyes as she strained not to shake, to stay ready and guarded before her killed, long-suffering sibling, for having not drawn the connection until that exact moment. Perhaps it truly was a concussion.

“You’re tired, sister, you are afraid I will do you harm when your arm gives out.” The Hollow Knight told her, their concern a hum nearly strong enough to rattle her fangs beneath their insubstantial voice. “How can I make you believe that I would not hurt you?”

“Don’t touch me!” Hornet hissed. “I do not fear. How can I trust anything you say, if you can know my thoughts more easily than I?”

The shade crept a little closer, then floated back the inches as Hornet swung her needle at them, the blow disgustingly uncoordinated and all she could manage. Her vision hazed and blinked at the edges, and Hornet shook her head sharply. It did not improve.

“I cannot do that, but you are of void just as I am.” The shade told her, their silent words given so quickly they blurred at the edges of their meanings. “There is a certain level of understanding between us. Can you not feel me?”

“It doesn’t matter if I can, you cannot be them. You’re just a,” Hornet cut herself off to regain her footing, annoyed as her center of balance listed. “Just an imprint. A vestige of what was, not my sibling. And I will cut you down if you dare raise a hand against us.” She promised, meaning every word even as her voice went vague and low.

“Sister-“ The shade insisted, spiking with panic as Hornet’s knees finally gave out, and then she knew no more.

Chapter Text

And so it came to be that Hornet awoke for the second time on the floor of the Black Egg Temple.

She felt vaguely ill, in the way one feels when they’ve seen through the worst of a sickness, and her head still ached, but all was quiet. Hornet lay still a moment, long practice making the transition from sleep a seamless one, intentionally kept her breathing slow, and listened carefully.

Around her came no sounds that might tell her where to brandish her needle, no draw of breath or scrape of chitin. There was only the whisper of wind somewhere very far off, and the drip of distant water tapping the slow hymn of delving caverns. The weighty silence of stone beneath her face, pressed against her cheek, through which no vibration warned. And no living thing, even the voiceless Vessels, could make no sound at all as they lived. Nothing living, save Hornet herself, remained within the Temple, and of that she was certain.

She was alone, then. Hornet breathed out slowly, turned her head to press her face to the cool stone and soothe the headache growing behind her eyes.

Perhaps what she’d seen had been an illusion, or some final goodbye the Void had found fit to grant her, one she had entirely spent on useless paranoia. The thought made her stomach turn, but there was no use regretting what was past. There would have been no use anyway but to give a voice to the sibling she’d guarded so long, for her own benefit. They had seemed pleased to see her, and that itself made their reality unlikely.

And she’d fallen before them. A frustrating setback, and especially so considering that she hadn’t taken a single direct blow from the battle. In all likelihood that was where the vision had drawn its roots; lingering void messing with her sight and her mind, weakening her.

But now she had to get up. Time had passed, and Hornet had no way of knowing how much until she left to see what had become of her kingdom.

The thought itched like a call; her kingdom needed her to know it as well as she knew herself. Her people would rely upon the same, if she were to help them in any meaningful way. The sooner she had seen the results of the Old Light’s defeat (for she had not dreamt in her unconsciousness, could smell no lingering scent of living sickly-sweet pestilence, and no heated orange burned at her closed eyes), the sooner she could determine where she was needed most. There might have been survivors freed by the illness’ end, or witless wanderers wondering what calmed the Infection’s rage, and both needed to be accounted for before...

Before whatever came next.

Hornet sat up stiffly, joints crackling like she’d been asleep on the hard stone floor for hours, and raised a hand to massage between her eyes where the headache was strongest with a muffled groan.

“Sister!” A voice called, thrumming with excitement, somehow lighter than she remembered while still that same not-sound.

Hornet’s first response, even as she froze with alarm, was a strange, familiar sort of exasperation that caught her nearly as off-guard as the call.

“Thank Wyrm, we were becoming worried. I’d forgotten how long it takes bugs to sleep.” And there was the same voice as before, indeterminably more tired than the other and drawn with breathless relief.

“I told you it takes hours, she just needed to rest.” The first chided, still far too pleased. “And she doesn’t like it when you wake her up.”

Hornet opened her eyes and saw two shades crouched over her, peering down with wide, white eyes like beaming lumaflies. The shade from before, the largest, loomed with narrowed eyes and long, stretched-out limbs of darkest black, that in the Black Egg temple melted along to and into the shadows until she couldn’t have ever guessed their true height, nor their true size, just that the twitching shadows she saw at the edges of her vision twitched with the tilt of their head. The smaller shade, in the moment they dipped close enough for her to feel the frost that seeped from their void where they hovered, Hornet noticed only the little pronged horns of, and that was enough.

In that moment, she decided two things; one, that if they wished to kill her, there was little she could do about in the time it would take to reach for her fallen needle, with the smallest shade’s face only uncomfortable inches from hers. The other was that she was remarkably unsurprised that this particular set of Vessels had found yet another way to complicate her life, should they even be the Vessels they resembled.

She glared dully up at them.

“You didn’t kill me.” Hornet said flatly.

The shades paused their strange, lighthearted bickering (it was difficult to resolve what they said to each other into words, but it nearly didn’t seem worth the effort from what Hornet picked up of it) to look at her with renewed focus and eerily similar tilts of their heads, and Hornet vaguely regretted saying anything. The first of them to move was the massive shade of before, the one she distinctly remembered passing out in front of, as it raised its head as though to attention and seemed, in an innate way Hornet was immediately suspicious of, faintly abashed.

It had called itself the Hollow Knight, she remembered, which itself made her predisposed to despise it, dually for the weakness she’d displayed before it and for the lie it told using her dead sibling’s face.

The other shade she knew. It looked exactly as the little Ghost’s shade always had when it came to collect its mask. But now there was a vibrance about it, a liveliness that it had lacked before with its dull white eyes, present in the curious way it stared down at her now.

Like Ghost always had, though never had she been the one they stared down at.

“She is very concerned I am not as I say.” The shade pretending to be the Hollow Knight said gravely to the other.

The little Ghost’s shade nodded as though that made sense for more reasons than Hornet felt it did.

“Do not speak over me as though I were not here,” Hornet snarled, grasping for her needle in the opening left as the shades backed off minutely, something she sensed more than saw as their direct attention left her.

Her hand found her weapon, but not its handle. The blade, something she kept sharp enough to slice the thickest silk in an instant, cut instead into her hand, and the pain sharpened her to awareness as nothing else had since she’d awakened. Hornet ignored the sting and the slick of blood, and in an instant she had the needle’s grip in hand and the blade lashed out in an undirected, wide-arching swing, feeling the shades’ proximity prickle like claws at her flesh.

They melted back as insubstantial as shadows, away from the cutting edge singing through the air. Hornet watched them retreat with bitter satisfaction and pulled herself to her feet. There was still a weakness plucking at her limbs, but now it was lessened such that she couldn’t tell if it was due to void or simple hunger and a hard bed. She was not certain how long she had remained in the Black Egg, but it felt like she had slept far too much, for all that she wasn’t especially rested. It wasn’t like her to collapse, nor to miss.

But her needle’s length held steady, and her legs did not shake beneath her, so it mattered not.

“My name,” She hissed. “Is Hornet. Use it, or my next blow shall not miss.”

“Hornet?” The deceitful shade repeated, its voice soft, as it leant down a little to look more closely at her, just scarcely out of range. “You’ve a name now? I have missed much. That is a powerful name, it speaks of defense and strength. It was well chosen, little one.”

“Do not pretend to know me. Who are you, truly? Or are you nothing, only some final retribution for my actions now that the Old Light no longer threatens, taken shape from that which I-“ Hornet cut herself off, leveling the shade with her hardest glare instead of her needle when it made to approach, separating itself from the darkened corner it had merged with.

It stopped in its tracks, something she thought was the only wise move it had yet made.

The other was not so wise, and, as she’d come to expect of them, not nearly as self-preserving as she’d hope.

“Hornet, you’ve seen me die before. I’m sorry it took a little longer this time, I know it worried you, but I’m back, like always. I had a long way to travel, and no mask to draw me.” Ghost’s shade said, drifting closer, presumably so they wouldn’t be talking (or what passed for speech from them) at her from across the temple.

Hornet’s claws tightened on the needle’s worn metal enough to scrape against it, and her arm tensed to cut them in half, but though they only stopped well within its deadly reach she found she could not strike them.

Unforgivable sentimentality.

Hornet laughed harshly, mostly at herself, and felt something twinge justified and unexpectedly hurt when the little Ghost reflexively twitched away at the sound.

“Do you take me for a fool?” Hornet said calmly. “You’ve never said a word to me. Not as you are, and not with your mask intact. I’m not entirely sure you speak even now, for you make no sound. This is a test, to see if I might yet be secure enough in my will to strike you down, and I’ve failed. I may as well; I’ve taken enough from the Void to justify its revenge.”

“So why do you finally break your silence, little Ghost? Why have you found your voice at last?” Hornet asked unkindly, her words edged in place of the blade she couldn’t find the will or need to raise to them, with all said and done and the Infection killed and gone, as the little shade shook their head quickly in denial.

Ghost hesitated then, and glanced up at the other for support.

Yet it had no answer it had not already given. “I do not know,” The looming, spindly shade said. “You have always been our sister, but now you feel as a sibling does, too. I did not see what became of you after I died, but though my eyes were blind, and my mind torn by an eternity of struggle, I only knew the Knight’s void near my own. There must have been change, and it must have been after. You call them little Ghost… Is that a name of yours?” The Hollow Knight’s shade looked back to Ghost, who nodded energetically, their white eyes a blur in their shadow.

“Hornet gave it to me. I like it.” Ghost replied, and Hornet refused to be softened. “That sounds right, I think. You’re void-touched, though you seem more… Alive than that.” They observed to Hornet.

“She breathes, and sleeps, and lives as no sibling I have seen. I do not know how such things can coexist.” The Hollow Knight agreed solemnly.

Hornet found she could not possibly care about anything else, least of all the potential far-reaching consequences of exposure to void. If it had found its way into her and could not be shaken from where it rooted itself, it did not change that she had a kingdom to watch, regardless of whatever new, persistent specters had come to bar her way. Hornet tested each of her limbs, surreptitiously relaxing and tightening her fists, and found nothing unresponsive or even unreasonably weak.

She was battered, and aching, and impatient, and growing more irritated by how little would slot itself into her layout of the world as the seconds ticked by, but she was not dead. The rest could wait.

The only particular shade of grey she could see between the ‘now’ and the ‘everything else’ was the issue of what to do with her siblings, which had always seemed to be the mawlek in the room in one way or another over the years. Not something she could ignore or put off, however much she wanted to, and never a question that had any good answers. This time, she could take some small, sardonic relief to say, was surely the last she’d need to consider them.

Shades did not tend to linger.

“You say you are the Hollow Knight.” Hornet addressed the watchful, malingering shadow briskly as it blatantly refused to quietly dissipate or move aside from where it existed directly in front of the Black Egg’s door. It would be best to prove that the thing wasn’t her sibling’s shade here and now, rather than to leave and never be certain.

It couldn’t be. No sibling of hers save the little Ghost themself would ever have cause to be anything but hateful to her, or frightened if their anger failed them, and both rightfully so. A cruel trick of the Void’s making was a likelier option than a sibling of hers unafraid and unresentful, particularly this sibling she had never chosen to save.

And, more quantitatively, there had never been another Vessel whose shade behaved like Ghost’s, that came back again and again. Never after so many hours as it must have taken this one. Ghost’s return she could accept, but that of the Hollow Knight? A Hollow Knight that, after all the years she’d kept their salvation from them, did not think badly of her? Unreasonable. Impossible.

And yet.

At their nod, she continued. “Tell me something I would not know, but that only the Hollow Knight themself might. Prove you are not simply void given form, taking from my thoughts to fool me.”

She’d been submerged in the stuff long enough that, from what dubious, admittedly circumstantial knowledge she had of void, it could have understood her regrets and her memory. The shade had expressed to know her pain for their passing before she realized it herself. It was always best to assume unpredictability, when one stands on uncertain ground.

“That seems a little contradictory-“ Ghost began dubiously, but their sibling began to speak before they’d finished.

“Father wanted to name you Protector during negotiations following your birth. Not as a title, but as your given name, granted before you were out of your first molt. Your mother attempted to tear off his head for suggesting it for reasons she expressed with volume. I was the only other in the room at the time.” The Hollow Knight relayed dutifully, almost militaristically prompt. “It was a tense afternoon.”

“I- He did?” Hornet frowned. “I suppose I must count that, too, among the things I am grateful to my mother for.”

That was not an event she had any knowledge of, save the faintest memory of her guardians’ unusual amusement when she’d asked after her naming ceremony, as all spiderlings do, in the years after her mother went to dream. It did, admittedly, sound in line with what she knew of the Beast’s actions.

Such reminiscing was for another time. There was another essential distinction the shade had made, one Hornet knew could not have come from her own mind.

She turned her scowl up at them thoughtfully. “I would never refer to the Pale King as my father.”

“You believe me, then?” The Hollow Knight asked hopefully, their voice lilting carefully entreating.

“You seem terribly glad for that, for one presumed to be mindless.” Hornet observed instead of agreeing, distracted by implications.

And then she barely held back a shocked gasp as, with a rise of frigid chill like the waves of a lake, something numbing and painful lapped up through her chest, carrying a terrible shame, an awful guilt that rose and choked and froze her through. It felt like she’d swallowed ice that stopped midway down her chest and refused to drop farther, refused outright to melt and lessen, spreading over her lungs until she could barely breathe.

It sapped her life, Hornet realized as she shivered violently and raised a hand to her chest, where it hovered as though she prepared to claw it out herself. It stole her soul.

“Stop-“ She forced past it, the weight of a shame not her own making her pulse frighteningly sluggish. “Stop!”

The ache became an anguish as her heartbeat grew deafening and slow, one that washed over her and deepened until Hornet had to lock her knees and judderingly curl into herself to stay standing. Then, without warning or cause, the cold slowed its creep, as though it tried to obey her an instant too late to be anything but another’s decision. There was a struggle even Hornet could feel, as though the sea fought itself even as it sought to obey the pull of the tides, and then the cold was joined by another.

This emptiness was gentler, lesser, calmer. Where the force stilling her life felt uncontrolled as a raging tempest, this one was as placid as frozen pond, calming even as it, too, hurt to feel. It did not contain that same unfathomable shame, but only understanding and soft words. The gentle dark, Hornet recalled, calm like what the Void promised as it had consumed her. The tide turned all at once, and Hornet was left struggling to breathe, choking on a trickle of black that fell to the hand she covered her mouth with. The void in her palm numbed as ever it did, so she shook it off with a sharp flick of her claws. It dissipated before it hit the floor.

And it was over, leaving Hornet to shudder through the residual chill.

Hornet swallowed, her throat dry and catching, and focused on her breathing to quell the way the world sloped this way and that, how her heart now pounded fuzzily in her hearing and her head rang with the noise.

The Hollow Knight fretted silently, their voice less of words and more distant than before, only a whisper of a thought. If it had been more, an actual voice of vibration and sound, Hornet didn’t think she could have noticed it past the white-static roar, even as it subsided from her hearing.

“I did not expect emotion unhindered to be so strong. I did not know I could hurt you.” The Hollow Knight breathed, more jarring horror than recognizable words.

There was a spike of resentment, just a brief touch of frost that made Hornet give a violent shiver before it was forced away.

“I cannot stay. I will not stay if I might cause you harm. I shouldn’t have come.” They whispered, and this time there was no pain at all from their void-speak, though Hornet heard how it would hurt them to do as they said, just as well as she heard how little they cared if it would.

She stiffly touched her claws to her mouth to check for spilling void and, when she found none, stood straight once more.

Unacceptable. Cowardice. Where would they go, her sibling she could still scarcely believe she saw again before her? Would they fall to nothing outside the Black Egg, would she lose them in even this faint mockery of life once more? Never had she seen a shade linger as long as they already had, delicate and isolated when surrounded by things that lived, wind that did not hang still. How many had she watched disperse by iotas, weak little bubbles of dark that would eventually carry off all of them if she did not cut short their suffering first?

Shades did not last, and already that seemed a threat more than a relief. Even past nostalgia and proof, to have the pain of theirs – and Hornet knew like she knew the wind off the mountains ran bitter and dust-choked that it was theirs instead of her own – reach for her life and so nearly grasp it, and at the last moment be called away, left no resistance within her to expect betrayal with. It was the Hollow Knight that spoke, and the Hollow Knight regretted her suffering.

Perhaps they, too, had hit their head on the way down.

Even so, she owed much to them. This was a chance. Shades on their own were volatile, but they came to masks, were vulnerable and as easy to disperse as a flock of maskflies without them. If she could only get them a mask…

“No,” She grated out past her raw throat. “No, you will not abandon this so easily. I will not lose you for my own weakness. Whatever you’ve done, it did not kill me.”

Hornet took a few bracing breaths then, in and out until she felt she could play at certainty. “Do not cower from your actions. Learn, and don’t do it again. We have much to speak of, Hollow Knight.”

“What was that? It was only void, it shouldn’t have hurt you.” Ghost spoke up at last to say as a nearly hesitant whisper, drifting closer with worry in their brilliantly white eyes and humming through their void, strong enough that Hornet felt it similarly hum in the back of her mask and waved them off the moment her limbs would respond, locked frozen-tight, with an impatient hand. “Are you okay?”

It was too close, and the chill of their presence made her chitin crawl and her heart race.

“I’m fine. I should be asking you that,” Hornet huffed. “If any could know, it’d be you. I am not made of such ephemeral nonsense as a dead bug talking.”

Not entirely, at least. The cold, the unmistakable touch of the dripping black the Vessels bled, had not left, even as she again warmed in its absence.

“Well, what happened? Are you hurt?” Ghost replied, as untouched by her brusqueness as ever, and Hornet had a moment of leaping paranoia that it was them to be the false mimicry of the dead, and knew just as quickly that it couldn’t be so.

What need was there to question them, when their every word, for all that she’d never known them to have any she could hear, reminded her of how they’d been before? There were few enough bugs who Hornet did not terrify.

Hornet noticed the Hollow Knight paying very close attention even as they must have been afraid to speak at all, their poorly-curbed, foreign shame prickling at her like needles, uncomfortably close to how her own did and far from the cold agony of awakened void, and decided in a rare moment of timely conversational forethought that if she could lessen it with a half-truth, then a half-truth she would tell.

“I was… Cold.” She said lamely. “It must not have felt nearly as bad as it looked, if you’re so concerned.”

“Oh. Are you… Lying?” Ghost ventured, yet the emphasis wasn’t on the question, only the rising disbelief in their voice.

“No.” Hornet lied.

“You are.” The Hollow Knight said then, cowed and regretful. “The void within you rose as I called to it, however unintentionally. How much of your soul did it cost you?” And is there anything I can do, was what went unsaid. It unnerved Hornet that she understood it went unsaid at all.

“I’m fine.” Hornet insisted, scowling up at them, and then replaced her needle at her back with a flourish to prove it. The effort, light as it was, made her shoulders quiver and ache, which she adamantly didn’t allow to show.

“Are you?” Ghost asked again, doubtfully, true apprehension edging into their voice as though the possibility of her collapsing then and there was, in their eyes, creeping upward with every word she said.

“What has become of me,” The Hollow Knight asked in quiet, dawning realization, though the thought was undirected and the lights of their eyes faintly dimmer. “I feel like I am… More, than I ever was before. No, not more,” The Hollow Knight murmured. “Unbound. Present. Singing, perhaps, overflowing. I feel,” They looked to Ghost as though searching for their own words from them. “I shouldn’t feel. Not like this.”

“…It’s always like that.” Ghost spoke up softly with a final puzzled look at Hornet, as though they knew annoyingly well that she was being withholding and were only familiar enough with her to know also that no further pressure would get any concession. They drifted up and close to the Hollow Knight’s bowed head, dwarfed alongside their sibling’s imposing dark. “It’s like there’s something missing, and it can hurt. But it’s a skill like any other, dying is.” They said with what that felt like a smile.

“And I suppose you’ve found yourself a master of it, with all the times I’ve seen you meet your untimely end.” Hornet said dryly when it became apparent the Hollow Knight wouldn’t respond.

But never had their mask broken. Not in half, not like this, not that they could not heal.

“Something like that. The point is that if only we can restrain from… Talking, or sharing, I guess, when we feel so strongly, then maybe the void that is yours shouldn’t be called to… I suppose it could be called empathy?” Ghost guessed tentatively.

The Hollow Knight mulled that over, gave a somber, acknowledging nod. “Just as before, then. I’ve experience with such things.” They said, like the familiarity of the idea had more worth than the idea itself.

“No, I don’t think so.” Hornet objected. “You’ve felt plenty since I’ve been awake,” And how strange to have felt it alongside them, even as only an echo. “It was only when it became so strong and so… When it was what the void fosters. It felt like the void itself.”

“Are you telling me not to be so negative?” The Hollow Knight squinted disbelievingly at her, though there was a welcome current of reluctant amusement beneath their words.

“No, only to keep it to your own mind as the rest of us must. Hollow Knight…” It seemed wrong to call them such. How far from the hollow being their father had named were they, how little a knight of the king? It was a title, and an unkind one.

“Might I call you Hollow, again?” Hornet began instead, and though it in retrospect seemed equally as unkind, the request came before she could think to silence it.

A childish nickname, like the sort her title-less nestmates gave each other when they’d played. Unfitting, yet attached to kinder times, at least by comparison. A reasonable enough name to grant them for fairness’ sake, considering the circumstances of Ghost’s. Not a flattering thing to be called, yet the Hollow Knight openly felt something like buoyant, bubbling joy at her question. Unbound, indeed, to be so easily cheered.

Was it unnerving to them, to be so suddenly utterly unbound in body and soul? Had they spent long enough as a grudging god’s vessel, a god of dreams and anger and light, that to feel came unwillingly, unstoppably? Or were they only so deeply, impossibly relieved to have their duty completed, their pain ended, that kinder things, any moment of hope and absence of agony, gave them joy only a being so long-suffering could know?

“Only if I can call you my dear little sister once more.” Hollow agreed, white eyes tilting in the dark at her, their arching horns displacing the paler shadows.

“I- You never called me that. You never called me anything at all.” Hornet accused.

“Not that you could hear, no.”

“Can I call you that, too?” Ghost piped up.

“No! No to both.” Hornet exclaimed, frustrated. “Neither of you can call me anything but my name. Hollow, I need to know if you are lasting enough to leave the Black Egg. I have to leave it, and I do not wish to abandon you here. Not again.” She said harshly.

She turned on Ghost, wearing her displeasure like a shield as though it could negate what she’d admitted. “If you can stand the journey, we have work to do. Would you be satisfied to remain in Dirtmouth?” She asked, not especially expecting the answer to be yes.

Hornet was not disappointed.

“Of course not! I want to help, and I can’t even write anymore, it’s not like I could do anything in Dirtmouth. Oh,” Ghost said softly, as though that had only just occurred to them. “Oh, I can’t write.”

They floated to a cracked, weathered wall, draped in the poorly-lit Black Egg’s heavy gloom, and raised a barbed tendril, black as though its shape had been cut through the world itself into the nothing beyond, and laid it against the stone. It fell to mist as it made contact, as though the void they were made of was insubstantial as air. Their bright eyes narrowed in concentration, and they tried again, their outline sharpening into clarity, and this time there came a quiet tap like a claw placed over the rock.

Ghost gave a little triumphant laugh that echoed unnaturally through her mind, as though through a much smaller space than the Egg, and swooped down to where their broken mask lay on the ground. They poked around it as casual as you please, though Hornet found looking directly into its vacant eyes made something hooked and painful catch in her throat. She did not look away.

Whatever Ghost was searching for, they didn’t find it, going so far as to unsteadily lift an empty mask-half with a mostly-solid tendril to check underneath it. What they did return with were a few curls of void wrapped uncoordinatedly around some handful of small, painted things.

“I can’t find my map, or my pen, or anything that I didn’t have on hand. You should take these, though. I don’t think they’ll do much for me anymore.” Ghost said quietly, more subdued than before.

When Hornet warily held out her hand, they dropped a clutter of little charms into it, carefully not so much as brushing her claws with any part of theirs.

Hollow leaned close, scrutinizing what they’d given her. “Where below the earth did you get those?”

“I found them.” Ghost said decisively.

It seemed a better topic of conversation than anything else they’d touched on and, as Hornet examined the handful they’d given her to hold, an intriguing one, if only because of all the secrets of Hallownest, the charms that sprung up through tragedy and circumstance throughout it were the things she knew the least of. Their use didn’t sit well with her, reminded her far too clearly of home and of Weaver-seals.

And she had no need for aid in battle. They would be wasted on her use.

“What does this one do?” Hornet brushed her thumb over the charm she indicated, carved into curling flames and painted a deep and menacing red. It felt like a last stand, something she had experienced firsthand more than once, and now once more, for however that translated to thin, painted shellwood, faintly stained dark at the edges.

“Oh, I liked that one. When I was close to death, it let me fight harder. It reminded me what I fought for, what was at stake. It let me stop caring if I lived, in a way, and sometimes that was enough to make sure that I did.” Ghost told her, their voice distant and almost wistful.

“I suppose it didn’t work this time.” They said. “Or maybe it worked just enough; the Radiance is gone, isn’t she?”

“No, I suppose not.” Hornet agreed softly, folding her claws over the charms and stowing them away. “It has served its function well enough. The Old Light is gone, and with her goes her plague. The silence is… Strange, and unmistakable.”

Hornet looked back to them, and saw the glow of their eyes, like floodlights in the dark of the Black Egg and the deeper dark of their form, a stark inversion of their face before and still just as clearly theirs. “I will get you another map, and a new pen, if you’d like. And somewhere better to keep your things.”

“Why? I can’t hold them for long. If I die as I am, I don’t think I’d have another chance. There’s little use exploring, when I’d be killed by the first vengefly.” Ghost asked without a hint of regret. “I’ll come with you. I’ve done what I came to do.”

“Hornet,” Hollow began warningly.

“Do you think I would allow you to linger like this? I told you not to take me for a fool.” Hornet scolded. “You only need an intact mask. There is much to do, yes, but nothing immediate enough that it cannot wait while I revive my siblings. Would that I might begin this kingdom’s rebirth without needless cruelty to you, who I have already been so cruel to.”

Ghost looked into Hornet’s face searchingly. When they spoke, there was something like disbelief in their voice.

“I expected the time I died here to be the last. I don’t know why I’ve found my way back again, up from the Sea far below, but it wasn’t because there was anything awaiting me. I didn’t expect to survive.” They said slowly.

“But you wanted to.” Hornet said, running her thumb again over the little stubborn charm in the pocket of her shawl.

Ghost nodded, the light of their eyes dipping in the gloom. “I did. I still do, but Hornet,” They hesitated. “I find it… Hard to believe that you’d go so far to help me for no reason but just that. With this fight there was Hallownest on the line, and at the Grave in Ash I already had the brand. You had good reason to make sure I survived. And,” They trailed off.

“And I’ve tried to kill you before.” Hornet finished for them, her voice level and carefully unaccusing.

Ghost was silent then, staring into her with doleful pale eyes, closer then to all their other siblings, in Hornet’s sight, than ever they had been before. It was right of them to mistrust her, she knew. Even she was unsure why she felt so strongly that this was what she must do, that everything she knew had to happen in her fledgling kingdom could be put off until she had righted this wrong.

Was that what it was? A wrong to be righted? A meager too-late apology for all the other little black shades with gleaming white eyes she’d watched fade?

Did it matter?

For good things done for the wrong reasons were indistinguishable from those done for the right ones. The shades deserved a future, if they had come so far to seek it. Of any surviving in Hallownest, they deserved to see what it might become.

“I understand.” Hornet said evenly. “You are vulnerable, and I have given you little reason to trust me with your safety, whatever amity might have grown between us in the journey past. Yet you will have to. I swear to you that I will return you to life, whatever you might choose to do with it afterwards. Take me at my word, or don’t. It will not change what I must do.”

“You tried to kill them? Why?” Hollow repeated quietly, whatever they’d wanted to say before set aside. Their wide white eyes bored into hers alongside Ghost’s, carefully neutral.

Hornet had never questioned the necessity of what she had done, but under the disappointed gaze of her once dearly loved older sibling she found a new reason to regret it; she found she still cared what they thought.

“If they had not been strong enough to defeat me, they would not have been enough to take your burden. They wouldn’t have been able to best the god you held.” She said simply. “I have done worse in defense of this kingdom. Make your own judgements of my actions, but we must go.”

“Hornet,” They said weakly, reaching out their single impossibly dark arm, like the night sky Hornet hadn’t seen clear in an age, even as they curled their claws in so as not to touch her.

Hornet turned away from them, to the discarded masks lying around her. A maskmaker would need to know what to work with. Only a small piece would be sufficient, just enough to know the texture and the make, to see what made it hold a shade, to infer the shape and cast a mask anew. This worked in her favor; if she’d had to haul the entirety of the Hollow Knight’s mask to the depths of Deepnest, any resurrecting would take longer than she wanted to wait.

She picked up half of Ghost’s mask, the split neat enough that both were nearly exact mirror images of each other, and called a length of silk to wrap around the horn and through the eye. The mask was strangely cool in her hands, its surface smooth and pale where it wasn’t faintly stained with grey. Hornet pulled the silk taut, tested the knot, and extended the strand so that she could do the same with the single intact eye socket from the Hollow Knight’s mask.

Not nearly a complete half, and still fractured around the edges, their mask worn thin and uneven and stained a darker off-white with neglect. It was frail in her hands, and she made certain the ties around it were tight enough to prevent its falling, but not so much that they might wear into the fragile corners. It felt unreal, that such a brittle mask might have come from the sibling she’d thought invincible so long ago.

A mask’s strength was less important than that of the bug itself; that they still clung to life was invincibility enough.

Once she had both masks secured, she slung them over her shoulder, tying the silk so that she mightn’t need to keep a hand on it. She tested the knot once, and then again, though Hornet could have counted on one hand the times a knot she’d tied had failed. It held firm.

Only then did she turn back to her siblings, silent and watching.

“Will that be enough of Hollow’s mask?” Ghost asked, their not-voice uncharacteristically hesitant.

“If it isn’t, I will come back for more.” Hornet told them firmly. “But the maskmaker is not our first goal.”

“Then where?”

“I am going up to Dirtmouth, and I’m paying for something hot and edible, and then I am sleeping until I can feel my hands.” Hornet announced. “There is a long road ahead, and I will need to ensure the inhabitants of that fading town are well enough to await my return. And,” Hornet grimaced. “I suppose I must be the one to break the news that the Infection is no more.”

“Be gentle. If you’re too excited about it, they might not believe you.” Ghost advised her, and Hornet, though unappreciative of the humor in their voice, however unpointed, could not help but be quietly relieved that they would find her deserving of it.

And when, she wondered, had she last been able to care for such a thing?

Chapter Text

And so Hornet made her way out of the Black Egg, trailed by the shades of the dead.

“Wyrm, what happened?” Hollow exclaimed the moment they cleared the door.

Hornet glanced around, scanning the smoothed stone path and the pavilion before it that led up into the Black Egg Temple, hand half-raised to her needle at the sheer shock in their voice.

It was empty. Piles of fast-rotting brownish muck sat morosely oozing against the outside of the Temple, the slow-building smell hardly noticeable in the Black Egg heightened to something rancid, between aged eggs and wet mildew, that pervaded the cavern utterly. Hornet had smelled worse, and seen worse, besides, and other than the decaying remnants of the Infection the cavern was utterly unchanged. More than that, it was nearly silent. Far enough down the path that it was nearly swallowed by dark even to Deepnest-keen eyes, Hornet saw rounded, half-obscured forms she recognized instantly as corpses, and not especially active ones, and that was all.

It would seem that Infection such as the Crossroads had seen was not easily shaken off.

Yet while its inhabitants had in part or whole succumbed to the height of the illness, remaining in the Crossroads was only the ever-present drip of falling water, a constant in caves such as these, the sprawling place carved from the stone, yes, but rooted in those naturally-formed caverns just below the surface. If ever there was part of Hallownest that had been made of serendipitous coincidence instead of sheer uncowed force, such as had carved the City of Tears from the solid rock, it was the Crossroads.

It had made the Crossroads something of a peaceful, easy-going place, a lifetime ago. It made it easy to dismiss, when nothing in particular was inclined to explode before one’s eyes, or one’s sibling wasn’t preparing to face a fate that would in all likelihood result in their and one’s own mortality.

So even by Hornet’s exacting standards, it was nothing to be concerned with. She looked back to Hollow, eyes narrowed in question, and found Ghost doing the same.

Hollow stared back, something oddly devastated in their gaze.

“This is what has become of Hallownest? It is in ruins. Worse, it is deserted. When I was sealed, it was brightly lit and celebrated and-“

“I was there, Hollow.” Hornet cut in roughly, their description vague and even so letting her hear again how the gathered nobles and common bugs alike had cheered her sibling’s long-awaited misery. “I remember.”

“I thought you hadn’t come.” They said, and the only thing in their not-voice was dismay.

“Why wouldn’t I have? I was too young to know better. It’s not like they could have stopped me.” Hornet said to the cavern at large, scowling up at the ceiling so her voice echoed in the empty chamber.

It bounced back to her from a dozen angles, running together until all she could hear was the bitterness of her words. In the dark of the Black Egg’s doorstep, the Crossroads were changed enough from the last time it had been open for her to heave a harsh sigh and descend the steps. She shifted the weight of her sibling’s masks over her shoulder as she went, the bone clacking against the metal of her needle in a way that set her fangs on edge as she turned down the path, taking the way that led to the dry well, and to Dirtmouth above.

“… What was it like? Hallownest, I mean.” Ghost asked, and even though they hovered close enough at her shoulder that her shell prickled with their chill, Hornet felt the question wasn’t directed at her.

It was a quiet relief. She might have said something she’d regret if it had been; her headache was returning with a vengeance.

“It was,” Hollow began, soft and thoughtful and glad, Hornet was annoyed she could tell, to be speaking of happier things. “It was overwhelming. You remember the Abyss, don’t you?” Regret, hesitation, worry for a response, what was akin to recently-unsettled emotion from a lengthy, though not unrewarding, conversation.

If Hornet could have muffled the hearing of her soul, or whatever void-tinged equivalent let her know their not-quite-speech, she would’ve. It was beginning to seem likely there wouldn’t be as much quiet, for all that if she didn’t speak there’d be no true sound, for some time.

Ghost conveyed something like a nod of affirmation to their sibling, which Hornet thought might have been accompanied by an actual nod behind her back as she led the way, and Hollow continued.

“It was the opposite. Where the Abyss is lightless and forever unmoving, unchanging, Hallownest was nothing but change. Every corner brightly lit, every bug with a voice and a will to express. I never spoke, could never speak, but I watched every moment. I was… Less then, I think. Better at not thinking, at quieting my mind, at least, for all the good it did. But even I noticed beauty. Hallownest was beautiful, and ever in motion.” Hollow mused.

“Where did you live?” Ghost asked, the curiosity lilting in their words of the exact flavor Hornet had always seen in the way they were ever looking a little closer than she’d ever had the patience for at all they found in her ruined kingdom, spellbound by all that they encountered in a way that had always bewildered her.

“I spent most of my time in the White Palace, but I accompanied the King wherever he went.” Hollow replied, and Hornet could hear the gentle fondness they spoke with, willing to accommodate any question their littler sibling might have.

She wondered if they’d tolerated her long-past childish larks in the same way.

“Did you ever see Crystal Peaks? Or the Hive? Or the Colosseum?” Ghost rattled off, their excitement nearly palpable in the air. “What was the City of Tears like?”

“Yes, no, and absolutely not, in order.” Hollow told them with a soft laugh. “The crystal mines were a yearly excursion for some time, just as much of the Kingdom was. Rarely did Father make his visits public, but he had his ways and quieter roads to follow, to see what couldn’t be clearly said. The Hive has always been its own domain, one Father often had no time to bargain with. I know remarkably little of it, truly. As for the Colosseum of Fools,” Hollow trailed off thoughtfully.

“No, the Pale King never visited the Colosseum in my lifetime. I’d always wanted to go, at least once, though it took quite a while to realize that I did. It sounded interesting. Less rigid than the Palace. Different. Though now I suspect the lack of order would have been the death of me, then.”

“It’s a lot of fun, if you’re sure you can try the trials over and over. I’m sure most don’t, but it’s exhilarating to try even if you don’t win.” Ghost told them.

“You aren’t going back any time soon,” Hornet promised. “I thought I’d told you not to go in the first place.”

“I wanted to see how far I could get.” Ghost said as they hovered ahead of her while she climbed a short cliff that might once have anchored a staircase long since broken from its fastenings, and flicked a black tendril carelessly, like a shrug. “And I won, eventually.”

“And how many deaths did it take?” Hornet shot back, hauling herself up over the edge and ignoring how the exertion made her vision swim and her arms shake.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Ghost snarked.

“The will and clarity of purpose to refuse to die, and you spent your free time competing in bloodsport. Perhaps I shouldn’t be as proud as I am. What did you win?” Hollow asked.

“Oh, lots of things! And a lot of geo. That wasn’t why I went though, really. I don’t know if that’s why anyone went; it was the challenge. I met all these Nailmasters, right?” Ghost said, with the air of one about to launch into a story. “I like them a lot, and they taught me all these incredible things, like nail arts and oil pastels. And the nail arts, at least, I got really good at in the Colosseum.”

“Nailmasters, hm? Did you ever meet one named Grimm? I know not if he was a Nailmaster exactly, but he tutored me for a time, and he was very good.” Hollow said.

“You’re taking this all very well,” Hornet remarked, focusing too closely on making her limbs move as she wanted to think better of it. “One would think you’d be more upset about… Everything.”

Hollow was silent as she kept walking, noticing with growing irritation how the road was completely flat here and yet her balance wanted to tilt this way and that, following the growing weakness of her legs. They said nothing, and neither did Ghost, for long enough that Hornet nearly thought they’d chosen not to answer.

It was a blessed relief until she fully realized what she’d said, just moments before Hollow spoke again.

“I felt nothing but pain and thought of nothing but the desperate futility of my purpose for long enough that Hallownest has grown ancient and ruined around me.” Hollow told her at last, and Hornet gave a shiver as the air grew faintly colder, though she felt clearly how difficult the effort was, to keep the emotion she heard snarled like brambles through their words from reaching her.

“I feel that lurking beneath my every thought, that yawning anguish, the immeasurable blame that is mine alone. Yet, as ever, there are those who would suffer should I give in to it. So I will not. I will think of anything else, Hornet.” They said, and there was a note of urgency beneath their carefully almost-calm voice.

Hornet frowned down at the stone below, blinking hard as the rubble doubled before her eyes. Her sibling’s masks clacked together at her back in a rhythm only just more uneven than her steps, and she spent long moments mulling over Hollow’s words.

“Alright.” She said after a minute or more had come and gone. And then, “I’m sorry.”

It wasn’t right that they couldn’t so much as feel their own pain, for fear that it would hurt her alongside themself. It cut at something deep in her chest that still remembered them as her steady older sibling, stoic and silent but whom she’d loved enough to be sure they loved her, too, when she’d been young enough that that had made perfect sense.

And it might have been what she was now certain was a concussion, but Hornet thought that the idea of them suffering needlessly, only to spare her the same (protection she did not deserve, love she had not earned) might have been the tipping point that finally allowed tears to flow.

The broken, fractured stone moving slowly past beneath her blurred, and when Hornet blinked next her eyes were stinging.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, and her voice was choked. “I’m sorry.”

“Hornet-“ Hollow said, and the concern in their voice (salt in the wound, unintentional but stinging nonetheless) made her suck in a ragged breath.

And Hornet stopped short with a stumble as Ghost appeared before her, staring up into her face, lowered so that she wasn’t looking ahead as much as straight down at the stone before her (foolish, an idiotic mistake), and their wide, beaming eyes were too bright to look at. Her hand twitched for her needle.

“Sit down, just for a minute,” Ghost asked gently, though it did not feel like a request.

It was worrisome that Hornet couldn’t find it in herself to argue. She sat down on the cracked, dusty ground, and the floor tipped beneath her dangerously until she rested against the remains of a broken pillar, only a stump now and reaching just high enough that she could lean her head against its cool, ungiving surface and watch the world dip and tilt. Tears dripped warm down her cheeks and stung her feverish eyes.

“You threw me harder than I’d thought.” Hornet observed, vaguely pleased to hear that the words were steady, if a little disjointed and wet. She brought a hand to her face to thumb away the falling tears, and found that at some point the cut along her palm had reopened.

The blood gleamed wetly along the wound, a deep blue.

“I suppose I deserved that.” She said.

It was unforgivable weakness, but Hornet thought she might well have brought it upon herself; she’d been the one wishing she could have cried at her siblings’ corpses, after all.

“I’m fine,” Hornet repeated, and her voice wasn’t steady anymore. “I’m fine.”

“Don’t try to stand, Ghost has gone to get someone to help. It’s alright, Hornet, you need not apologize.” Hollow said, their not-voice low and soothing, and when Hornet blinked her eyes open she saw they were staring closely at her, their single arm raised as though they’d like to lay their hand over her forehead, like she was a fussy grub running a fever.

The thought was ridiculous enough that she didn’t question how Ghost might have expected to accomplish such a thing, but then the understanding that they’d left at all clicked into place. Hornet’s eyes widened and icy dread dripped down her back, and she clutched with scraping claws at the half-pillar to pull herself to her feet.

They were vulnerable. They would die, and it would be her own fault.

That could not happen, not when she’d only just promised they wouldn’t. Not when she could finally think to help them, finally care, when their safety and all of Hallownest’s didn’t run against each other. Her limbs would not respond properly, and now her tears were of impotent frustration.

“Hornet,” Hollow fretted, hovering above her as she struggled to stand, their tendrils lashing and the air chilled even as they didn’t dare to touch her. “Hornet, stop, sit down,”

Hornet followed neither request, heard every painful beat of her heart in her mask louder than them, blurring her vision, and her legs scraped the floor as she fought for control enough to bring them between her and the hard earth below. No, Ghost would not die, not as long as she lived. Not to anyone, least of all a foolish misunderstanding. They’d kill them, they wouldn’t know better, just as she hadn’t.

Inch by unsteady inch, Hornet stood.

“Hornet, please, they’ll be back!” Hollow pleaded with her, distress etched into every almost-word.

“’M fine,” She mumbled. “Stop talking at me. Which way did they go?”

“Oh, dear!” Someone said, her voice pitched high and startled.

Hornet looked up and leaned heavily against the stone supporting nearly her entire weight, sacrificing a stabilizing hand to blindly grasp for her needle’s handle. It wasn’t where she expected it to be.

This voice, she thought, must have belonged to the little beetle down the way, a lumafly light too bright not to squint at affixed over her eyes. Eyes that reflected the light. Dark, living eyes, something Hornet had never thought she’d be so uneasy to see.

And there was Ghost, hovering at her side and dashing back to Hornet’s, hovering anxiously over her alongside Hollow, their little cluster of tendrils whipping through the air with their sudden worry. Worry for her, of all people, Hornet was dazed to realize.

“You’ve made a mistake.” She informed them.

“I don’t think I’m the one who’s met something she sh-shouldn’t’ve!” The little beetle exclaimed, though Hornet hadn’t been talking to her.

“This is Myla, she’s my friend, she’ll help you.” Ghost told Hornet quickly, as though they were afraid she’d lose the focus to listen if they didn’t speak fast enough. “She won’t hurt us. Don’t scare her, Hornet.”

“If I scare her like this, then she should be frightened indeed when I can stand.” Hornet replied thickly.

“Oh, I’m n-not sure about that. Come on then, let’s get you h-home.” Myla calmed, though her own tone never lost its nervous twitter.

She stepped closer, and Hornet had to press her forehead to the cool stone it rested on and squeeze her eyes shut as the quick movement made her stomach turn and her mask pulse like it was breaking apart.

“Don’t t’ch me,” She gasped as the swooping feeling didn’t abate, her mind swimming and muddied and now slipping at the edges. “’M fine, I’m fine.” She insisted, half to herself and half to the hands, much warmer than the air, bracing her shoulders.

And then she passed out.

Chapter Text

And so Hornet awoke in a strange bed, in a strange home.

She found she was lying on her stomach, her front half draped comfortably over a pile of what must have been a dozen pillows, and was briefly gratified that she’d recovered enough to tell such all but immediately. Though her eyes were closed, there was a light washing over her that was strong enough to notice regardless.

There was a blanket, thick and roughly woven and scratchy but comfortably warm, something she found more reason to appreciate than typically she did. It was draped over her back and tucked under the jut of her horns, carefully pulled up to her neck. In the moment before Hornet could recall exactly the circumstances she’d lost consciousness in, it was the most comfortable she’d been in years. Decades, maybe.

But of course, all good things come to an end.

Hornet prised open her eyes and, again, found Ghost not a hand’s span from her face. Their brilliant white eyes were huge and glowing, even in the soft light of morning filtering in through a little window somewhere behind them, throwing their edges into lesser contrast than in shadow with an almost grey halo of blurry void, like the bristle of moth’s down held before a bright light. She blinked and squinted in the brightness, which must have been reassurance enough for them to then settle back to a more comfortable level of personal space.

“Good morning.” Hornet mumbled. “I don’t suppose you have anything you’d like to say, before I’m awake enough to argue?”

“Well, you still snore. I’ve been waiting at least two months to be able to tell you.” Ghost noted, and she wondered briefly why she’d expected any different. “Also, you scowl in your sleep. Myla thought you woke up at least twice, because whenever she said anything, you’d look like she’d given you the worst news of your life.”

“I don’t snore.” Hornet told them, muffled by the blanket.

“And I think you’ve more of a death wish than I ever did, which is astonishing.” Ghost remarked. “Considering I actually died, and all.”

Hornet hummed in false consideration. “Anything else?”

“I’m worried for you. So is Hollow.”

“There’s no need. If nothing I’ve faced has been the end of me yet, whatever misery the void can inflict shan’t leave a mark. I feel fine.” Hornet lied. “We’ll leave as soon as I’ve eaten. You’ll be in a mask before the week is out, if that’s what you’re concerned for.”

“No, Hornet, that’s not what I’m concerned for. Don’t you know that? We’re worried about you, not what you can do for us, and you’ve never just… Stopped, like that. You had to have known. There’s no way you didn’t know void would do something like this to you. You scared me.” Ghost said, quiet and too honest.

Hornet felt something heavy and solid as a lump of bleak ore wedge itself at the base of her throat.

“I’d thought I was joking, inviting you to say what you will before I can put up a fight.” She murmured. “I think you a fool to care so, for what is result of my own actions. I’ve given you no reason.”

“Good thing it’s not your decision, then.” Ghost snapped, and something fragile in their voice made Hornet sit up and look at them properly.

They were crying, thick black tears rolling from their ever-wide eyes and rising to dissipate into the air. Their waving set of indistinguishable silhouette tendrils had gone still, and they’d fallen back some to hover just before the headboard, on the far side of Hornet’s mountain of pillows. The sight made something cold twist like a hook in Hornet’s gut, shocking and sudden and nothing like void.

She could only stare at them, unwilling to dig the hole she’d dug any deeper and hurt them more, and unable to take back what she’d said.

There was a quick judder like they’d shivered, that Hornet felt without seeing the same way she heard their voice, though their dark little form hadn’t moved an inch. They stared back and carefully didn’t try to make her feel what they felt, except in the way anyone might see another cry and know they hurt.

“You scared me. I’m not used to being scared like that, and never for you, of anyone. You’re always so strong, but you fell apart and then you collapsed, Hornet. And then you wouldn’t wake up.” Ghost said, very softly.

“I have no intention of dying, nor of allowing such weakness as this again. I meant what I said; I truly believe there is little that could mark my end.” Hornet said, the words coming both unbalanced from her usual calm certainty and sharper than she’d wanted. To comfort wasn’t what she knew how to handle, but the hook in her belly gave a vicious twist when she thought of brushing off their worries.

Hadn’t she told herself she would be less cruel to them, now that it mattered not if she was? Was it worse to accept care undeserved, that they would think better of sooner or later, or to wound her siblings with her words to fend it off?

“Stop looking at me like I don’t know what I’m saying.” Ghost told her with wavery admonishment covering the steel beneath their not-voice. “Whatever you’ve done, I don’t want you to die. You’re my sister, we did the impossible together! You don’t get a say if I like you or not. And I do.”

Hornet blinked at them, taken aback.

Well, when phrased like that, it would seem there was little for her to do but accept the third option and allow them their care. She knew better than to argue with the certainty they spoke with, something she knew in some odd way past their voice, as well as because she knew them as much as they knew her, was founded in unwavering will. Something in her chest eased at that, though Hornet couldn’t tell if it was unwilling warmth or the absence of the burden of choice.

How strange, to be cared for in turn.

“Fine. I grant that you have that right, to… Not wish death upon whomever you please. What do you want of me?” She asked, half reflexive sardonicism and half truthful curiosity.

Ghost tilted their head like they hadn’t expected her to capitulate so easily, their tears slowing to a sluggish bubble of void or two that fled the corners of their eyes. They drifted a little closer, and Hornet fought the reflex to draw the blanket back up around her shoulders at their approaching chill.

“Oh. You’re being honest.” They said, almost wonderingly.

Hornet scowled. “I thought you’d said you could not read my thoughts.”

“I can’t, but void is a very honest thing.” Ghost said somberly, as though the words were older than them. “Intent cannot be disguised within it.”

Then they laughed suddenly, a quick little not-sound that nevertheless held nothing unkind at all. “Maybe that’s why I trust you, now. I can tell you’re not a cruel person.”

“That’s ridiculous; the only way one can tell such things of another is to know their actions. How one behaves is a better judge of their character than… Whatever you’re doing.” Hornet dismissed.

“That still doesn’t reflect as badly on you as you think.” Ghost told her, and it felt like they’d smile if they’d had a face.

“Where’s Hollow?” Hornet asked loudly, ignoring them completely, to Ghost’s quiet amusement.

“They’re trying to not be intimidating in Iselda’s shop, as far from Myla’s house as they could go.” Ghost accepted the topic change smoothly enough, though their strange not-voice lilted with a lightness like laughter. “They’re afraid they’ll worry themself so much they’ll let something slip and hurt you while you sleep, since they’re still not very used to being a shade yet and neither of us knows where exactly the line is for that kind of thing. We should go tell them you’re alright.” Ghost said, all traces of humor dropping from their silent voice.

Hornet nodded, sliding out of the little bed. It was a nicer one, raised up off the ground and covered in clean sheets that she’d coated in a fine dusting of dried blood and regular dust both, and a few spots of faded black beneath where her head had lain that she intentionally did not draw attention to. Instead of looking closer to confirm what she already knew she checked her needle, then her shawl, then that her miscellaneous things stuffed into pockets here and there were intact.

All was as she’d left it, yet still something was missing.

“Your masks,” Hornet said abruptly, casting around as though they’d be hidden on the floor somewhere. “The silk I spun was not intended to last; it would have failed with how long I was asleep. Where are they? Did they fall in the Crossroads?”

It would be a trial to recover them if they had. Hornet had very little memory of the particular path they’d taken, and none she’d trust with something so important.

“Myla has them, I helped carry them back. They’re in the other room. Hurry,” Ghost urged.

Hornet didn’t have to be told twice, tying her needle to rest where it always did and following them through the open doorway.

She hadn’t been lying as much as she’d feared, when she’d told them she felt fine. Her legs were steady and her headache all but gone, with no trace of that creeping, dousing cold in her lungs. Nothing but a persistent chill somewhere in the center of her chest where usually she was warmest, untouched by the balmy warmth of the sunlight and the thick woven blanket, and a drip of void left on the bedsheets where her head had lain.

Nothing she could not handle.

If it allowed her siblings a voice, at least to speak to her, then it was a price she’d accept.

The room Ghost led her to was just as cheerily lit by the rising sun as the last, something that didn’t sting Hornet’s eyes as much as she’d expected it would. She thought wryly that she might only be getting used to bright lights shined into her face, with how brilliantly the shades’ eyes shone. If there were going to be sunrises now, it was just as well.

Hornet took a breath of clean air untainted by putrefaction and lighter, cleaner than any tunnel’s might be, and in the place of rot there was the faded scent of something savory. This room was a cluttered little space, every empty wall stacked high with shelves and boxes and old half-broken mining equipment, among it empty lumafly lanterns and chipped pickaxes and more specified instruments, ancient and missing parts but clearly worth something to someone if they were piled so high here. Yet it didn’t feel unwelcoming, only lived in and well-used, and sun-soaked as the little bedroom.

Her home was in the winding, claustrophobic tunnels of Deepnest and the darkened, unending caverns of Hallownest, but that wasn’t to say an occasional sojourn to the surface went unappreciated.

Though, last she’d been to Dirtmouth, and the time before that, and the countless trips before even then, the sky had been the same clouded, storming black, choked by dust and the eternal wind rolling off the high mountains and cliffs that guarded the land Hallownest lay beneath. Sunlight, Hornet realized with something uncomfortably similar to amazement, was something she had only seen in her earliest days.

The home she found herself in was empty, and while she listened carefully and waited for Ghost, Hornet could not resist surreptitiously shifting her shawl so that the warm light shone on her hand, angling her head so that she might see without looking directly.

She had things to attend to, a sibling likely needing comfort (a daunting task indeed), but the way the sunshine washed over her cold carapace was enthralling, even for the brief instant it fell upon her and chased away the chill, just for a moment, painting in stark clarity all the long-healed scars over her knuckles in only the lesser shine they cast, the black on black contrasted more than ever she’d seen it.

Had she seen herself like this the last time her hand had touched sunlight? Had she scars even then, ever hidden in the dark that only like this could she distinguish from unmarred chitin?

Hornet looked away and spotted Ghost hovering above a small chest tucked against the far wall, nearly unnoticeable amidst the mess that Hornet could only pick a tentative, haphazard organization out of. It was indistinguishable from a half-dozen others nearby, crouched and wrapped in ornamental once-gleaming metal scarified by use and years.

“They’re in here. Myla said that Hollow’s was in bad condition, that the light would be bad for it.” Ghost told her, tendrils flicking in scarcely-contained nervous energy as they waited for Hornet to pull the masks from the unlocked lid and retie them securely, returning them to rest over her shoulder, lower than her needle.

The return of their weight, hollow bone bumping irregularly against her back and clacking against her blade as she tied off the silk, tested the knot once, twice, again, sobered her from fantasies and the wonders of her kingdom, newly living. It would not truly live again, Hornet thought, until her siblings lived within it.

Not in a way she could abide.

“Did she not think to wait until I awoke, to ensure I would not rifle through all her belongings to find them again?” Hornet asked, checking her knotwork once more and striding to what she assumed was the front door, the only entryway in the little home aside from what led to the bedroom.

“You were asleep for a long time, maybe two days.” Ghost replied. “She had to leave at some point.”

“I was not asleep for two days; I don’t spend as much time sleeping in two weeks.” Hornet rebuked.

“Have you noticed the sunlight? It’s been really consistent with when it comes and goes.” Ghost answered innocently, hovering close at her side until she waved an annoyed hand at them for space, refusing to dignify them with a response.

The door was not locked, and she closed it behind her after Ghost had darted through.

“Fine, two days then. I suppose I cannot fault her for that. You said Hollow was in the cartographer’s shop?” Hornet said, less a question than an irritated confirmation to change the subject.

“Yes, with Iselda. I haven’t left you to check, but she said she’d take care of them.” Ghost told her.

“And you trusted her at her word? I was under the impression that that one wielded a nail.” Hornet admonished. She walked a little faster, every moment spent in the beaming sunshine baking her mask and soaking into her shawl like a betrayal as the cartographer’s huddled little building bent low and silent down the road, deceptively sleepy and serene.

“They’re good people, Hornet. I like them.” Ghost defended, something bristling a warning behind their words.

It took all the effort Hornet could muster past the growing worry pricking at her as the shop neared and no new voice emerged to talk into her mind, whispering and more feeling than words, not to respond with something pointed enough that she’d regret it.

Dirtmouth was changed around her, as though the breaking of the storm clouds had turned it into a place she’d never been. The dark doors and darker windows were cast into color instead, old and faded but recognizable, the empty window frames dusted with the light-colored earth settled over them, and when Hornet glanced up into the morning sun she saw that same dust hovering soft and ethereal in the air. The eternal wind, always harsh and scraping, had stilled to a gentle breeze that swirled in the motes that caught the light, and the lumaflies were resting in the streetlamps.

It hadn’t been so in an age, in years she’d never know the count of. The sun was so distant, without anger or virulent turmoil or madness, only the warmth of day and the slow thinning of the wispy clouds above as it rose. Of course, the sky would be changed, Hornet reminded herself. The stasis was gone.

The Old Light was extinguished.

Hornet heard conversation, though she walked too quickly to tell where it came from, and as she turned the corner nearer to the cartographer’s shop she heard someone laugh, open and delighted and far-off and alive.

Chapter Text

And so Hornet, as she tended to, brushed off the wonder of the incredible, the impossible made possible, because there was, by the virtue of existing in the world as is, always something else to worry about.

And if she broke into a quick jog for the last few steps before she threw open the half-ajar door to cartographer’s home with an echoing slam, no one would dare speak of it where she might hear.

The inhabitants of Iselda’s shop, only two, startled in their respective ways at her entrance. Iselda herself, present exactly as Ghost had promised, jumped back from the counter she’d been slouched over, her hand flying to the pommel of the longnail propped against the wall behind her. She had it in hand and defensively angled before her by the time Ghost dipped in beneath the roof, upon which its edge lowered just a little.

Hollow, on the other hand, had been curled morosely into a corner, closed in by teetering stacks of mapping paper and as small as they could make themself, which still only just kept their sweeping black horns from brushing the ceiling with their head bowed low. When Hornet arrived they’d taken up nearly half the shop by volume, and when she alarmed them their reaction was just as defensive as Iselda’s.

The immediate lashing of their tendrils might have meant the same, translated to a more regular bug’s physicality, as reflexively standing up to an abrupt, jarring noise. Their blaring alarm, like an inaudible, shrill shriek, was less easily translatable as it rattled through Hornet’s mask so violently that it brought her nearly unnoticeable headache roaring back to life, painful enough that her hands flew up to cradle her skull as though the cool of her palms could deaden it again.

Iselda barked something obscene and loud and ducked behind her counter as black-tinged papers, most pages half-torn to shreds, were tossed into the air with the more conventionally audible deafening rustle of piles originally stacked shoulder-high being thrown across a room with force. Hornet watched through narrowed eyes as, like a wasteland storm, the falling paper obscured all more than a foot in front of her.

It was over in moments, the sudden outburst of noise leaving a ringing Hornet was swiftly growing very tired of to echo in her mask in the ensuing silence, broken only by the settling sound of pages drifting down to coat the floor, and the counter, and to gently alight in the dip between Hollow’s long horns.

Hornet noted, as she watched the scene calm back into stillness, that Hollow must have mastered physical presence at some point; there were two neat, even holes punched into the wall behind them where their mask had met the ancient, weakened wall when they’d jolted.

“Hornet!” Hollow greeted, sudden heady relief buoying their not-voice.

Still accustoming themself to the waking world, then.

Disregarding the mess they’d made, the immense shade extricated themself from their corner, void melting where it met opposition and reforming until they were face to face with her, hand twitching where it remade itself already half-extended, like they longed to touch her shawl and reassure themself that she was well.

And Hornet was briefly panicked to see that they, too, began crying to find her awake and sound. The void dripped from their eyes, unnaturally wide and piercingly white as their gaze moved almost imperceptibly to search her for anything amiss. She stood her ground as they squinted with the eye shot through with a bolt of white that stretched back between their horns, nearly as tall as the roof of the shop and, as close as they were, towering even as they were mostly laid back so Hollow could be more-or-less eyelevel with her.

The tears did not abate, but after a moment Hollow ceded her personal space, apparently reassured by what they saw. Hornet caught a flash of black out of the corner of her eye and looked up to see Ghost coiling a tendril or two around one of Hollow’s horns, their form tiny compared to their sibling’s. There was a conversation she couldn’t quite see the shape of that passed between the two, quick and vague and as indiscernible as though it were happening in a different room, and all Hornet could tell was that it was a greeting, and a reassurance. One evidently well-needed as Hollow calmed themself, the anxious twitch of their countless tendrils slowing and the cold in the room that Hornet had hardly noticed build receding by degrees.

“I suppose you’ve something to say to me too?” Hornet guessed.

Ghost hummed with disquiet and disagreement, but Hollow brushed past whatever they told them with a slight shake of their horns, jostling the little shade where they clung.

“I’m sorry.” Was what Hollow told her, with remorse so heavy it bowed their head and returned that awful hook to twist in Hornet’s abdomen, taking the place of their relief such that it seemed to have never been.

“What?” Hornet barked bluntly, taken by surprise, and Hollow flinched. The hook dug deeper.

“No, what could you possibly have to be sorry for? Did you-“ Hornet cut herself off. Asking if they’d been the one to give her that godawful concussion when, of course, they had, however much removed from fault they were to have thrown her from them when they’d been maddened with pain and god-fury, would not have been a road she wanted to go down.

She sighed instead, and tried again.

“It was not your fault, nor even your doing. I was being foolish, caught up in all there was to do. To be taken by surprise by such a thing as a head injury was my own mistake, that had I been thinking for an instant I might have foreseen.” Hornet told them as soft as she knew how, watching closely to ensure they would not have cause to flinch away from her again.

It was only a head injury, after all, and only an unusually severe one. Hardly cause for grief.

“I’m your older sibling, Hornet. It does not matter what you might’ve done; I should have helped you.” Hollow said, the words low and raw and undercut with some ancient grief.

Ah. Not only the injury, then. Hornet empathized, even as she marveled at the differences between them.

“You couldn’t have.” Hornet said, low and intense. “There was nothing you could have done. No harm has come of it, do not carry this needless burden alongside all you already shoulder.”

“No harm?” Hollow laughed bitterly. “You have been insensate for days. You… Hornet, you nearly died. I felt it.”

“Hm. Another unexpected boon of the Void’s gift.” Hornet said dryly.

Hollow was silent for long enough that Hornet began to regret making light of the situation, however unfounded her siblings’ worries were. Of course, she wouldn’t have died, and to think so nearly caused her to give a grim smile for the very concept, which she kept from her face on the vague understanding that Hollow might not appreciate the gesture. She’d weathered through a hundred concussions without rescue or soft beds or concerned siblings. More, perhaps.

But then, some newborn, quiet suspicion whispered to her, when had it ever taken two full days to recover from one? When had she last collapsed, for any reason, before the Void had nearly taken her?

And Hornet was suddenly starkly aware of the little knot of cold in her chest that had not once loosened since it had formed in the Black Egg, blankets or rest or sunlight be damned. It called to mind the dark, it felt as the Void had, and the same as what had run intangible and cold and black over her claws, what she’d bled by her needle far more often than her own blood was spilt.

“You are right. There was nothing I could do, and it was unbearable. I would have done anything, but there was nothing to do.” Hollow said.

Would that their birthrights had been reversed, Hornet abruptly wished. Perhaps it was cruel of her to think so, but she’d gladly have fought that burning, vengeful god for an age, if only Hollow could have been the one to face their kin as Hornet had, because Hornet knew they were not lying. They would have done anything, and so they wouldn’t have killed the Vessels she was tasked to. They would have found another way, they would have done anything else, and Hallownest would still have been safe with them.

It couldn’t have happened that way for a dozen inalterable reasons, a hundred, and it was useless to wish it had, but Hornet knew Hollow would not have made her mistakes.

How could they think themself at fault, after all they’d done? How could they still feel so strongly, after spending their eternity trying with all their endless persistence (so characteristic, it seemed, of they three), fighting until their world died around them and they followed it by grievous inches?

What could she do, in the face of it?

Hollow’s claws slowly folded in on themselves as they retreated from her, their thoughts a wordless, quiet drip of carefully contained guilt. Always, they reached out to her, though she could not understand why.

So Hornet reached a steady hand out to them this time, as sure as she was unfamiliar with the gesture, and laid it along the side of their face, framing their widening white eye, the one unbroken by the deep crack that had marred between their horns. They were cold as ice biting into her palm, but the void in her chest did not rise to choke her and it was only as uncomfortable as too long a time spent out in the downpour of the City of Tears; numbing, her fingers already stiff with chill, but not painful.

Of course, warming one’s hands afterwards did tend to sting, but Hornet hardly spared a thought to think of it.

It was a needless risk to take, to learn by doing if direct contact with a being all but entirely made up by what had nearly killed her (might still be killing her, something wary in the back of her mind whispered) would carve at her life as the substance itself had. Yet Hornet could not bear to watch Hollow accept blame once more, undeserved and so painful to her sibling who would take responsibility for the world’s wrongdoings if they thought it would help in the least. How long had it been since they had been touched with kindness, however ironic it was that Hornet of all people might be the one to do so?

Had they ever been told that any misfortune at all was not their fault, not a mistake of theirs to suffer for?

Hollow had frozen as if they’d truly been carved of ice as cold as they felt, eyes shocked-wide and staring.

“Do you remember the White Palace? Do you recall when I first visited?” Hornet asked them.

“I- Of course I do. You were so small, and delicate, and I was so frightened you’d fall the wrong way somehow and crack your mask open. It was just before your third molt, was it not?” Hollow said slowly, as though uncertain of her intentions.

“I remember being anything but delicate, but yes, the very eve of. Do you recall the banquet?”

“I do. I realized you were missing halfway through, and I had to find you. I was under no orders but to be polite to the guests, and I found I might understand losing the King’s child fell under that excuse. And wasn’t it fortunate that I did?”

“You recall how you found me.” Hornet guessed.

“Wailing in the gardens, covered in the wreckage of what had been Mother’s favorite hydrangeas.”

“And you recall what you did?” She guided.

“Nothing. I did nothing.” Hollow breathed in horror, as though it were new and not centuries past. “You were crying, and I could not leave you there. I couldn’t. But neither could I hold you, nor comfort you. I could not bring myself to abandon you to fetch help, and just as tightly was I bound not to allow myself to pick you up from where you had fallen. It would have been an admission, of thought as much as care. But I was so certain of myself, then-”

“No, you didn’t do nothing.” Hornet broke in to correct. “You were there when I needed you. I told you, I was not a delicate creature. What pain I felt was minimal, but the shock was real. I was calling for someone to take notice and help me, in such a strange place as the Palace grounds. And you did.”

“I did nothing! I crouched there at attention as an automaton might, and watched you cry until-“

“Until I took matters into my own hands and climbed into your lap, and clung to you and sobbed until my tears ran dry. And then I told you of all my fears, though if you’d told me they were such then I might have bitten you, already the proud daughter of Deepnest. Everything from the blinding pale of the White Palace stinging my eyes to the uncaring disregard of the Pale King to the tension my mother could not hide, visiting that place. And you listened to every word. I could tell.” Hornet said to them.

“Is that how you remember it?” Hollow said, their weak whisper underscored with affection they could not seem to press away. “That is why you scarcely left my side afterwards?”

In place of a reply she couldn’t find the words for, Hornet leaned forward and tapped her forehead to theirs. Icy cold shocked between her eyes like she’d dipped her face in the surface of an underground lake, but Hollow reflexively leaned ever so faintly into her, a nearly imperceptible pressure as Hornet’s mask met with little resistance to nudge against. She was careful not to lean too far and risk plunging entirely into the insubstantial void of their form, but bit down her shivering until Hollow edged back, where then they gently nudged their face into the hand she still had lain upon it.

Then they carefully removed it with their own, their single hand making hers tiny and childish in comparison until they returned it, stiff and prickling, to her side.

“You will lose a claw like that; I know I am as cold as void itself, as I am now. I snuffed Myla’s fireplace twice before coming here.” Hollow told her, their voice wavering and thick. “I am glad I might help you now, at least, if you will allow it.” They said with the faintest undercurrent of lightness, like the taste of hope.

“Help me by taking a page out of Ghost’s book, and don’t die.” Hornet said, a little gruffer than she’d meant to, though Hollow only felt something content and warmly glowing, like a small, kind smile, like they’d half-expected her to say something like that.

“That’s pretty cute. They’ve been waiting here for you for a while, you know.” Iselda commented.

Hornet stiffened and, with Hollow’s bulk blocking Iselda from view, allowed her eyes to close briefly in dismay. Iselda could only have heard half the conversation at most, but Hornet all at once wished the Void would return to consume her before she could face the fact that she might never intimidate this bug again.

She took a deep breath and let it out as a harsh sigh, and gestured for Hollow and Ghost to follow before leaving the shop entirely.

“Hey, wait, get back here! Your friend ruined a lot of paper because of that little stunt,” Iselda called after her. “And someone’s picking up the bill today, if you’d be so kind.”

Hornet stopped, clenched her frozen hand into an aching fist, and turned back around. She strode back to the counter, past Hollow where they sheepishly lurked just outside the door, and looked over the devastation.

It was quite a lot of paper, most of it torn in some way and half of the rest stained with blotches of dark, washed-out grey. Iselda brushed off what had fallen onto her desk while Hornet surveyed the carnage, so that she could lean on one elbow there and fix her with an unimpressed stare.

“How much.” Hornet asked darkly.

“Not so fast, kiddo. I think you owe me an explanation as much as money. Your ghost there has been languishing in my store for a day and a night, and they aren’t the talking sort.” Iselda drawled, tapping her claws on the counter’s surface rhythmically.

“I owe you nothing of the kind. If you keep talking, I will keep my geo.” Hornet said.

“Touchy! I was just gonna ask your name, so I’ll know who to look for if I find another white-eyed ghost in my shop.” Iselda remarked.

“Now would be a good time to tell her about the Infection, I think. Iselda’ll tell everyone else if they ask. And she might let you off easy, since it’s so important.” Ghost offered.

“Stay out of this.” Hornet snapped, half to cover up that she’d nearly forgotten she hadn’t already, to which Ghost made a wordless impression that felt remarkably like they’d rolled their eyes at her.

“Aw, that’s no way to speak to your siblings, spider.” Iselda clucked disapprovingly.

“My name is Hornet.” Hornet said tensely. “Tell me how much I owe you before I decide to rescind my offer.”

Iselda scoffed, sliding her hand to tap a pointed claw on her nail’s pommel. “You could try, Hornet.”

Hornet bristled, her own claws tensed as she raised them to her needle in spite of Ghost’s protest, but before either of them could act there came a worried shout from outside, muffled and quickly approaching. Hornet didn’t take her narrowed eyes off of Iselda, but Iselda dropped her hand from her nail like it’d burned her and craned around Hornet with concern, turning to confusion as the shout was replaced by the tap of claws over the threshold.

Hornet found the idea of failing to see what might have come up behind her more pressing than keeping her eyes trained on the cartographer’s wife, and glanced around to see a fuzzily familiar little miner beetle, still carting her dirtied pickax and wearing her lumafly light, huffing in the doorway like she’d run there from Crystal Peaks.

“Myla!” Ghost exclaimed in delight, though the miner beetle, of course, didn’t react, only heaving a great sigh of relief when she caught sight of Hornet.

“Oh, thank goodness, I was so w-worried!” Myla fretted. “I got home just now to find you gone, after you’d been sick for days! You shouldn’t’ve just left, I nearly jumped out of my sh-shell running to look for you.”

“This is the mystery bug you’ve been hosting, Myla?” Iselda said, her voice dully steeped in something like disappointment.

Hornet consciously did not react to it, slowly lowering her hand from her weapon.

If her siblings were to be believed, and, to her consternation, it was appearing more and more likely that they were, she owed much to this little bug. She had, evidently, dragged her home in spite of scarcely coming up to Hornet’s eyelevel at the tallest, and then given up her bed while Hornet fought off whatever weakness the empty dark had inflicted upon her.

It was a greater kindness than Hornet might have spared, had their positions been reversed.

“Yes, this is her. How are you feeling? Are you alright? Is there anything you n-need?” Myla asked, and Hornet could find nothing less than genuine in her voice even as she scowled down at her, bemused.

“I’m fine. Thank you.” Hornet said stiffly.

“She says her name’s Hornet. Do you know any hornets? I hear they’re solitary on occasion.” Iselda said when, from the lengthening pause, it became apparent Hornet wouldn’t be offering anything else.

“Oh, no, I don’t th-think so.” Myla replied. “Where are you from, Hornet?” She asked politely, all sweet, chirring voice and cheerful interest.

“Deepnest,” Hornet began, somewhat unsettled that what she’d been certain would lead to a fight had been derailed so quickly, and Iselda cut her off.

“You’re not from Deepnest, what was all that about the White Palace? Cornifer tells me that’s on the other side of the Kingdom. Where royalty lived. A one Pale King, if memory serves.” Iselda said pointedly. “Keep your story straight, kiddo.”

Hornet had very suddenly had enough.

“My name is Hornet, and I am of Deepnest, and I will not be looked down upon and cross-examined by some scavenger seeking to know more than she must, of matters that do not concern her, unless she wishes I treat such an offense as I would in Deepnest.” Hornet snarled. “I will pay for what my actions have damaged, and you may request no more of me. Do I make myself clear?”

The shop was silent save the rustle of the fallen pages in the gentle breeze wafting in from the open door, and Hornet was suddenly aware of exactly how savagely she wished to be anywhere but there.

“Yeah, alright, if you’re going to be like that.” Iselda mumbled, though she had a strange look about her, like she’d heard something different from what Hornet had said. Curiosity, to Hornet’s annoyance, and nearly recognition, as though she were suddenly savvy to… Something.  “Three-hundred geo should cover it well enough. It’s just paper, after all.”

Hornet nodded stiffly and searched through her pockets for the sum, anger burning hot enough on her tongue that she did not trust herself to reply.

“You’re from D-Deepnest?” Myla spoke up, hushed and careful.

“Yes. I thank you again for your aid,” Hornet told her tersely. “I owe you a debt greater than you know. If ever you have need, ask, and I will return the favor.”

“Oh, n-no, that’s alright,” Myla said quickly. “I only found you in the first place b-because my friend led me. Are those your siblings?”

“Yes.” And then, because Myla looked like she was expecting more, “They are… Not feeling well.” Hornet lied poorly.

“I feel well enough, considering. There isn’t much worse one can get than how I was when I lived.” Hollow said reasonably, poking their head in from the doorway.

“I’m glad.” Hornet deadpanned.

“If you are going to tell half-truths, at least ensure they are half true.” Hollow suggested unnecessarily. “A moment of wisdom from your older sibling.”

“You’re glad they’re not feeling well?” Myla asked tentatively.

“No! No, I’m,” Hornet stopped herself, sighed harshly, and fished out the last of the geo to slam it down on the counter.

“Thank you for staying with my sibling while I could not. Do not speak to me again.” She told Iselda, who nodded wordlessly, though that was likely more to do with the bewildered, still-inexplicable sort of look she had to her now than agreeance, and strode out of the shop with the full intention to keep going regardless of who called her back.

Myla followed her out, her footsteps faster than Hornet’s to make up for her shorter stride, and Ghost caught up easily, hovering alongside her while she fumed.

“For what it’s worth, you tell half-truths better than you lie.” They offered, far too amused for their own good.

“Yes, thank you, Ghost.” Hornet told them flatly.

“Is that their name, or are you just c-calling them a ghost?” Myla asked from behind her.

“It’s their name.” Hornet replied shortly, marching into what looked to be the general store’s open doorway and up to the shopkeep without pause.

The fly at the counter looked up at her and left off where he’d been polishing a lackluster lumafly’s glass container to a shine, reaching up to set it on a lower set of shelves behind him, the others stacked far over his head, and addressed her with a pleased buzz of his wings. She recognized him dimly, thought it bizarre, for some reason, that he not be holding a nail.

“Ah, hello there,” he began, and Hornet smacked the geo she’d already gathered in hand on his counter with force. He jumped just slightly at the sound, something warning edging into the set of his folded arms.

“A spool of red thread, as strong as you can offer, and as much food as whatever is leftover will buy.” She told him, deliberately calm.

The fly squinted at her, and then around her at who, from the warmth of the room, could only have been Myla. It must have been how long she’d been unconscious and unthreatening, Hornet decided, that had led what might be the entire population of Dirtmouth to hold no wariness for her at all. That did not bode well, considering Dirtmouth was a not-insignificant portion of the entire living population of Hallownest.

“I take it this is your unexpected houseguest?” The fly intoned, entirely too unimpressed to have thought himself unsafe with an armed, annoyed stranger in his store. A Nailmaster, Hornet recalled, and narrowed her eyes at him. Not in years had she met with a Nailmaster, and not for countless more would she miss the experience. Of course, there would be one living in Dirtmouth nowadays.

“She’s feeling a lot better.” Myla said weakly.

“Hmph, I can tell. Well, geo is geo, however disrespectful its owner.” The fly shrugged, and set about poking through the piles of merchandise closest to him.

Hornet waited dispassionately for him to find what she wanted, and took a deep, steadying breath.

“… Miss Hornet?” Myla said gingerly.

Hornet exhaled slowly, and the calm with which she answered was more genuine. “It’s just Hornet. Yes?”

“Oh, okay. Hornet… Is Ghost alright?” Myla asked, her voice wavering just noticeably.

Hornet turned and looked at her, and found the little miner nervously picking at her claws, looking up at her with dark, entreating eyes when she felt Hornet’s gaze. Hornet reminded herself that this bug had shown her unprecedented kindness, going so far as to wait by her side for longer than Hornet had stayed in one place at all in years, out of no obligation but simple generosity. Moreover, she hadn’t taken advantage in any of the dozens of ways Hornet’s mistrustful mind told her she’d had the chance to, not picking through her pockets or exhorting some imbalanced price for her care, or even once trying to kill her.

As far as she knew, that wary little part of her suggested before Hornet silenced it. There was justified caution, and then there was rampant paranoia, and the latter held more dangers than it prevented.

It made little sense, but perhaps Myla’s actions played into how fond the little Ghost seemed to be of the miner beetle. Given their trust of Hornet herself, they were not an apt judge of character, yet otherwise they did not often seem to misplace their confidence.

So Hornet answered with honesty deserved.

“No. They aren’t, but they will be. I will ensure they’ll be alright.” Hornet told her firmly.

Myla stared up at her, mulling over her answer, and Hornet waited while she thought.

But Myla must have come to a happier conclusion than Hornet thought she might have, and instead of bursting into tears, as Hornet had feared, only gave her a slightly tearful smile then, her mandibles clicking quietly. “Okay. I believe y-you.”

She gave a hiccupy laugh and looked back down at her claws. “You aren’t a very g-good liar. I’ll tell my family they’ll be okay, when they all get back from the mine. I just came down early to check on you, but they’ll be here tonight, if you’d like to s-stay for dinner?”

Hornet declined with a measured shake of her head. “I thank you for the offer, but there is much I must do.”

She paused then, considering. “Might I ask something of you?”

“S-sure, what is it?” Myla agreed readily.

“Nothing difficult, I hope. Tell me, Dirtmouth is well, isn’t it?”

“I guess? I mean, it’s not such an exciting place to be, but it’s much better than being caught in any awful, angry d-dream down in the tunnels.” Myla shuddered.

Hornet nodded. “And you have nothing to report, no recent deaths?”

“To report…?” Myla sounded out, as though she expected Hornet to pick a different word. “Oh, no, I don’t think so. My sister broke her f-favorite pickax the other day- Oh! Did you find your masks before you left?” Myla asked.

“I did. Ghost showed me where they were kept. Would Dirtmouth be able to fend for itself, should it be attacked from above or below?” Hornet pressed.

“I think so? I mean, I killed a r-really big vengefly the other day. My dad says he’s k-killed a few crystal hunters, but I’ve never seen him do it. Oh! There’s Sly and Iselda, they’re good with nails. Kind Elderbug says he used to b-be decent with a greatnail. Sometimes Cloth drops by, she’s really g-good with hers!” Myla rattled off cheerfully.

“Don’t count me among those freeloading mercenaries, I don’t do that kind of work anymore.” Sly called from behind the counter, where he’d displaced half his stock already, presumably hunting for the thread. Hornet spared a moment to wonder how much foot traffic his little shop saw, if such a simple request as hers took so long to find from the mess.

“Anyway, why d-do you ask? Is something wrong?” Myla blinked up at her.

“I- No, nothing is wrong.” Hornet gave a short huff of a laugh. “Something has gone right, actually. The Infection is no more.”

There was a loud crack and the muffled tinkle of glass as Sly dropped the box he’d been shifting and turned to her. “What do you mean, the Infection is gone?”

Hornet stared down at him, vaguely surprised that he would know it by its first name, one she hadn’t heard used candidly since the last bugs of the City of Tears long before. “It’s defeated. It was in the effort to end it at last that I was wounded a few days ago, and my siblings killed.”

Myla gasped, and Hornet was quick to reassure her before she could start crying, or something equally emotional that she had already dealt with too much talking to deal with, too. “They will get better, they are not bugs like you or I.”

“And who are you to declare that it’s gone, just like that? Like you could’ve just walked up and killed a disease, a disease of dreams, with a nail?” Sly demanded, bracing his arms on the counter and ignoring whatever had been broken.

“I am the soul responsible for Hallownest’s protection for an age past, Nailmaster. It is my responsibility, by duty and birthright. And no, it was hardly that simple. My sibling cut down the being it sprang from, faced it at its source and brought an end to the illness’ spread. Such a feat required great sacrifice to achieve.” Hornet told him sharply, glancing away so that he might not see the effort it took to keep her voice even and free of spite unearned.

Sly scoffed. “A bold claim. Don’t be humble, just say you singlehandedly saved the world and be done with it. You make it sound like you’re the next queen. It’s a ruin, who cares if now it’s a slightly safer one?”

Hornet bristled, though there’d been no particular expectation in her to be met with trust. It mattered little if some mouthy Nailmaster disbelieved what had come to pass, when the doom that had taken so much from her could at last be cast behind, finally forgotten. “If it is a ruin, then it is my ruin to watch. Hallownest’s fate and my own are one and the same.”

Sly squinted at her. “Not a stance many’d take these days. Who did you say you were, again? What’s your name, stranger?”

“My name is Hornet, of Deepnest.” She said again.

Whatever the consequences, whatever there was left to take of a ruined kingdom, there was little Hornet thought she wanted less than to rule. That of her mother’s was long fallen, and to invoke the Pale King’s blood in her veins left a bitter taste in her mouth, but that wouldn’t be why she would remain as always she had; a distant protector, ranging her kingdom as a tireless, necessary guardian. No, Hornet was certain of something very simple that made the concept of rule a fate to avoid if at all possible; she would not be a good leader.

Hornet was not a kind person, she knew, but she also knew she was quick to anger, a dangerous quality in any position of power. Raised as a princess she was, but a princess of Deepnest is not a queen of Hallownest. A Protector was not the guidance a fragmented, slowly reviving kingdom would need at its head.

There was little to lead, anyway, and less reason to try. Hallownest wasn’t a kingdom anymore, not truly.

And there was no one living that knew her name with any familiarity, not anymore. None but her own siblings could even trace her heritage, and they, Hornet grimly thought, were not the sort to tell. Better to let Hallownest’s old monarchy die with it, rather than try to tie together a scant band of wasteland wanderers and ragged survivors under her control, when they’d likely be better off figuring such things out for themselves.

No, Hornet would not lead unless there was no other option, when she could better serve as provider and guardian, guide to the wandering and defense against threat, an able needle and nothing more. She’d done the same for a long, long time.

This, at least, she could do.

“Hornet, huh? From Deepnest? Sounds familiar. Were you in the City of Tears, all those years back?” Sly asked, many-faceted eyes glinting in curiosity.

Hornet grit her fangs and refused to allow herself to dwell.

“Yes.” She agreed emotionlessly. “And there’s nothing I wish to discuss about it.”

“The Protector, then. That was what you called yourself, wasn’t it?” Sly said anyway.

“It’s what I am.” Hornet said tersely, irritation sparking to see her warning ignored. “Seek me if you have need of a needle in your defense or knowledge of the Kingdom’s depths,” she paused, and scowled fiercely at him. “And for no other reason.” She told him, enunciating each word meaningfully and with all the ire she could dredge up, which she thought amounted to quite a lot.

“So you’ve been here since the beginning,” the fly bulldozed on as if he hadn’t heard. “And you were there for that. And you’re telling me that this entire time there was something that would’ve stopped it? Something that could’ve stopped everything?” He demanded.

“Yes.” Hornet growled. “Or it might’ve ended everything the Infection didn’t.”

As though the thought hadn’t occurred to her a hundred thousand times, since long before Ghost had even opened the way into the Black Egg. As though every single time in the long centuries she’d watched an opportunity fade by her own blade she hadn’t wondered if it’d be the last, or if this one might have been capable of the impossible, even when she knew they couldn’t have been.

Hornet had the sudden and alarmingly powerful desire to cut him down before he could pull any more painful memories to the surface, and quelled it before her hand could do more than twitch for her needle. It wasn’t an option anymore, to simply kill all her problems before they could become worse, and she would do well to remember such. The Nailmaster was no mindless husk.

It was tempting, though.

Sly leaned back from the counter, watching her with considering eyes and apparently ignorant of her brief internal struggle. “There wasn’t much left the Infection didn’t take, once it was done with the City.”

“No. There wasn’t.”

He stared at her, and out of the corner of her eye Hornet saw Myla fidgeting uncomfortably, glancing between them, and at her back there was the faint chill of her siblings and the accompanying quiet hum of their thoughts, suppressed and distant but watchful, nonetheless. Hornet did not allow herself to look away or be anything but utterly still, but the eyes on her, present and listening and observant, made her carapace crawl with discomfort. Not for the first time that day, she wished she could’ve been anywhere else.

How ironic that there were so few bugs left in Hallownest, and yet, the way her week was going, she’d have to deal with every last one before it ended.

Then Sly huffed to himself and turned back to his stores, and picked up the box he’d dropped, hefting it with ease though it was nearly twice his height. “Hmph. It might as well be your kingdom, then, if you’re that vigilante Protector. Not much of a consolation prize, but hey. You were the only one that didn’t leave, and didn’t die, either. I remember, I’d been just about to strike off on my own when the order came to close the City.” He replaced the box on its shelf, and paused there. “You never knew her, but I owe a lot to you. Does the name Esmy ring any bells?”

“I- No. It doesn’t.” Hornet said, wrestling down her growing irritation. She’d been a vigilante like a mosscreep was an innocent shrub, though after a time it had been her own decisions she followed above all others.

There’d been nothing else to rely upon, and reason enough to go against the Pale King’s commands, not in the least of which that he’d been dead and gone for the worst of the City of Tears’ end. Hornet could no more have left the City to flicker and die than she could have dropped her needle and walked away into the wastes that lay past Hallownest’s crown of mountains.

For whatever good her desperate efforts had done for the Kingdom’s doomed heart. She’d thought no one else remembered, anymore. Or, rather, she’d hoped they didn’t.

“Well, you got her out, and me, too. Or some other taciturn white-masked spider in red. Doesn’t matter, I’ve needed to thank someone for longer than she lived after. And on that cheerful note,” Sly said, abruptly dropping all solemnness and prising open another box, this one old and creaking as he hefted the lid. “Here’s your food. It’s not great, but I haven’t been able to resupply in a while. Funnily enough, not a lot of traders want to drop by.”

He rifled around in the depths of the crate while Hornet struggled for anything to say to him and emerged with an overflowing fistful of something dried and stiff, and not colored as anything Hornet might have immediately pegged as edible. He presented it to her, and she took it, though not without reservation.

“It’s meat. Not sure what kind, but it hasn’t killed anyone yet.” Sly explained, perhaps to whatever expression she’d made. “It’s good for the road.”

“… Thank you.” Hornet said, the words stilted. And then, because it didn’t sit right with her that he’d think as highly of what she’d done, for a single bug she couldn’t so much as remember the face of among the thousands she’d taken from the closed City so long before, “It isn’t my kingdom, not to rule.”

“Obviously. But, eh, do what you want, if you’re still so gung-ho about the guardianship thing. We’re alright up here, and I’d say not a single one of the bugs living in this faded little town knows they’re on top of anything but a big, deadly hole in the ground. Ah, well, maybe the cartographers.” Sly admitted.

“I have something I must do, but then I’ll be back.” Hornet promised. “There’s more I can give now that the Infection is gone, more I can help with, but I won’t rule. I will ensure there is not cruelty as there was in the King’s time, and that is all. The rest is yours to decide.” She told him, mulling over the words carefully.

“Mine?” Sly said, startled.

“No.” Hornet said flatly, with what she hoped was a more unimpressed look than he could ignore. “All of you that live still. I’ve done my part, now I hand you yours. The Kingdom is safe to inhabit once more, and already it is built to be so. Perhaps without gods or kings, it will be a fairer world you build.” Hornet told him.

And then she glanced to Myla, slightly star-struck and staring at Hornet, still standing in the cramped little shop with her shawl torn, her mask dirtied and her hands scraped, dusted and marred with void and blood and grave-dust and carrying her siblings’ empty masks on her back, like she was something to be admired, or else a fascinating, incredible mystery. Myla jumped at her glance, stepping back from the door and out of her way, but hesitated before speaking again.

“… Were you from this place, from b-before?” She asked faintly. “You know, before it w-was abandoned, and all?”

“Yes,” Hornet said, disquieted by her amazement. “I’ve been here for longer than I know.”

“Oh. That’s a long time?” Myla guessed, and then, before Hornet could do more than nod, “What happened?”

The faint tinkling crackle of the glass as Sly cleaned fragments from the bottom of their crate stopped, and Hornet considered the question for a long moment. It was a fair one, if not one she wanted to dwell upon. Was it that her kingdom’s gods had waged a terrible war neither could win, that mortal bugs couldn’t survive? Vengeance of a scorned higher being? Mistakes, hundreds of mistakes that could not be undone, piled atop each other until there was no clear path to any remedy, none that would spare the innocent?

An old god and a yet older one, whose dispute had ended with an entire kingdom in the crossfire, who hadn’t even survived it themselves.

“Plague, a god-sickness,” Hornet said simply. “And it has been dealt with at its source.”

Myla nodded mutely at her, and Hornet nodded back and made to leave, stopping short before she’d taken two steps and turning back to Sly.

“Did you ever find the thread?” She asked.

Chapter Text

And so Hornet certainly did not flee Sly’s shop before she’d even eaten the tough, dried meat of dubious origin the Nailmaster had handed her along with her thread, which was not her preferred crimson but more of a bright, saturated red that she did not comment on in her haste.

“We’re leaving.” She told Ghost and Hollow where they’d been haunting the doorway, hovering back some to let her pass.

“Shouldn’t you eat first? It has been a long time, has it not?” Hollow asked, and it sounded like more of an honest question than a suggestion as the shade rose to follow her, with Ghost, having attached themself to cling to one of their horns, taken along for the ride.

“I’ll eat on the way. If we remain much longer, I fear there will be… Expectations.” Hornet grimaced.

For conversation, if nothing else, and there was only so much of that Hornet could handle in a day.

She darted around the corner of a building, keeping to the scant shadows the midday sun cast from Dirtmouth’s low-slung buildings, and remembered just in time not to press her back to the wall and risk the masks she carried as she hid. Stomping through the dust and making in the general direction of her home, just past the building Hornet hid behind, Myla ran to meet with a small crowd of similar looking beetles, all chatting merrily, covered in fine pink crystal dust and still sporting their mining gear.

Hornet held her breath as they passed, and with no small amount of amusement that they didn’t in the least try to hide, Hollow obligingly made themself as scarce as the could manage, stooping to conceal as much of their horns as they could behind their hide until the miner beetles were out of sight, and kept a hold on Ghost when they gave a delighted thrill and tried to duck away to follow Myla.

Hornet gave a soundless sigh, nodded in stern acknowledgement to her siblings, and made the last distance to the stag station’s swung-open door without further difficulty. There was little she dreaded more at the moment than being snagged into chatting with an entire crowd all at once, when she’d already today spoken more aloud than she had in the last decade put together, if one took out the weeks she’d spent occasionally, and often begrudgingly, talking to Ghost.

Her sibling misunderstood what she’d meant, however, about expectations.

“And why do you avoid them? If m- if the White Lady is no longer acting as queen, and Ghost is technically dead, should the right of rule not fall to you?” Hollow questioned, following behind her with Ghost corralled to perch between their horns, evidently content to be carried so long as nothing interesting was happening, as Hornet made for the stag station before anyone else could ambush her into conversation. “It would be your birthright, and why not accept it when there is no other order imposed upon Hallownest? Would it not be worse to leave it without a king? There will be more people to come, won’t they need help?”

“I would not leave it to weaken, only to fend for itself when it can. Its people are not a monolith; they’re hardly a people at all. Just a collection of scavengers over whom I have little say.” Hornet replied distractedly, ducking into the station and forgoing the lift, leaping instead down to the level where the stagways rose to meet the faded little town she left.

She struck the bell, and waited. “It’s not my birthright, at any rate. It’s your kingdom if anyone’s, or else Ghost’s. You know full well the Pale King never intended me as heir.”

And upon seeing what he’d done to the one he had, Hornet had on good authority that her mother had publicly disallowed him that right, anyway. For all that circumstances had changed her fortune for the worse, Deepnest had been what she was raised to take, never Hallownest.

“You know better than that. I don’t ask what you intend to do with Hallownest; I ask why.” Hollow elaborated. “Scattered they might be, but they still live within Hallownest’s lands. That brings them under our protection. If you do not take the throne, in name at least, then someone else might, and they might be a worse option.”

“And I will protect them, but not in that way.” Hornet told them sharply, bristling at the assumption that she’d allow such a fate, even hypothetically. “’Hallownest’s lands’ is a vain title given to an expanse of dead earth and the empty hollows beneath it, worth nothing at all as a monarchy. I will not allow injustice here, in this land I protect. You may not have seen the City of Tears once the Pale King ordered it closed, but I will not have any put into the situation I was; to obey the rule of law upon pain of death, or do what must be done, what is right.” She spat vehemently.

“How can I know I won’t become what the Pale King did? A distant ruler, too preoccupied with grand schemes and terrible consequences to realize his people were suffering? I cannot take his place, Hollow, and I will not!” Hornet said fiercely, turning away from them so that her glare, the old fury she knew she couldn’t hide, wouldn’t be so obvious on her face.

“… You think he did not know?” Hollow said quietly, but with a low current of something so torn, almost defensive and nearly aghast, but mostly dawning like they’d never before considered she’d think so.

It wasn’t out of the question that they hadn’t; they’d had so little time to.

“If you’re arguing in his defense, you’d be better served to take a different tack.” Hornet scoffed, bitterness she didn’t mean to speak with seeping into her tone.

Hollow flinched at it, and Hornet noticed more through that tenuous void-given understanding than the twitch of their claws. She glanced away and down the funneling road of the stagways, as yet too still to suggest that the Stag was near, and tried to think of how to back down. She was right, of course, but that didn’t matter. The Pale King had been dead far too long to fight over useless things like his intentions, when his actions, what carried far more weight, had left them as they were.

“He knew.” Hollow carried on unexpectedly, even softer, and Hornet could only make out the shape of their words with effort.

“He knew the suffering of every mind in the Kingdom. He saw it all, everything the Old Light was taking, maybe more as he watched all it would take, too. And I saw what it did to him. It destroyed him, Hornet.” They said with a nearly even voice, their grief so well-hidden and smothered that it was only the otherwise absolute silence of their void, and her growing familiarity, that let her pick out that it existed at all.

“The Infection destroyed many. Do you expect me to forgive him of it?” Hornet asked, with as little resentment as she could manage. She wasn’t certain that was altogether very little.

“… No. I don’t even know if I do, and I went into the Black Egg knowing, even if the impossible happened and I ever left it while I still lived, that I would never see him again.” Hollow said, and now, impossibly, they were mournful.

“…He meant that much to you?” Ghost spoke up hesitantly, their own not-voice a better play at neutral than Hornet had managed.

“Yes.” Hollow said simply. “I don’t- It is- It’s horrible, what became of us was horrible, everything was, but,” they hesitated. “You were not there, he… It was as though he knew he wouldn’t live to try again, if I could not do this. If I was not enough, there would be no second chance. So I tried. For Hallownest, and for you, and for him.”

“It is difficult to hate someone you watch sacrifice everything he had, every hope he might have possessed, his life and dreams and mind, for something that was already breathing its last. And to do so simply because it begged him to help it. There was no selfishness in his distance; he was only trying to survive long enough to give all he had left.” Hollow met Hornet’s eyes to say, and it felt like an apology for a god dead an age since.

Hornet had hated her father for so long, so viciously and for so many reasons, for what he’d asked of her and what he’d done to the people of the kingdom she guarded and the dark, silent siblings she’d almost had, and had instead to cut down for his mistakes, and, for the longest time after his death, this had made her think of him as a faceless creature. Cold and merciless, asking ever more when there was nothing else to be given. Part of her thought that she’d always think of him that way, for all that she’d seen him in person, heard him speak, dozens and dozens of times over her youth in the White Palace, even when he’d been far too busy to entertain a spiderling princess too young to be of use.

She hadn’t been able to think of him as a person after what he’d done, and after his disappearance along with that of the White Palace, a place that had once been nearly a home to her, she’d barely considered him a god, and never one worth remembering, not ever a parent.

But she’d held her hatred for an age of life, and while it was old and as worn into her heart as an ancient, well-trod path, it paled in comparison to what lived still.

And Hornet would not allow the Pale King, in any memory or hateful ghost in her thoughts he might exist as, to hurt those she cared for. If Hollow had found reason to remember him with pity, however undeserved, then it was not her place to doubt them, not when even an age of their own hardship hadn’t ground out that spark of loyalty, of care.

So Hornet only closed her eyes and took a deep breath, held it and fought down the prickling, unsettled frustration that the day had already caused her, and let it out as a sigh to feel her anger fade. She would not keep it close, not this time, not at the cost of hurting her sibling when she needn’t, and Hornet was certain that if she spoke without thinking it would be with more venom than Hollow deserved.

“Alright.” She said in a tired rush instead. “Is that why you’re so insistent upon someone taking his place?”

“Everything fell to pieces so quickly, quicker than I could grow, even with the Pale King himself giving all to keep Hallownest from a more abrupt end than it saw. I fear what will become of it, without such a power at its head.” Hollow confirmed.

“I am not him.” Hornet said without irritation, glancing back up at her looming sibling, and it felt like something eased in the air between them.

“I know. I am glad for it.” Hollow told her with something that felt like a weak smile. “I do not think I could ever want you to take his place, anyway. If you think the path you take is best, then I will stand at your side for it.”

“And,” Hollow said, with something in their tone that Hornet was amazed to realize might have been tentative mischievousness, “He was twice as blunt as you ever were, and twice as difficult to convince to take care of himself, even on his better days.” Hollow laughed faintly, their thoughts noticeably lighter. “It is a relief you do not quite take after him that way.”

“I’m gratified you think so.” Hornet said with a surprised huff of a laugh of her own. Then something occurred to her, and she frowned thoughtfully up at them. “How did you manage to get him to do anything, without betraying intent that was not his own?”

“Discreetly. Catching the attention of a retainer here, refilling a water glass there, just so happening to find myself without further direction near his quarters, so that when he finally tracked me down whenever he realized I was gone, late into the early morning, it would occur to him to sleep for a few hours. Nothing difficult, nothing I could not explain away even to myself as an implicit instruction or happenstance.” Hollow told her, with just enough difficulty in remembering to allow them to mark the recalling with fondness.

It might have been a hint of vindictiveness towards the old king, but the idea of her older sibling, who she’d in all her years never considered might have had a cunning streak to go along with all their rigid rule-following and duty and fate, launching a full-scale act of subterfuge for the unambiguous purpose of tricking the all-knowing Pale Wyrm into taking a nap, startled a true laugh out of her, louder than she’d expected and tapering into helpless giggling.

The circumstances were dark, and if she thought about it too closely she was sure the shine would be off the whole concept quickly enough, but Hollow was looking at her with what could pass for an eldritch smile, the hum of their thoughts distinctly charmed, apparently pleased to have made her laugh, and Ghost was similarly cheered where they were balanced between Hollow’s horns like a vigilant little sentry, observing the conversation with their watchful, knowing eyes so familiar.

The air of the stag station, thick with dust floating hazily through the narrow traces of the surface light left to illuminate it, seemed brighter and warmer than ever it had when she’d been here before, for all that it was perhaps a little darker in truth. The lumafly lamp at the side of the stagway was dimmed with its little inhabitant finally sleeping in the day, and the shadows deep and long, but above her head and through the station door was still the sun, edging its slow arc towards afternoon now, new and promising.

And perhaps it was the sunlight, or the similarly warm lightening of her siblings’ constant, quiet thoughts as the sudden relief of it all finally caught up to her, that they were talking about the future, planning what they’d all do in her kingdom that was still there, but Hornet couldn’t help but grin up at them both, dark and observant and staring back at her with something she thought she could best pin as bemused tolerance.

They were still there, after all. They’d all survived, more or less, and sooner than later they’d be able to truly set their sights on what was left to them of the world they’d inherited.

“I can’t believe this,” Hornet said aloud, through a breathy laugh that still hadn’t entirely died. “Little Ghost, you must have been a worse influence on me than I’d ever expected.”

At their questioning hum, curious and bright-eyed, she gave an amused hum back. “Optimism. You ridiculous creature, you’ve made me hopeful.” She accused.

“Only now?” Ghost said, their not-voice like a laugh of their own as much as words. “I guess I wasn’t trying hard enough.”

Hornet rolled her eyes without any kind of hardness in the action. “No, I don’t think that was the issue,” she replied, and cut herself off to look to the stagway as the distinctive rumble of the approaching stag rose from the road beyond.

It had taken him quite a long time to arrive this run. Perhaps he’d been farther off than she’d expected, or maybe he’d been more affected by the Infection’s end than she’d expected. It had been some weeks since she’d seen the last stag of Hallownest, and the sickness’ devastation had been overpowering for most of them.

He looked well enough as he pulled into the station, the great beetle aged and creaking but no moreso than she’d ever seen him, when she’d happened upon the stag stations Ghost opened in the weeks prior, and a fair bit more cheerful than she’d noticed before.

“Ah, the Protector! It is good to see you once more, my friend. I hope your travels have met with easy roads, made all the easier with the shifting of the seasons. You’ve noticed the change, haven’t you?” The old Stag greeted, lumbering close to the edge of the stone platform overlooking the stagway to peer up at Hornet out of one dark eye.

“They will be easier roads to walk now, at least.” Hornet nodded agreeably.

“Ask him why he took so long to get here, he’s never taken this long before. Is he alright?” Ghost encouraged, drifting down close to the edge and startling the ancient stag nearly into flight as he noticed them melt from the shadows.

He leaned his vast bulk away from Ghost as they hovered near his face, tossing his horned head and giving a disconcerted huff. “My, what a strange being. Very forward. Very cold.” The Stag grumbled nervously, and startled again when Hollow moved from behind Hornet, leaning closer to inspect him, very nearly as large as he was altogether, though more ill-defined and notably lankier.

“Interesting. It has been a very long time since I have traveled through the stagways, even before the Black Egg. A stag is smaller than I’d always remembered them to be.” Hollow observed. “Are they usually so nervous? He seems very frightened.”

“Perhaps if we think very carefully, we might come up with why that is.” Hornet said flatly.

Hollow froze where they’d reached out their hand to investigate the buckles of the Stag’s saddle, as the Stag kept very still and watched them with wariness verging on paranoia, and glanced down at their claws. They’d passed through a narrow trickle of sunlight from above, in the glow of which Hornet could see the blurring of their edges, fuzzy in the direct light.

“Oh. I must look… Unusual. Am I truly so frightening to see?” Hollow asked, drifting back closer to the shadows and turning their wide white stare to Hornet, looking for all the world like they’d been pulled huge and formless and razor-edged from every grub’s fears of the dark, and somehow simultaneously like she’d kicked their pet mosscreep.

Hornet was saved from delivering the unfortunate truth by the Stag, responding as though she’d been talking to him. “I cannot say, I’ve never met with one such as these.” He said, his gruff voice shaking slightly, admirably disregarding Hornet’s misdirected sarcasm in favor of his growing unease.

“Do not fear them, they only welcome you as a friend.” Hornet felt the need to say as Ghost visibly wilted from the stag’s discomfort, still darting around over his head as though he might recognize them if they showed enough enthusiasm.

“I guess I shouldn’t have expected him to know it’s me; Myla nearly didn’t, and she’d seen me like this before.” Ghost said. “Could you tell him it’s nice to see him? I hadn’t had a reason to go to a station before the Black Egg.”

“Protector, what are they? They chill the air, as biting as the wind that howls through the Stags’ Nest from the wastes.” The Stag told her in a hoarse whisper, cringing and tilting his head this way and that to regard Ghost out of both his eyes.

“I expect you know them already; my sibling has met you many a time, even if you do not recognize them as they are.” Hornet replied. “And they tell me they’re glad to see you.” She relayed, having nearly forgotten he couldn’t hear Ghost speak.

It was fortunate for all involved that they were on the road to Deepnest, a land long-empty of talking folk, if she’d be required to act as translator otherwise. However well-intentioned her siblings might be in what they told her, Hornet felt there was little likelihood that anything they said would come across accurately in tone or clarity. Not only because she was quickly losing patience with the whole ordeal of translating the void-speak the shades used to something that could feasibly come out of a bug’s mouth, but also because, if she had to spend much longer on needless smalltalk, there would be consequences her siblings would not appreciate.

And if Ghost asked her to apologize for letting slip something too rude to one of these endless bugs that they’d come to consider as friends, intentionally or not, there would truly be no saving any air of comfortably fearful reserve that’d somehow survived the day.

“Glad to see me…?” The Stag wondered aloud, like she’d spoken in a language he was only passingly familiar with.

Then he stilled, squinting up at Ghost where they floated over his head, looking down at him with eyes beaming white amidst the dusty light from above, that spilled down to the stag station and the deeper black of their void. The dark little shade was almost humorously small above the Stag’s great horns, unknowable and strange alongside his mundanity and all the more familiar for it.

“… Little traveler?” He ventured, his rough, low voice uncertain.

Ghost did an elated spin in midair, accompanied by a wordless thrill of elation to be recognized, slightly distant like an excited giggle heard across a running stream.

“Little one! How pleased I am to see you, however changed you may be.” The Stag rumbled in delight. “And what below the earth have you met with, to have been changed so?”

“Hornet,” Hollow abruptly spoke up, having spotted the inconsistency in her plan. “How will I fit.”

“You have no weight, there will be no issue. Surely when traveling by stag, Deepnest won’t be too long a trip to make.” Hornet said distractedly, watching Ghost as they drifted closer to coil a tendril or two around the tip of the Stag’s long horn, the chitin apparently too dense for their cold to be felt and making the old stag go cross-eyed to keep them in his sight, and began to happily ramble about what, exactly, they’d done since they’d last seen him, seemingly disregarding that he couldn’t hear a word of it.

She sighed and leaned against the wrought iron retaining fence as it became increasingly clear they had no shortage of words to share, of things she’d never heard them speak of that, regardless, now they felt no need to filter or hold back. Which couldn’t’ve been helped, she supposed; they’d hardly had time to swap stories in the past few days.

Had they done the same to her, whenever they’d taken a bench to rest together, safer with another to keep watch than alone? Had they told her the same tales with the same excitement as they did now for the uncomprehending Stag, when she couldn’t have understood a single word?

It would’ve made sense enough if they had, as she’d always gotten the feeling that theirs was the buzzing, anticipatory sort of silence, yet it felt almost wrong to overhear. The closest experience Hornet had to compare it to was the misplaced sort of discomfort of watching a bug give their last farewells to a loved one, though, and this was not like that. It was more that they didn’t care in the least if the Stag heard them talk, only that they could talk to him at all. They seemed so childlike as they went on about what sounded like a quick rundown of the last day or two, notably avoiding mention of anything even tangentially close to the events of the Black Egg, on and on as Hornet pretended to look over the dusty, faded list of destinations the stagway connected to.

No, not childish. Carefree. Happy. It was nearly the same thing, Hornet thought, but there was a distinction to be made. Ghost felt they could speak to the Stag without reservation, even as he occasionally spoke entirely over their whispered not-voice, having his own totally separate conversation by the pleased little head-bobs they gave when he did.

How lonely must it have been, Hornet suddenly wondered, to have a voice after all, and never be heard?

And that realization, as late and slow coming as it was, came with another attached; if Ghost had a voice, and if Hollow, taken as the single Vessel closest to utterly empty, had one just as useable as Ghost’s, did that mean all the others had, too?

And how many of their siblings, Hornet followed slowly with an unsettled weight growing low in her stomach, had spoken to her before they’d died? Had they, too, used their voice to speak of moments and adventures and marvels, before she’d taken it from them?

She’d never thought to wonder, she’d never known they could. Even long after they’d proven otherwise, she’d hoped, every time, that every weak Vessel was one the Pale King had succeeded in making empty. It was a pathetic sort of ruse to cast over oneself, to pretend not to see all the little signs of life even a creature without pulse or breath could express, when there was no alternative than to do as she had. Yet Hornet supposed it had been a serviceable lie if nothing else; if she’d forgotten they lived, there was no shame in doing as the Pale King had told her she must, that even without his asking she would have known to do.

Had he ever succeeded, even once?

“Hornet, is something the matter? You feel- No, you look upset.” Hollow said, and Hornet turned to see them leaned down to her eyelevel, face tilted so that the soul-white eye unfractured by the damage of their once-broken mask could stare directly at her, somber with concern.

Hornet looked away.

There was no use in such regrets. She would tell herself so over and over again until she believed it, again. What she’d done had been necessary and, more importantly, it was in the past. There was nothing she could do to take back her mistakes, even if she could be certain she would not repeat them if the same terrible decision was hers to make once more.

And Hornet was not certain. Never had she been less certain of anything in all her years.

If she was again back in the youth of Hallownest, when all fates seemed to rest upon her protection, upon the safety of the Hollow Knight, would she still choose to kill the Vessels who returned to take up their burden? Those who came to the Black Egg with a nail in hand, those she knew could never have succeeded?

She did not know. And worse, she did not know if it would have changed anything at all if she hadn’t.

She had not considered the necessity of her actions in a very long time. She’d forced herself to accept them so long ago, she hadn’t been able to justify arguing against the need, not since-

“Deepnest.” Hornet mumbled, half to herself.

The Stag paused in his lopsided conversation, and Ghost similarly looked up with a flick of their tendrils, telling her without words of their good mood, eyes beaming bright and joyful. Hornet almost couldn’t bring herself to repeat her request and end the moment of happiness Ghost had found amidst it all. But they would have plenty of time to speak to the old Stag, and anyone else they cared to, once they were safe and living once more.

The masks she carried clattered dryly against each other when she pushed away from the ancient iron grating.

“Take us to Deepnest.” Hornet said again, and her voice was steady.

“Ah, of course, bells are not rung just for an old stag’s company,” The Stag said good-naturedly. “Though I’m grateful you would spend the time to catch up with one. It has been some time since I’ve seen you, little one! I hope you’ll travel the stagways more often on your newest journey.” He chuckled. “Hop on, any who will come, and we’ll soon be going.”

Hornet obliged him, climbing aboard his saddle and waiting for her siblings to sort themselves out to do the same. Ghost tucked themself alongside her, cold as winter sleet, with a tendril wrapped twice around the guard rail and the others tucked beneath them into the shadows of the seat.

Hollow had a more difficult time of it, partially due to the pointed look they kept stopping to shoot at her, something Hornet found no issue with pretending she didn’t see. What they eventually settled on was to sink as much of themself as they could into the shadows behind the front seat, and crane the rest of them, still most of their torso, over Ghost and Hornet to hold onto the decorative curl at the front of the saddle.

“Remember to duck, the stagways’ tunnels are narrowly excavated in places.” Hornet suggested, to put darker thoughts out of her mind.

If such a thing was physically possible, Hornet got the distinct impression that Hollow would have heaved a great, put-upon sigh, and then she had to scoot out of the way, and nudge Ghost along with her, so that Hollow could lower their head enough to lay their horns flat.

“It’ll be over quickly; the Stag is very fast.” Ghost reassured.

Hollow hummed their resignation, and Hornet signaled the Stag.

And as it turned out, neither Hornet nor Ghost had been entirely accurate with their expectations for a trip down the stagways. The Stag was very fast, something that Hornet found difficult to become accustomed to when the hurtling through the dark at speed wasn’t under her own power, but the trip stretched on far past when she’d expected it to end. Hours, and then hours more, that the Stag tirelessly ran and seemed to take every opportunity to try and throw them off his back.

Hornet hadn’t traveled the stagways in longer than many elderly bugs had been alive, but there was little excuse for Ghost’s misjudgment.

“We are nearly there, aren’t we?” Hollow asked almost plaintively several hours into the journey, having laid themself as flat as they could across the Stag’s back after a few close calls with the tunnel ceiling and a handful of the Stag’s sharper turns that, in spite of them weighing what must have been next to nothing, nearly shook loose their handhold.

Hornet found she could not reply in any reassuring way that they wouldn’t have immediately seen through as a blatant lie. The tunnels seemed to stretch on endlessly, and in the dark and with how closely they were squeezed into the seat, her entire right side had gone numb with cold from their proximity some time before, space impossible to maintain with the constant jostling and shifting of the Stag’s stride. Even without the cold, the close quarters were gradually making jumping off to walk the rest of the way through the tunnels’ pitch black increasingly appealing; she’d never done well with physical contact not wholly of her own volition, and neither the ages nor new traveling companions seemed to have changed that.

Half an hour since, as well as temporal estimation translates to public transportation, Hornet had begun daydreaming of simply standing and walking off the side of the saddle, come what may.

Contrarily, Ghost consistently failed to keep their enjoyment of the ride to themself. Every hairpin turn made them thrill with enjoyment, sunk securely into their seat and unbothered by their own void’s chill, and evidently blissfully ignorant of her discomfort. When the Stag grunted a warning and jumped, still running full-tilt, over what must have been an interruption of the road, be it gnarled deep-delving root or crumbling crevasse, Ghost couldn’t contain their silent shriek of enthusiasm at the moment of weightlessness, nor Hollow their spike of beleaguered alarm as they narrowly dodged a stalactite.

It was all Hornet could do to remind herself that just because she was in moderate misery did not mean that Ghost had to be, too.

“I think we’re about halfway.” Ghost said, nearly as noncommittally as they tried to be, and Hornet closed her eyes in the tunnel’s dark and pretended she hadn’t heard.

Chapter Text

And so as soon as the Stag had hastily disappeared back into the stagways, running as though all the spiders of Deepnest were at his heels, Hollow turned on her.

Yet before they could say a word, Hornet had cut them off.

“Whatever decision is made regarding Hallownest’s protection, I will not make it alone.” Hornet reassured them, knowing full-well that this wasn’t what Hollow had meant to talk to her about. “If its safety is my duty as child of its once-monarch along with my title, then that duty extends also to you. Indeed, if we speak of technicalities, I would assume Ghost the rightful king out of all of us.”

“Ghost?” Hollow repeated, perplexed, looking to their smallest sibling and successfully sidetracked. “What earthly technicality could mean such?”

“I suppose you’re right, if you’re talking about the King’s Brand.” Ghost shrugged with a distracted twitch of their tendrils, their not-voice still buzzing with residual excitement from the trip through the stagways. “Though I can’t imagine you’d want me in charge. I’d rather stay put, I think, and spend some time getting used to talking again. And besides, I’ve only been here a few months. You have the most experience of any of us, if you’re trying to get someone to step up.” They said to her, having apparently completely missed every one of Hollow’s unsubtle cues.

Hornet barked a grim laugh. “Experience with what? Watching a kingdom meet its gruesome end? Surviving where all else withers? The only experience I have with rule is to despise those who impart it. You were listening, when I spoke in the Nailmaster’s shop; what good can a wyrm’s child do for a kingdom? Or the Beast’s child, at that? I am no god, and I have no prescience to aid me, only too great a familiarity with the use of my needle.”

“And besides, apparently I’m a vigilante.” Hornet concluded dryly, the way the word echoed in the empty stag station bouncing it back as hollowed and softly distorted as a water-damaged painting.

“Exactly, you’re a vigilante, and I’m a wanderer, and Hollow’s,” Ghost searched for the right term for long enough that Hollow took pity on them, evidently, and said something vague and prompting that Hornet didn’t catch through their void-speak. “Tired. Hollow’s tired.” Ghost decided on.

“I was listening, I was right outside, and I agree; maybe there’s no way to make what’s left be whatever Hallownest was, to be called the ‘kingdom eternal,’” Ghost reasoned. “And maybe that’s alright. It doesn’t need to be that again. Kingdoms are always changing. I don’t remember much of Hallownest before, but I think what it is now isn’t so bad.”

“And if you aren’t going to reinstate the monarchy, so to speak, we may as well... Consider what else there is to do.” Hollow mused, dipping their head as if in thought and apparently suitably sidetracked, to Hornet’s relief. “And as it happens, we are all a little too skillful with our nails, as you said. But then, is there truly a need for them, now? There is no Infection, and all the folk of Dirtmouth are very kind. Is that how all of Hallownest is?”

Some awareness grew in the back of Hornet’s mind as she opened her mouth to respond, a faintly creeping cognizance of something amiss, but she brushed it off with a glance; there was nothing here, nothing in Deepnest that could harm her, and the stag station was as eerily quiet as the Crossroads had been, lacking even the brush of moving air those caverns kept. The old silk strung around from above was unmoving as though it’d been carved lacelike from the stone it hung from, pale only in the light from her siblings’ eyes, and the shadows stretching beyond it were empty.

Nothing, of course, nothing there. She’d already found what lurked in the dark. It must be only the silence, unbroken save by her own voice, that prickled like a threat up her back.

“There’s always a need. There’s always risk, even if it remains unseen.” Hornet mumbled distractedly, sweeping the lifeless station a last time before snapping her gaze back to her siblings. “Perhaps not as pressing now as before, though. Hallownest is… Far emptier than I’d thought it to be. More so than even I expected.”

“But there are still people,” Ghost argued, and out of the corner of her eye Hornet saw Hollow watching them with something like clinging hope, hanging on their sibling’s every word even as Ghost didn’t seem to notice yet, or at least not enough to decide to draw attention to it while they tried to remember all those they could think to mention. “The Mantis tribe wasn’t infected at all, not the one in the Fungal Wastes. And there were plenty of mosskin around, and those mushrooms also, you know, the ones that talk? They seemed more alive than the husks, they could be alright.”

“Or the spiders!” Ghost remembered with excitement. “They didn’t seem very rotted, not all of them. We’ve only seen the Crossroads; it could be that there’s plenty of bugs left and we just haven’t found them yet. They must all be wondering what happened. We should visit them once we leave Deepnest.” They decided, as though laying out their own future with all the ease one might brush aside a cobweb.

Hornet’s first instinct was to dismiss the thought outright, knowing it to be a narrow chance at best and knowing better the toll the Infection took on a bug once it began to eat at them, body and mind, but again caught Hollow’s eyes when they turned to hear her response, and a hint of their carefully muffled void, almost indiscernible beneath Ghost’s vivacity. That same hope, a spark fed to an almost-expectation, something grasped desperately for, and Hornet could only imagine that it was for their kingdom to not be quite as dead as it seemed.

There was no need to tell them that there weren’t any other Dirtmouths, that the City of Tears was empty and the boroughs and towns between the two as lifeless as acid-burned stone. Hornet found herself unable to say outright what the centuries had taught her was inevitable, the grim likelihood she saw stretch before them, when it would change nothing but how much grief her next words caused her sibling.

Either they’d be unexpectedly right in their hopes, or they would learn in time.

“I will need to see all that remains, regardless. I cannot say what we’ll find.” She said instead, neither a false hope nor a condemnation, and turned away.

“We should go to the Mantis tribe first, to see if they’re alright. They aren’t far off at all. Hollow, have you ever fought any mantises? They’re really good, they’ve killed me lots of times. That was a while ago, though; I’m sure if we went together, now, they wouldn’t try to harm you if you didn’t want to fight back.” Ghost suggested, and mimicked with two tendrils what could have been an impression of a mantis’ forelimbs, or maybe remembering a particularly decisive blow that had once done them in.

“I can’t say that I have,” Hollow replied like they were moments away from following it up with ‘and you shouldn’t be able to, either,’ for all that Ghost, Hornet knew and knew that Hollow knew, was by now fully capable of laying waste to the entire Mantis tribe if they’d a mask and a decent nail.

And in all reality, paying the mantises a visit wasn’t a terrible idea; it was unlikely that the tribe had fallen in the past weeks, having persisted so long without difficulty. Or, at least without extinction.

Though Hornet thought she’d scout ahead first, once both shades were safely living again and could be left alone; if the mantises had managed to all get themselves killed in the intervening weeks of the Infection’s rampant spread, she’d rather be the one to face the aftermath, at least to prepare how she’d break the news to Ghost, who for all that they’d evidently met a fair share of ends at a mantis’ claws seemed to have nothing but admiration for them.

“I’ve shared a fair few words with the mantids, and even more battles, and I imagine them to be faring perfectly well. Perhaps even a little disappointed, now that the endless supply of Infection-crazed combatants has dried up.” Hornet said wryly.

“Is the truce still in place?” Hollow spoke up suddenly, as though they’d only just remembered it had existed at all. Perhaps they had; even without having acted as host to a maddened, burning god for so long, Hornet found recalling such early memories as that a trial. “Father spoke of one once, in the same sentence as he admired their prowess in battle. Or as near to such a thing as he ever came; he said they were a ‘menace’ and ‘needlessly stubborn,’ I think.”

“It was when last I met with them. The truce between Hallownest and the Mantis tribe was with the understanding of mutually devastating consequences if it did not come about, and a mutual threat, besides. Though the only threat from Deepnest now should be the dirtcarvers, breeding too quickly to have been overtaken by Infection.” Hornet answered contemplatively, frowning to herself.

An important consideration; there was no reason to maintain the truce any longer, except for the tentative peace it might grant. The mantises had kept the wilder beasts of Deepnest at bay, something she distantly recalled an old simmering irritation for from when she’d only been thinking of the spiders’ lands as her home, when the spiders had needed to keep watch for the braver of the mantises’ youths always crawling down their tunnels and roads in search of some fierce creature to prove their worth upon. An anger long gone, and long covered with different paths for her ire to take, when the world became too empty to make things like borders an issue she cared about in the least.

At least, not within the Kingdom.

And now there were few such beasts left, if any. And the Mantis tribe was still there, still as honed and vicious as ever.

“Perhaps it should be renewed,” Hornet considered with a scowl. “If only to spare whatever unprepared travelers might foolishly venture near their lands. To ensure there are no… Misunderstandings.”

“I’ve beaten the Mantis Lords before; would that be strength enough to get them to think about it?” Ghost suggested, and Hornet heaved a sigh, unsurprised.

“Of course, you have. The sister-lords of a tribe of warriors, and you’ve found the strength to best them without even my knowing of it. Why did I ever think you mightn’t be strong enough for that you came to face?” Hornet wondered aloud, trying to soften her words to humor instead of admonishment.

She must have succeeded at least enough for Ghost to catch on, because they gave a pleased hum and drifted up to comfortably rest again between Hollow’s horns.

Hornet found herself nearly smiling at them, chelicerae twitching against her will to see her sibling anything but upset from something she’d done. Perhaps there was something to be said for the whole business of being friendly, however unpracticed she was at it. And she was unpracticed; Hornet could count on both hands the number of times she’d smiled outside of battle in the last century, and, to her chagrin, she realized then that they’d all been at Ghost or, more recently, Hollow.

Oh, well. If anyone deserved her piddling attempts at approachability, it was her siblings. They wouldn’t tell.

“But yes, I think that would be sufficient. Many times over the years have I faced the Mantis Lords and earned their respect. Should you and I come to them to ask for peace, I find myself hard-pressed to expect them to turn us away. It will be a tense negotiation, but with two who have bested their Lords I can see compromise as result.” Hornet told them. “Though they will be disappointed to lose unwary wanderers for their young to practice on.”

“Might it go even better if all three of us had succeeded in this trial? You have fought me maddened and near death; I think I would fare well in any other state.” Hollow offered. “If I can be returned to life, as you expect we two may be, then I would want to do what I might to help.”

Hornet stilled. They weren’t wrong; she could remember her days in the White Palace, before the sealing, where she had watched her sibling fight and, very often, demanded to practice with them. It had never ended in quite the resounding success she’d hoped for, but she’d learned something every time. They’d seemed impossibly skilled, to her youth and inexperience, had seemed the strongest bug in all the world.

Part of her looked ahead with childish enthusiasm to see them proud and unbeatable once more, securely reliant upon their own strength and wielding a longnail as precise and sure as once they had.

But the rest knew better. She had seen too many dead by mantises’ claws, had felt the slow crumbling of their weathered mask in her hands, knew how long it had been since they’d wielded their nail of their own accord.

It was unsettling, to doubt them like this. Was this what she was forever to be torn between; the knowledge that her siblings had strength of their own and the ability to put it to use, and the helpless worry that one day it wouldn’t be enough, that, in spite of it all, Hornet would find them slain by nothing more than an accident?

And to think, she’d thought the Vessels gave her grief when she’d only needed them dead. The living were far more trouble.

“Once you prove to me that you can hold your own, a fresh reminder of our ability would be a convincing bargaining chip.” Hornet compromised very skillfully, she thought. “At any rate, such concerns are useless until I have done as I’ve promised. Let’s go; I don’t wish to linger in Deepnest any longer than necessary.” She added.

It was the truth. Of all her failures, Deepnest’s was the bitterest.

From here she ought to have heard the scratch of claws on webs like antiquated memory told her to expect, the murmur of distant voices, chittering and casual and alive. The Deepnest stag station opened to the Distant Village itself, and it had never once been quiet in all the time she’d lived there. The home of the spiders, the nest they had carved and crafted for themselves, Hornet’s mother’s lair.

Yet it was silent. She’d never returned for the simple pain of seeing her people overtaken, once the Infection had destroyed them, too, had seen no reason when there was little aid to give, and all the likelihood to necessitate cutting down what had been family of hers in their madness. Broken little Weavers hatched into a plague, deephunters and deeplings and devout calling meaningless cries, savagery without intent and death without need.

They couldn’t know, not like she did.

“Yes, that is reasonable. I do not like my chances, to face them as I am.” Hollow laughed, just a faint echo amongst thoughts. “Won’t you wait a moment and eat first, though? I rarely visited, but Deepnest’s reputation precedes it. It is a treacherous place to travel, and I doubt that will have changed.”

Hornet scowled up at them as more of an acknowledgement than an expression of distaste, drawn from darker thoughts.

She had all but forgotten that she’d been supposed to be eating with the distraction of the stagways and the familiarity of the lightless land, but now that they mentioned it, she found herself ravenous. She hummed surprise, for she oughtn’t have been so for days more, and dug out the fistful of tough meat Sly had handed her for her geo. It was slightly warped and strangely frigid from its time in the pocket of her shawl, and she kept her thoughts from venturing to wonder at its origins as she gnawed at a strip.

It was bland and unusually gritty, and took work to get even a bite of, but it was substantial enough and, best of all, made by somebody else, so Hornet found no reason to complain. Any food she didn’t have to hunt down and prepare herself was food she preferred.

The old, broken station bench was still there, and a quick swipe of her needle cut away the aged silk drawn over it. Not much good to sit on, cracked jaggedly in half as it was, but decent enough to sit by and lean against.

“Are you sure that’s edible?” Ghost asked, drifting down from atop Hollow’s head to peer at her chunks of jerky, that she dropped onto her shawl rested over her folded legs.

“You don’t eat, why would you think it wasn’t?” Hornet grumbled and tore off another bite.

“It looks more like a strip of leather than anything. Do you not have anything else with you?” Hollow added their own concerns, and Hornet suddenly felt far more scrutinized than the situation merited.

“No, Hollow, I don’t.” She snapped. “This isn’t a White Palace feast; it needn’t look appealing. I’ll find something better when we leave Deepnest.”

They were silent then, both of them, staring at her with blinding white eyes glowing all the starker in Deepnest’s impenetrable gloom, their void all but formless, leaving only two particularly judgmental shadows to gaze at her like she’d done something both needlessly impolite and worrisome. As far as she could remember, her own mother had never fussed so much over her eating habits. Though she huffed indignantly at them, the shades’ blank eyes never shifted even as she took another tearing bite of her food.

How she would live with them once they discovered she hadn’t the heart to truly ignore them, Hornet didn’t know.

She gave a frustrated sigh. “Fine, I’ll hunt once we’ve met with the Mask Maker. There should be plenty of dirtcarvers delving into the loose tunnels at the outskirts, one of them will be suitable. Does this satisfy you?”

“It does.” Hollow replied, with gratification warming the thought. “I am beginning to suspect you pay yourself about as much attention now as when I knew you first. For similar reasons, even. Always careening off to whatever required your attention next, with no regard for silly things like physical safety or rest.”

“Are you calling me a child?” Hornet glowered up at them around a mouthful, uncertain if she should be offended.

“No, I only realize you are the same Hornet you always were. It’s nice to see that some things never change.” Hollow said, fondness creeping back into their voice and, as ever they’d been long before today, steadfast in their refusal to rise to match her indignation.

It was something she was as irritated by as she was grateful for, and Hornet found herself letting the matter drop as she finished eating.

She stood as soon as she was done, feeling begrudgingly better for the moment’s rest (for the stag ride had been far more exhausting than she remembered them to be), and saw that at some point in the minutes her attention had wandered, Ghost had disappeared from the corner of the shadows where she’d expected to find the white beacon-flare of their eyes. A quick glance over the eerie, silent stag station, thickly strung with draped spiders’ silk and shadows nearly too deep for even Hornet to see the ends of, told her that they weren’t nearby enough to be unconcerned.

So she strode through the station, brushing aside ancient, decayed cobweb as thin and fragile as sighs where they were threaded over her path and ignoring how her steps were the only noise, echoing with measured taps against the faintly damp stone below. Even with the spools of old greyed silk to muffle it, wound and forgotten by the boarding rail, the sound was so isolated that it felt like she might be the only one in all of Deepnest, the last to set foot in what had been her home.

To a technicality, she supposed she might be right to think so, at least for now. Yet she felt the unnatural chill as Hollow followed, felt just as strongly their confusion at her sudden departure and then their slow, unalarmed curiosity to realize, as she had, that Ghost was nowhere to be seen. At least someone wasn’t overly worried, then.

At the edge, where the flat stone of the station tipped into a heady, unguarded drop over the seemingly endless black, Hornet could faintly see the Distant Village hanging morose and untouched in the distance. Her home was only shades of grey less deep than those around it, suspended far off through the inscrutable dark, vast specters of silk held aloft like slivers of old moons. Hornet knew they were emptier now than ever they had been, home to nothing but shrines and memories and corpses.

It was not a thought she had any desire to dwell upon, for all that there seemed no choice but to dwell with the reminders spread before her eyes and as loudly silent as a memorial.

And there was Ghost, hanging in midair over the descent and just below where the stone Hornet stood upon gave way to the Distant Village’s open cavern, with the long fall beneath them. She didn’t see them at first, a deeper black on what was already fathomless for how distant the cavern’s far side stretched, until they turned to look at her with their full-moon eyes brighter than anything that had shone on Deepnest in an age. They glanced up for only a split second before staring back at whatever had caught their attention, that Hornet couldn’t make out in the least when she looked.

“There’s someone down there,” Ghost told her before she could say anything, their voice lowered like they were afraid of being heard and ever so slightly shaken, as though they’d seen their namesake. “Hornet, I think there’s somebody down there.”

Hornet nearly replied on reflex, that there couldn’t have been.

Deepnest’s sickened, maddened people had all gone, killed alongside the Infection animating them, and she’d know they had until she saw evidence they hadn’t with her own eyes. No one remained to venture so deeply, who would not have met their end either at the hands of those same dead folk or by the chittering mouths of the dirtcarvers in the higher tunnels. And even then, all that lay below them was a deadly, sheer drop that met with Deepnest’s chilled lake, stretching on as wide as the floor of the vast cavern the Village hung within, and farther.

And even that was not only too cold to swim within, cold that locked joints and spelled death as certainly as a drop to the ungiving stone might, should one fall into its depths far enough from the shore, but haunted as well by twisting ghosts of its own. Eyeless things swam in the lake, things huge and deliberately slow as they displaced the frigid waters and the flooded caves it ran from and into.

Nothing and no one but the spiders lived in this deepest hidden place of Deepnest for good reason. A bug of Hallownest wouldn’t know that the beasts were not nearly the only danger. There were no spiders left, and there could be no one else.

But as Ghost spoke a chill ran up her back, and she knew they were not talking about a bug. And yet the alternative was just as impossible, and it was only the shock as they spoke, veering almost into fright, that made her suspect.

“Who?” Hornet found herself asking instead, her voice similarly lowered though she, as familiar with Deepnest as any spider even for all the time she’d spent away, feared nothing within it.

“I don’t know. I see them, down near the bottom, just above the water.”

And then Ghost gasped, not as a sound but as a cold jolt of apprehension that speared through Hornet’s chest and made her claws twitch for her needle.

“Not just one,” Hollow murmured from where they’d silently come up behind her, tall enough to look down from over Hornet’s head. “Two, at least, though from so far away, I cannot tell. Ghost, are they…?”

“They must be. Hornet, they’re shades.” Ghost said and looked up at her once more with their pale-haunted eyes like washed-out suns, burning in the dark.

Chapter Text

And so the exceptions became the rule.

As the far-off watery depths below the Distant Village remained unchanged in their unwillingness to betray their secrets to her, Hornet’s siblings awaited her response.

As though it were her decision. In a very meaningful way, Hornet knew that it was. They knew not the road to their destination, they couldn’t speak to demand their lives back even if they found it, the tunnels here were treacherous even when abandoned; it would be folly to go on alone, if she chose instead to leave.

“They’re shades,” Ghost repeated quietly to themself as much as to her, deeply thoughtful, and only waited for her to decide.

There was unfamiliar pleading in their eyes when Hornet tore her own away from the precipice at her feet, in their soundless voice, asking her for something they’d never say aloud, that they only now seemed to realize they couldn’t do themself. Hornet considered them, trying to tease meaning out of the little thread of fervent, well-hidden thought they had held somewhere caught between showing to her and discarding altogether, to know what made them sound, she noticed abruptly, so scared.

The realization came as a heavy drop of her stomach, drawn from her own conclusions more than any hint Ghost had given up, something they were too shaken to ask outright for. It shouldn’t have been a surprise at all, seemed dismally clear now that it was plain in her mind.

They were afraid of her. Yet, no, that wasn’t quite right, Ghost had never in their life feared her, even when they’d have been well served to.

They feared what she’d do. In the absence of their own strength, their own ability to draw their nail and carve what they wanted from the world, they feared what she’d do with hers.

They wanted her to save the ones they saw below, and they were not certain she would.

Those other little remnants they saw clustered over the freezing lake, those that couldn’t have existed except that Hornet knew they did, as though to finally slot the sound of struck bell into place for what it was. They wanted her to go collect them and do as she had promised for them, too, for these siblings that must have fallen in Deepnest, given in to some set of claws or some hidden peril somewhere, made a fatal, long-forgotten mistake and found themselves forever still in the dark, for all that they’d escaped their birthplace.

Another shade. Two, perhaps, or more. Impossible, she thought again as she stared over the edge, into the darkness that still refused to allow her to see its end, and knew even as she thought so that she was wrong.

For why should it be impossible, she scolded herself. Already it had happened twice.

Another shade. If they were like Ghost in their disembodied helplessness then they were vulnerable, in unimaginable danger even as Deepnest’s sharpest fangs were done away with, and the lightless lake below, with its coiling things and their pale, translucent flesh hidden below the surface, made her tense with that recognition, with the immediate understanding of what she must do. No, she could not leave them there.

She would not. How strange, for that to be a choice she might make, now. Stranger still, to make it.

How remarkable, that these siblings had been strong enough to survive, at least to die here, where even unwary spiders might meet their ends. How privately, callously relieving, for she’d never once killed a Vessel in Deepnest.

Yet part of her, likely the quiet little part that had pulled her back from the edge of countless fatal mistakes of her own, was very aware that she would be at their mercy. She remembered the agony of Hollow’s shame, unthinkingly shared, not painful for the emotion as much as how the dark trapped between her lungs had tried to meet it, tried to grow towards it and consume her, as though it’d have liked to be something mindless again instead of caught someplace warm.

Even thinking of it made her chest ache, tensed like she’d dropped her heart in icewater.

The shades of Deepnest might kill her. They would probably try, even without meaning to. Even only Ghost and Hollow, hovering some feet from her before and behind, had meant that there was a persistent shiver running through her that she could not stifle since the Stag had left Dirtmouth, a slowness to her limbs and a numbing of her reflexes, as though she’d stood in drenching sleet for hours. It was a profoundly uncomfortable cold, even though they knew better than to allow what would truly hurt her, now.

How ironic. The Vessels might be the ones to kill the Protector, after all this time.

How very, very strange that they would return, when not a single other had ever managed to, save Ghost themself. From the little Ghost she’d expect nothing less, and Hollow had always been incomparable. It was not beyond her ken to expect them to prove themselves exceptions. But no others before them, never, not in the centuries she’d spent dealing with shades and the Vessels they sprang from.

It was as though life’s most basic rules had changed. The dead lived once more, though with luck, the phenomenon wouldn’t be so infectious again. And who was she, to turn away from those she was sworn to protect, who still clung to life so dearly? Whom she could, at last, allow to live?

No, Hornet decided, and the deciding was startlingly easy. Of course, she would not leave them here, nor allow them to suffer for her cowardice.

“Can you see them? They are too far down, and I cannot pick them out.” Hornet said dispassionately, stepping closer to the edge and staring down into the gloom.

“… Not well. More like, I can tell where they must be. If they’d only look up, we could-“ Ghost said, cut off when Hornet drew her needle and cut away the silk coating the wall nearest her with a single precise stroke, and then struck the exposed stone sharply with the flat of the blade.

It was cacophonous, deafening in the stillness, ringing out over the expanse and back from the abandoned village and slowly fading to nothing. Hornet stared intently down into the chasm below and waited.

For a moment there was no change, only the smooth blanket of darkness stretched beneath her, uninterrupted by so much as a gleam off the unmoving water. It was nearly unnerving, to be unable to see through dark such as this. Void was a problem and a darkness unto itself, but Deepnest’s lightless reaches were too familiar to be inscrutable. It was only this cavern, the heart of her forsworn home, where she had never been able to look down into the dark and see its end.

And then there was a speck of white, two specks, pinpoints like distant stars in the velvet black, and then they were joined by another pair. They blinked in and out like backlit pinpricks as though their owners couldn’t decide where to look, holes in the perfect night, so close to each other and so small and far-off that Hornet could only be sure of the two that Hollow had predicted, though she might have guessed at more.

“They see us. Are they coming?” Hornet asked grimly.

“I think so.” Ghost said quietly. “What are you going to do?” And will I need to stop you, they did not say.

“With luck, very little. I place my life in your hands.” Hornet told them, though this, at least, grated at her every instinct to choose to do, and decisively replaced her needle at her back.

Ghost whipped around, their eyes burning bright and just as white as their slowly approaching kin, rising from the lake far below. “You’re going to try to help them?”

“I’m certain I don’t appreciate your surprise.” Hornet said dryly. “What were you expecting me to do?”

She regretted asking as soon as she had; it wasn’t a fair question, and she knew it.

“I-” Ghost hesitated. “It… I suppose it doesn’t matter. Thank you.” They said, and far from the suspicion she’d expected them to have for her, there was only a soft sort of awe warming their thoughts, a lightness, like the taste of hope. Something stronger than it even, something like gratification, uncharacteristically subtle, like they’d been proven wrong and took to it with grace, like they’d half-expected her to do something like this from the beginning and were only glad to be proven right.

“They are coming.” Hollow said slowly, as though there was something bothering them. “They must be… They must be as we are.”

Pointed realization was what colored their words then, as they straightened with a jolt to stare piercingly at her, and Hornet did not see cause to meet their gaze. “They might harm you. No, they will, it is the nature of the dark to seek itself, and they must be lonely.” Hollow told her, just this side of accusing.

“It might have been wiser to inform you of my actions beforehand.” Hornet mused aloud, belatedly. “I trust that you will warn them.” And oh, how only the saying so was like pulling fangs. Yet she did trust, Hornet scolded herself. There was no other option.

Her life in their care was a less repellant idea than she’d thought it would be, though it mightn’t have mattered if it had been. Between a moment spent uncertain of her own safety and the retrieval of the unfortunate souls at the very deepest point of the world outside the Abyss itself, the choice was a simple one. She did not make a habit of regretting necessary decisions.

More importantly, there was nothing else that might have been done, and so it hardly mattered if she truly trusted or not. This was the burden she had accepted in swearing to return her siblings to the living, and it was nearly a relief to have only her own life to weigh against it. And if it lessened what guilt was harbored close and poisonous and half-forgotten in her chest, what was, of course, useless to face when it was not necessary to, then all the better.

“You truly haven’t changed. We’ve minutes at most before they are near enough to cause harm. I will go speak to them. Stay here, both of you.” Hollow said, as grave as Hornet had ever heard them, and then they were no longer trying to keep themself as small as they could and Hornet could see, in the flickering uneven edges of their void-black outline on shadow-grey, the true size of her sibling’s shade.

All she could pick out was an impression of something vast passing close overhead, the flick of barbed tendrils only nearly clear for a split instant, and they dove down to meet the little white pinpoints and were gone.

“…I can’t believe I ever thought you were so stoic and ruthless.” Ghost announced after a moment had passed, breaking up the tense silence before it could truly settle in, and Hornet turned her scowl at them.

“I don’t mean it as a bad thing that you aren’t.” Ghost backpedaled. “It’s almost a relief, and this is proof; you’re truly too much of a good person to be as hard-hearted as you try to be. Though I do think you’re a little bit of a hypocrite, telling me not to take stupid reckless risks all the time.” They continued with a tilt of their head and something like the impression of a half-smile.

“I’m not a good person. Just because I’m willing to accept a certain level of danger in the name of what must be done doesn’t make me good.” Hornet rebuked. “In many ways, that is why I’m surprised you’re here now.”

“But this time, ‘what must be done’ is important because you decided it is, right? It’s like you said; there’s a lot you could be doing right now, but you’re down here helping us.” Ghost hummed pleasantly for what they must have considered their checkmate, undeterred when she stubbornly didn’t respond, having nothing to say that wouldn’t hurt her argument or them. “I knew I was right to like you, even after you tried to kill me. Twice. Maybe more, if you count all the times I didn’t win.”

“I saved your life immediately after our second fight.” Hornet pointed out reflexively, the memory of their blood on her claws, over and over until they’d beaten her at last, too sharp-edged to dwell over.

“So I guess that cancels out at least one.” Ghost teased lightheartedly, like it’d only ever been harmless sparring.

Then they gave what could’ve been a sigh, soft and a little more tired than she’d have expected, and turned away to look down at where the little constellation of shades’ eyes still twinkled in and out of existence, yet hadn’t grown any closer in some time. Hollow must have reached them, then.

“I guess you find it hard to believe, but I do love you.” Ghost said, the words jarring like nothing else they might’ve. “Hollow, too. We talked a lot while you were asleep.” They said out into the darkness, apropos of nothing but with a weight like they were leading up to something, surprising her from darker thoughts.

“They don’t want to talk about most of what it was like for them before, but they’re always glad to talk about you. They know you from back before the Radiance, and I know you from after everything but the final days. I suppose a lot has changed in between, but we both trust you, and that has to count for something.”

They glanced down, so that she couldn’t see the uncanny gleam of their eyes. “I know you’ve done terrible things, but… Maybe it’s enough that you’re trying. I keep hoping it is, at least. I didn’t know for sure that you’d want to help whoever’s down there. But you do, and I think I trust you for it. To do it. That you’re safe, now.”

Safe for me, for my family, was what went unsaid, that Hornet understood even so.

“You’ve done awful things, I know that, and I still love you. Because you’re my sister, and I know you’re a good person, and I know that because you try to be, even if you’re good at pretending you’re not trying at all, like you’re only doing what you do because someone has to. I need you to have heard that, whatever comes next, even if you don’t ever believe it.” Ghost told her, and Hornet finally realized with a flash of a tearing, staggering pain that felt uncannily like guilt what specific awful deeds they were referring to.

The failed Vessels. She’d wondered how long it would take them to finally understand, truly understand, what had been done by her hand.

She wondered now how long they had understood, and simply chosen to treat her no differently, regardless.

“My mistakes are unforgivable.” Hornet snarled before she could think better of it. “What I have done is unforgivable precisely because it was I who committed the crime, their sister who they should have been able to trust. What does it matter if I try? I have always tried.”

There was some memory in the back of her mind, some familiarity in the terrible conviction Ghost looked at her with that did not fit their face, their horns, and Hornet shook it off as quickly as it came.

“I’m not trying to tell you what you did wasn’t unforgivable; I’m not trying to forgive you of it. But that doesn’t change that I love you. It’s very, very hard to live with having done something terrible, something you can’t take back, and I know that too well. But I can’t just stop and be consumed by it, and neither can you.” Ghost argued back, their head turning to aim the beacon-shine of their eyes back onto her face.

They seemed brighter than before, and Hornet blinked against their force and refused to look away.

“Of course not, you’re,” Hornet hesitated. “It couldn’t have been,” she tried again, her voice hard, and faltered to keep from that unkindness.

There was a distinction to be made, no matter what Ghost thought of themself. They loved so easily, of course they ought to be loved in return. They were not unkind, she’d seen nothing but kindness in how they’d helped so many of those who remained to Hallownest, singlehandedly saving more of her kingdom than she’d ever been capable of, by the simple fact that they’d found reason to hope for a better fate.

She’d seen it in how they’d waited for her to tolerate them in the months they’d survived her land, stalwart and unswerving in their determination to befriend her no matter how she’d snapped and snarled at them when they unerringly met in their travels over and over again, the strange little ghost who refused to die. Always ready to fight, to defend themself and their ambition, but rarely the first to raise their blade.

They weren’t like her, not at all. Whatever mistakes they’d made in their life, theirs were not indefensible.

“You’re a good person.” She said more harshly than was strictly necessary before she could think her tone through, unintentionally parroting them.

“Says you.” Ghost said. “But I don’t want to start a fight. I only wanted you to know that I meant what I said. I wouldn’t trade you for anything, no matter what you might think or do. It… Sort of worries me that you’re so willing to trade yourself for things. Like now.”

“I did not die to your ilk before, and I won’t die to this.” Hornet said sternly, because now she knew they did not understand. They mightn’t trade her, but she had traded them, done away with their like in a thousand of the lives of their nameless siblings.

Acid-laced words they did not deserve welled in her mouth, recriminations for Ghost and for herself that were useless because it was all over, and she’d never need to draw her needle against one of them again. She was the cruelest thing Hallownest had ever birthed, and she had done her job well. What right had they to think kindly of her, what reason? What right had she to want to believe them?

None, yet still they did. Still the past weighed down on the old, blooded blade at her back, and still the remorse she had no cast-iron excuse to ignore any longer climbed her like water up a wick, and still the lights of the nameless shades’ eyes looked upwards as though entreating her to try again, regardless of what might’ve become of them if she’d found them only weeks before. Knowing precisely what she’d have done was a sickly and newly shocking thing, startlingly difficult to hold in her mind alongside Ghost’s trust. Hornet swallowed down her venom and grimly suppressed her remorse, both reactions pointless and both as like as not to cause her to say things the little Ghost deserved better than.

And then, because she’d responded to their persistent, damned determination to see the best in her in the same way she might respond to deadly offense, the coldness of her own words heavy in her throat, Hornet sighed and consciously relaxed the rigid set of her shoulders before she spoke again.

“I am… Sorry you found such difficulty in your life. Is that why you came back?” She asked, intentionally without edge or anger, glancing away to train her eyes on the pack of shades still distant and far below.

“No. I heard Hollow cry out. I came back for them. I’d long forgotten them by then, but I still came back.” Ghost said. “I’m glad I did.”

“Hm.” Hornet hummed in acknowledgement, without anything she could think of to say to them, grim memory tugging at her mind, some recognition of their not-words that she couldn’t quite put a finger on.

The silence dragged on as they watched the darkness together, not quite as uncomfortable as it was wrongfooted, tentative. It didn’t seem like apology enough that she’d given, not quite enough to even out what she owed.

“Were there no sisters to make attempts on your life, out in the wastes?” Hornet offered lamely, her words frustratingly hesitant and uncertain, a stumbling effort to lessen the tension that, she was sourly aware, was entirely her own doing.

It had the desired outcome at least, as Ghost gave that funny little thrill of surprised humor they did, the equivalent of a giggle, Hornet thought, before replying. “None that tried so hard to, anyway.”

They paused a moment, thoughtful.

“We’ll be okay, you know that, right?” Ghost asked her then, looking up at her with their round white eyes so earnest.

“What? Why would we be?” Hornet replied, bewildered and knowing from the urgency of their almost-words that they meant something more than the safety of their shells.

“Just a feeling, I suppose.”

It felt like all they had to say on the matter, and the certainty they spoke with made any hard-edged response die in her mouth, so Hornet said nothing else. And then they again waited together in the lesser silence that followed, until Hornet noticed the eyes below all flicker out at once, and return a little closer than they’d been. They were coming, then.

Hornet took a deep breath of the crisp cavern air, cold and tasting of grit and cavewater and mildewing silk, and let it out as a sigh. “Of course, I care about you, too. As much should have been obvious, from when first I chose to stand guard while you rested. From when first I found cause not to raise my needle to you, even.” Hornet mumbled. “Thank you.”

The little Ghost beamed at her at that, almost obnoxiously happy, the warmth of their affection a startling contrast to the void she knew it from as they made no particular attempt to set it aside or muffle it, even as they said as much without anything that could be recognized as a coherent word.

“For what?” They asked after a beat, during which Hornet struggled to reconcile that she might’ve been the one to make anyone’s mood so light for any reason, and it took her a moment to force back her bafflement enough to respond.

“For waiting. For fighting. For a hundred things. For not dying, for coming back.” Hornet told them.

And it was the truth. Hornet was almost startled by how much she meant it, how glad she was that they hadn’t died in the lasting way a more reasonable creature would’ve, any of the times any other bug might have. Even now that they, like her, had outlived their utility, still she was glad. They deserved better, to see more of life than its end, and now they might have the chance for such. A kinder existence than whatever haunted them yet from beyond Hallownest’s enclosing ring of cliffs, siblings and friends who cared for them, a home in the peace they’d bought. Hornet was almost desperately glad for it all, that someone, at least, would get what they deserved from the world.

And they would get the life they deserved. She would ensure it, Hornet swore to herself as the eyelights of the shades below neared, even as the still air around her cooled like the calm night before a snowfall.

Chapter Text

And so Hornet met those siblings of hers that had found their ends in the winding, seething beasts’ tunnels she’d long left to rot.

When Hollow, still distant enough that she couldn’t hear what they said, if anything, looked again back to the little gaggle of shades they headed, the only way Hornet could tell that they hadn’t slowed their inexorable return was the ever-increasing chill in the air.

And once they had come closer, she saw there were only two after all.

Crowded so close together that their eyes dipped in and out of existence when their nervous drifting brought them behind Hollow’s form or one another, the shades Hollow ushered upwards were exactly the same dark as the knight themself. Each rounded pair of lights seemed to find their owner a little less certain than Hollow in their path, stopping and starting like they hadn’t quite mastered movement.

And then all at once Hornet could pick them out from the darkness around, Hollow a shifting, narrow mass of much deeper black with their arcing horns sharp against the shadows, grown longer, Hornet thought, and all the more jagged for being ill-defined. And behind Hollow, stopping midair before Hornet as Hollow did and pressing close around their massive sibling like a brood of frightened grubs, were the shades. She had to take a step back as they arrived, to give Hollow the space to stoop down into the station’s entrance with a last vigilant glance back over their shoulder.

The little shades milling restlessly between the webbed-over iron barring, too narrow to fit through as plastered to Hollow’s sides as they'd been, looked like Ghost. Or rather, Hornet reconsidered, Ghost looked like them, like any other of their kind.

For every shade she’d ever met, save Hollow themself, had appeared thus. Fathomless black, filled with a watchful, patient quietude, eyes whiter than anything and so stark in their round little impressions of masks that Hornet saw them imprinted on her vision long after she’d looked away.

Only the horns had ever changed, as a reminder that it wasn’t the same ghost each time.

She hadn’t recalled they’d been so small, though any difference in size between them and Ghost would have been inconsequential at best, and difficult to determine, besides. There was an uncertainty to them that Ghost never had, a nervous sort of fear. It seemed that they melted into each other, and Hollow too, their darknesses the same such that when one drifted before another there was no adjustment Hornet’s eyes could make to contrast where their void overlapped.

It was so cold that Hornet saw the puff of her breath when she exhaled next, and she tugged the fall of her shawl down to make it impossible to see how she’d crossed her arms tightly over her chest to ward it off.

“Hornet, these are our siblings. They have no names that they know, but they recall where their masks lie.” Hollow said gently, tilting their head down to indicate the two pairs of eyes in black little forms that had pressed themselves closer still as they spoke.

“Good.” Hornet replied firmly, scowling at the comparative loudness of her own voice as the strange little things both jumped at the sound.

And then she realized she hadn’t thought of what to do next. The shades made no attempt to speak to her and must have been very carefully keeping their void’s call in check indeed, for the only cold Hornet felt was the slow descent of the air into bitter chill. And instant mortality had (reasonably enough, she thought) been her primary concern.

Could they survive the travel through Deepnest to the Mask Maker, even with her constant guard and the peace the spiders had found at last? It went without saying that she would try to take them there along with the others, but was such a thing possible?

There were difficult tunnels they would have to endure on that road, where she knew dirtcarvers and worse had long burrowed their nests into the loose earth. Hornet was capable, yes, and with only herself she wouldn’t have thought twice. With Hollow and Ghost in tow, she mightn’t have worried overmuch; two shades were not so difficult to guard, when they were as aware of the danger as she was.

But two more little remnants, a pair she could only now distinguish between the eyes of even as they huddled fearfully close to each other and to Hollow, two who had already proven they could not survive her land? Who might never have learned caution for all the hazards of Deepnest, everything that would go wrong no matter how lightly one tread, who could easily only know a single way of many to die? Two was more than she had anticipated, for Hornet had never anticipated any at all, though how and why they could possibly exist was yet a question gaining a louder, more insistent voice in her mind as she considered them.

Why now? How could they yet remain?

Hornet scrutinized them, but, just like Ghost and Hollow, their forms were as solid as could be expected, not shedding drips and rising splatters of void like dissipating, ephemeral blood as all before them had, their gazes sharper and more aware than even Ghost’s had been when they’d found themself like this before the Old Light was defeated, with the same strange clarity of mind as Ghost and Hollow had gained since.

It had to have been the Radiance’s death to allow for such a change, but how? What influence could a captured, bound god have had over all of Hallownest that might’ve evaporated so suddenly, and allowed a host of the void-touched to return to life, in whatever mockery of it a shade represented?

A deeper chill than from her siblings ran up Hornet’s back, stricken horror she only just kept herself from drawing a startled inhale before the force of. If these Vessels she’d never once chanced upon in life had returned, how many others might? How many that she had seen, had killed?

How could she face them? How could she meet them and expect to survive?

One of the shades, the one hovering before Hollow and closest to her, Hornet thought, made the first not-sound of the pair; a choked-down little hiccupped thrum of their void, what could have been a distressed trill. And then they began to cry.

Hornet blinked as they twisted away from her and buried their face in Hollow, who looked astonished for a long beat before they gathered the tiny shade close, to nuzzle between the little one’s horns and whisper comfort to them.

“You’re glaring,” Ghost offered when she looked to them for explanation. “And thinking really hard about something that’s made you very sad. It’s alright though, you don’t need to be, it’s only temporary. We can get them masks too, right? The Mask Maker you talked about can make two more?”

“That’s not- Yes. There’s no reason they couldn’t. I told you not to read my thoughts.” Hornet said reflexively though, of course, they couldn’t have.

If the possibility of others hadn’t occurred to them, then there was no reason to suggest it. No reason to waste the energy to think of it, when these could very well be the only other shades in Hallownest. That they hadn’t stumbled upon any before was promising, considering the sheer number of empty masks she’d made empty, the countless more she’d looked down into the Abyss and seen.

“…Can they tell?” Hornet asked, because the concept that she was somehow unhappy too loudly was nearly too strange to accept.

She wouldn’t have done well as a Vessel, if it was impossible to hide so much as a grim mood from any others in earshot. At least the Mask Maker wasn’t so far, and the experience, Hornet desperately hoped, would be over quickly.

“I assume so. I can tell, I do not see why they shouldn’t be able to do the same.” Hollow agreed, gingerly letting the shade they held down when they craned towards the other, perhaps seeking the familiarity of what might have been their twin.

“I see.” Hornet said, frowning. And then, with a little more effort than she thought it ought to have taken, she schooled her expression to something more neutral.

“Are you alright?” Hollow asked, the honest concern threaded beneath their voice the only thing that saved them from her bristling embarrassment. “You look unwell. Are we too much for you, all together like this? I had thought it might be a little cold, but-“

“No, I- Yes, Hollow, I’m fine. I apologize. I haven’t needed to be… Unthreatening,” Hornet said stiffly, the sentiment unfamiliar in her mouth. “In some time. I don’t mean to frighten them.”

The very thought that she’d be so daunting without even conscious effort on her part was a more unwelcome one than it usually might have been, even after how Dirtmouth had taken to her. Hornet was fully aware that she was an intimidating person; she didn’t mind it. Sought to be such, even. It made those unavoidable interactions she had to weather all the shorter, and had kept her safe from many of Hallownest’s more sentient concerns for as long as she’d stalked its lands.

It had served her well when there’d been people to frighten off, and again when her presence meant as much as her words towards instructing the terrified and the badly shocked towards safety.

Yet she found she didn’t want to frighten the shades, her siblings. It might have been guilt, or how very small she still could not help but think of them as, or even fear for her own wellbeing, but Hornet found the sight of the nameless creature, who must have died so very young to be so scared of her when she’d done nothing meaningful to cause it, twisted the same wrenching hook in her gut as seeing Ghost cry did.

So Hornet crept closer as she would to prey she had wounded but not yet killed, so as not to startle them with speed or sound, and knelt on the cold stone before them.

And there, so close that her hands began to go entirely numb at the fingertips, she could feel a hint of what Ghost and Hollow spoke of, of knowing another by their void. Hornet found the two little ones each had different emptinesses to them, quiet thrums of uncertainty and fear, alongside Hollow’s more familiar steadiness.

They were afraid, Hornet found, terrified of her.

“Did Hollow not tell you of me?” Hornet asked, her voice kept as even and quiet as she knew how. “You needn’t fear, sibling-mine. I shall do you no harm.” She said, low and solemn as a vow. In a way, she supposed it was a vow. She might spend all her remaining days upholding it, and never consider her debt paid.

And as she’d hoped, they responded to the sureness of her voice. Hollow, their eyes and the cut of jagged white over their face beacons in the darkness high over Hornet’s head, hummed their encouragement, and the frightened shade nearest Hornet turned their face to her little by little.

Hornet flexed her hand to ensure it would respond, hidden beneath her shawl, and offered it to them. They twitched back into Hollow, but when she only held it open and still, they dared to look back at her, and Hornet could hear the first delicate threads of curiosity hum soundlessly from them as they considered.

“Terribly brave a creature you are, venturing so far. Would that I had your resolve.” Hornet murmured to them, drawing on long-faded memories of nestmates of ages past, of the soothing of weaverlings and the young when such things still lived in her fraught land. “Will you continue to be so, little one? There is yet a further way to go, but I will not allow it to spell your end again.”

The shade stared at her for a moment that felt endless, their unblinking, solid-white eyes staring deep into her own, and Hornet refused to falter even as she fought to keep worsening shivers from reaching any limb they could see.

Then they looked down at her offered hand, and reached out a tentative tendril to wrap around it.

When Hornet had touched Hollow in the sunshine and open air of Dirtmouth, she’d thought nothing could have ever been colder. She’d been wrong, for the little shade’s touch was all the nearer to void itself, at home amongst the shadows and cavern-chill of Deepnest. Hornet had never considered herself especially bothered by the cold, even to the point that she preferred it over those overly warm places in Hallownest if a choice was possible, but even so she nearly flinched away from the shade on reflex. It burned like fire, colder than ice, yet not enough to immediately numb.

Still, the touch of spilt void was not an unfamiliar one, and this was only scarcely worse than it. Hornet did not allow the shock to show on her face, and must have stifled the pain well enough that they didn’t notice it, because they took heart from her lack of response and drifted a little ways from Hollow and their twin.

“Sister, Hornet,” they said hesitantly. “You’re not void?”

“Not as you are.” Hornet said.

They nodded as though that made sense, or were at least content to take her at her word, another tendril appearing from their formless shadow to pat at her hand. They turned it carefully over, feeling the points of her claws and the thin layer of frost that had begun to form over her chitin, that Hornet hoped Ghost or Hollow, who might better realize what it meant, wouldn’t see.

And as they did, the other’s interest overcame their lingering fear. This shade drifted forward as the first had, peering around their sibling until Hornet lifted her eyes to meet their stare. They flinched back from it for only an instant before they, too, rallied and came close.

And Hornet found herself crowded by curious ghosts, and consciously kept her breathing slow and even so as not to allow the prickling discomfort the closeness caused to creep in alongside the cold. The second shade, with rounded down-angled little horns and inquisitive wide eyes, did not dare to touch her, something she quelled her relief for, instead choosing to speak up with their own whispered, unpracticed not-voice.

“You’re warm?” They asked in utter confusion.

“Are you from the Abyss, too? Somewhere different?” The first questioned, giving her hand a slight squeeze.

“Come to help?”

“Come to save? A mask again?”

“Can we leave? Go somewhere else?”

They asked their quiet questions, and Hornet dutifully responded to each as well as she could. There was some aspect of their void-speak she was missing, some piece of understanding she lacked that made the rest fragmented, if comprehensible, but as they talked they seemed to realize the same, and what they said copied how she spoke more and more as they learned how.

“Where are we?” The first asked, holding tightly to her hand now as though afraid to let it go, where the burn had mostly died into a throbbing numbness. Tolerable in the name of keeping them from startling, and Hornet decided that even if it hadn’t been, she was in too deep to let Ghost or Hollow know otherwise.

“Deepnest,” Hornet told them, very consciously keeping her voice level. “I know it very well; I was born here.”

“How?” The shade implored. “It’s so dangerous. So loud. Where did you hide?”

“I do not hide. I am of this place, and I fear nothing it might hold.” Hornet explained. “It is not such a terrifying land, only unkind to the unwary and the unprepared.”

Hollow and Ghost had settled nearby, having their own conversation just far enough away that Hornet could only pick out the vague shape of their words, something she found herself deeply grateful for. The cold had nearly become more than she could bear, but now they were distant enough to give her some respite.

Still, she doubted if she’d ever feel warm again. She thought she might not take it for granted as once she had.

The first shade gazed up at her with open wonder, meticulously careful to keep their void separate from hers as Hollow must have asked of them and still more than obviously enthralled with her every word, their eyes bright below the upwards curve of their dark horns, superficially similar to Ghost’s. It was discomfiting, to have a Vessel take such a strong and immediate attachment to her and still be unable to shake the feeling she’d seen them somewhere before, cut them down once, somewhere, yet Hornet found herself unable to brush them off, or even to cease the vigilant filter she ran her every response through for fear of upsetting them.

They seemed so much more childish than Ghost, so much more fragile. In a way, that realization was unsettling in itself; she’d never been good with children.

Yet this had to come to an end; there was much to do. Every moment they spent here, unprotected in the heart of Deepnest, of all places, was a moment they might be stumbled upon by an especially adventurous surviving beast, another instant the suspicion she had of the implications of these siblings grew, a pair of shades huddled down at the bottom of the world where they had no reason to be, the very last place she’d expect to find them.

“So no, I am not intimidated by this land.” She finished belatedly, having nearly lost the thread of the conversation beneath all they’d given her to mull over.

The shade before her gave a giddy little thrill at her answer that made Hornet’s own eyes narrow in amusement, chasing away her rising dread.

“I’m not scared either!” They exclaimed. “I’m not scared of anything!”

Hornet hummed her approval and, very considerately, she thought, said nothing about how they’d minutes before been crying with fear.

It would be quite a risk, taking them directly to the Mask Maker. It was a lengthy trek for a set of younglings, even ones so quiet and arguably untiring as these. Had they been spiderlings, she never would have considered it; too many curious hands to watch, too many fearless, foolish little misadventures to head off before they could get underway. At least if she made the attempt now, she would have Ghost and Hollow to herd them while she ensured their safe passage.

And their masks. She would need to retrieve a piece of each to be safe, a marker of their identity. They would be difficult to carry while remaining as battle-ready as she’d like, but it could be done. If she snapped off a horn of each it wouldn’t be difficult, assuming these shades had not somehow met here from corpses scattered across Deepnest.

It seemed unlikely, from their familiarity with each other if nothing else, and yet.

“How did you and your kin come to wait below the Distant Village, over the water it looks down upon?” Hornet asked, honestly curious for their answer.

The shade thought about this carefully before answering. “We left the Abyss, we remembered the way out. I thought we’d also remembered where we died, but we got... Lost. The dark was loud, and we- and my sibling was scared.” The shade corrected themself hurriedly. “So we waited where it was quiet. I remembered being- I remembered there was something vicious hidden in the tunnels, something that lied. At least over the water we could hear it if it came. Nowhere to hide, no one to hide as,” they murmured heatedly. “Nowhere we couldn’t see it coming.”

A leaden weight settled in Hornet’s gut at their words, and a fury that gave her crystalline clarity. Hornet knew exactly how they’d died. There was little that lied in Deepnest. Beasts that hid their faces, creatures that crept in the fringes, but perhaps only one creature that could be said to lie.

The shape-shifter, the hope-reader, the damned cowardly creature she’d hunted a hundred times and never tracked down. She knew too much to find it, feared too little for it to mistake her as prey. By the time she’d left Deepnest, never to return before the end had come and gone, she had tried countless times to drive her needle through its true face. Its nest she could find easily enough, embedded confidently into the bedrock of her mother’s land. Yet the creature itself would appear as anything, anyone, disappear without a trace for months or years until it hungered again.

It might be one of the only creatures she had ever truly hated, if only for how neatly it evaded her, every last time. Though now she had been given a far better reason to want it dead, and want the craven thing dead she did. If she’d the time, the weeks to track it, she’d try one last time to end its miserable existence, assuming it still lived at all.

But her siblings needed her, and she would not allow any wrath to come before that, however well-earned. There was a trickling awareness of the irony of the situation, of how she had so easily changed to finding the murder of Vessels a crime worthy of her needle instead of a necessary fate, an awareness she pressed away before she could think too deeply upon it.

“I cannot promise you vengeance,” Hornet began. “But I can ensure your safety. I will take you to retrieve your mask, and then you will live again. The beast you speak of will not dare show any face it wears while I await its blood.”

She gave a short, humorless laugh. “It may well already be dead. Little else survived the Infection, I cannot imagine that Nosk would be any different.”

“Good.” The shade said so vehemently that Hornet blinked in surprise. “It killed my sibling. I’d kill it if it was still alive.” They assured, their not-voice impassioned and sure.

Hornet gave another laugh, this one disbelieving and half-startled out of her. “I fear I’m a poor influence on you. You sound nearly like a spider, as vengeful as nettle and just as eager to sting.”

“You don’t fear anything.” The shade reminded her even as they beamed with pride, their little tendrils flicking in unconcealed delight at the unwitting praise in her words.

“Hm, I like to think so. You are a fierce one. That will serve you well, but I’d ask that you wait until I’ve found you a mask and a nail.” Hornet advised, looking on with something she felt was likely indulgence, foreign as the concept was, as they wriggled with excitement.

Then something seemed to occur to them, and they stared up at her, their eyes keen and brilliant. “Is that my name?”

“Is what your name?” Hornet asked, suddenly concerned that she’d said something inadvisable, all the vulgar words she’d called Nosk (silently, she’d thought) flashing to the forefront of her mind.

“Nettle. I like the word, what is it?”

Hornet huffed a faintly relieved acknowledgement, something warm in her chest in spite of the biting chill. They seemed just as excited as she’d felt to ask after her own name, long ago.

Though this was hardly a proper naming, missing the thought one typically put into one’s identity and entirely without the acknowledgement the event merited. Her name had been one of the proudest moments of her life, given amidst cheer and triumph and congratulation.

Far from where she crouched now on the stone, in her nearly-killed kingdom surrounded by her nearly-killed siblings, her own voice the only true sound in the abandoned village beyond the broken, webbed-over lift she crouched beside. Yet if anyone deserved a name, an identity of their own to choose to differentiate themself from the nameless shadows, it was a Vessel. It would mean the same as one given with pomp and circumstance, and be cherished just as well, after all.

“A stinging plant, persistent and adamant. Retaliation for harm, and protection by defense. It might be your name, if you desire it. It is not my decision to make.” Hornet reminded them.

“Nettle…” The shade mumbled to themself, tendrils flicking rhythmically as they mulled it over. “I like it.” They decided.

“Can I call you that?” Their sibling spoke up, and Nettle let go of Hornet’s hand at last to drift closer and briefly bump their forehead against their sibling’s.

“Of course! If I’d want anyone to use my name, it’d be you.” Nettle told them, aglow with delight. “Oh! But you need a name too!” They exclaimed, linking a tendril with one of their sibling’s like joined hands.

“Do I? I haven’t done anything like what you have.” The shade replied doubtfully.

“You’re why I’m here!” Nettle told them earnestly. “I’d never have left the Abyss if not for you. You’re like… You’re like a song. You have wonderful things to say, things I’d never think of in a thousand years. And you say them so… Short?”

“Concisely?” Their sibling suggested quietly.

“Exactly! I always say too much, but you can make anything sound beautiful. Like a poem. It’s… You’re like a sonnet!” Nettle burst out. “That’s a poem, a little one.”

“Sonnet? I’m a sonnet?” The shade laughed in disbelief.

“Yeah! So, what name do you want?” Nettle asked eagerly.

Their sibling stared at them as though they couldn’t quite believe what they’d been asked, which Hornet thought was a reasonable response. But when Nettle didn’t lose any of their enthusiasm, only watching them expectantly as though to encourage them to pull a suggestion from thin air, the shade hummed another quiet laugh, this one warm and resigned, as though they ought to have expected as much.

“I think Sonnet suits me, don’t you?” They suggested, eyes narrowed just a touch in a fond smile.

Nettle gave an impression that Hornet could compare closest to a thrilled gasp, tendrils flicking with boundless energy. “It does! What a pretty name! Do you like it?”

Sonnet giggled, by all appearances giddy and pleased with their choice and Nettle’s enthusiasm both, and nodded.

“It is good to meet you, then. Ghost and Hollow should know of your names as well, if you’d tell them.” Hornet suggested, and found keeping her voice steady wasn’t as much a task as before.

A complete dismissal of tradition or not, she found herself unable to care either way. How rare it had become, while she hadn’t been paying attention, it seemed, to see honest happiness. She’d nearly forgotten what it looked like, as the shades both readily agreed and then dashed away to inform the others of their choices.

For once, she thought, it was all very simple, as the newly-named shades explained as much to their intently listening siblings some ways away, their edges blurred in the dark and their eyes blinding-white. Like the uncomplicated happiness, the blind, willing faith the pair gave so readily had cleared away all the doubt the future held. They had only to suffer Deepnest for a short time, days at most, before she could return them to the surface and begin accustoming herself to new world, where death was not so quick or certain, where the sun shone in the day.

Perhaps this was why Midwife liked children. Hornet thought the old centipede would have liked these, if she’d been around to meet them.

Hornet’s chelicerae twitched in a half-smile at the thought, and she looked out over the black expanse stretching below the Distant Village, grey and empty in the distance.

Hornet thought of all that she’d considered impossible that had come to be regardless, and of Ghost’s inexplicable reassurance, to say to her that they’d all meet a better fate than she’d resigned herself to. That, too, seemed impossible, but Hornet had been proved wrong about more than one unshakable truth of the world recently.

She felt her hand, frozen stiff by Nettle’s well-meaning hold, begin to distantly buzz as a sliver of warmth returned to it, and was abruptly gratified for the resilience of her ancestry in a way she rarely was. Had she been entirely common bug, the limb could well have been lost entirely, from the silver of hoarfrost she saw had formed over it before she hid it back beneath her shawl.

She tucked her chilled hand under her arm to warm, and began to wonder if to be content was yet some other new impossible thing that might be made reality, if only she chose to allow it.

Chapter Text

And so Hornet found she wasn’t quite careful enough with what she’d told her siblings.

“You said you’d give them what?” Hollow exclaimed with as much affront as she’d ever heard from them, speaking over Ghost as their smaller sibling, perched up on one of their long horns, rambled happily to the other two.

Hornet made a dispassionate noise as response, and shook herself awake from where she’d taken a moment at the edge of the stag station, leaned against the solid, web-strewn metal of the lift long rusted and tied in place, to try and regain an ounce of warmth. The short rest had turned into a short, shallow nap, unintentionally taken, and though time was a difficult thing to determine without the comings and goings of others or the cycling of a lumafly (the one she recalled by the stagway must have flickered out at some point), she thought it to have been only an hour or so that they’d let her sleep. Two, perhaps.

She oughtn’t have needed to rest for an entire day more, at least, yet Hornet found it difficult to drag herself fully awake. Strange, but not unduly so; it could simply be that she hadn’t been as fully recovered as she’d assumed.

That it had never before taken quite so long to recover from such a meager injury, Hornet hardly spared the thought to consider. Any weakness would sort itself out soon, just as it always had, she was certain.

And of Hollow, she’d heard just enough of the conversation she’d dozed through to venture a guess at what they were talking about. “I assume you speak of nails. I believe I promised one to Nettle, in not so many words, and what of it? I was much younger than them when I had my first.” She explained with a muffled yawn, picking her way through the scattered silk back to the shades, who must have spent the time chatting while she napped.

“Are you counting the years they spent in the Abyss, the centuries spent dead, or some other appreciable stretch of time I’ve forgotten?” Hollow asked.

“Neither, I was perhaps… A year old, two at most, when a training needle was first put into my hand.”

Hollow tilted their head at her, eyes narrowed. “I know how quickly you grew, and you’re certainly lying. I never saw you with a nail before you were eight.”

“I don’t doubt the Pale King had different ideals about weaponry in polite company than Deepnest.” Hornet said.

Hollow stared her down, unimpressed.

“Alright, fine. I was four.” Hornet admitted. She’d been a smaller spiderling than was typical, slower to molt, and her guardians had thought to be more cautious with the weaponry she was allowed, yet it was still faintly embarrassing to have waited so late. And this was in spite, she’d later been told, of her best efforts to speed things up.

Hollow had the most stricken, resigned look she’d ever seen on the face of one without much of a face to speak of, as though they were imagining her waving around a full-sized needle in her first instar, and Hornet had to stifle a giggle that bubbled up unbidden from her chest.

To that, the tall shade tucked their chin fondly, accompanied by a warm sort of touch to their void like a surprised laugh of their own, and Hornet could not find the resistance to make herself distant for it any longer. It was Hollow, after all, and they’d seen her shriek with childish delight enough times when she’d been small that there was no shame in it.

And there was reason enough to relax now, if only a little, even if it was preemptive.

So she smiled instead, just a faint twitch of her chelicerae as she leaned against a discarded spool to resettle the weight of the masks tied over her shoulder.

“That is more reasonable. That is around when you became completely intractable, far from the dear, amenable little one you’d been previous; gone mad with power, I assume.” Hollow said like they were recalling a favorite memory. “You made life very interesting.”

“Very stressful, I could believe.” Hornet said.

“Not at all, you were a breath of fresh air with every piece of silverware you stole and used to dig up the potted plants, and every viscount you terrified into an early molt.” Hollow told her so genuinely that for an instant, Hornet nearly thought it was a compliment.

“Shh!” Nettle shushed them, and Hollow obligingly replied with wordless patience, like they’d mentally settled back and laced their fingers over their lap.

It was just as well that they didn’t actually move to do so, Hornet thought, considering the cluster of shades they’d found strewn over them like they’d all dropped in from a windstorm. Nettle had affixed themself to their arm, Sonnet was tucked under their chin and craning around their horns to listen intently to Ghost, who was settled in their customary spot draped over Hollow’s forehead, as their more world-wise sibling regaled them with some of their more exciting stories.

It was clear enough from the twins’ rapt attention that Ghost had been at this for some time, and that they’d found their stride at some point and become unwilling to cut themself off.

Though Hornet was impatient to leave now that she was alert enough to think to, the distraction had given her a few hours’ peace, and Hollow seemed content enough to be the stage for the exuberant storytelling, so Hornet crossed her arms and kept her peace, with the intent to let them at least wrap up their tale.

And as she listened in, she found that out of all the things Ghost had experienced, all the wonders and horrors they’d survived, what they were regaling the other three with sounded like nothing so much as a dramatic retelling of creeping through the halls of a stormlit City tower, and nothing more eventful than their daring escapes from the belflies roosting in its eaves. She’d come in near the end, it seemed.

The tale reached a crescendo, and Sonnet gasped, a silent, enraptured thrill.

Ghost was good at talking, for one who hadn’t in time uncounted. This could have been helped by how they could give impressions of the trial they’d faced, mental images less picture than impact, like if she’d looked upon the belfly as it shrieked, wings spread and belly alight with vibrant orange, smelled the rain of the City of Tears and the musty scent of molding window drapes, and then closed her eyes just as it struck and tried to recall the menacing glow of Infection and the equal menace in the tiny creature’s opened jaws.

It gave a compelling effect, though Hornet was certain Ghost was softening the edges some, to take away from the actual danger such a creature posed, to make the story exciting instead of worrisome. They were practiced with it, like they’d been telling these stories to themself in the place of an audience for long enough to have them prepared beat for beat.

Hornet wondered if they’d find more to tell, brighter tales with happier endings, when there was no greater fear in their mind than how they’d be received. When they would have the entirety of her kingdom at their feet to explore without any reason greater than their love of it, that she knew was strong enough that even with everything on the line, she’d never known them to be able to stop themself from poking in every dark corner, just to see what they’d find.

It was a nice thought. She’d be glad to see what they’d do with their life, even should they not allow her to be in it.

It seemed more pressing than ever that she see to it they’d get a life to live at all. Such happy fates were not easily wrung from the ones they’d been given, and the shades were so very vulnerable like this, all of them. A half-life as the one they’d clung to ought to have been transient at best, a moment of exposure between either true death or a return to life, and Hornet didn’t dare to think it one they could sustain forever.

“Let’s go. There’s no reason to linger, when what we seek lies so near.” Hornet broke in as Ghost ended a narrow escape from the last exploding fly. “It’s only perhaps two days’ walk to Nosk’s lair, and then another to the Mask Maker, if we take a direct route.” She continued as Hollow looked uncertain, and Ghost paused to listen before they could launch into another tale.

“Why there first? Is that where you think they died?” Ghost asked, and after a moment’s thought gave an agreeing nod. “I wondered about what that was. I was too distracted to fight when I found it first, but with how it tried to lure me to... It’s not a bad guess.”

“I know it’s not, that’s why I made it.” Hornet told them.

“Ought I know who that is?” Hollow wondered aloud, tilting their head up some as though it’d give them a clearer view of Ghost to ask, where the smaller shade was still sprawled between their horns.

“Not necessarily, if you’ve only rarely visited Deepnest before now, and not a who. Only a what. A more often cursed creature I have never known.” Hornet said. “One I have never managed to kill. It fears me, as well it should, but it preys upon the weak and the hopeful, and the frightened. If their masks do not lie within its nest, I would be sincerely surprised.” She said, nodding to the twins.

“And if it’s still there? We can’t help you fight it.” Ghost pressed. “Well, I might, but that could be a little risky.”

“If it lives, I wouldn’t need or want any help you might give. Though I imagine it wouldn’t. Surely even Nosk would not be spared by the Infection. And even if it was, it is a coward, it would not face me.” Hornet dismissed, checking the ties securing her siblings’ masks across her shoulder where their weight, as light and untroublesome as it was, she still couldn’t bring herself to completely forget.

“Is that what killed us?” Nettle asked, their voice hushed.

“Of that, I have little doubt. I’ve long wondered about that dark corner of Deepnest, ever darker than the rest. There must be a way into the Abyss there, one the Pale King had no means of preventing, that I overlooked. Little wonder I’ve continued to find your like scattered across Hallownest over the years, though how any escaped Deepnest without help, I can hardly imagine.” Hornet said wryly, and realized her mistake far too late.

“There are more? They survived?” Sonnet asked with their not-voice unthinking and genuine, looking down at her from where they’d wedged themself onto Hollow’s narrow shoulder. “Can we meet them?”

Hollow reached up as though to hush them, and Ghost glanced away.

It took a moment for the questions to sink in, where Hornet let the silk between her claws go slack. And then she took a quiet, grounding inhale to try and press back the terrible, tired guilt that settled sickening in her chest, cold and heavy and seeming to try with dagger-claws to climb up her throat.

Of course, it would be worse now, staring past Sonnet so as not to meet their eyes and still seeing in the downward-curl of their dark horns another Vessel, the last to meet their end at her needle. The one to die only hours before Ghost had proven themself to her, so that she did not have to kill them, too, after surviving Deepnest and Hallownest and whatever else had lain between them and meeting her in that Greenpath clearing… It was nearly too cruel a fate.

The shade before her now might have been able to meet another, if she’d only been a little slower. If she’d taken a day more to watch them, if she had not been so ruthless, so used to the unfairness of it all. At the time, she’d hardly given the last Vessel she felled a second thought; they were only the next weak link in a long chain. The death had been only what was necessary, as they could never have bested her, and she hadn’t had to so much as deliberate it.

Now, she could only think of them as a child that had not had to die.

It was useless to hurt so for what was passed, when all that had changed was that she could at last allow herself to care, Hornet knew. Yet it felt like a slap in the face to have it spoken nearly aloud by one who looked so like the Vessels she’d ended over and over, and it was with a shock of jarring, revolted panic that Hornet realized her hand twitched now towards her needle, as though she’d forgotten that she didn’t need to any longer.

She crossed her arms instead beneath her shawl, digging her claws into the thick chitin there with force enough that she wouldn’t forget them.

How foolish of her, to have shaken the reality of what she’d done for even a moment, when fate seemed so set on forcing the past upon her anew. Hornet exhaled deliberately, drew in another slow, measured breath, and let it out even slower, and felt steady enough to respond.

“No. None survived. There are no living Vessels.” Hornet told them.

She had made very certain of it.

“Oh. It must have been because they hadn’t met you.” Nettle said solemnly. “You’d have protected them.”

Hornet’s breathing hitched and she froze where she stood, the leaden weight of what she’d done, what they’d mistaken her to be, rising floodlike with the foolish, ignorant trust the shade spoke with, and all at once it was too much to ignore.

It was only to be expected, she told herself as tears sprang too forceful and fast for her to choke down, stinging hot at her narrowed eyes as she turned abruptly, took long, deliberate strides to the mouth of the stag station and leapt down to the first suspended platform, the silk still holding strong enough that it didn’t waver under her weight.

They couldn’t know, had no reason to know, and Hornet ignored the call Hollow gave after her as she swung herself to the next level with practiced ease, bypassing the woven lattice meant to serve as a ladder entirely, having never truly forgotten the ways and roads of her home.

Yet Hornet found the open trust they’d spoken with tore at her like they’d laid her open with a nail, fed the unbearable shame of ages, of countless horrors she had not allowed herself to think of, until it seemed too large to be entirely crammed into her chest, until it clawed and forced its way into her throat and she choked on it and couldn’t have sobbed if she’d tried, and through the scorching, tight-drawn burn in her lungs that kept her breaths shallow and gasping she would have gladly taken any void-chill instead.

She hadn’t been expecting them to say such a thing, yet she ought to have anticipated it. Her own immediate response, the sheer force with which the heavy horror of her actions suddenly became too real to bear, to cause her to turn tail and flee from it like a coward, shocked her nearly as much as the guilt itself.

Hornet had needed to do what she’d done, she knew she had, there had been so many things worth so much more than her peace of mind, and even that was easy enough to keep if she’d known it was necessary. To be the one tasked to spill blood mattered no more than if it had been anyone else’s burden. She wouldn’t have wanted another to have killed in her place, if they might have felt as she did now. And of course, someone would have had to, it’d been the only option, the only hope, and she’d been the only one who could’ve hoped to live long enough to see the task through to the end.

Why burden another, when there was already blood on her hands.

Yet a worse thing, even worse than what she’d done, lurked and suggested itself to her, a growing, insidious idea, insistent even as Hornet refused to think of it directly.

The only option. Had it been?

She wanted to be alone, to howl with agony she did not deserve like a wild, forgotten thing at last for all she’d done and all she hadn’t and all she’d never see again, to mourn now that it was over and there’d be no new atrocities to suffer. To hide away until she’d been spent of the pain, to let it scrape its way free from between her lungs, harsh and bloody and cruel, until she was too tired to hate it any longer.

She wanted to retreat, to finally have nothing to call her back, to cry in the dark where none would ever see her.

And Hornet knew she couldn’t, didn’t deserve the respite even if she could have had it. Because it wasn’t over yet, for her siblings still lived and her heart still beat. And between the two, their shared past could never truly be over until one faltered and stopped. Yet the shade’s words hurt like hissing acid into an open wound, and the only thing she feared more than returning to them and saying something unforgivable was that if they saw her guilt, they might realize what she’d done.

“Hornet, slow down,” Ghost said, at her side already somehow, and Hornet nearly lashed out at them on reflex, her claws landing on her needle before she felt them move, and even as she stayed her hand the awful shame rose again to consume her.

How often would the impulse of centuries, to strike down what hurt her before it could kill, bare itself towards those she could not harm? Those who, now that all their duty was done and gone, she at last need not harden herself towards? She’d had to survive, and so she could not have allowed care and could never spare a one, and when had it become easy not to?

Repetition makes anything routine, no matter how vile. None can survive fully cognizant of all tragedy, and her life had been required of her until her duty was done.

She thought she wouldn’t be able to bear it, should that duty be hers again.

Ghost’s little form was easier to see as she fell and twisted, catching strands of silk in her claws to slow her descent, the speed giving their absolute darkness contrast against the lesser shadows around, and for a split instant she felt hunted.

The stone and silk rushed by and the lake grew closer, and then Hornet landed without a stumble on the hidden ledge far below that led out into Deepnest’s wilds, shrouded and made nearly impossible to see from above by the overhanging cliff face and spiders’ silk alike. It opened like an unwilling maw before her, narrowly cut into the rock, black and silent as the Abyss. It shouldn’t have been, should never have been empty of chittering and eyes and life, but Deepnest had fallen to the gods’ plague as completely as Hallownest, such that even this, the singularly traveled road to and from the Distant Village, had gone still.

Her failure was absolute.

“The tunnels will be clear for some time. Don’t fall behind, and don’t allow the rest to do the same.” Hornet told them, her voice grating and hoarse, and did not slow as she pressed on into the dark.

“What? We can’t just keep going, they’re terrified! Nettle thinks they’ve hurt you somehow.” Ghost called from behind her. “They couldn’t have known, Hornet, and I haven’t told them.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Hornet snarled, entirely conscious that she had no right to be hurt, and furious that their words had wounded her anyway, the accusation that she thought they’d tell the others when she knew they were smarter than that.

They’d be right to tell the rest what, precisely, had become of the escaped Vessels, but even now she could understand, and thought Ghost to know as well, that it would be a deadly rift in so dangerous a place as this. Mistrust, even well-earned, could kill on these roads. “You think I don’t know they were unaware?”

“Oh. You’re not angry at them.” Ghost realized.

“Of course, I’m not angry at them!” Hornet despaired, succumbing to draw her needle as she walked, if only for the comfort of its weight in her hand while her sins tore her apart. “They’ve done nothing! Must I say it aloud? Where is your damned void, to tell you that which I cannot?”

“Why now?” Ghost asked, and instead of the blame Hornet had expected there was only sorrow. Sympathy. Unearned, unintentionally cruel. “We’re so close to undoing their deaths, and who knows how many others like them there are that we could help, too. It’s impossible, and incredible, but we could do it.” They said so fervently. “What about this, now, hurts you so much? It can’t just be what they said.” Their not-voice was only confused, without even a touch of accusation, and not a hint of anger in their bright eyes when they drew abreast of her, matching her speed.

Instead there was concern. Sincerity that only wished that she not be in pain, that they could somehow help. It hurt like a knife in her back, twisted sickeningly in her stomach like it hoped to eat away at her. She was not the one they ought to be concerned for.

“It is because I am uncertain.” Hornet spat the words like they burned her. “I would take any pain, any regret, if only it would have saved my kingdom. But did what I was tasked to do save anyone? Did it do anything but prolong the inevitable, and cost the last of you your lives? Could it all have been different, if I had done differently?” Hornet ground out past the knot tied in her throat, and hated herself for doing so, feeling tears hot as brands roll down her cold face.

“There is blood on my hands, Ghost, and I do not know anymore if it had to be spilt.” She said, harsh and low.

Ghost was silent for a moment then, glancing up and behind them for the rest of their siblings as Hornet followed the empty tunnel away from the Distant Village. They must have not been too far behind, yet far enough that Ghost spoke again to her without whispering.

“Did you want to kill them?” Ghost asked her, their voice short and intense and sure, like they had a point to make, something to prove.

It set her on edge, even as she knew they’d never intentionally hurt her. And such a strange assurance that was, when she felt like she knew so little any longer. Of them, a sibling of hers, she ought to have had nothing but justified suspicion.

“Of course not. Don’t be so shallow as to assume that my actions draw cause from what I want.” Hornet told them, equally forceful past the desperately shallow breath she could draw, like her chest simply couldn’t expand to fill her lungs, shocked tight. “I did what I had to, no matter if none again will ever know what lay at stake.”

“And you thought there was no other choice? Nothing else you could have done?” They continued.

“Of course not. You’ve learned enough by now, seen enough, to know that the Hollow Knight was the final gambit, and the Old Light already brought to our very doorstep and bound. Had she ever truly escaped, Hallownest would have burned in her light. The choice was a simple one; something so intangible as my ability to live with myself, or the lives of all that were left. This does not excuse my actions!” She insisted. “I should have found another choice! I should have made one! That’s what you’ve done, isn’t it? Wyrm’s sake, you killed a god! I could have found a way.”

“You should have, but you couldn’t. You gave everything you were to save as many as you could, like Hollow, and the cost was too great. It’ll never be like it never happened, and one day we might meet someone who’ll never forgive you, but you’re still alive, and they’re gonna be, too. You can’t agonize over it, Hornet, you know that won’t help. It’s over. It’s enough.” Ghost insisted, their not-voice undercut with pacing turmoil like she’d never known it to be, and when Hornet glanced back at them, she saw that they, too, were crying.

It brought her up short, and Ghost blew past her before they slowed enough to drift back to her while she panted, less from the exertion and more because that awful tightness still hadn’t wholly lessened its grip on her chest.

“It’s enough. It’s enough that you’re alive - that we’re alive. I’ve lost too many to that stupid god I killed, and all the stupid things that stupid bugs tried to do to stop her; I won’t lose you, too.” They told her, burning with resolve such that Hornet nearly stumbled beneath it, the will with which they’d denied death itself. “You’ve done something awful. But you’re my sister, and I know you’re better than it. I know it. You’re still alive, and you’re going to stay that way, and that’s all I care about.”

And with that they fell silent, their eyes phosphor-bright and unrelenting behind their blackened tears, their soul alight with that unbreakable will, as much care in them as there was daring, asking her to try and change their mind, to break her disagreement upon what could not be broken.

Hornet only stared at them, struggling to reconcile the half of what they’d told her, they who ought to have hated her. Yet Ghost had never been one to do as she expected, not when it mattered, and so Hornet found she could only do as she’d done when they’d surprised her every time before; give them the benefit of the doubt.

It would help no one to keep arguing. And to argue with Ghost over something they’d made their mind up about, even before she’d understood what they contended, was akin to arguing with the sun; there could be no changing how they acted.

“This is the second time I’ve made you cry.” Hornet said instead, stiffly, once she’d caught her breath. “I never apologized.”

Ghost gave a wet laugh, scrubbing a tendril over their face to clear away the dripping void, and all at once the Vessel who’d slain the Old Light was again only her little sibling. “It’s not your fault, I’m just a little too soft for this sort of thing.”

“What, comforting guilty consciences?” Hornet asked before she could think better of it.

Ghost laughed again, weaker. “Watching my siblings suffer, I think. It’s been a while since I could… Hear it like this.”

Hornet glanced away. “One would think you’d be well used to that by now, regardless.”

“It’s not the kind of thing you get used to. You know that better than anyone.”

Hornet hummed ambiguously, the rapid pace of her heart gradually steadying, and sniffed through her own slowing tears. “I suppose so.”

She sighed then, and thumbed the lingering dampness out of her eyes, and found some of the vicious edge was taken from Nettle’s words. They still circled like hunting vengeflies, biting at her whenever she failed to drive them from her thoughts, but something about the way Ghost was still there, staying with her though she deserved no such loyalty, let her force away the worst of it. She was not alone as she’d longed to be, but with the steady hum of their presence, as sure and certain as if she’d reached out to touch them, Hornet could not find it within herself to be anything but quietly, privately grateful.

There was little time to waste feeling sorry for herself, and waste it she would not. She’d run in the right direction, at least.

They waited together in the quiet then, just a short walk from where the main road through Deepnest’s depths would diverge and begin to become unknowable, listening for the others to catch up as her lungs gradually recalled how to function.

What Ghost told her wasn’t something she thought she could ever truly believe, that there could ever come a point when the price she paid matched what she had taken, but there was comfort, however unearned, in having one by her side who knew all that she’d done and still stayed. If they would still wait with her, for her, once they’d a mask and a nail once more, Hornet could not say, and found herself unable to care to think of when compared with what they’d already done. They were here now, and all that mattered was that she would fulfill her promise.

The tunnels were as silent as she’d expected, so close to the Distant Village that the spiders had been all that inhabited them, and yet Hornet could still feel the pull of Ghost’s sadness and knew without looking that they were crying still.

Perhaps this, at least, she would not stand by and allow.

So she sighed once more, gently this time, and turned to them as they glanced back to her in response, and came close enough to brush her claws beneath their wide, glowing eyes. The dripping void numbed her fingers instantly, yet Hornet found herself nearly used to it, or at least unbothered enough that it took little effort not to show the discomfort. Her next trip to a hot spring, she thought wryly, would be a singularly painful experience, if she’d become so accustomed to the cold as this.

“I’m alright, you don’t need to-“

“Quiet. You’re my little sibling, I’m not going to leave you to cry.” Hornet grumbled to them, and once she’d dried their eyes, she pulled them into a hug.

They were cold, unbearably so, but she’d expected such. What she hadn’t expected was the quiet gasp Ghost gave, and the well of something aching like a sob they had no true voice to give, and the unfettered happiness, in part her own relief that they’d allow her to comfort them but overwhelmingly theirs.

They’d told her as much before, but Hornet very suddenly knew that they loved her. That her simple presence, the fact that she was there when they needed her, meant more to them than she’d ever know, and while she’d known she was a sister to them by blood, Ghost honestly loved her as one. She wondered at it, carefully tightening her arms just enough that Ghost similarly burrowed their frozen face into her shawl, the weave quickly stiffening with frost. Not so much that their form, cold, yes, but also frighteningly insubstantial, would be under strain, but just enough that it felt less like she held a shadow.

Hornet drew the edges of her shawl over her hands to protect them, and briefly nuzzled between their horns, all the contact she dared. Her face still stung from it, and she hoped they did not notice her shiver.

“I’ve been unkind to you, and never once have you deserved it.” Hornet murmured. “I’m sorry.”

“’s alright,” Ghost said, their void-speak wavering with tears that hadn’t quite stopped. “I’m tough.”

“That is not as reassuring as you think it is.” Hornet told them, and held them that little bit tighter even as the cold began to burn through her shawl.

Then she sighed, the shaky breath coming out in a puff of white. “Fine. I will try.”

“Try what?”

“Acceptance, I suppose. Moving forward, letting go, whatever you want to call it. If it’s ‘enough’. If only because I will not have you suffer alongside me, as you insist to.” Hornet groused.

Ghost gave a weak laugh, their not-voice unimpeded by Hornet’s shawl, and nudged their face further into her shoulder. Hornet felt the chill scald her there, where they must have been crying still, and only brushed a covered hand soothingly over their back.

Was it always this terribly cold, she wondered to distract herself, to touch a child of the Void? Was it moreso because she had void of her own now, or was she less chilled for it than she might have been without? Did that matter at all, or was a living creature always to wither before the watchful dark, forced to shrink back and away or to join it in its emptiness?

At any rate, here she would stay if only Ghost could draw some comfort from the embrace, reassurance where, she was slow to realize, surely they’d had none for the longest time.

It wasn’t the same for her; Hornet had never thrived on others’ company, never cared for conversation when she could have had silence, and she’d been raised, at least in part, among loving guardians and her mother. It was not entirely unthinkable, Hornet grasped, that Ghost had never had a hug in their life, not from someone who lived and breathed. And they did thrive on companionship, had constantly sought hers out even before the Old Light’s struggle and their subsequent death, wanted her friendship and attention for whatever ungodly reason.

She had rarely allowed them it, not without reason or mutual benefit, a brief shared respite on a bench or an easier hunt or a quick one-sided conversation to update each other on their respective progresses. She’d had things to see to, a kingdom to watch, and she’d never quite been able to quell the reflex to draw her needle when she chanced upon them from behind, before she recognized their horns. It had been better for both their sakes if she did not linger at their side.

And now it pained her that she hadn’t. Did they think she would go back to her avoidance when they were safe once more? They must, for she’d never shown them any different, and that was unacceptable.

“We’re going to find a house when this is over. Dirtmouth, I think, is a good compromise, with its stag station and proximity to the edges of the Kingdom. And that is where those you are fond of live, isn’t it?” Hornet decided.

“What?” Ghost said, jolted aware from where they’d let their mind wander, like they’d been nearly dozing.

“Dirtmouth. Or would you prefer the City? Though Hollow ought to have their say, too, so don’t get attached to either.” Hornet informed them.

“You don’t already have somewhere to stay?” Ghost remarked. “And you’ve been here how long?”

“I’ve no need. I spend too little time in any one place to want one, though I have my favored hideaways, as any would. I suppose that will change, if there’s no need to keep an eye on the influence of the Infection any longer. I’m aware of few wholly uninfected folk who wandered the Kingdom that you haven’t managed to collect in Dirtmouth. Yes, the surface would be best.” Hornet decided.

Did Vessels tolerate sunlight? She hadn’t noticed any discomfort from either shade in the time they’d been aboveground, but perhaps darkness was more comfortable to a being of void. A question for another day.

Ghost only edged back some, and Hornet let them go easily so that they could stare up at her, puzzled as though they were trying to sort out her thought process.

Hornet sighed shortly. “The littler ones will need a safe place to rest, and I mean to give them one, and any others we might come across who would want the same. I do not imagine that will be every Vessel, if even there are so many returned, but if they are so inexperienced as these, I would not want them made to be wanderers. And I,” she scowled, mostly at herself. “You don’t need to be on your own. I do care about your safety, and it would give me peace of mind if you knew that. I know I am not… Always clear about it.”

“You’re offering me a place in your home, which you don’t have yet, because you’re worried I’ll be lonely?” Ghost summarized, faintly incredulous.

“Were you planning to hitchhike around the Kingdom first? Obviously, you’re under no obligation to accept.” Hornet said curtly in place of an answer.

“I hadn’t really thought about what I’d do. After it was over, I mean. I’d expected… Well, you know what I expected to happen. Of course, I accept, but… Are you sure? You,” they hesitated a beat. “You like your space.” Ghost finished lamely, and Hornet cursed herself for every time she’d bluntly rejected their company, even as she knew they were right.

“Of course, I’m sure. We will have a… Not exactly a kingdom, but somewhere to live, and siblings to watch. Should you need me, I do not want to be spending my time halfway across Hallownest. It would be efficient, if nothing else, to all live in the same place.” Hornet said sternly.

When she spoke again, her voice was as gentle and sincere as she knew how to be. “You don’t need to be concerned with my comfort. It’s not as though I’ll be locked inside with you all; even as I will not rule, there will be much to do, still. If that proves insufficient, and I feel you’re about to drive me up the walls, I’ll take a daytrip and return. But I will come back, Ghost. I’m not going to leave when this is done.” She promised.

Ghost only looked at her, seeming just as small, for a moment, as the smallest shades Hornet had ever seen, and just as young. Then they gave a choked, amused hum, the lights of their eyes narrowing some, fond and happy.

“You don’t need to convince me, I already said yes. I wouldn’t want you to be lonely, either.”

Chapter Text

And so Hornet and her siblings wound their uneasy way through Deepnest, following the narrow, serpentine tunnels where they beckoned.

She’d never once forgotten how it twisted, the tricks the tunnels – carved by spider and beast alike – would play upon those unfamiliar with their circuitous logic. Hornet had never known every scraped passage in Deepnest, and thought she never would, and not only because every moment she lingered within them was a moment the near-silence rankled at her, unbroken by all but the murmuring not-voices of her siblings and her own footsteps tapping over pressed stone and muffled over compacted earth, brushing through the little patches of softly shining fungi where they grew tall around her ankles.

It wouldn’t leave her thoughts, this especial failure she had allowed for, the utter annihilation of the spiders. Not here, where there was little else to distract and she was forced, every moment, to be completely aware of the hush that had descended.

Yet there was another, more practical reason not to know all the tunnels Deepnest had to offer; there were simply far too many, miles upon miles of earth scratched open and forced through. And they changed. Already Hornet had come across numerous new off-turns from the main road, each lurking and claustrophobic. Deepnest was a place of uncertainty, of feeling one had constantly taken the wrong turn, of worrying that, eventually, one would delve so deeply that there would not be a road to take that could ever lead up. Tunnels below tunnels, danger upon danger, even the most level head might take fright and abandon their set path.

And then, if they were unlucky, they would never escape. The passages changed, maps were useless past the most well-trod thoroughfares, only one who knew how the tunnels shifted, who had no fear of the dark or the many, might always also know the way through them.

And Hornet had never been afraid. Not of such petty things as danger or death, or uncertain roads where a mistaken step would be an end, or creatures far quieter and hungrier than her with far sharper claws. Once, she’d been so bold as to think that meant she feared nothing at all; that the familiar horrors of Deepnest were the worst that ever could exist.

She’d been wrong. Yet there was almost a comfort in returning to these tight passageways, her horns never more than inches from brushing the crumbling earth above and the tunnels themselves rarely wider than her outstretched arms, now that she’d led them away from the main road in search of her quarry. To be at once aware of how very little could impact her here, only what came from ahead, what lurked behind, what might crawl from the ground before her, and to know that this path was one of thousands, tens of thousands, more… It settled her like a heavy blanket draped over her shoulders, to know that she was safe in the familiar unsafety, that Deepnest was still as wide as wonder and deeper than anything could ever know.

Hollow was not as comforted by the darkness, nor even the closeness of the walls, more reassuring to Hornet than an embrace. They didn’t say as much, but Hornet had become familiar enough with the distant thrum of their void to tell when something was truly amiss.

Her sibling was closed in so tightly that the broad arc of their horns constantly brushed the walls, only their intentional intangibility saving them from more than one tight squeeze. This place had never been made for a creature so used to openness as them, even the relative open space of the Black Egg, and never for one who could not thrive beneath the crushing force of the world overhead. Had Hollow been living, and had they a mask of solid bone, there would have been no pressing onward.

And Hornet could tell this wore on them, that this confinement brought their mind to others before it, when even as insubstantial as they were, they still had to worm their way through at times, even as she went to pains to choose tunnels that she thought would remain wide enough.

She hadn’t known at all what to do; it was unfair to hold them to her own standards, to expect them not to fear or allow themself to be choked by the earth all around, so different from the spacious carved caverns of Hallownest, but she had no words to comfort them, for all that she wished she did.

In the end, it was Ghost who’d known how to help, as the subtle hum of Hollow’s thoughts became quietly desolate and flat, chased themselves in tightening, suffocating circles; they talked to them, as simply as that. Softly, a few of Hornet’s long strides behind, Hornet caught just a few words of every other sentence as Ghost spoke to Hollow of everything and nothing, of lighter places and friendlier people and complicated, unlikely stories that, eventually, had Hollow asking even softer questions.

Hornet was grateful, and faintly ashamed she hadn’t thought to do the same, though she’d never been the sort to carry light conversation of the sort that distracted.

For their part, the little ones kept close enough to her side that, though she hadn’t loosened her grip on her needle once she’d followed the tunnels deeply enough to feel the far-off rumble of the surviving garpedes creating crawlways anew, Hornet’s hands shook with their cold.

Ordinarily she trusted her senses utterly, and had as much confidence in her reflexes. She might feel the dirtcarvers coming by the grinding of their jaws through soil and rock and be ready to cut them through by the time they breached the tunnel, notice in an instant when a denizen of Deepnest had taken notice that she walked among them, but her limbs had been slow to respond as the road wound deeper, frozen nearly stiff.

So, she kept her needle ready.

Nettle and Sonnet kept their thoughts largely to themselves as they journeyed, their wide eyes more illumination than the tunnels might otherwise see in years and years, and drifted close enough to her that every once in a while Hornet might feel a tendril brush ever so lightly against her shawl, noticeable almost entirely by the icy chill it left as the shades sought the reassurance of her presence. Hornet said nothing against them, so closer and closer they edged as the tunnels began to wind downward, when the stone in the walls became all but replaced with the buried, rounded forms of ancient petrified carapaces, and it started to become a squeeze even for her.

It was Nettle who eventually gathered the courage to speak up.

“Are you okay?” They asked, tentative and so faint that Hornet scarcely heard them past her own thoughts whirling blazing fast, going over again and again what they might find within the lair they sought; thoughts of battle were always better, more useable, than fretting over things she couldn’t change.

Hornet glanced down at them, nearly pressed to her side and watching her with wary eyes, like they thought she might have chased them off for daring to speak. Still, she took a moment to think, and to consider what she could allow them to know.

One day soon, she would tell them all. They didn’t deserve to have their faith so misplaced as it was, to trust in her like they did, yet they also needed better than to be caught with their life depending on someone they despised. Better to give them security now, when they so dearly needed a capable needle to rely upon, and truth when they were safe to know it.

It wouldn’t be long, after all.

“Yes, I am well. I apologize for my actions; you’ve done nothing wrong, and there’s no cause to fear you have.” Hornet told them stiffly, narrowing her eyes at the path ahead; there was a turnoff nearly upon them that she could see, a burrowed, constricted hole in the wall, and another just past it. It felt like a diversion, like the wrong path to tread. They had to be close.

“But I scared you. I’m sorry I did.” Nettle said sincerely. “I’m afraid of losing my siblings, too.”

They were quiet then for a moment, and as the path momentarily widened Hornet saw them reach out and twine a tendril with one of Sonnet’s almost mindlessly. Sonnet nodded a brief affirmation and turned their face away even as they clutched at Nettle in turn, and the path grew narrow enough that they had to fall behind Hornet and let her take the lead.

Nettle said nothing more for a time, drifting just in her wake.

And then, after long minutes, “Sonnet died first.” They said tonelessly, their silent voice only that, with none of the added meaning and emotion Hornet had come to expect from the words the shades shared.

“I was… I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything at all. We survived so much, all that trying and all those others who didn’t, that when they died, it was worse than anything else. I’d wanted to give up before, to sleep like the shades in the Abyss always asked us to, but it had always felt like a choice. When the thing came for me, I don’t think there was anything else I could’ve done but wait.” Nettle mumbled. “I understand why you’d be scared, and hurt, thinking of the others. If something like that happened to you, too.”

Hornet could hardly breathe, and for this once it had little at all to do with the void in her chest.

“You didn’t run?” Sonnet quietly asked. “You didn’t even hide? You died because of me?”

“It was neither of your doing that caused your death.” Hornet said a little too sharply. “There was no possible way you could have known what awaited you, and little you could have done to escape it.” And Hornet knew that better than most. Nosk laid its traps well, and very, very carefully. Even past its clutches, Deepnest was always hungry.

“Promise me you won’t do it again.” Sonnet asked regardless, pleading. “Not even if I die for good.”

“But you won’t. Hornet said she’d protect us, we won’t die at all!” Nettle swore.

“No, that’s not,” Sonnet objected, and bit down whatever they’d been about to say. “I’d rather you escape than see you again in the Abyss, even if it meant I wasn’t alone there.” They said instead.

“Well, I would rather go back to the Abyss than let you stay there alone.” Nettle said stubbornly. “And it doesn’t matter anyway, because we aren’t going back to the Abyss. We’re going to be fine; we only messed up once! We know better now.” Nettle told them with a thought like a slightly strained grin, and with every ounce of conviction they could muster.

“…What?”

“We know better! We already died, we’re basically experts in it.” Nettle insisted. “So we’ll be really good at not doing it again.”

Hornet could almost feel the perplexed stare Sonnet cast at them, as though they couldn’t quite parse what they were hearing. And then the shade broke into their own quiet, disbelieving laughter. “That’s dumb, Nettle.” They said, yet they sounded nearly grateful, like their sibling’s steadfast obstinance was something they’d forgotten to consider and were glad to be reminded of.

Nettle perked up some at that. “But it almost worked the first time, right?”

Sonnet hummed agreeably. “I suppose it did. And as usual, if you’re going to be stubborn, then I guess I’ll have to be stubborn with you. You’re right, I guess. A little. This time we have Hornet, and Ghost, and Hollow, and we’ll have masks soon. But if something happens and I see you in the Abyss with me, I’m chasing you out.” Sonnet warned.

Nettle snorted. “Aw, don’t be modest. You’d out-stubborn anyone just because you could, you’re just sneaky about it.” They exclaimed, drifting to bump playfully into their sibling, nearly checking them into the wall in the tunnel’s close quarters. “Don’t worry at all, we’re practically there!”

Hornet refrained from mentioning how very far they were from anything less than dramatically dark and dreary, and was vaguely proud of herself for the effort.

And then she realized the ground had been utterly still for some time, the distant garpedes gone too distant to hear, and apart from the chill of her siblings, the air had itself been steadily growing colder as they progressed. Deepnest was never a bright or well-lit place, yet rarely was it without its little illuminations, luminescent fungi or eyes in the dark or lumaflies brought down into it, that’d yet to be crunched down as a snack.

There had been none for some minutes, the dark growing less familiar and yet, somehow, with more to it, a concentration and density it hadn’t had before.

Not quite void, but not quite natural darkness. A thinner mixture of both, more like, as though by drips and shadows there had been void diffused through the air here, and whether it was brushing against or coming up from the ground, Hornet couldn’t have said.

Yet that couldn’t be right. They approached Nosk’s lair, yes, and within the reaches of Deepnest nearest to the Abyss, as Hornet could guess from the depth and the dark, but not near enough in the least to have these tunnels be void-touched.

Not once in an age had Hornet so much as seen void not brought out from the Abyss by a Vessel, even as she ranged Hallownest corner to corner and top to bottom until she knew its every secret, until no change went unnoted. Never in Deepnest, though she hadn’t been there in so long the roads had all but entirely shifted within it. Moreover, never had void unclaimed found its way higher than the Abyss itself.

The singular exception Hornet could think of was the Ancient Basin, where the stuff reached up from below and hung saturated in the air. It hadn’t been so once, long ago when the Pale King and his palace yet existed, but that change had happened nearly as soon as he’d left. Hornet had avoided the empty palace grounds for years, but when she had returned, she’d found the darkness’ touch unmistakable, oppressive and draining more than her hopes. The Ancient Basin had not always been so loudly silent, no, but neither had it become more or less so in an age, and never anything beyond it.

What lay before her was new. It had to be.

Something had changed, something was different now. The Void’s dead rose with their minds and wills intact, the Void itself had… Could it have been freed by what the little Ghost had done? Come to venture outside its ancient haunting grounds at last?

Yet surely it couldn’t have been the destruction of the Radiance to allow such a thing; there had been many, many years before the Infection, an age long past and long before her own time when Hallownest had lived and grown without mention of the Old Light’s influence at all. It was an old kingdom, older than even she truly knew, Hornet thought. Older than anyone might know, anymore.

So what, then?

Hornet scowled thoughtfully to herself as she stopped, stood now before the narrowest tunnel yet, one only the littler shades might traverse freely and that she’d need to nearly crawl through. It offered her no discomfort, she’d seen such tunnels before and traveled them often enough, but it was colder than she’d expected. The brisk air rose from it like a gentle, soundless sigh, continuous and nearly undetectable, and she could see through only a little less of its obscuring dark than she thought she ought to, where it plunged down into the earth like a gateway to the Void itself.

Her siblings fell silent as she regarded it, and without any other noise or distraction Hornet could hear the faintest whistle of rising air, a sound like it was drawn by gasps from the bellows of lungs of some great, fallen beast, rising and falling in time with the gusts of cold that brushed against her legs where she stood at the tunnel’s mouth.

“I can’t,” came a very soft whisper behind her. “I can’t, don’t ask me to.” Hollow pleaded.

Hornet turned away from the path, confused to hear them sound so shaken, their voice underscored by conflict she could only touch just the surface of. There was an unfamiliar fear as striking as spiders’ venom within it, mingled with a near-mantra all run together like a sentence in bleeding ink, that felt like it’d had meaning, once, though now it was only painful and suppliant and confused.

Hollow’s eyes were unimaginably wide, overpoweringly white and nearly frantic, though her sibling didn’t move at all. Hornet was struck with the sudden impression that they were trying their best to be small, to be less, and reduced enough to be dwarfed by the narrow hole in the earth they traveled through. They had their horns laid back as far as they could and their arm drawn in close beneath their chest, having been forced to travel nearly stretched out on their belly to fit, yet the difference their efforts made was limited at best. They were simply too large for the tunnel, something Hornet realized with alarm and growing trepidation; she hadn’t noticed, too caught up in less immediate concerns.

She swept the littler shades carefully out of the way to stride past them and back to her eldest sibling’s side, where Ghost was already hovering, the brush of their void as comforting and gentle as they could make it as they spoke continuously, softly to Hollow.

“You aren’t trapped here, it’s alright. You’re only a shade, there’s nothing you can get stuck on the stone, nothing that can hold void that doesn’t want to be held.” Ghost reassured. “You only have to let the edges of you fade, and be calm.”

“I’ll lose myself if I do,” Hollow breathed, every word a struggle. “I’ll forget, I won’t remember how to remake them. She will draw away my will.”

“She’s gone. You’re okay, she’s not here anymore, Hollow, she’s gone. You have a stronger will than me, sibling, you won’t forget. You aren’t trapped.” Ghost told them, though Hornet caught on to who, exactly, Hollow was so frightened of as they began to shake in spite of the little shade’s reassurance.

Of course. She should have foreseen that Deepnest would have affected them so, for what had been their sacrifice, if not confinement? If not a very slow degradation of their mind and will?

“I can’t move. I can’t warn them. I can’t hold her, I can’t see.” Hollow sobbed. Their entire form wavered like a candle nearly blown out, and a drip of void rose from one long horn, followed by another. “I can’t, I can’t,” they said, nearly inaudibly, eyes going impossibly wider, and Hornet saw no recognition in them for her or Ghost.

There was a similarly dripping cold rising inexorably in her chest, numbing the back of her throat and freezing in her lungs, the chill deepening ever so slowly and still the same void-drowning as before. It wasn’t panic, and it wasn’t guilt, not her own at least, and her heart painfully slowed to feel its touch. Hornet consciously breathed deeper, and ignored it.

“You can. You did, and you will.” Hornet told them, her voice so loud it nearly caused her to falter, though she hadn’t spoken above an assured whisper. Void was silent or nearly so, and true speech was a stark contrast to it, however quiet. She’d become far too used to its sound.

Hollow didn’t outwardly respond, but Hornet felt as everything they were seized up as though electrocuted, like prey that thought it had been seen.

Hornet took in a slow, settling breath of the frigid air.

“It’s only the dark, sibling. There’s nothing here but unmoving stone, and you, and I. There are no gods, blinding or empty or otherwise, and she is long gone. You can move. You can see. There is nothing to warn against.” Hornet continued, gentler, softer.

“There is,” Hollow insisted, though their voice was vague and uncertain. “She only sleeps, only waits.”

“Do you feel the Radiance’s light? Are you in pain?” Hornet asked evenly, folding her legs beneath her to sit down next to their face where it was lowered nearly to the tunnel floor, before the steadily-growing absence of feeling in her chest could creep out to weaken her limbs and cause her to fall.

“Yes,” Hollow gasped. “Always.”

They pressed themself to the stone below, eyes wide and sightless and their claws scraping shaking furrows into the earth, and Hornet felt painfully clear how profoundly the memories built by hundreds of years had similarly carved their ways into her sibling’s thoughts, their expectations, such that they knew, of course, that the Old Light was not gone.

Here they were, in the cold and the tightly-bound dark once again, so of course here the Old Light must be, and any absence of the pain their eternity had inflicted upon them was just a lapse, a brief calm, before the worst again came to pass.

What a cruel fate, the kind that could be feared even once it was escaped.

Hornet had never been afraid of the dark, had no reason to associate anything but relative safety with the crushing weight of the Kingdom above her within these tunnels, the press of the walls, yet though she could not understand her sibling, not entirely, there was no frustration in her. Only a resignation, and the promise she’d made them, and care that burned caustic in her blood. It hurt to see them like this, she realized, and she couldn’t tamp down the pain with detachment.

Not after choosing to care in the first place.

To love was a terrible burden indeed, yet she found she preferred it even now. She’d had her fill of cold reserve, of careful distance and the silence untouched by thought or word not her own. And of the things she would do for it, the least was guiding her sibling through fears and unfounded, yet still potent, expectations of the worst.

Hornet let her breath out in a long exhale, and reached out her hand to brush her claws over Hollow’s forehead, calming and mindful of the white glow of the crack their very shade could not heal from. In an instant she could hardly feel past the slow, piercing throb creeping up her wrist, but she’d expected as much.

Something to settle them. To show them she remained, if they could not see.

“Does this hurt?” She asked quietly.

They shuddered almost violently, something she felt told to her more than saw, and their great, piercing eyes gained a distant thoughtfulness, a subtle abatement of the tension. “No.”

Hornet nodded her understanding, and settled her palm over the almost-substantial black biting into her chitin. Not quite true cold, yet not exactly the searching, passive draw on her soul that pure void made. Here she would wait for them, a gentle, unremitting reminder of the present for them to hold to, until either her hand froze solid or they no longer needed it. And she had her doubts that the former would stop her, if the latter had not yet arrived.

The vicious, draining void in her chest raged for tense moments longer, then stopped its slow advance and slowly, slowly began to inch its retreat.

It wasn’t long before Ghost crept close, edging around Hornet to curl against the side of Hollow’s horn and press their forehead to it, and Hollow’s drawn-taut tension fell minutely at their presence. The tunnel was cramped enough that Ghost’s tendrils curled against the hem of Hornet’s shawl, freezing through it where they brushed its surface, yet Hornet was gladder for their company than not.

Never had she truly sought companionship, no, and rarely had she missed it. But then, never had there been two creatures more determined to care about her, not since her guardians had left, since her mother had gone to dream. And it was fitting, Hornet thought, that she make an exception for them, to care for them in return.

To be alone was something she’d chosen, and it had allowed her to fulfill her duty without fail, but her duty had changed. It had taken a new form, and Hornet wondered at that her nail had found less use within it than her words, unreliable things she had never trusted quite as absolutely. And could she trust herself, to try for what her kingdom and, just as importantly, her siblings needed of her? They needed strength, but also care she had not been able to give another since she’d been very young.

Her siblings needed her as sister more than protector, and the difference was a wide one, Hornet mused while Hollow slowly calmed.

But she had never been one to back down from anything her duty had required of her, though her siblings were hardly a duty as such.

No, Hornet found that even if she hadn’t made her promise to carry out the task she’d taken on to completion, to help the shades regain their lives, she’d have wanted to ground Hollow through their fears, and hold Ghost as they cried, and give them a future and safety both that they’d never had. For longer than she could clearly remember, she’d never cared to do such things for anyone at all, yet now she could think of no possible way she’d have done any different.

How quickly they’d wormed their ways into her heart. Yet it hadn’t been quick at all, had it? Not for these two particularly frustrating siblings of hers.

Minutes more and Sonnet was at her other side, resting against her without a word, and Nettle settled at her back, and there was more than even that for her heart to hold.

Hornet sighed, and resigned herself to the cold as the minutes then dragged on so long they must have become an hour or more that they waited patiently there, in the stark white light of her siblings’ glowing eyes.

She’d begun shivering in spite of herself by the time Hollow spoke again, slow and tired.

“I’m sorry.” They said, lying still beneath Hornet’s hand. She did not dare try to curl her fingers, but that did not feel like what they referred to.

“Don’t apologize, there’s no need. Did you expect us to go on without you?” Hornet couldn’t help but ask.

“I expected to be more resilient than I am.” Hollow said faintly. “To be thrown into panic over the sight of a pinhole of a tunnel… I did not hurt you, did I?”

Hornet deliberated for an instant, weighing the likelihood they’d see through a lie to how the thought of coming right out to tell them they’d done her harm caused the void in her chest (or something that felt like it) to wake and sting her, to imagine the pain it would cause them. “No.”

Hollow’s eyes brightened once more. “I did. After I told you I would not.” They whispered brokenly.

“You didn’t. I’m only cold, not weakened as before.” Hornet shot back.

It was the truth. She guessed that if she’d stood her legs would be feebler than she’d like, and her hands stiff with the deadening chill sweeping like frostbite into the air, yet she was still fully aware. Her mind was sharp and functional, as were her limbs, to an extent. Whatever had caused her to lose consciousness for two full days after the Old Light’s defeat, be it the battle, the subsequent concussion, her initial encounter with the Void itself, or the accidental inciting of the void tainting her soul to reach for her life from within, it hadn’t been replicated in the least.

That, at least, she was glad to have been spared, if only for Hollow’s sake.

“And there is no shame in fear. Not of Deepnest, of all places. Not from you, of all people. You’ve more cause than most to have hang-ups about confinement.” Hornet observed before they could argue with her. “I’m honestly surprised you lasted as long as you did.”

“Before I allowed myself to be overtaken by fear without substance? Before I allowed myself to hurt you?” Hollow asked, their voice harder than ever she’d heard it, and none of the hardness directed at her.

They tilted their head half-heartedly away from her hand, nearly as an afterthought, and it occurred to Hornet that they must be utterly unaware of their effect on the living. Hollow at least, she knew, knew that they had a cold aura about them, yet not one of the shades had tried to distance themselves physically, though she admittedly hadn’t made her discomfort clear.

She recalled when Hollow had told her they felt no pain at all, in the state they were now. Perhaps that meant they felt nothing of the world, and that they’d been more literal than she’d known, that only sight and sound and void itself could alert them to another.

“Before you could no longer pretend you hadn’t suffered, at least for a time. There is no shame in that, either.” Hornet told them. “I’d thought myself to be the most distrustful one of us; must I answer some question of yours, now, to prove you’ve done me no harm?” She tried to joke, though it didn’t quite reach her tone.

“The day I can think of a question that would tell me that is the day I am much more self-deceiving than I’d like to be.” Hollow replied.

Then they gave a deep sigh, and moved their great head so that they pressed both into Hornet’s hand and Ghost’s embrace, their littler sibling quiet where they’d been curled against them, keeping their peace until now.

“How can I help, the next time this happens?” Ghost asked without moving, the thought clear as it was muted, as though spoken into a hushed room.

“I would not expect you to, little Knight. There wasn’t much of anything either of us could have done to head off such a thing.” Hollow told them gently.

“Hollow.” Ghost said, giving their sibling’s horn a forceless headbutt to express their disapproval. “I’m not gonna leave you to sort it out alone while you have a panic attack, if I can help at all. What can I do?”

Hollow expressed something like unsurprised discontentment at them, threaded through with a deep hesitance. But then they fell quiet, and thought.

“Presence. Touch. Anything you might think to say. Those things helped. There was never another in the Black Egg,” Hollow said, slow and reluctant. “And nothing physical changed except painfully, from within. She rarely spoke to me, something I will always be grateful for. Her focus was… Elsewhere.” Hornet got the strong impression that they only just refrained from tacking on a wry qualifier, then, perhaps some unkind reason the Radiance had not spoken to them, likely more because they knew their siblings would fight them on it than for their own sake.

Ghost nodded their acceptance like they’d committed it to memory, and Hornet took back her hand. It made a concerning, if quiet, crackling noise when she hid it beneath her shawl, something she covered with a heavier sigh than she might have made otherwise.

Then she gave a thoughtful hum, frowning without heat down at Hollow, who felt what was close to a curious, if tired, inquiry up at her in response.

“I’ve discussed this with Ghost, but it concerns you too, I think, and Nettle and Sonnet, if you are well enough to consider it. It is a pressing concern; we must come to an agreement.” Hornet said, gravely enough that Hollow narrowed their eyes in response, and the shades cuddled against her perked up with little matching interests in their thoughts at the mention of their names. “Now is as good a time as any, a natural moment of respite before the end of our journey.”

Hollow tilted their head to the side some, watching her closely.

“Would a house in Dirtmouth or the City of Tears suit you better?” Hornet asked, her chelicerae twitching in a smile.

Chapter Text

And so Hornet ventured into Nosk’s lair alone, save for Nettle and Sonnet drifting tentatively behind.

It had taken effort on her part and Ghost’s, and the timely addition of Sonnet’s clearer memory of the tunnels closest to the lair, specifically how very narrow they became towards the end, but they’d together persuaded Hollow to stay at the mouth of the entrance. Something they’d only agreed to on the strict condition that Hornet and the little shades take less than an hour or so to return.

Hornet hadn’t truly expected them to take so much convincing to decide to stay behind, knowing the deeply-rooted, blaring fear they had felt only to look upon the small, uneven hole in the ground, innocuous and half-constricted with blackened, gnarled roots like darkened chains. Yet she found she could hardly blame them; needing to leave her siblings behind like this, unguarded in Deepnest of all places, had her balanced on the razor edge of returning to them to find another way, though she knew well that all tunnels carved to Nosk’s lair would be so small.

Intentionally so, as all clever creatures of Deepnest would know. Limiting to both the size of prey and the space it had to maneuver.

It was a difficult situation, with no clear solution that didn’t cost something or another that Hornet wasn’t entirely willing to give up, be it the opportunity to have Nettle and Sonnet’s masks in hand quickly or the certainty of Ghost and Hollow’s safety.

And if some of the convincing had been on Ghost’s part to persuade her to go, Hornet took some small, vaguely embarrassed comfort that no one but them would ever know.

It felt like the wrong choice to have made, no matter the consequences otherwise, to leave them behind. But if nothing else she trusted Ghost when they told her they weren’t completely defenseless, and herself when she listened very, very carefully and neither felt nor heard any suggestion that anything crawled through Deepnest nearby enough to take notice. It was strange that she hadn’t felt even the far-off vibration of a tunneling garpede since they’d crossed into the void-tinted tunnels, yet Hornet couldn’t find herself too surprised for their absence; it would seem even so simple a creature as those felt the difference.

So, on edge and annoyed with herself for her lack of clarity of purpose, to be so hesitant when she knew what had to be done, Hornet left Ghost and Hollow and ventured down. There was no better option to be had, and this one, at least, gave her the peace of mind of knowing Ghost was easily small enough to come fetch her if there was trouble.

The two shades of Deepnest proved easier to sway. Nettle had no qualms at all about following her into the dark, trust that Hornet thought boded very ill for several reasons, and Sonnet seemed to have come to the same understanding Hornet had; if they wanted to be certain to find the right masks, the shades themselves would be the best judges, should there be any doubt. Their empty-dark horns were distinctive, and reminiscent of their masks if experience was anything to go by, but Hornet had to be sure. She’d seen very many little masks, too many to trust only her own judgement to pick out the right ones should Nosk have been a more effective hunter than she hoped.

And as expected, the tunnel became tighter, the walls edging closer and the air filled by lightless sheets of silk-thin, tangled roots, all tied together and caked with black earth and brushing, cool and faintly damp, against Hornet’s mask when the ceiling became too low to stand.

For several long, tense stretches, Hornet had to crawl, staring unblinking at the inscrutable darkness ahead, shrouded and cut off by hard arching roots she had to squeeze past and more of those draping, searching strands, fragile and still growing. She was careful, in these close quarters, to keep her needle from catching on anything and disturbing the packed earth, and to prevent the masks she already carried from being dirtied by the same. In the end she hauled the bones back over her shoulder to hold them in an arm and shelter them that way, to keep them safe from the gnarled roots above.

“It’s quieter than I remember.” Sonnet said, their not-voice hushed as though they thought someone might overhear.

“Well, I think we came from the other direction. Maybe that’s why.” Nettle suggested. “Though it’s a little hard to tell.”

“It is. It’s no wonder we got lost on our way back; I’d never have wanted to come this way. And the tunnels look so different.” Sonnet agreed.

“They’ve likely changed in the years since you died,” Hornet huffed, wedging her horns past a particularly tight cranny and twisting to take the pressure off the empty masks in her arm. How she’d come back the same way with two more, she hadn’t a clue. “Only paths carved into the very bedrock of Deepnest are certain, and even those have been known to collapse.”

“You think the tunnel will collapse?” Nettle gasped.

Gods, save her from anxious Vessels and her own poor word choice.

“No, there are no faults here. If there had been any dirtcarvers, or if garpedes were known to roam nearby, I might be concerned. This is only,” Hornet cut herself off to squirm the rest of the way through a bottleneck and into the, thankfully wider, next section of the tunnel. “Only an especially annoying way to travel, without any such danger. Though I don’t look forward to being caught here by anything, least of all Nosk.” She couldn’t help but add.

“I thought you said it was dead?” Sonnet said tentatively.

“I said I would be surprised if it wasn’t, which is not entirely the same thing.” Hornet corrected. “Yet the creature would have just as difficult a time as I to cause any issue here, if not more. Worry not.” She told them, more sternly than she’d intended.

“Is it that big?” Sonnet asked.

“Anything would seem big in here, I guess.” Nettle told them. “It’s a little weird that the tunnels are just about our height, though. I don’t remember ever having to crawl.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t a meaningless decision on the creature’s part.” Hornet mused darkly.

“We didn’t see any other shades, coming back through Deepnest.” Sonnet said slowly. “Do you think it got any others?”

Hornet stilled, stopped for a moment to brush the clinging, delicate roots and damp earth from her horns and pick the same from where they’d fallen over the masks cradled in the crook of her arm.

“It is likely.” She murmured down to the broken fragments, their empty eyes round and filled in by the murky red of her dirtied shawl. “There were many Vessels. Don’t be surprised if we find remains within the lair we seek.”

And then she jumped, tensing and reaching for her needle on reflex as something terribly cold, yet unnervingly soft and insistent, butted against her shoulder. She knocked her horns against the tunnel roof whipping around to see what, showering her and Sonnet both in a dusty fall of dry earth where they’d buried their dark little face into her shawl, the edges of their down-curving horns faint where they ought to have pressed into the fabric.

“I don’t want to see them, Hornet,” Sonnet mumbled tightly. “They won’t come back.” They said with such certainty, like they’d been told as much by the dead shades they hadn’t even seen, in a way that ran a chill of foreboding up Hornet’s back, one she soundly ignored.

She hesitated. The closeness prickled at her, the almost-touch of their void discomforting in a way unrelated to its chill. In hundreds of years, since her mother had gone to sleep and her guardians, the long-departed Weavers, had abandoned Hallownest altogether, Hornet had not desired the comfort of another’s presence. She’d been lonely, and often felt alone in all the world once Hallownest had truly fallen, isolated and wary in her ruined kingdom, but that had never translated to wanting contact.

Ghost, at least, there was precedence for. They were the sort of touchy-feely she’d eventually grown to tolerate as just another eccentricity of a particularly stubborn Vessel, and when Hornet kept watch while they slept in the months past, they’d had a tendency to jolt themself awake if she ever pried loose the tight-clawed grip they inevitably worked into the hem of her shawl. The first time they’d tried to hug her goodbye had startled her so badly she’d very nearly taken off their arm.

Unless situations were dire, and the option clearly of use, Hornet did not do physical contact, and particularly not when she hadn’t seen it coming.

Yet though this sibling was as uncomfortable an intrusion as a nail bared to her flesh where they sought her comfort, something she had not offered them and had had no time to anticipate or steel herself to, all but a stranger to her and cold as any other, she could see that they grieved. And hadn’t that been a luxury she’d dearly wanted, to be allowed the safety and patience to mourn the fallen? Could she be so callous as to turn them away, when she could feel they were on the verge of tears, in desperate need of consolation they’d never known from one who had the faintest chance to truly protect them?

Hornet couldn’t. More, there would have been no reason to, no duty that could have been denied in doing so. There was only a frightened child, seeking her reassurance.

So she shifted her grip on the masks and edged them around by the silk they hung from to rest again against her back, out of the way, and for a moment she let Sonnet hide their face in her shawl with Nettle hovering around them both, humming with worry.

Then she sighed, and when she spoke, her voice was gentled. “I may need you to tell me which mask is Nettle’s if there is confusion. But if there isn’t, you needn’t look.”

Sonnet only nudged their face deeper into the weave, and the sudden bite of cold too familiar to overlook told Hornet that they’d begun to cry.

So she scowled, at herself for her hesitation more than at her sibling, and rested her hand at their back, pulling them into a half-hug.

They twitched as though confused at the touch, raising their head to crane over their shoulder and stare down at her hand, and then up at her with their eyes too bright, that never quite seemed to be eyes as such to her, for their focus. Too intense to understand, and yet as real and living, she knew, as sunshine over the baked earth far above. That, too, seemed unreal and inexplicable, as though the sun ought to have forgotten itself as Hallownest had over the long years it had not shone over her kingdom.

Yet her sibling’s eyes were cannier than any star ever might be, though black tears dripped from their edges, never leaving hers even as Hornet let them go almost as quickly as she’d offered an embrace.

Sonnet was quiet as Hornet gathered herself, the chill of two shades lesser than four and easier to ignore the sting of, the cold that was not entirely cold. It took her a moment to find her feet again, a moment longer than it ever had, as though her will over her body was lifted and slowed like it ran through thick muck instead of soul. She was well enough, she knew. Hornet had had worse; there was no threat to her life, and anything less than that was a price she had agreed to pay an age before.

Hornet brushed the dirt from her knees and her shawl and cleared her throat, nodding briskly to the shades, uncertain what other acknowledgement to give, and turned to the road ahead with the air between them still unsettled.

It was darker, though wider, than the one before it. The ancient shells omnipresent in Hallownest’s ground lined the tunnel now, those that clustered from its lowest reaches to the shallowest caverns of the Crossroads and above, so dirtied and stony with ages past that any history they might have held was lost to time. Only their rough, convex edges were illuminated by her siblings’ eyes, the spaces between thrown into shadow, and above them hung stagnant stalactites, though no water dripped here any longer, the lengthiest of their bitter points driven into the earth below.

Beyond the tunnel Hornet felt moving air, and in the opened space pulled her needle free to rest ready in her hand. It was very, very quiet, and Hornet did not trust what made no sound.

“Why are you helping us? Why do you care?” Sonnet asked suddenly, causing her to tense before she recognized the blaring thought as different from her own, cut through with a mistrustfulness none of their siblings ever seemed to have for her. “Hollow told me you’re our sister, and you feel like a sibling, however faintly, but you’re not one, are you? You’re not from the Abyss. You have such color to you, such soul and life like none of us ever had that we didn’t take. You don’t have to be here.”

“Sibling,” Nettle began fretfully, but Sonnet only shook their head at them faintly, and did not look away.

“I want to know. Who are you, Hornet? Why are you different?" They demanded.

Hornet stared back at them for a long moment, and once again, for only an instant in time, felt hunted. It was not a reversal she did well to bear.

Then she turned away without answering and began to walk, leaving the shades to follow behind. If they would delay her with questions as open-ended as theirs, whose answers to tell in full would take long enough for Hallownest to again ascend from the clay, then they would have them answered as they progressed. Hornet had little patience left to be haunted in Deepnest’s lands.

“Do you know how we are siblings, little one?” Hornet began calmly, her voice bouncing back to her as theirs never would, even as muted and muffled by the dirt and the hanging roots as it was. “We share a father, and little else. You are bold to ask such things of me, yet I cannot fault you the question; why do I care?”

She snorted a humorless laugh.

“The only answer I can give is that I shouldn’t. For a thousand different reasons I shouldn’t, beginning with the role I was born to fulfill and ending with my regard for my own life. But then, your cursed kind shouldn’t have the will to demand I answer for myself, nor the mind to think I ought to, nor the voice to shape your thoughts to me. Many things shouldn’t be, yet it is only right that they are.”

Hornet glanced down at them, narrowing her eyes in what she hoped was something kinder than the dour expression she suspected it was. “Ask your questions once we have left our eleventh hour behind, and I will answer every one. But the reason I care, you deserve to know before anything else, is because I chose to.”

“Oh.” Sonnet said, sounding cowed and more than a little lost, all their bravado used up. “Why did you choose to help us, then?”

“Someone must. No one ever has, not in a way that mattered. And I owe enough that it may as well be me.” Hornet told them simply.

And it was the truth. Hornet knew herself to be an unsympathetic person on the whole, and just as well to be one to rarely do anything by halves. Ghost and Hollow had won her care by unwillingly ceded inches and moments, but she could not think of herself as Hallownest’s Protector if she did not give all she could to the others as well.

Gone were the days when each Vessel represented a new and immediate threat; now there was nothing to threaten, and they were only children she had wronged. Even if she’d never harmed these two specifically, there was more they deserved of her than an uncaring, brandished needle. And what they deserved was a champion, the protection she knew she could give, and the end of the wrongs she knew she could right. Her determination to see their uncertain deaths through and back to life was what they were owed, yet a stake in her walled-up heart was what she had freely given.

Who had ever cared for the children of the Pale King? Hornet had her mother for precious few years, but then she’d had her guardians for a time. Allies past that. Aid if she could bring herself to accept it, until it, too, faltered and died under her failure to keep it safe. What did the Vessels have? Only each other.

And now they had her, too, no matter what might come of it.

They had her again, some very quiet part of her mind tried to correct, a soundless voice not her own, and not theirs, either. Hornet gripped her needle’s scratched-iron handle and let the thought lie until it faded.

The path ahead ended without ceremony, yawned wide before her into a far more extensive cavern than she’d expected, its roof high enough that it was enshrouded in concealing shadow, such that it could have been bent low to only a nail’s throw above her head or arched to the heights of a City tower. Within her sight and above the deepened gloom it was hung with more of the darkened, gnarled roots that crouched over the tunnel they’d come from, reaching down like frozen, knotted claws. They forked and divided, twisting lines of black that reached down to grasp at the floor, long and uncanny as broken limbs, and past them she could see the great hunks of jagged rock half-buried in the floor like they’d fallen heavy from above.

Somewhere distant there was a faint white glow, something she thought must have been from a bed of Deepnest’s luminous white fungi sprouting amongst the rounded stones and empty carapaces similarly curved, still swathed with webbing. Here it only served to throw the dried shells and hunched stone into just enough contrast to, in the void-touched air, make it impossible to see anything past a silhouette of each.

Hornet’s grip on her blade tightened, and she raised an arm to bid the shades to stop before they reached her, that the lightening of their chill told her they obeyed.

It was a lair, a hunting-ground if ever she’d seen one, of a predator that sat and lured and amassed the evidence of its success. From above hung those successful hunts, dirtcarvers both whole and dried and left so long that their segmented shells had fallen to pieces from shifting gently in the slow, contemplative movement of the air. Bound in silk she saw what must have been the remains of Devout, their claw-masks slightly askew and tensed in death, their fur stirring slowly where their dried-stiff limbs didn’t.

And between and around the simple beasts and the killed spiders hung Vessels, their masks paler amongst the dim than the Devout’s, as though to draw her eyes to them. They were long since only masks now, tied by their horns or the fall of their cloaks, almost all of them unfractured. Force to break a mask wasn’t how spiders fed.

How long had they waited, Hornet wondered distantly, that they could have died with a sound mask?

Something deeper in the cave shifted, and such unnecessary thoughts fled before cold focus, narrow and intent upon what she saw move in the shadows. Not the rustle of the faint underground breeze or the fall of old chitin, something intentional. A lure, a trap?

“Don’t look. Stay here.” Hornet told her siblings sharply and, without waiting to see if they complied, she slunk ahead into the dark.

Her claws were nearly soundless on the stone and packed earth below, her needle held tense at her side, her movement a steady prowl as she edged without pause around fallen corpses, old and still fresher than the fossilized carapaces rising from the floor, eyes locked on that instant of motion she’d seen and still as aware of what lay around her as of her own heartbeat, mounting and ready.

What she found had fallen into shadow, of more than one kind.

Never had Hornet seen Nosk in person. She had only heard description of it from the rare survivor, the lucky few. It was akin to a spider in its limbs, though how many it had varied victim to victim. It was hunched, but still towered over the Devout that whispered its name. Black chitin, rending claws, a voice that to some was whispered and confused their legs and their minds and to others was a piercing shriek so high it froze them where they stood. Always though, in every tale and recount, it was quicker than thought, carried a face not its own, and was singularly terrifying to look upon. A minor god of the many Hallownest once boasted, of the dark and the hunt.

And so, Hornet understood, this could not be Nosk.

She did not lower her needle, but her stalk lost its caution as she approached the great dark thing trembling on the floor, unguarded by crannies to hide within or barriers to shelter behind. It lay on the far side of its lair as though it had fallen there and simply lacked the will to stand, its limbs long and needle-sharp and glossy black and folded awkwardly beneath itself, in a tangle like a death-curl, but far more relaxed. Uncomfortable to look upon, but not wholly lifeless.

It had a spine of a body, its back interrupted by the jut of vertebrae like thorns, some of whom curled around its shriveled, darkened belly, its softer underside a murky brown like decay and splotched with deepest black. At the spines’ tallest Hornet could have had to reach high to touch the tips, though it lay prone before her.

And it had no face at all.

It keened as she stared down at it, tapering off into a wetly bubbling chitter, and the dreaded creature only reacted to her presence to twitch away. Where there ought to have been a face was only a soft, withered end to its carapace like its abdomen, open and dribbling something blacker than anything, the chill of which she felt even careful feet from its spill.

Nosk was not dead, but neither was it living.

Was this what a hunter saw when they gazed upon it, having no ready fear to use and giving no quarter to invent a face of its own, Hornet wondered, or did the thing only lack a face as it died, lingering on the edge of a cold, tainted death? It was touched by void, and it was void, residual and lifeless, that Hornet felt cool the air around and deepen the shadows.

Hornet frowned slowly, watching it flinch and try to claw its way back to life, but it was as though the thing were trapped in its last moments, and as the moments lengthened into minutes, it did not die. Hornet tapped the tip of her needle pensively on the ground, something Nosk didn’t give the slightest reaction to until she took a step closer and felt the dense chill in her chest turn leaden and icy. Not growing, not reaching or sapping, but sharper than before. Aware of what lay before it.

Nosk gave its strongest flinch yet, pressing vainly away, and its chittering slowed with the heaving of its side, yet still it did not stop.

And abruptly it was all very clear.

The Void was reaching beyond its ancient confines, so long defined as to be written into the stone at their borders, as slow and creeping as mist. Its children were unbounded by masks or shells, or at least no more relied upon them to exist. Their void was not hindered by the world outside the Abyss now, not innately. Something had been lost, a way left empty and open, and the Void had nothing to keep it low. Instead it rose, and already it had reached Deepnest.

She’d been wrong, somehow. It must have been the destruction of the Radiance, however little sense the explanation made.

Days. She’d only had days to think her kingdom free of gods and their wars at last. Hornet couldn’t help but laugh, low and bitter, as the creature squirmed at her feet. Of course, there would be more. Had she thought her luck good enough to assume that a power of collected regret and emptiness, something whose force came from that it was nothing at all, would have been content to allow a power vacuum to remain unfilled?

Yet that wasn’t right, either. She’d known the Void. It did not desire, nor hate, nor fight. There was no intent within it, no more than there is in a collapsing mineshaft or the steady approach of nightfall. If anything, what occurred now was passive, like fog rolling into an opened doorway.

And if not passive, then its approach made little sense. She might have called what it did to Nosk revenge, had it been anything else.

Hornet tightened her claws until they scraped gratingly over the metal of her needle, and her shoulders tensed until she was fighting not to reflexively call her silk and waste her soul, gazing coldly down at Nosk’s body as it cringed, evidence she could not ignore of another apocalypse, yet another thing that threatened all she had left, that she could not fend off with her blade.

And this time, she had no innate immunity to spare her. She’d wondered, in the times before the Infection had emptied Hallownest, what it might be like to not be sure in her own survival of the bodiless thing that plagued her people. It felt, Hornet found now, like a labyrinthine mist, a path through a sucking mire. There were safe roads to walk, she thought, but she would never be able to know which, and ever she traveled deeper and further from solid ground.

Nosk gurgled pathetically, too poisoned to writhe. Hornet grit her fangs, and raised her blade.

How miserable an end. Not vengeance, but mercy. It deserved less.

Hornet plunged her needle into its side, through its mock-ribcage and into its abdomen with a muted tearing sound. She must have struck accurately, for Nosk fell limp and still without a jolt, its shallow breathing cut off immediately.

There was a difference with this new threat, Hornet thought. She’d known what to do with its predecessor; ever there had been a clear and obvious way forward, however difficult it was to weather and however painful it was to walk. Protect her kingdom, defend the Hollow Knight, wait for a strong enough Vessel. What could she do against this? What resistance could she present, what remedy was there to hope for, to fight for the chance of? What else did she have to give, after she’d given everything she had to what came before it?

“Hornet?” Nettle called from far behind her, the fear they tried so hard to fight down bright beneath their voice.

“I’m here. Stay with your sibling.” Hornet called back mechanically, tearing her eyes at last from Nosk’s corpse to the ones hanging over her head.

Whatever the answer was, she would find it. She’d not given as much as she had for as long as she had to see her kingdom and those who remained within it torn from her by something just as insentient and unfeeling as the fossilized stone she stepped past. No, Hornet would not give the Void an ounce more than it tore from her itself, not any more of her regrets and not her siblings and not her life. It had convinced her once to succumb, and it never would again. If she had to wait and fight through another age to see it so, Hornet could not leave Hallownest to its fate, any more than she might have left it to the Infection.

As ever, there was little to do but fight.

Above her head, there were only two little masks that resembled the two shades she’d come with, and though she had to be quick to catch both them and her weapon as they fell, they both came down easily enough with a quick throw of her needle.

They landed light in her arms, trailing brittle cloaks that broke to thin pieces in her hands as she brushed them away, as light as the masks on her back for all that these were whole. These masks were fragile, too, thin and frail with age as though they were older than the rest. And there had been more Vessels here, many more. When she looked upwards again Hornet could see the masks of a dozen others strung about the cave just in her line of sight, some nearly new and others so old they crumbled in place, yet only these two had returned.

Hornet absently wondered why as she picked her way over the uneven floor back to her siblings, a mask held carefully in each arm, cradled as though they held a soul still.

“You found them! Sonnet, look, Hornet found our masks!” Nettle exclaimed, nudging their sibling where they’d half-hidden behind them with their tendrils drawn up over their eyes.

Sonnet tentatively peeked past their shoulder just in time to see Hornet come back into the tunnel as promised, and they openly felt something akin to baffled wonder, like they’d only just begun to trust that Hornet would make good on her word, trepidation left behind in an instant as they drifted curiously closer.

“Can they… Hold us?” Sonnet asked, reaching out a delicate shadowy strand to touch theirs where Hornet held it out to be inspected, once she’d drawn them some ways back from the mouth of the cave, away where they wouldn’t see what she’d seen even from a glance.

“I don’t know,” Hornet replied, glad for the distraction. “They’re whole enough, but they have seen better days. Masks rarely hold up when left unused so long, and yours don’t seem to be the exception.”

“I’ll try,” Nettle reassured them both with aplomb. “It’s all in one piece, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.”

They steeled themself then, flicking their tendrils in excitement, so Hornet, without any particularly good reason to dissuade them, set Sonnet’s mask down on the ground and braced Nettle’s in both her hands, wondering with growing disbelief if they were simply going to try to cram themself back into it.

Surely it was a more complicated matter than that, or perhaps there was some unforeseen issue with adding a shade to a mask to make a whole Vessel. Hornet had never understood exactly how Ghost managed it the few times she’d felt it necessary to watch over their fractured mask while it awaited the return of their shade. Only that she’d look up to feel them coming near, only the cold on the wind back then with none of the associated thought or pain that came nowadays, and in a rush of darkness they’d be whole once more.

The matter of their approach seemed to occur to Nettle, too, because the moments ticked by and the flicker of their tendrils slowed, and they tilted their head contemplatively at the mask in Hornet’s hands.

Perhaps it was a little unfair of her, given how long she’d lingered in Nosk’s lair, but Hornet became very aware that time had passed since the point Hollow had asked them to be back by as Nettle considered, thinking so intensely that it was a soft little background hum as they examined their mask from every angle.

“Ghost knows more of the process than I,” Hornet suggested. “They may be able to give direction.”

“Oh, that’s a good idea.” Nettle said, rearing back midair to nod earnestly at her. “Have they died many times?”

“More often than I’d prefer.” Hornet responded dryly. “And they’re awaiting our return. Let’s go.”

“Why do they come back?” Sonnet spoke up almost rhetorically, still staring into the empty eyes of their own mask. “Why didn’t we? Why didn’t anyone else?”

Hornet didn’t respond, had no response to give, tucking Nettle’s mask back under her arm and reaching for Sonnet’s.

They let her take it, wafting back some and watching it go with eyes unsettled, fraught with questions Hornet could not answer. Hornet held it with care, though the edge of the eyehole softened to dust beneath her hand regardless as she hooked her claws through to lift its hollow weight. The chalky feel of the ancient mask sat uneasily with her, nearly as weak and fragile as the Hollow Knight’s. Their masks had to be decades or more older than some of the others, she’d seen as much just from looking at the rest where they hung and would continue to hang until she could convince herself their owners would never come for them.

What was it that had given these few shades the strength, or even the ability, to return? Why not every shade that had fallen, why were there not dozens more, hundreds? Hornet couldn’t know, and felt that the answer was probably so far removed from what she could piece together that it was useless to try for it.

More frustratingly esoteric godly nonsense, in all likelihood. She scowled to herself as she turned and began to walk back up the tunnel, to begin the ascent to where they’d left the others.

“I suppose I didn’t think to come at all until just a little while ago,” Nettle said unexpectedly, as though Sonnet’s question had been directed to them. “When I was in the Abyss, I mean. There was… It all went hushed, and I could have gone to sleep. But I’d forgotten that you’d died when I did, Sonnet. It never really sunk in, I guess, in all the time I spent waiting. But I remembered being so afraid for you, so I thought you must need me. It was so calm there, so safe, but I couldn’t stay when you needed me, not when I’d finally remembered you did.”

“So maybe it was like that,” Nettle mused. “Everyone else just… Didn’t think to do anything but stay. And sleep.”

“Did you not see any other shades, coming up from the Abyss?” Hornet asked sharply, trying too hard to make sense of the implications to soften her tone.

“None, though I guess I wasn’t really looking.” Nettle said apologetically.

“And I followed you out. I saw you leaving when I awoke, I couldn’t let you go alone, though I’d wanted to sleep like the rest.” Sonnet paused, and then their voice had a growing incredulity to it. “Are you telling me we’re only here because you didn’t look to see if I was already in the Abyss before you left?”

Nettle gave a faintly abashed giggle and a quick, shallow nod-shrug, like they weren’t sure if their sibling was upset or not.

Sonnet gave a startled, thrilled laugh, and wrapped them into a many-tendrilled hug for an exuberant moment. “I’m glad you didn’t! For once in our lives, I’m glad you didn’t think for an instant before charging off to danger.”

“Oh!” Nettle said, delighted. “I should do it more often, then!”

“No,” Hornet and Sonnet told them at once, unamused and weakly panicked, respectively.

How much they took their siblings’ warnings to heart might remain to be seen, Hornet thought as the tunnel began to narrow once again the further they got from the empty lair, particularly considering Nettle’s buoyant good mood that didn’t abate even as Hornet led the slow, laborious creep back up.

Still, Hornet couldn’t bring herself to snap at them even as her own mood soured with the umpteenth time she’d knocked her horns against the tunnel ceiling, or when her arms began to ache with the awkward positioning (a surprise in itself, for even if the masks had been far heavier than they were, she might have thought herself capable of carrying them for hours with ease).

It was, instead, nicer than she’d admit to listen to her siblings’ simple beaming happiness, untainted by burdens or regrets as they chattered to each other in the lifting of the tension that had followed them down the claustrophobic tunnel, even if that happiness wasn’t hers to feel.

Chapter Text

And so Hornet found some things make less sense the more one knows of them.

“Oh, don't worry, it’s very easy.” Ghost told their attentively listening little siblings, while Hornet sat on the rounded stone some ways away and tried to remove the solid layer of dirt and dust that had settled resolutely over her, trickling irritatingly down the back of her shawl and caked into the edges of her hands.

The cavern they’d stopped in was wider than it was tall, and better lit than most of Deepnest, with patches of the pale fungi’s fruiting bodies growing tall from the floor and ceiling, dense enough to, in Hornet’s eyes, light up the space as well as any lumafly. Nearly too dense, as she’d had to rip up a mat of it to find anywhere clear to sit.

Hollow had established themself laying draped over the more broken-up rocks and old, smoothed stalagmites around her, uncaring of the fungi and more than large enough to do so and still leave her ample room as she vigorously shook out her shawl. Their and Ghost’s masks were already carefully dusted off and laid aside, along with all the little things that had come to be carried in her pockets, smaller knives and silk-muffled, spiked traps and her little bowl of carved shell, her collection of sewing needles and mismatched half-used spools of thread, most of them red, among other pocket-sized essentials she wasn’t sure to find wherever she roamed.

Ghost’s charms had stayed with her as well, tucked now between their half-mask and her tram pass, with that furious little red charm that kept pricking at her when she laid claws on it.

She’d half a mind to throw that one away while Ghost wasn’t watching if it snapped at her one more time, and only that the charm wasn’t necessarily hers to leave behind stopped her.

After it had shocked her once more with its fiery little spark and she’d set it aside with the rest, Hornet found more than one small tear in the edges of her shawl now that she’d been still and unoccupied long enough to notice, and she busied her hands with sewing them closed with the last of her good thread while Ghost talked, annoyed just to look at the wrong shade of dyed red Sly had traded her. It wasn’t difficult or complex work, the tears as neat as she could have asked for, and while Ghost explained the intricacies of returning to one’s mask (a great deal less concrete than would have allowed her to follow along, and she’d lost the conversation somewhere around when Ghost began to lapse into impenetrable metaphor) she instead focused on making her repairs as even as she could with her fingers stiff from cold.

Hollow apparently felt much the same about the enigmatic shade-to-Vessel process as Ghost told it (though Nettle and Sonnet appeared to all the world to be taken with their every word), or perhaps Hornet’s eldest sibling only knew well enough what to do already, because instead of leaving her to her anticipated moment of quiet they watched closely as she tugged the needle through the split edges of her shawl.

“Incredible. And this is how cloaks are made?” Hollow asked, intrigued.

Hornet glanced up to find their huge white eyes level with her hands, just scarcely what they might have thought a respectful distance away, taking full advantage of the larger cavern they’d reconvened in to spread the mass of their reaching black tendrils and drift comfortably in currents unrelated to the shift of the air, and yet angling their huge horns almost flat against their back so that they might look up at her and watch her work with their full attention.

It was endearing, Hornet thought with an amused hum out loud, and enough for her to forgive both the interruption of her focus and how little they knew of textile work; they’d been raised in the White Palace, and she in the Weavers’ den, and however jarring their lack of understanding towards something so basic and vital, it was hardly their fault.

“I suppose that depends on the maker. My shawl is woven, the strands so fine and tightly interlaced that it does not come undone when torn, if repaired skillfully enough, but it is almost entirely a single piece unbroken by seam or edge. Yours was a creation of weaversilk as well, the grand pale one you wore to the sealing, and it too was woven on a loom. It’s a rare cloak that isn’t woven in some way in this kingdom.” Hornet said half-jokingly, though again it must have fallen short of her tone, for Hollow nodded gravely.

“And that is a different process from sewing.” Hollow stated to confirm.

Hornet gazed down at them, struggling with herself and knowing that the Weavers, each a master of any number of fibrecraft both powerful and mundane, might be turning in their graves to hear such a thing without the ability to lecture the Vessel on all they knew.

“Somewhat.” She decided on, and was pleased that her voice came out only slightly flat. “I’ll teach you to sew, if you’d like. Or perhaps I’ll build a simple loom, and show you weaving. There is great value in the creation of such things, room for artistry alongside use. It takes dedication; I imagine you’d be suited for it.”

“Perhaps not as much as you presume. I might find it a difficult feat, if it is as involved as it seems.” They said.

Hornet opened her mouth to argue that she would teach them anyway if they asked it of her, of course, still preoccupied with considering all they must never have been taught that she’d need to start with, before realizing what they meant.

It gave her pause, and she lowered the shawl to her lap to consider them. Yes, sewing would be complicated, with only a single hand at one’s disposal. Such a thing had never been a particular issue with the Weavers; a hand lost was a hand that could be regrown. And at worst, there were always seven more for most of her folk. Such a number hadn’t been the circumstance of her birth, to her general annoyance in the days of learning her guardians’ craft, but it had hardly meant she couldn’t weave.

She huffed pointedly and resumed her mending. “If we can deny death and destroy gods, we can learn to weave singlehandedly. If there’s one quality you have never wanted for, sibling, it is unending, dogged tenacity. If you want to work silk, I have no doubt you will.”

Hollow gave an acknowledging, vaguely sheepish sort of impression, and shifted noiselessly to rest their head in their hand. “So your offer still stands, then? You would teach me?”

“Of course, it does. Persistence unto absurdity is a trait I’m beginning to believe we all share.” Hornet scoffed gently. “I’ll be making myself a loom; I may as well make you one, too, and show you how to use it.”

“That sounds very much like optimism, little sister.” Hollow sounded like they’d smiled around the words.

“Only reasonable foresight. If we choose somewhere to live, we’ll not have the usual distraction of travel and battle to keep us occupied.” Hornet explained without meeting their eyes, chelicerae twitching with a smile of her own. “We will, however, have need of cloaks, blankets, towels, scarves, any number of things that might be made. The City of Tears has much to take, yet what remains is ruined by mold and decay and years. It’s only efficient to make these things ourselves.”

“So you expect it to be… Peaceful, after this?” Hollow asked.

They hummed thoughtfully, and perhaps a little wistfully, as Hornet tied off the last stitch and gave her mending a few sharp tugs to test its strength instead of answering immediately. “I can hardly imagine it. That there might be a time for rest after all, with so little on the line as building looms and learning to use them.” Hollow said, and beneath the pensive wonder, too distant to truly understand the shape of what it was they wondered of, there was such exhaustion, the desire for respite of one who had known none for far too long.

Hornet understood, had felt it herself too many times to count at the fall of too many bitter ends, and it caused her to hesitate just a moment. “There is something I must speak to you of-“ she began, and as she did, the cavern’s quietude was filled with a shattering, almighty crack like the peace itself had broken in two.

Hollow jolted up, and Hornet to her feet with her shawl thrown away and her needle at hand in an instant, looking reflexively to the littler shades and past them for the sound that caused the pit of her stomach to go cold and her heart to skitter in horror anticipated, having heard the crack of a mask too many times to mistake it as anything else.

But there were no threats to be seen, and as soon as the sound had come, it was gone, leaving behind only an echoing silence like prey frozen stiff at the sight of the hunter. And so Hornet’s eyes fell instead on the shades themselves, similarly frozen but apparently unharmed, and then to the fragments of Nettle’s mask on the floor.

It had to have been Nettle’s; Sonnet’s lay undisturbed, as did Ghost’s and Hollow’s at her side, and among the cracked, broken remains, fractured at a dozen points into a hundred pieces nearly unrecognizable as having once belonged to a whole, Nettle dripped black.

One of their dark horns was wholly gone, only a stub remaining where it had arched over their head, and it bled great drops of void into the air. More void, Hornet was sure in the split instant she took to watch it run, when all the world was startled beyond breathing, than they could afford to lose.

Nettle moved first, bringing a shaky tendril up to feel slowly around the base and dislodge another swell of black, and then Hornet had grabbed up her shawl and crossed to them in between heartbeats, swathing the fabric over the stump of their horn and pressing it tight there even as Nettle made a startled gasp and wrapped a pair of tendrils tightly around her wrist. They were colder than ice, a painful shock of Hornet’s own, but she spun the silk to affix her needle over her shoulder singlehandedly and picked the little shade up in her free arm. Against her bare chitin they were agony, growing colder by the second as their surprise trickled into growing, unchecked terror.

“What do they need.” She barked to Ghost, who shook themself to attention to reply.

“Soul, they need to replace the void they’re losing. The hot springs is close, isn’t it?” Ghost said, their voice flat and as matter-of-fact as hers, something she’d have felt begrudging respect for had she been thinking of anything but the present.

“Minutes from where we stand. Grab my things and a fragment of their mask, and don’t fall behind.” Hornet ordered, and bolted away.

Without her needle to aid her the distance felt longer, more exposed, though she knew it wasn’t, not by much. The tunnels here were narrow and winding, and her needle nearly useless as mobility. And for the moment, the only thing Hornet felt for the thin veneer of void ambient in the air was a bitter gratitude, for if it hadn’t been there to make the tunnels so quiet and lifeless she might have met worse resistance to her passage than the untrustworthy earth below. As it was, it was only instinct that could never be lost that guided her to leap over the shallowly obscured beds of sharp-spiked stone and sudden, plummeting drops.

And ahead was a slender stream of soft white light, filtering through the fallen stone of a cave-in; a recent one that hadn’t had time to settle, the stones loose and the earth lightly packed.

It would take less than ten minutes to shift by hand. Hornet was uncertain she had that time to waste; how many shades, she fought to recall, had ever lasted so long once they’d begun to disintegrate? Had any? Nettle stirred in her grip, perhaps reacting to the spike of despair the thought gave her.

“Hollow,” she gasped, her legs frighteningly weak for all that she hadn’t run more than a few minutes at most. A worry for another time. “Hollow!” She shrieked, her throat choked with growing, deadening cold, and could only hope they understood.

They could break it in an instant, they had the force, she remembered clearly the holes they’d punched in the cartographer’s aging roof. The way could be cleared

“I’m here,” her sibling’s low voice called behind her, and Hornet felt as a painful jolt of her void their alarm, only mostly kept separate from void itself. Her head spun with it, but greater was her relief to hear their voice.

“Move, now.”

Hornet threw herself to the side, twisting so Nettle wouldn’t hit the wall as Hollow surged forward and past her in a mass of forceful darkness, coating her chitin in a thin layer of hoarfrost in the split second where she felt the immense, intangible pressure of their passing before they crashed through the cave-in as though it hadn’t been there at all, whipping tendrils silhouetted against the sudden blinding light of the spring’s cave before they were gone, carried through by their momentum.

Hornet stumbled away from the wall and to the edge, falling more than jumping down and striding to the pool, the gentle trickle of springwater falling unheard past her focus and the searing bite of spilling void, as it soaked through her shawl to numb her hand where she clamped it tight over Nettle’s wound.

She waded into the clean white water gracelessly, falling to her knees where it became deep enough and shakily lowering Nettle to the surface, just enough that they were partially submerged.

And as soon as the glow of soul touched them, Nettle seemed to come out of whatever shock had fallen over them. They gasped and struggled, eyes glowing so blindingly white that they shone past the fabric thrown over their head, and Hornet tore the shawl away and threw it to the side with a louder splash than she’d expected, where it sank. Nettle’s eyes gained intensity until they were too bright to look into, but only when the drip of escaping void had stopped and their writhing had turned jerky and desperate did Hornet lift them from the water. Immediately they threw themself at her, wedged their head under her chin, somehow as dry as ever they’d been, and wrapped every tendril they had around her so tightly that she could hardly breathe.

And as the moments ticked past in the rapid beating of Hornet’s heart, swelling through her hearing and only slowly giving way to the constancy of falling water, Nettle clung to her and began to sob. Loudly, more confused and distressed than pained, and Hornet let them cry and held them as tightly as she dared while she slowed her own ragged breathing, and the ringing in her head she hadn’t noticed begin faded with the spring’s burbling.

There was a flicker of dark movement at the corner of her sight, and Hornet snapped her head around to face it to find Ghost hovering at the water’s edge, looking uncharacteristically hesitant, with Hollow huge and hunched some ways behind them with their darkness overlaid by Sonnet’s eyes, wide and whiter than the water.

Hornet took a deep breath, and held it, and when she let it go she felt less like she faced down an impending, barely-avoided horror as it passed by.

“I’m sorry,” Ghost whispered into the weighty silence. “I didn’t know it wouldn’t hold them.”

“You couldn’t have.” Hornet said flatly. “The mistake was made where it was easy to treat. We won’t make it again.”

Like she’d very nearly done so recently. Would Nettle have survived the longer trip, if they’d tested the strength of their mask at Nosk’s lair? It wasn’t a question she cared to ask, and one she cared less to think of dire answers to, especially when the crisis was over as quickly as it had begun. It wouldn’t do to linger over what could have been, particularly when the worst had not come to pass.

But she would need to be more careful. She’d known the shades to be delicate, dangerous at times, yes, but about as durable as a soft-skinned grub. Such a mistake could not happen again.

They needed masks. Strong masks, healthy and faultless. Very much hinged on the Mask Maker, Hornet abruptly realized, and if they could accomplish such a thing. Now, she knew the cost of failure.

No matter. If they could not do as she demanded, she would make the damned masks herself. Somehow, her siblings would live.

There was no other outcome she would accept.

Nettle hiccupped something, their wailing quieted almost as quickly as it’d begun, and Hornet realized she’d been staring off into the great masks carved of the pale stone from which the springwater poured, knelt in it up to her elbows. “What?” She asked, tilting her head to catch a glimpse of them where they still clung to her without disturbing their hold.

“It’s not their fault, I thought I could do it.” Nettle repeated tearfully. “Sonnet’s right, that I don’t really think things through sometimes. Sorry.”

“None of us thought harm would come of trying, and no one is at fault for the outcome, least of all you.” Hornet told them, sharper than she’d intended, causing them to flinch in her arms.

She paused, battling down the bristling edge in her voice. “I’ll take you to Sonnet, if you’re feeling well enough.” She offered, gentler. Better to let the sibling they knew best provide comfort, if she couldn’t manage a sentence without frightening them.

“Okay,” Nettle said, pressing closer regardless. “Thank you.”

“There’s no need,” Hornet said, standing from the water and wading back to shore, where Sonnet had crept closer as it became apparent Nettle was in no further danger, visibly anxious to check for themself that they were alright. And if they weren’t alright, it was in a way Hornet would not be able to tell; they no longer shed void, and she had no further way to know if they hurt. “How many times must I tell all of you I won’t stand idly by when you have need of me?”

Of all the reactions they might have given to that, Nettle gave a shaky giggle. “Ghost was right. You’re a really good sister, even if you’re a little weird.”

“Were those their exact words?” Hornet deadpanned.

Nettle giggled again at her, a little more genuine, as Hornet opened her arms at the edge of the spring, where Sonnet waited. Nettle clung tighter for a moment before letting go and drifting away, where Sonnet immediately set upon them, checking over the stubby black remnant of their horn, once maybe a little longer than Ghost’s and now scarcely a quarter the height.

“I wonder what could have happened. I saw the mask myself, it was weak, yes, but not fractured at all. Thin, but no thinner than mine was near the end.” Hollow said, and Hornet glanced over to see them for once drawn to their full height, their horns dark against the pale steam lifting from the water. “It ought to have held.”

“I think it best that we accept we know little of shades and masks, and probably never will.” Hornet decided, to cut off the implications of a failed revival before they could become all she thought of. It must have been the mask, had to have only been its weakness to cause it to break. Any other option was unacceptable. “Do you have my things?”

Hollow reached out their hand in reply, where they’d apparently scooped up all the contents of her pockets, and set them with care on the ground before her. “Ghost has left the masks on the bench.”

“We’ve established that physical contact isn’t necessarily something to be wary of,” Hornet observed. “There’s no need to be so cautious.”

“Can you honestly tell me that touching one of us doesn’t nearly freeze you solid? You haven’t said as much, but even I have some understanding of how bugs work.” Hollow said, to her surprise. “You shiver, sometimes. Surely it’s uncomfortable?”

Hornet paused where she’d turned away to retrieve her shawl from the depths of the spring.

And she noticed that she felt fine.

Tired, but not overly so. Achy, but only inasmuch as she might be in the days following a particularly difficult injury as it healed. Cold, but only in the very deepest recesses of her chest, and even that was fainter than it had been since the Void. Hornet flexed the hand that had touched the void Nettle lost, and found it easily responsive, moving as smoothly to her command as ever it had. That growing faintness in the back of her mind, the steadily creeping weakness in her limbs, all gone. Though she’d hardly noticed, she recalled that once she’d splashed into the springwater, the bitter cold from carrying Nettle had faded enough to be unnoticeable.

Hornet scowled at the hot spring, which, she realized, should have been agony to sit in for the simple temperature difference, to go from chilled-cold to steaming warm.

“I think I can, actually,” Hornet told them slowly, frowning then at her hand that, in spite of it all, was painless to close.

And a suspicion began to form in her mind. “Ghost,” she called.

Ghost, staring into the milky-white of the springwater where they’d drifted some ways away from the rest, looked up at their name and floated back over upon seeing Hornet’s expression. They made something like a quiet chirp of inquiry, a quick soundless question as they approached.

“You said Nettle needed soul. Am I wrong to think this is a quality of your kind in general? Can you not produce your own?”

“No, you’re not wrong. It makes sense though, doesn’t it? You can’t really make something from nothing, and outside the Abyss there’s no source of void. We don’t eat like bugs do, and I suppose the energy has to come from somewhere. That’s how I’ve always thought about it, at least. Why?” Ghost asked.

Soul. What a concept; a living creature that didn’t have soul of its own making, something she’d always been taught was a substance everything that lived made in excess. Perhaps taking her own words to heart would be prudent; there was very precious little she knew for certain of shades, only scarcely more of Vessels, excepting that they were not what she’d been told they were so long ago. They willed, and thought, and spoke, and most essentially, they lived.

And everything else, Hornet found, was up for debate.

No, it wouldn’t be necessary to worry them with her unfounded suspicions. It was one thing to establish that the shade of a Vessel needed outside sources of soul, and entirely another to jump to deciding they must be leeching it from her like some especially chilly ticks. Or, for that matter, that her own void had begun to take from her in the same way. If nothing else, it would alarm Hollow, and Hornet could not abide by being the cause of any more grief for her eldest sibling.

And even if they were siphoning soul from her, what good would come from the shades knowing of it? They must not, if they hadn’t told her by now. It was unlike her to trust another’s goodwill so far, yet Hornet found she couldn’t think to mistrust theirs, not honestly. It wasn’t as though she’d any other solution to offer, and it hadn’t killed her yet. If the slow draw upon her soul was the price to keep them at her side where they could be protected until she could give them masks once again, then it was a price she’d gladly pay.

“Hm. Only curious.” Hornet said, stilted and a beat too late.

“You do bring up a good point, though,” Hollow said thoughtfully, distracted as Ghost tilted their head inquisitively at her, the little shade not particularly satisfied with her answer but, apparently, not especially inclined to get onto her about it just this once, either. “In the Black Egg, there were seals collecting void for me to draw from to sustain myself. Before, while I was still being trained, it was ensured that I would have plenty of soul at my disposal. Yet I haven’t felt the need for either.”

Hornet held her breath, and was annoyed with herself for the anxiety.

“I haven’t either, and I know what missing soul feels like. It’s a little strange, to be honest.” Ghost agreed.

Ghost was quiet for a moment or two, mulling it over until their attention was drawn by Nettle and Sonnet, evidently fully recovered and playing with the springwater, daring each other to dip a tendril in and amusing themselves with the blinding-bright gleam it gave their eyes, something Hornet belatedly hoped wouldn’t spell more trouble.

“Then again, I’ve never been just a shade for so long before,” Ghost said, distracted amusement lilting their words as they watched their siblings giggle amongst themselves. “Maybe it’s different like this. No one’s ever written out the ground rules for Vessels and their component parts, after all, at least not to me.”

Hornet gave a considering hum and stepped back into the water, kneeling again into the warmth and basking in it for as long as it took to fish out her sodden shawl from the bottom, half-disbelieving that she’d even indirectly managed to keep something she knew would concern them from their attention and unwilling to press her luck.

The shawl, at least, was cleaned enough for its stay at the bottom of the spring, so Hornet only squeezed the worst of the water from it and tugged it back on, and refilled her pockets with everything she’d left behind. As she’d come to expect, the furious little charm Ghost had pointed out to her was searingly hot when it touched her hand for the brief moment before she deposited it back into its pocket, but again when Hornet wondered if her sibling would notice if she dropped it into the hot spring, she reluctantly decided against it.

Once her things had been all replaced and her needle again strapped over her back, Hornet turned to the matter of the masks.

Hollow and Ghost’s mask pieces were familiar enough to tie with silk and carry over her shoulder, but what they’d recovered of Nettle’s was a shard hardly the length of her longest claw, and Sonnet’s was a whole mask yet.

“Is this the biggest piece you could find?” Hornet asked dubiously, turning the shard over in her hand.

“I was in a hurry, but I think so.” Ghost said pointedly from where they’d wandered back over to impress their littler siblings by half-immersing themself in the soul-rich water, making their eyes beam like twin lighthouses and causing Nettle and Sonnet to shriek with delight when they blinked at them.

Hornet had just turned away to fiddle with the rest of her possessions when there was a colossal screeching, at once utterly silent and deafening beyond words, and she whipped back around to find the dark imprints of abyssal faces dispersing like fast-moving clouds into the air.

“I can still cast spells!” Ghost told her with glee, the depleted gleam of their eyes gaining intensity again as the littler ones cheered.

Hornet aimed a fierce glower at them, resisting the urge to massage between her eyes where the uncanny not-noise had sparked her recently-defeated headache anew. “I’d ask that you didn’t.”

“What, can’t you?” Ghost goaded, their ego almost tangibly inflated by the others’ encouragement.

“Of course, I can. What did you think I was doing with my silk, drawing it blade-sharp around myself when we fought before?” Hornet scoffed. “I can cast plenty of spells, probably more than you.”

“Honestly, I thought you were just really quick with your thread.” They admitted. “But I know that’s not true.”

“You think I’m lying?” Hornet said, justifiably, she thought, affronted to be falsely accused; if the little menace knew more than her about battle, she’d stake her needle at the hot spring’s edge and dedicate her life to confectionery. “You can’t have more than, what, two?”

“Four! Five, I guess, if we’re not just counting soul magic.” Ghost defended, with the smugness of one who thought they’d just soundly dealt the final blow.

Before she could prove them wrong, Hollow made a wordless impression to the room at large that felt, to Hornet’s bafflement, somehow like the gentle, restrained amusement of one watching a spitfire weaverling declare themself fiercest in all the land. It drew her attention and Ghost’s both, and they turned to see what their sibling had to say for themself. Hollow, broken from their usual deathly stillness, was watching them with considerably more settled confidence than could make Hornet anything but wary, a few of their longest tendrils flicking like the others’ did when they were too self-satisfied to stay still.

It was good to see them anything but haunted or worried, and Hornet was distinctly aware that they weren’t in a serious argument, and so the wariness itself became more watchful curiosity that threatened to draw a grin from her even as she tried to stay stoic.

“Do you want to guess how many I know?” Hollow offered with a sheepishly prideful almost-laugh, and Hornet could sense a trap when she saw one.

Ghost, evidently, could not. Even so, they narrowed their eyes like this wasn’t something they’d considered before, and did what Hornet supposed was some quick mental math, even if she couldn’t think of anything at all they could possibly have to estimate from.

“Twenty. At most.” Ghost decided, and immediately seemed to think better of it as Hollow’s thoughts took the shape of one about to land the final blow, victory assured.

“Four-hundred and three.” Hollow told them with slightly self-conscious relish. “If we are only to count soul-magic.”

Then, as Ghost’s eyes widened and they, far from disappointed, seemed ready and eager to launch into an earnest interrogation, Hollow turned to Hornet, who could only pray they wouldn’t deepen the blow to her pride by asking how many, exactly, she had in her arsenal.

“I think that means I win.” Hollow said instead, as much an indirect question as a statement of triumph.

Hornet refused to dignify that with a response beyond an affirmative huff, pocketing the mask shard she still held in her hand and tying a length of silk to the horns of Sonnet’s mask, so that it rested at her waist opposite the point of her needle.

“Let’s go, then, if we’re done here. Half of Deepnest lies between the Mask Maker and where we stand, and we’ve taken too long already.” Hornet told the cavern at large, to the immediate dismay of the youngest of her siblings, the vague annoyance from Ghost to have their questions postponed, and the knowing acceptance of her eldest.

“Do you not wish to rest some? It has to have been more than a day since we left Dirtmouth. Maybe two. Half a week? Bugs sleep that often, don’t they?” Hollow asked without moving, and Hornet didn’t know why she’d particularly expected them to have a very clear idea of either the passage of time or the actions of creatures that needed sleep.

“Most of them.” Ghost agreed meaningfully.

“Definitely.” Sonnet supported, without any suggestion they knew what they were supporting but willing enough to pile on the bandwagon, and Nettle threw their distracted agreeance in with their twin’s, preoccupied with trying to cup springwater in their insubstantial tendrils.

Hornet gave a short, beleaguered sigh, and sat down on the bench.

Chapter Text

And so Hornet found that when one has been pushed to the limits of their endurance for time uncounted, a little bit of comfort goes a long way towards a restful sleep.

So far, in fact, that it can make up for quite a lot of unusual, typically uncomfortable circumstances.

Hornet hadn’t needed to open her eyes to realize what was amiss, and it was perhaps a heartbeat’s rapid evaluation to decide it wasn’t worth the effort to get up and fix. The issue was, as ever, the shades.

They were clustered around her like a clutch of weaverlings before a roaring hearth, and for all that the only true sound in the hot spring’s cavern was the white noise of the trickling water, Hornet could hear them like they were each humming thoughtlessly, subtly, as though under their breath. If what their waking thoughts were (and they’d better have been asleep if they knew what was good for them) was like something that'd never been sound at all translated to a spoken voice, what they were now was more akin to soft, easy breathing.

A strange, passive sort of communication. Nearly unnerving, save that they each clearly thought nothing of it at all, and Ghost, who knew full well that she hadn’t been able to hear them before, seemingly hadn’t once considered explaining how it worked.

Sonnet stirred when Hornet opened her eyes, as concrete as a draft of air, and she watched them warily until they settled back down, draped loosely over her lap. Nettle was out cold at her left, curled tight with their back to her side, and Ghost at her right with their head leaned against her shoulder, their eyes dimly lit. Hollow she could only see the gangling arm of without moving her head and craning to look over the back of the bench, which they’d apparently settled down lounged awkwardly across, their limb propped up more-or-less shading Ghost with the thin claws of their hand brushing the damp stone near her feet.

All of which was news to Hornet, who was entirely certain she’d fallen asleep alone on the bench.

The cavern was quiet. The situation was unthreatening. It was also, as the seconds dragged on and Hornet became aware that sleeping sitting up had left her neck sore where she’d had her head tilted against the back of the bench, remarkably uncomfortable. Yet she hadn’t slept being watched over by another in many common bugs’ lifetimes, and so it felt like something to be marveled at, how easily she’d fallen asleep and then how easily she’d awoken, surrounded on all sides by siblings taking whatever passed for a nap if one was a shade.

And while she was counting her blessings, Hornet felt she might as well appreciate that, for once in what had become an incredibly exhausting week, she wasn’t frozen solid. The shades’ presence was far less cold than before, only the faint, nearly refreshing coolness she had long associated with Ghost, and with Hollow before them, apparently satiated with soul from the spring and dozing in the warmth. Which was good, because they evidently had a lesser opinion of personal space than she did.

The discomfort of the abrupt change to the norm, though, mounted as the spring trickled on and the shades did not miraculously wake up because she had.

The wilder part of her, the part that had become very used to solitude, prickled at the proximity and snarled for the contact, something she hadn’t asked for and hadn’t allowed. It was something she’d never coped well with, being touched, far less so when it was a surprise.

Hornet leaned her head back the inches she’d raised it from the dewed metal of the bench, setting her horns against it with a nearly-soundless click and staring despondently at the stalactites overhead, debating if waking them all at once, jarringly, was an acceptable price to pay for the space to breathe and chase the crawling, closed-in itch the lack thereof wrought under her chitin, and to get up and crack the stiffness from her shoulders that, while not quite painful, was unignorable with nothing else to focus on.

Ghost murmured something muzzily and buried their face in her shawl, and Hornet only barely stifled an annoyed sigh. But, stifle it she did.

At least there was comfort to be had in many eyes to keep watch, even if not a one was especially alert, and further comfort, a guiltier one, to have the company of others. Used to solitude she was, but if she could look past how it made her carapace crawl, this felt so like when she’d been young, taking her rest with the weaverlings and Weavers, her guardians. She had not felt herself deserving or desiring of such a thing in a long time, and she didn’t now, but Hornet didn’t allow herself to move until Ghost stirred again at her side mercifully few minutes later.

“That wasn’t very long. Did we wake you up?” They mumbled sleepily, their not-voice hushed and blurred as a half-formed thought.

Hornet shook her head minutely, aware her own voice would be infinitely louder no matter how quietly she whispered, and wondered with vague exasperation if they were using the days she’d been unconscious in Dirtmouth as a benchmark estimate for how long she usually slept. She felt… Rested, unusually so even having dozed as she had, which suggested it’d been hours at least.

“Don’t be mad, we’ll go soon.” Ghost told her even as they cuddled closer, pressing their cool forehead against her arm, the temperature obvious even through her shawl and just as obviously nothing like the cold they’d been before. They repositioned their shifting nest of shadowy tendrils, curling them neatly beneath themself and settling back down.

“How long did I sleep?” Hornet asked as softly as she could, grateful for the constant rush of the hot spring’s water that nearly drowned her out.

“I’m not a clock, I don’t know. Not as long as we’ve been in Deepnest.” They answered blearily.

“Whatever would I do without you.” Hornet said dryly. “Less than a few days, I hope?”

“Uh-huh,” they agreed, half-awake.

“Just a few hours.” Hollow said, and Hornet looked to them to see their eyes had brightened with awareness, though they hadn’t move their head from where it rested over the back of the bench with the point of their face overshooting the seat, their horns taller than Hornet even still.

They didn’t sound sleepy, only quiet and contemplative and with a gentle sort of disbelief about them, as though even if they’d been as they were for hours, the situation hadn’t quite sunk in. Hornet couldn’t blame them; none of the past days – maybe less than a week – felt quite like they should have happened. Like it was simply impossible that there could be any kind of peace, any hope again to strive for that wasn’t simply the cessation of a dead kingdom’s virulent, creeping ending.

Though in that context, it seemed only typical that there would be some other god’s force to combat in the Infection’s place.

Hornet sighed under her breath, and hardened herself to the reality. Best to rip away the bandage all at once. They ought to be aware of the danger.

“The Void is changed. Our kingdom is not yet saved.” She told them, her voice cold though she spoke in an undertone, looking down to where Sonnet had nested themself in the folds of her shawl and hadn’t yet moved.

“I know.” Hollow replied. “None of us could be here if it hadn’t.”

“No, I- Hollow, this is different. I believe it to be growing, as much as so dead a thing can grow. Expanding its influence, perhaps, or perhaps it’s always been like this and only now, with what’s happened, can it arise.” Hornet insisted.

“Growing, though? Void doesn’t… Do that. It doesn’t live, or think, and it definitely can’t threaten a kingdom. It just is.” Ghost spoke up, alert between one thought and the next. “It’s literally nothing.”

“Drifting, then. Rising like steam from an uncovered pot. I don’t care why it’s here, only that it is.” Hornet hissed, not as quietly as she tried to be. “And however passive, it is a threat. You did not see the lair I saw, and the dying creature within it. Perhaps it was weakened in wake of the Infection, or the Vessels it hunted had a fatal consequence for their deaths, or perhaps the worst happened, and it was simply overtaken by the Void itself. It wouldn’t be the first that coldest substance tried to consume in such a way.” She said vehemently.

Nettle shifted at her side, and Hornet glanced over them, shocked for a wild moment until she recalled why they’d lost one of their horns. A further failure of hers, yet one that had at least not cost them their life. The horn-stub, she saw, was as neat and defined as any other part of their blackened silhouette, and fortunately not faint or bleeding void in the slightest. It had not, however, regrown.

Hornet eyed them and lowered her voice. “There shouldn’t be void in Deepnest, yet there is enough to chill the air and warn away its inhabitants, whatever might be left of them. Where shall it creep next? The City of Tears? The Kingdom’s Edge? Will it waft up from below and take the Mantis tribe, and rise through the Fungal Wastes? At least Deepnest is empty.” Hornet hissed.

“You found Nosk? And it was void-touched?” Ghost sat up to clarify, refusing to rise to her growing annoyance.

“It was all but killed, smothered. There has never been void such as this in Deepnest, that I know.” Hornet said firmly.

“That is… Concerning.” Hollow noted, their thoughts running subdued, quick and disquieted.

“I didn’t see anything like that when I came through Deepnest,” Ghost said contemplatively. “And I was pretty thorough; I was lost in there for long enough to be. Whatever happened, had to have just happened.”

“I think it the Old Light’s doing, or at least in connection to her defeat. Hundreds of years of nothing, and only now does the dark begin to pose a threat outside the Abyss? There must be correlation.” Hornet said in a harsh whisper.

“Who’s the Old Light?” Nettle asked sleepily.

“A very angry moth,” Ghost supplied at the same time as Hornet said, “No longer an issue,” and Hollow stayed conspicuously quiet.

Ghost felt faint amusement at her as Hornet shot them a glare, and Nettle seemed to decide that was reason enough not to inquire further, shrugging them off and drifting back to sleep.

“At any rate, this is… Bad.” Ghost said with slowly growing realization. “Very bad, if it impacts others the same way it hurts you. And the Void itself isn’t totally harmless to us, either. In the Abyss, the Void Sea calls.”

“Ancient enemy,” Hollow murmured.

Hornet turned to look at them, and Ghost craned around her to do the same. Hollow, though, shifted their head away, angled so that their bright eyes disappeared behind the darkness of their horns.

“She would call me her ancient enemy before I began to falter, when she spoke.” They said slowly. “I think she mistook me for the Void, or at least an extension of it. That is, before my faults became apparent, and she knew I was no pure vessel.”

“Hollow,” Ghost began, hovering up some to duck around Hornet, but Hollow lifted themself off the bench and drifted some distance away without looking, gone misleadingly still with their unease and with their hand placed over their chest where, Hornet recalled, they’d struck the point of their own nail during that final, brutal battle.

It turned her stomach to remember the wash of heat the blows had released, intense and humid and sickly-smelling, the wet, sliding snap as it pierced through their back, and Hornet knew without needing to be told in any way that Hollow was remembering the same.

“Could it be related?” Hollow persisted. “She thought me only pathetic once I had broken, but before that she hated me, not for my role in her capture but for what I was. Hatred such as hers does not come unfounded. And what is more opposite of light and warmth and dream, than the emptiness and the dark?” Hollow said quickly, as though to say their piece before they lost the nerve to. “Perhaps she’d always fought against the Void, always held it back.”

Sonnet stirred at last, perhaps reacting to the distress Hollow couldn’t entirely force down, and when Hornet lifted them from her lap and set them aside they went easily, questions bright in the stir of their thoughts and, thankfully, unvoiced for the moment.  Hornet stood from the bench and stepped closer to her eldest sibling, waiting like a wafting black veil frozen in place and even the hum of their void very still now, with their head hung low and their eyes distant and turned away when she came close enough to their side to see them.

Hornet waited until she was sure they had no more to say before responding, watching them closely as they tried to calm themself, to think of anything but the Radiance and, as Hornet could see in the faint shake of their hand even as their mind was quiet, the pain the memory brought them.

If she called attention to it, when they so clearly only wanted to give what help they could and turn their mind to other things, there would be unnecessary anguish. Something she realized with a jolt of intuition that Hollow must not want to deal with now, at least not in front of Nettle and Sonnet, and especially when there was still the looming possibility to hurt her. The reminder left a bitter taste in her mouth, but it let her decide what to say.

“So you think it’s her influence that’s missing?” She asked.

“I do.” Hollow answered quietly.

“Can we confront it? Do you think we can fight it?” Hornet asked again.

“No, it’s not a god, not really.” Ghost answered in their place, softly and watching Hollow, as she did, and in the slow consideration of their words Hornet remembered the days she’d waited for them at the throat of the Abyss, when they’d ventured into it and sought to understand, to remember what had become of their siblings and themself an age since.

What they’d seen there, she’d never know.

“It’s much, much bigger, less defined. Whatever we do, it’ll have to be a little more creative than walking down to it with a dream nail and a death wish.” Ghost said, without the impression that they wanted to discuss the matter any further at all.

“Then we’ll think about it on the road to the Mask Maker, we’ve wasted time enough to have crossed Deepnest twice over by now. I’d promised to get you masks before the week was out, and it’s beginning to look as though I’ll break my word.” Hornet said.

Ghost, when she looked back to them, still seemed on the edge of going to their sibling’s side, the brightness of their eyes fretful like they had understood Hollow’s unspoken desire to be done with talking about the Old Light just as Hornet had, and yet still wanted badly to comfort them regardless. Hornet shot them a meaningful look and nodded to the littler shades still dozing on the bench, and hoped that they’d take her meaning.

Ghost stared back at her searchingly, visibly torn, but after a long moment’s deliberation shallowly nodded their assent. Hornet checked the ties securing the masks one last time as Ghost drifted away to rouse Nettle and Sonnet with a last hesitant glance to their eldest sibling’s back, Hollow still turned away and unmoving.

A second spent watching Ghost go told her that the two littlest had settled back down while their older siblings talked, and while Ghost nudged them awake, Hornet waited at Hollow’s side.

Hollow still had their arm crossed protectively over their front, running their claws over the faultless black there as they stared absently into the rippling springwater. There was an absent look to them, such that Hornet nearly worried they hadn’t heard Ghost or herself at all.

“…Are you alright?” Hornet asked after a minute passed and they didn’t acknowledge her, taking care to soften her voice as much as she could so that the others wouldn’t hear.

Hollow didn’t respond for a long moment, their head bowed, quiet and contemplative and conflicted. “I don’t think so. It feels like a mistake to admit, and to be so upset by such a little thing as recounting a memory, and not even an especially painful one, seems to be a worse failure still. But then, that is not so unusual.” They murmured.

Hornet stood beside them, conscious of the argument growing behind her as Ghost met with more resistance than anticipated and the limited time before they inevitably got the other two prepared to leave, and still couldn’t bring herself to respond as sharply as she wanted to. Couldn’t allow herself, more like. Hollow deserved better than her unthinkingly cutting words. They all did, but Hollow, for whatever reason, felt them more keenly than the others, though she’d at least managed to more or less gentle herself to the littler ones.

“No, it’s not so unusual at all to feel foolish.” She said softly instead. “Or as though you’ve failed, or made mistakes uncountable. But I find it helps to have one who thinks you worthy to try again, in spite of the failings you cannot see past. And I think you worthy of much more than that, sibling.”

Hornet laughed faintly to and at herself and glanced away from them, up to the rift they’d broken into the wall above the spring where they’d come through from the tunnels. “Though you’ve hardly any failings to be forgiven of. None of this was your fault, was it?”

Hornet could feel their incredulity overtaking the steady, simmering misery they’d felt, as Hollow made an exception to their steady silence to tell her of it. She looked up to see Hollow staring at her with such an impressively skeptical look in the tilt of their head, for all that their face could hardly express it, that she nearly giggled in spite of the situation. Instead, she sobered herself to reply.

“It’s true. I understand that you may never believe it, but I’ve fought for this kingdom as long as you have, Hollow. I have been here, sealing to unsealing, and I have seen enough to know. You needn’t inherit the shame of gods and parents, who in both respects ought to have known better.”

“If I had only been able-“

“But you weren’t. And neither was I.” Hornet interrupted, too fast to be kind and too high to be cutting. “And all there’s left to do is pick ourselves from the wreckage and try again.”

Hollow gazed down at her, their eyes tired and haunted-distant and the white of shed soul. “You cannot forgive yourself either, can you?” They said lowly, less a question than a weary acknowledgement of another who had survived too much.

Hornet looked away, and found her eyes drawn back to the others, where Ghost had by now given into their siblings’ reluctance. All three were sat huddled in the middle of the bench, talking quieter than she could hear, though she could still discern the soft hum of their lilting good mood, the gentle, far-off brushes of interest and lighter thoughts like moths’ wings, just loud enough to notice. They weren’t quite like Hollow and her, in that way. Was that what gave Ghost their imperturbable resilience, their ability to see wonder where Hornet only saw the empty shells of what was, the cities abandoned where they found unexplored intrigue, the crossroads unwalked for lifetimes that Ghost only knew the beckoning promise of, instead of the countless living others they should have seen in its place?

They were young, yes, but they weren’t naive. Hornet recalled what they’d told her, of whatever they’d done that still wore on them. Yet it did not consume them as Hornet’s own faults consumed her.

Such a strange resilience that was, and one she did not begrudge them, though she wondered for its cause.

“No. I can’t.” Hornet said softly in reply. “But what use is there in allowing it to destroy me?”

Hornet took a steadying breath of the mist-heavy air. “But then, I have had many years to mourn this kingdom. Time you have not been granted. So mourn, sibling. I will begrudge you no sorrow. Only, do not allow your shame to destroy you, either.” She told them, looking back into their wide-pale eyes.

“How could I not? I see it everywhere. A thousand little losses, the empty stag stations and the decrepit halls and vacant homes. There isn’t anyone left, is there? It is all gone.” They said entreatingly, as though she hadn’t seen the same as they changed. Hadn’t been there to watch the stations go empty and the homes to rot.

“And if it is all gone, what purpose is left to me?” Hollow whispered, as though to speak louder would make it too terrible a question to face.

Hornet considered that for a long moment.

“… There are valuable things that remain, and they are only saved because you never gave up. A stag, a sibling, a home. The promise of more. And you’re our sibling; when have we ever given up on anything?” Hornet asked rhetorically.

“We’re all too stubborn to know when to die, and look what it’s won us; a life to live, instead. Mourn. And know we love you, no matter if you never have a purpose again but to live. Especially if you don’t.” Hornet said to them, and offered Hollow her hand. “I’ve been trying the same recently. It isn’t so bad.”

It was oddly straightforward to speak to them like this, Hornet found as black tears welled from Hollow’s wide, unblinking eyes, rolling down their face and disappearing back into their form, and they reached out with shaken, uncertain claws to accept her hand. Their hand was so large that she could only comfortably fit her grip around two claws of theirs, yet she did so. As with the others, they were only a welcome cooling where they’d been blazing ice before, like a stone set in the shade and picked up when one’s hands were warmed by the heat of midday.

Ghost had seen all of Hallownest’s decrepit, miserable glory, as she had, but they hadn’t known it while it lived. Hollow understood all they’d lost just as she did, perhaps moreso with their last sight of it taken when there was still a pulse of life to be found there, and all Hornet could think to do, could ever want to, now, was to ensure her sibling wouldn’t be counted among what had faded with the years. Even if to do so she had to speak quietly, and be calm, and bare her thoughts and failings to another in spite of every instinct and reflex to do otherwise, for what had she learned from her life if not that some battles could not be fought with a needle?

Hollow held her hand with care, just as they had when she’d led them around the White Palace as a child. “To do any of what you suggest is a betrayal of all I was supposed to be.” They said, and neither of them were truly the same anymore.

“To hell with what you’re supposed to be. Hallownest is gone, and with it all need for such a mindless creature. Be a living bug and a sibling of mine, instead. Are you ready to go?” Hornet asked, forcing habitual impatience from her tone.

Hollow leaned down and knocked their forehead briefly against hers, stayed there a moment with their eyes dimmed as though they sought the strength to do so, and when they arched back and took away their hand with a gentle squeeze of her claws, there was a tenderness to their thoughts as they told them to her, an indistinct smile. “Alright, little Hornet. If I must try, then try I shall, for the world is less than it was. Perhaps you are right. Hallownest is changed, and what I can do for it has changed just as surely.”

It wasn’t the acceptance she’d hoped for, but Hornet supposed she had no place to talk when considering self-forgiveness. Yet they didn’t sound quite so sad any longer, less beaten down by what haunted them, by the anguish of the hardly-gone past, and so she only eyed them up and down and scowled.

“I thought I’d told you to use my name, and nothing else.” Hornet accused.

“I did use your name.” Hollow defended, eyes brightening. “I’ve followed your instruction to the letter.”

“Well, I’m adding another; no additions or variations.”

“But it is only the truth; you are very little.”

“My name itself is enough-” Hornet began, and cut herself off. “I’m not little. I know you’ve seen other bugs. I’m taller than many of them.”

“But shorter than me.” Hollow reminded her good-naturedly.

Hornet narrowed her eyes irately at them without any honest anger for a moment in her eternity, and turned away to pace back to the bench, where the littler shades had lapsed back into restful dozing, apparently utterly ignorant to any tense, emotional discussion that may or may not have occurred a nail’s throw away. “Ghost, wake up. We’re leaving.”

Chapter Text

And so Hornet discovered that Deepnest, without the spiders to defend it and with fewer wilder beasts than she’d anticipated, was far less intimidating to those who traveled its roads than when it thrived, or even when it fell.

All a traveler of Deepnest of now might need was a competent guide, and no fear of falling to the thorns and sudden drops lining its depths, and, ideally, a lack of understanding to exactly how deep the tunnels ran. One cannot fear what they do not know to, and the shades, aside from being largely immune to falls and pressing darkness, had never journeyed the path she brought them down. Either that, or they trusted Hornet far more completely than she felt was sensible.

At any rate, the end result was a complete lack of fear from any of them, which manifested mostly in ceaseless interrogation from Sonnet, and endless, undamaged curiosity from Nettle, entirely recovered in spirit from their scare and having evidently learned absolutely nothing at all about sticking one’s head in dark places.

Though it must have only taken somewhere in the neighborhood of a day and a half to cross the rest of Deepnest with how empty it’d become, climbing steadily to where the Mask Maker kept their home and unhampered by anything more dangerous or aggressive than a few straggling packs of dirtcarvers, easily slaughtered with the quick point of her needle, Hornet was at the end of her patience. Ghost was very little help in this regard, just as taken as Nettle with the mysteries hidden along this new way through Deepnest that they’d never traveled while living, and this interest itself ended in Hornet adding a handful of curiosities to her quickly-filling pockets whenever the two discovered little shiny things and brought them back to her to hold onto.

Ghost’s argument for this was that she was obliged to do so, as she was the only one with physical form. Hornet’s argument to them was that they were her pockets and her word was final about what went into them. Even so, she’d already acquired an impressive sum of pocket-change geo encrusted in various unsavory residues, and a number of equally shiny and absolutely useless little stones.

In the end it was Hollow that proved to be her salvation, with the patience and the reach to, literally if need be, steer the others away from whatever had captured their attention this time and back to the path, and through their and Hornet’s efforts they made good time.

But however capable they were, Hollow was less than helpful to field Sonnet’s increasingly in-depth questioning. When one is presumed mindless, Hornet thought with grim despair and enough wisdom to keep it to herself this time, little effort must be extended towards one’s education, at least not in a way that would have been immediately helpful, and at this point that meant she alone had to try to remember things she’d been taught lifetimes ago and hadn’t thought of since.

“Why are there no fungi in the Abyss?” Sonnet asked with a tilt of their head, easily keeping pace floating alongside her as Hornet scaled a sheer, open tunnel wall angled almost directly up, climbing by the darkened roots jutting from it, the earth too loose here to use her needle.

“I don’t know.” Hornet replied, for the hundredth time.

“Oh. They glow very prettily.” They said like a compliment, as though they thought Hornet, as the reigning expert on Deepnest, had had a hand in making them do so. “… Do you know why they glow?” Sonnet tried.

“Bioluminescence. Not an uncommon trait, many different things in this kingdom have some variety of it.” Hornet said, relieved to have an answer to anything at all.

“Oh! What’s that?”

“It’s when a creature or other similarly living thing produces light.” Hornet told them, grunting with annoyance as she grasped for a higher handhold and disturbed a shower of dirt, that Sonnet neatly drifted out of the way of and which Hornet had to shake vigorously from her mask.

“How do they make it?”

“I… I don’t know.” Hornet sighed.

“Do you make bioluminescence?” Sonnet sounded out the word carefully, and it stood out from the otherwise casual flow of their void-speak.

“No.”

“Do I? My eyes glow.”

“You,” Hornet cut herself off, scowling, and hauled herself higher as she thought it over.

Did it count? They were hardly a living creature, per se, yet they did live. Was it light of their own creation, or the use of whatever latent energy was present in the soul they held, inherently not their own? Did that matter at all? All things consumed something, and whatever they did with that energy was considered of their own doing. What did make their eyes glow?

Hornet was not a scholar, and she never wanted to be one. It made things far too complicated, when her life was already overcomplicated enough.

“Perhaps.” She decided on.

She climbed up onto the ledge she’d been angling for, the cold having hours since begun to seep back into her limbs and make them just noticeably slower, though not nearly to the frozen crawl they’d responded to her will with before. All going well, the draining of her soul would never reach such a point again.

“We’re here,” Hornet said hurriedly as Sonnet perked up like they’d ask something else. “How far back are the others?”

Sonnet, sufficiently distracted, peered back down the tunnel’s drop into the darkness below. “They’re coming. Is this where we’ll get our masks fixed?”

“Yes,” Hornet told them, glancing up and away from the edge she’d just surmounted.

She’d rarely come to this part of Deepnest, even when she’d lived within its bounds. It had been a point of contention among the spiders, whether to allow the tramway to emerge so close to the Distant Village or not, especially once her mother had gone to dream. The Infection had made the decision for them in the end by the closure of the City of Tears and the slow decline of the Hallownest bugs, and then the disappearance of the Pale King, leaving the construction eternally incomplete. Shellwood supports, holding the excavated cavern up before the customary stone of Hallownest’s structures could be put into their places, were scattered and rotting still in the dark and strung together by chains, and they seemed nearly as ghosts of their own.

Many had thought the whole ordeal an imposition, a trespass where Deepnest had held firm against Hallownest for so long, and Hornet could understand why, looking over the ancient construction site with all its lumafly lamps struck down to leave it bathed in the dark of Deepnest, though it would forever remain as strange as when it had been well-lit.

Yet for all that she hadn’t frequented the failed tramway, she knew of the Mask Maker where they’d taken up residence nearby, long before Hornet was hatched. They had been nearly a myth in Deepnest, yet their skill was very real, and nearly omnipresent. Masks did not remain broken there. It was rumored that they would give a mask to any who had need, geo for their services or no, the recipient grateful or not. She’d never had to make the trip, her mask as resilient as her shell (and for it she could only thank her heritage, given how often that resilience had been tested), but even long after the Infection had taken hold there would, very occasionally, be a bug whose mask did not stay cracked.

They must still live. And if not, their workplace still stood. How hard could a mask be to make, truly?

True to Sonnet’s word, Ghost’s head up poked over the ledge as she watched, the pale of their eyes brilliant in the dark and impossible to miss, and they waved to her as they rose and Hollow’s face appeared instead, where Ghost had settled themself for the time being in the dip between their sibling’s long horns. Hollow leaned down to let them slide off, and then reached up and deposited Nettle from where they’d had them held carefully in hand, the little shade’s pouting suggesting they’d recently been retrieved from another unplanned side trip. They perked up quickly enough upon sighting Sonnet, and more so when they realized they’d all stopped moving.

“Are we there? Is this the place?” They asked, drifting quickly closer to peer around Hornet into the distantly-lit tunnel beyond.

It was an unremarkable place by all appearances, just another carved hole in the solid earth that wound away into the darkness. She’d passed a hundred of them in the past day’s travel, a thousand, but this one was different.

Hornet knew well when tunnels were made by spider’s intent or by the aimless scraping of wilder creatures, and this one was old and meant to last, and far within its entrance she could see light. No brighter than a particularly dense cluster of luminescent fungi, but lit differently from such. Through the stone below, set just-so into a path so that it might look uncovered by erosion or coincidence, she could feel a curious sort of vibration, one closest, she thought, to the heavy drum of rain on the roof of a City tower, though far more uniform than that, almost intentional.

Hidden in plain sight so that only one searching, or one lucky and mindful enough of their surroundings, might find it. But not concealed too thoroughly; the way was open and clear, the tapping from within unmuffled, and at the tunnel’s very doorstep was what had nearly been a tramline. At one point it might’ve been an open and inviting entryway, if the expansive cavern it bordered had been brighter.

“It is.” Hornet confirmed, and took a quick headcount – just in case – before turning back to the tunnel in question, drawing her needle and using the flat of the blade to gently push Nettle back when they tried to duck around her, to see down the narrow little hole in the cliffside ahead. “Be patient, and do not overtake me. I know not what we will find.” She cautioned them as she stepped inside.

The sudden tension to her words must have been warning enough to make the suggestion stick, for they fell back with a quick, eager nod and left her to focus on the growing brightness of what lay ahead, obscured by the sheets of draping roots she had to cut down and out of the way to move past. The chill and the hum of focused thought behind her, as familiar now as her own, reassured her that the others followed closely, though they mindfully allowed her space enough for her needle’s use should the need arise.

It was not a long tunnel, more a front porch than anything else, and at its end she stepped into a den of pale faces and empty eyes.

Hornet’s own eyes widened before she could control her reaction, taking in the sheer number of the masks lying unused and piled around, though stacked with such care that their placement couldn’t have been anything but intentional. Larger examples, each unique but all of the same general size – far larger than most bugs she’d ever seen – decorated every open space on the wall, and Hornet had to shake off the nearly physical sensation of all of their dull gazes pinning her in place.

And in the center of all the made faces, stacked dozens deep on the floor and making the wide, round-cornered room feel much smaller, giving it a strange inward-facing sort of focus by countless watchers, there was a living bug, humming and chittering to themself where they worked with both hands on two separate nearly-masks, as though there simply wasn’t enough time in her timeless kingdom (timeless no longer, she reminded herself) to make all that had to be made. The lumafly lights overhead were dim and dusty, but they illuminated quick, careful hands doing quick, careful work, and the hollow eyes of a mask that was not a face.

Hornet stepped guardedly closer, glancing again around the choked den with its shallow, stark lighting, but the Mask Maker didn’t glance up from their work until she was stood before them, nearly of a size with Hollow but hunched so far over their worktable that they were almost eyelevel with her.

There was a jolt of strangled alarm behind her, quickly beaten down, and Hornet tilted her head to the side just enough to see Ghost back up and into Hollow, who pressed reassurance at them that even Hornet felt the echoes of.

“They are not real. Look; the Mask Maker is painting one now. None of these masks have ever belonged to another.” Hollow said.

“I know. It only brings back some… Recent memories.” Ghost replied shakily, unsettled in spite of it.

“The creature needs no mask. Hers is whole, nearly unmarked. Only a few imperfections. Does she want them undone, or is she unsatisfied with her burdens? Does she wish to be cast anew?” The Mask Maker spoke into the silence without looking up from their work.

Hornet fixed them with her stare, their muffled voice impartial and still causing her eyes to harden.

“Do not make presumptions, Mask Maker. I require your skill, but not for myself. Will you accept payment?”

“For the faceless, I provide, princess of two kingdoms. No payment; what is worth a face? An identity? A life? Show them to me, those bared to my craft.” The Mask Maker said.

Hornet hesitated, but when the Mask Maker set down their tools and stood from their work she stepped aside, claws tight on her needle.

The Mask Maker made a fascinated chitter that set her fangs on edge, and climbed over the workbench to better examine her siblings, crowded behind her. Here was another place Hollow barely fit, taking up most of the empty space in the mask-crowded workshop, and so when the Mask Maker reached out a hand it was a simple repositioning of theirs to place their face, white eyes calm and narrowed, between the littler shades and the Mask Maker’s claws, their horns long enough for the insubstantial tips to brush the ceiling.

The Mask Maker tutted at them chidingly. “No need for fear, maskless creature, mind without focus. It shall find nothing but that it seeks here.”

“Do not refer to them as such.” Hornet commanded as Hollow winced, something she only knew from the disturbance in their steady-calm void, for they didn’t so much as twitch to acknowledge the Mask Maker otherwise. “And do not touch them. I have brought parts from my siblings’ broken masks,” Hornet said, and retrieved first the shard from Nettle’s, then tugging the silk supporting the others’ off her shoulder. “Will they be sufficient?”

The Mask Maker leaned back from Hollow, still staring over their unmoving face, and hummed high and thoughtful. “To remake from, no. Show them to me.” They unfolded a long, gangly arm to her, spindly fingers spread for her to do as they bid.

Hornet carefully laid first Sonnet’s and Ghost’s mask and mask-half, respectively, onto their palm, and then tucked Hollow’s eye and Nettle’s fragment between them. As soon as she had, the Mask Maker reeled their limb back in and peered closely at what she’d given them.

“No, the original bindings are destroyed, the Wyrm’s doing bled from what you give me. I will need to make them anew, if they are to house a creature living again. Such remarkable contrast he conceived, the most thorough remaking of a mind. Or perhaps not a remaking at all, but a forging. So complete, so absolute, that it remains impressed upon the nothing underneath.” The Mask Maker mumbled, turning the pieces over in their hands to examine from every angle.

“Can you make them masks?” Hornet demanded.

“Yes, of course, faces I grant to all that request. Yet they will not be masks as these were, they will not molt nor change. But to contain? Focus? To define and form? Yes, with ease. To create as the Wyrm did is an art known only to those who bear broods, but to replace? As easy as to craft a nail.” The Mask Maker dismissed, climbing back past their workbench and scattering the masks she’d handed them over its surface, setting aside those they’d been working on with meticulous care and reaching beneath to retrieve blunt tools with angled edges, brushes, a pot of thick white paint, all amongst other things Hornet never would have thought to expect a mask to be made with.

“So which face is crafted first?” They asked. “All will be made, but a first there must be.”

Hornet considered, and looked back to her siblings, but the Mask Maker stopped her before they could answer.

“No, I’ll remake the largest. More to craft, more to carve and seal. It will tell if there is enough imprint to remedy the face, which will be imperfect no matter the precision of the carving. If that one can take to a made mask, with its broken soul and its shattered self, the others will see no difficulty.”

There was a sharp stab of shame from Hollow behind her, petering into an inwards-directed, intentionally stifled sort of resentment that made Hornet see red. She was across the room and stood before the Mask Maker between one breath and the next, the craftsbug paying her no mind as they thumbed the unchipped metal edge of a tool to test its sharpness, and she seized them by the drape of their tattered cloak, pulling them down to meet her fury.

“I will not tell you again, pathetic, fiddling beast. Do not refer to them so. Do not speak of them as a broken thing, or you will craft these masks at needlepoint.” She hissed the words with cold malice, venom welling in her mouth.

The Mask Maker stared out from behind the empty eyes of their mask, silent, their ever-moving hands still as though they’d been frozen in place. Then, as she released them, they inched back into motion with careful slowness, like she might take offense should they launch back into their work.

“I’ve meant no disrespect, princess, forgive my blunder. They are no longer only the nothing, are they? Part of a whole, but distant, apart. Look at those you have brought before me; no faces, but wills, still. It shouldn’t be so,” the Mask Maker mumbled, turning away from her and beginning to strike with their tool at a vast block of something pale and solid in a far corner of their workspace, that when they impacted its surface broke only minutely and made a hollow sort of sound with each hit.

“Such faceless creatures should be only that which they are innately of; indeed, come near to that substance and they might yet be lost to it, without a focus to draw them away. How strange that it would not be destroyed, shone upon until it is nothing, recoiling in the Light as all dark must.” The Mask Maker mused.

Hornet felt they were not talking about her sibling in specific, and so left them to their muttering with a glower, her needle heavy in her hand. “The Old Light is no more. The dead it woke now sleep again. I suppose, then, that there is much it cannot harm any longer.”

“No more?” The Mask Maker did not pause in their work. “Not hidden away, not only obscured?”

“Dead. The Old Light is gone from this world at last.”

The Mask Maker’s steady hands hesitated so briefly it could have been a trick of the light. “Does she not fear a god’s passing? Knows she not that which the Wyrm could not forget? What forces have been misplaced, what darkness threatens…”

“How long will the mask take to carve?” Hornet cut them off harshly.

“… Hours, at most, and less for the others. A face is a face, and I have made many.” The Mask Maker replied distractedly, colder than before, but already with most of a block of the rough dimensions of Hollow’s mask carved from the whole. “Leave or stay, I care not.”

Hornet narrowed her eyes at their dismissal, but replaced her needle at her back and brushed past her siblings and away through the tunnel, leaving the dim workshop to its master’s company.

At the mouth of the tunnel, overlooking the spiraling drop below and accompanied only by the cascading, far-off clink of shifting chains and the nearer, unceasing drip of water, as ever caves such as these hosted, Hornet sat at the overhang with a sigh. It wasn’t long before her siblings trickled out to join her, settling around her like a dark little flock of maskflies for the wait.

And a long wait it would be, Hornet thought wryly. She was unused to doing nothing for so long, and she’d only just slept a day or two before, to judge only by how long the ascent through the tunnels had seemed to take. Not that rest would come easy at the mouth of the Mask Maker’s den. The beast (not a spider, surely) would not bother them, of that Hornet was sure, but their words weighed heavy on her mind.

“I don’t think I like them.” Nettle announced. Then, when Hornet set her chin in her hand and looked over at them with tired amusement, they glanced worriedly over their shoulder and back at her. “Can they hear me?”

“No, complain all you wish.” Hornet told them. “I’m the only one needing to watch her words, if another overhearing is the concern.”

“Oh, okay. I don’t like them. They shouldn’t talk about Hollow like that.” Nettle said decisively.

“No, they shouldn’t.” Hornet agreed. “And if anyone ever again speaks of any of you as such, tell me, and I shall ensure they regret it.”

“They told me they do not need me there to carve the mask,” Hollow said, emerging last from the tunnel to wind like a coil of blackened smoke past them and into the wider space beyond, as Nettle beamed at her in delight. “Should I be concerned, or is this typical of mask-making?”

“They’ve honed their craft long enough, they ought to be able to work without a live reference by now.” Hornet replied uncharitably. “Are you alright?”

Hollow drifted back to rest their torso against the eroded stone that ran to the side of the tunnel mouth their siblings clustered in, and put up no protest as Nettle jumped up from Hornet’s side to dash to eyelevel and headbutt them solidly between the eyes, something the almost inaudible murmur of their discontent, too quiet to put a name to, quieted further for as Hollow briefly nudged back. “Yes,” Hollow said indistinctly, and then, surer, “Yes, I will be fine.”

“What they said was untrue. You’re not a broken thing to be experimented with, and if there is any inconsistency in the mask they make for you, they will not live to try again.” Hornet vowed vehemently.

“Are you not worried they’ll hear you?” Hollow asked, watching Nettle dip back down and settle next to Sonnet to strike up their own conversation, and neatly avoiding a true response to what she’d said, Hornet noticed.

Very well. If they would not defend themself from this, she would do so for them. “Not at all. If the Mask Maker knows the consequence of a poor effort, then they will be less inclined to make a poor effort.” Hornet assured them, reasonably, she thought.

“If they say anything like what they did again, it’s not just you they’ll have to worry about.” Ghost added hotly. “And I don’t think I appreciate all they knew about the Void, or of the Pale King, either. It felt like they knew things they couldn’t have known, things that even I don’t know.” Ghost said, tendrils flicking uncomfortably where they floated a little above the broken stone at Hornet’s open side. “And they talk of it very… Vaguely.”

“I’m sure they thought they were being very literal. Most of what they said seemed familiar enough, only in different terms. But then, I had never met them. Years spent alone have a way of taking a toll on anyone.” Hornet told them, to which Ghost hummed noncommittally. “As for what else they said… I do not like the implications, but they aren’t so far removed from all I already suspected.”

“We killed a god, and now we have to deal with the aftermath.” Ghost summarized.

“You and Hollow killed a god, I only helped as I could. Whatever consequences might arise, it was a heroic deed we fought for an age to achieve, at great cost and for great good. I’d ask that you not forget that.” Hornet reminded them sharply, and immediately wished she’d thought to soften her tone.

Yet Ghost, as ever, took it in stride. So well in stride that Hornet abruptly wondered how often she spoke so coldly without realizing, that this instance she noticed didn’t faze them in the least. “You’re right, I guess. There isn’t anything else I would’ve done, for a hundred reasons. And even if it wouldn’t’ve helped anyone but you, I’d have done it anyway.” Ghost said, glancing up to Hollow. “No use wondering what could have happened if I hadn’t.”

“So, what should we do? It’ll be something like a day or so until we can leave. Are we going to spend it waiting here?” They continued like they didn’t particularly expect her to agree.

“Unless you have another plan, I suppose we will. It is only a day, and then you might do whatever you wish." Hornet said. "I’d thought you’d welcome a brief respite after traversing Deepnest.”

“A brief respite is fine, but there’s nothing to do.” Ghost complained. Then they tilted their head thoughtfully, as though something had occurred to them, and Hornet had time for a brief moment of preemptive exasperation as they looked intently up at her. “When did you last eat?”

Hornet glowered at them. “I’m fine, worry for yourself.”

“I’ll worry for myself when you stop giving me reasons to worry about you. You promised you’d find something after we’d talked to the Mask Maker, and we’ve talked to the Mask Maker.” Ghost remembered, and dutifully reminded her.

Hornet’s scowl deepened, though now it was mostly directed at herself. She had promised that, hadn’t she? Days that felt like weeks before. Wyrm, and it had been days, hadn’t it? She’d hardly noticed.

But then, as she realized now, she’d been feeling far too terrible to think of food for much of that time. Like the steadily intensifying heat of a fire, Hornet had barely noticed as she’d crept gradually nearer to deadly weakness, distracted by the haste and concern of her goal, and then distracted further by the certain complications that had arisen along the way. The relief of the hot spring had only brought with it its own implications, more to trouble her already troubled thoughts. And there was the matter of the potentially fast-approaching end of their kingdom, that she still had yet to think of an answer to.

And of herself, Hornet had the self-awareness to know she was more used to ignoring her own needs in the face of more pressing concerns than she’d ever allow her siblings to see.

She snorted humorlessly at herself, to Ghost’s clearly-felt confusion. Hollow had been more accurate than they’d known; she hadn’t changed in the least, only adapted as she’d had to. It was fortunate that she was fairly certain, by this point, that not one of them had more than the vaguest clue how often a bug of flesh and chitin did ridiculous, inexplicable things like work to sustain their physical forms. Still, it wasn’t something she could put off forever, or even that she wanted to. She’d simply forgotten.

And Hornet thought it unwise to rely upon the resilience of her heritage unnecessarily, and worse still to needlessly cause her siblings to worry.

“Fine. It was foolish of me to wait so long. You can cast spells, you said. How many?” Hornet looked back to them to ask.

 Ghost answered immediately, as though the knowledge was something long since known to them. “About three at once, if I’m careful. Maybe less, it doesn’t feel exactly the same to use them as it did when I had a mask, but they’re powerful. Are you going to go hunting?”

“I will. I shouldn’t need to go far; we are far enough from any unconventional darkness that the dirtcarvers will behave typically. Protect the others, and do not leave this place.” Hornet warned, giving them a pointed look.

“I won’t, don’t worry,” they told her, amusement and a certain self-satisfaction, like they were particularly pleased they’d gotten their way without a fight, bright beneath their voice when she stood to go. “Hurry back.”

And as fate would have it, she did hurry back.

It took less than an hour of searching to attract the attention of a pack of straggling dirtcarvers, as limping and weakened by the disruption of the Infection as any other she’d seen, but alive and hissing, regardless, and a moment more to dispatch them. They were small, only very young beasts that hadn’t had the time to be fully overtaken, but she was only one spider. It was only when she’d finished dressing the whole set and bound the remains in silk to haul back that she realized she’d have far too much to eat on her own.

A dirtcarver was not an especially palatable creature, mostly jaws and hard backplates, but a brace of them as she’d prepared was a week’s meals at least if it was only her eating them. How easily she’d fallen back into the habit of returning to others with something to show for her absence, a task she hadn’t had to take up since the fall of the City of Tears. It had been unthinking reflex to prepare food for her siblings, too, when of course they wouldn’t be able to eat it.

Yet there was no real reason to leave behind what she’d caught when they’d have the time to cook it well enough to keep for another day, so Hornet returned with as much as she could carry wrapped tightly in her silk and thrown over her shoulder, far heavier, she couldn’t help but notice, than masks. It was a reassuring weight though, a victory tangible and satisfying to carry on her back. It had been the same all that time ago, back when she’d still been certain that she could help those who needed her, to have a measurable, immediate aid to give.

And though the spoils of her hunt were now only for herself, a trace of that satisfaction remained, more than enough to set her in a better mood than in… Months, it must have been.

And why shouldn’t she be? Any anxieties she’d had about the survival of the Mask Maker were brushed aside as quickly as she’d confirmed they would make her siblings masks, and her siblings themselves would have the safety of physical form in countable hours. Always, the future loomed distant and waiting, but it had also been so for so very long.

Hornet was certain of many things, but most of all that she would not give up the brief almost-peace she’d found, not if it was torn bloody from her claws. Not ever again would she lose what she protected to a power unopposed.

But there was time yet to be concerned about that.

“Watch these, I’ll find something to burn.” She instructed Nettle upon climbing back to the entrance to the Mask Maker’s den and swinging her bound dirtcarvers down from her shoulders, and they nodded emphatically while she glanced around.

“Where are the rest? I’d told Ghost not to leave.” Hornet asked them, frowning. The narrow tunnel was empty save the two of them, she saw, sparking annoyance and slow dread at once as a strangely weighty mixture low in her chest.

“They’re just waiting inside, watching the Mask Maker work.” Nettle reassured quickly, likely noticing her irritation. She’d never been good at hiding such things. “They’re nearly done! Only, it's a little boring to watch after a while.”

“Nearly done? Already? I’ve only been gone an hour.” Hornet said, her scowl deepening. Before she’d even shaken loose the tightness her shoulders had accumulated from the climb back up, she had her needle drawn again and ready at her side, its point low and uncleaned from her hunt and still claw-sharp.

Nettle followed at her back. “Are you gonna kill them?” They asked, a little too eagerly.

“That depends on what’s become of our siblings.” Hornet promised grimly, pulling aside the last sheet of soil-snarled roots before the Mask Maker’s den forcefully enough to break some from where they hung, and stepping inside.

Three pairs of gleaming white eyes glanced up as one, and three distinct threads of void-speak called greetings, saving the Mask Maker from an immediate fate.

Hollow was as hunched over as the space required, and the others unusually distant from them, like they thought their larger sibling would have need of the extra room before long. Hornet felt the quickly building tension, mounting since she’d been out of sight of the cave, snap into relief she only expressed in the loosening of her grip on her needle. They’d stayed put, at least.

The Mask Maker, however, was changed.

Gone was their nearly frenetic energy, replaced by a singular sort of focus that drew Hornet’s gaze from the shades. They were chipping very, very carefully at the face of the huge mask before them, that looked almost exactly as Hollow’s mask had before, save that this one was a gleaming, pristine white, cleaner than Hornet’s own mask had been in years and years and unmarred by any sort of scratch or mark, least of all the painful crack they’d had in their last days.

Hornet scrutinized it, but the proportions looked exact, even to her untrained eye. It was an incredible feat of craftsmanship, one she’d never have hoped to replicate in a hundred years’ practice.

How fortunate they were that the Mask Maker still lived, Hornet thought, distracted by the mindful carving of the eyes from the solid white, as purposeful as though there had never been any doubt of their placement, as easy as if the Mask Maker was simply brushing the excess away and the mask lay completed and whole underneath. It was nearly mesmerizing, to see a craft executed so surely.

“It is good that you brought the eye,” the Mask Maker murmured to their tools, their face bent low to their work. “It differs from the nothing beneath, not nearly so cutting, far more suited to a living face. The horns are not so important, but the eye is how the face looks out from within.”

They lifted a hand to indicate her to be silent when she made to respond, and Hornet let her questions die without voicing them, disgruntled.

“Is it to your liking? Or will you be taking my life, and trying the rest yourself? My tools I keep sharpened and ready for your use.” The Mask Maker asked distractedly, having carved the symmetry of the eyes to their satisfaction and taken up a harsh-grained stone to sweep along the curves, over and over until fine white powder fell from the rough edges.

Hornet considered, eyeing them and waiting to see if they’d shush her again. “I won’t-“ she began, cut off once more by the Mask Maker’s waving hand.

“Good, good, then keep your peace and allow my task’s completion.” They instructed her.

“Hornet, it’s incredible,” Ghost called from where they’d drifted up near the low roof, presumably for the better vantage point to watch the Mask Maker work. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do anything so carefully and still be so good at it. They make it look like anyone with hands could do what they do, like knowing just where to carve and the exact pressure to use is as simple as anything.”

“Like how you look to where you hear a sound in the distance, like it’s just something you know to do.” Sonnet added, mystified, their head moving minutely to follow the Mask Maker’s hand as they set aside one grinding stone for another. “Can I do this?”

“Not-“ Hornet started, cut off immediately by a quickly thrown hunk of splintered white, extra from Hollow’s mask. She jerked her head back and out of the way, and what would have smacked her squarely on the side of her horn instead sailed past it to impact the far wall with a muffled thud and fall to clatter through a pile of masks.

“Be quiet or leave. The others had no such trouble to choose the former.” The Mask Maker said shrilly.

“Throw anything at me again and we’ll soon discover how well you carve with a single hand.” Hornet snarled back waspishly.

All four siblings felt something like near-frantic discouragement at her in their own ways, and the Mask Maker didn’t respond with insult or apology, so with some effort Hornet lowered her needle and let the matter lie.

“Do not take offense, they only need the quiet to work.” Hollow told her, tearing their eyes away to look down at her while she fumed.

Hornet glared mutely back, her expression as flat as she could make it.

“Ah, right. I will take that as, ‘Of course, Hollow, I’d never remove a bug’s hand just because they told me to be quiet, even if they were rude about it.’” Hollow told her, in what Hornet decided she was offended to think was their impression of her voice.

The voice of the Void was not hers, so Hornet settled to stare daggers at them instead.

“And that was, ‘I’d never think to, because Ghost, my favorite sibling, would have to stop me, and nobody really wants that.’” Ghost added with a laugh, delighted as she turned her glare at them instead and pointedly returned her needle to rest at her back.

“If you were the favorite before, I don’t think you are anymore.” Hollow chuckled.

“Oh, no, she’s gonna be furious. But I’ve never been the one talking when another can’t, before.” Ghost reasoned, coming down to tap their cold forehead to Hornet’s horn, to let her know alongside the lightness from their void that they were entirely joking. “Might as well make the best of it.”

Hornet waved them off irately, unwilling to let them know they’d succeeded in tempering her irritation. They were right, she supposed, even as she glowered straight ahead and refused to look at any of them. It was hardly unfair that they be able to talk when she had to keep her silence; the situation had been reversed for much of their lives. She could tolerate a short period of voicelessness, when she’d gone years without speaking before.

That did not, however, mean she had to be especially happy about it. Hornet was not one to take any sort of slight with grace, and that had been her downfall long before her duty became one of life and death.

So she crossed her arms beneath her shawl and blatantly did not respond to either of them, and leaned back against the wall behind her to wait out the Mask Maker’s work.

Chapter Text

And so Hornet found that the fine details of carving a mask were much more time-consuming than she’d anticipated.

The Mask Maker, of course, had been right in their estimate; it took a few hours past Hornet’s return for the mask to be completed, even as every move to carve it was never deliberated on or hemmed and hawed over as far as Hornet could see.

It was good, in the end, that she’d more-or-less given herself a good workout to catch her dirtcarvers to let her settle in for the wait, though by the end of it she was thinking longingly of where they were laid at the Mask Maker’s doorstep.

She was, however, continually headed off whenever she thought she’d leave to prepare them, or perhaps to simply eat one raw, by Sonnet’s entreating eyes turned towards her. It was as though they could sense when her restlessness became nearly enough to act upon, which she hoped without particular expectation wasn’t the case, and without saying as much were asking that she’d stay, so sure that the next moment would be rewarded with the exclamation of the Mask Maker for their finished work.

Though she was hungry enough to be annoyed for it, she had also used enough effort that to stand in the Mask Maker’s den and rest against the back wall between the stacks of masks wasn’t much worse than a relief. That itself was something of a surprise, that she’d be so easily tired by what had amounted to a very simple hunt.

The void in her chest, the draw of her siblings’ on her soul, or some return to normality that was no longer normal, caused by the breaking of the stasis? There was no telling, and Hornet was not one to mull over unanswerable, useless questions. She’d live, and she could wait.

And so the time passed, not longer than she’d expected and still seeming to drag on with the patient tap-tap of the Mask Maker’s tools, the repetitive rasp of their grindstone at the curves, smoothing with the increasing fineness of the grain until the mask was a soft white like clean snow or unbound lumaflies. When they finished Hornet nearly didn’t notice, watching with stinging, half-closed eyes as the Mask Maker worked, but as the silence between tools stretched on, she blinked and looked up.

They had the grand mask held aloft, inspecting it from every angle, running their thumbs along the arcs to search for snags or rough patches or imperfections and finding none. Hornet shook herself awake and straightened up to scrutinize it alongside them.

It looked perfect, somehow more so than when she’d arrived. The edges, she realized looking at the finished product, had been ever so slightly harder before they’d smoothed them, the curve of the horns made up of many short cuts instead of a clean sweeping surface like it now had. It had been skillful before, but now it looked whole. Finished. As though they had simply taken Hollow’s unharmed mask from before they’d been sealed and somehow had it now in their hands, fresh from molting and still scrubbed clean, without the wear of years and neglect it had gained in the interim.

“Did I look so… Pretty, once?” Hollow asked, tilting their head as they regarded the finished product. “Was this truly my face?”

“Yes, of course,” Hornet said with a wary glance at the Mask Maker, who didn’t make a fuss for her distraction. “There’s a statue made of you that stands in the center of the City of Tears. Did you not see it when it was created?”

“I did, but it was… It disquieted me. It is very easy to forget oneself, if there is no reason to remember.” Hollow said slowly. “I must have been a wretched sight, when… By the end. But that looks like the Pure Vessel.” They told her.

“There was never any such being, but this would be yours, if you’d like it.” Hornet told them.

As much as the reality of their vulnerability as a soul without a shell, a mind, as the Mask Maker had put it, without the focus of a mask, grated at her nerves and haunted the shadows she saw in the corners of her vision, if they rejected what the Mask Maker had made for them, she would not argue. It was simple fact that to be so exposed in Hallownest, in Deepnest, was to invite a more permanent death than they’d known, but this was their mask.

And a mask, Hornet knew very well, was more than simple shell, greater than protection for what lay underneath. It was identity, the self, the unmoving face to be known forever by. And if they disliked the one created to replace their own, Hornet would rather wait hours or days more until they found a mask to suit them than force upon them a face they could not recognize as their own.

“This suits the creature perfectly. They are a being of solidity and sacrifice, a shore upon which all else must break. A mask is no name, you creature of the end and the defiance of Light, but far more precious than that. This is their face, whatever else it became. Yet the choice is ever the maskbearer’s, whether the mask worn is what one is, or what one will become.” The Mask Maker told Hollow gravely, and held out what they’d created.

Hornet watched as Hollow stared into the thing’s vacant eyes, offered up to them with care and cradled between the Mask Maker’s thin hands, and reached out to take it into their own.

It was an uncanny mirror of their face, as white and intact as she remembered it to be when she’d known them first, when they’d both been far younger and their kingdom had still stood, yet it seemed as an empty, molted shell might when held before their shade, dark and expansive and gone still as midnight as Hollow considered. There was a turmoil in them, a battle she could feel only the fringes of, something reflexive pleading to be heard and something else, newer and dissatisfied, that circled and refused to be silenced.

It was long minutes that they gazed into the mask in their hand, and never did the tumult subside, though it grew to be joined by a venomous, biting guilt when they looked up from it and back to Hornet.

“I cannot,” they tried, soft and so hesitant the thought was barely directed, less words than tentative refusal. “Hornet, I… It looks like the Pure Vessel. That’s not… I’m not,” Hollow broke off.

“I want to be. I still want so badly to be as I was taken for, the one that was the statue’s design, pure and,” they hesitated. “As I ought to have been. It is my face, I know that, but it’s… It does not belong to me. I do not deserve it. I don’t know if I even want it, or if I only seek uselessly after what has never been. For I have never been pure, have I? To even want this is wrong, even to think to want. I shouldn’t,” they breathed. “I should not dare to.”

Hornet fought down her blazing words, her gut reaction to defend them from what she could not touch, the thoughts and maddening injustice they did themself after all that had been already done to them, and Ghost was speaking before she found anything to say that wasn’t bladed and vengeful.

“It wasn’t right of him to ask that from you, sibling.” Ghost said, moving so that they hovered close at eyelevel with Hollow, who tilted their vast, weighted head to meet their gaze. “Everything that he wanted from you, he was wrong to. I never had the chance to grow, but you were forced to become too much.”

“I chose it. I am not blameless; I chose to take up this burden, Knight, I took the only chance granted us, our only escape. I should have been able to be what was asked of me for it. I could have prevented it all.” Hollow replied without an ounce of exaggeration, and without expectation or despair. As though they were stating a simple fact, one they wholeheartedly believed.

“You couldn’t have, and you couldn’t’ve known. No one could’ve. It was an impossible, impossibly cruel thing to ask of anyone, least of all you. I came back to this stupid, haunted kingdom to save you,” Ghost said tensely. “To help you because I knew you needed help. You’re not the Pure Vessel, because no one ever could’ve been. Not one of us.”

“Then what am I? What’s left?” Hollow asked, desperate and so desolate, as if the very breaking of themself from what they’d tried so hard to be had left them stranded, and they grasped for anything to ground themself from its loss.

“You’re my sibling, whom I love and whom I’ve forgiven.” Ghost said immediately and so stubbornly that Hornet could have believed that they were instead reciting something fundamental and inarguable, like the hardness of bedrock or the silhouette of the mountains built upon it against the sky. “And you’re the reason anyone is still here. You’re too self-sacrificing, and too willing to weather what hurts you in silence, and nothing in this world has ever been kind to you, but you try so hard in spite of it, in spite of everything. You’re good, and steadfast, and cleverer than I’ll ever be, and you’re more than you think. And past that, you’re going to be whatever you decide.” Ghost told them.

“What if you’re wrong? What if I am nothing? What use can I be, if there is nothing left of me?” Hollow whispered.

“You’re not a thing, you don’t have to have a use.” Ghost looked directly into their eyes to say. “None of us do. All I want of you is for you to be happy, and not to hurt anymore.” They said, their voice thick with sincerity and the beginnings of tears.

“And if I cannot be happy? If I can never forgive what you so readily do?”

“That’s okay, as long as you get the chance to try.” The tears overflowed to drip down Ghost’s face, and when Hollow felt a gentle concern at them past the fraught disorder of their void, Ghost darted forward to press their forehead to their sibling’s, as though to hide in their wake. Their own void gave a little distressed hiccup, then another, like the shivering a bug gave when they cried, black little tendrils flicking in their upset.

Hollow’s void stilled at their crying as though they were at a loss, then rose with their own aching sorrow, and they set aside the mask to hold Ghost instead, drawing them close and tucking them beneath their angular face, where Ghost burrowed into their collar and cried. Hollow gave an unpracticed, soothing thrum through their void, strong and undirected enough to make Hornet’s stir in her chest, and she turned away in part to fight down the coughing fit it tried to incite.

It wasn’t enough to hurt badly, and this was too important a decision to influence with any damned fragility.

“Don’t do that,” Ghost said tearfully, and Hornet froze, thinking she’d been caught, before they continued. “Don’t just stop being upset because I am. I’m tough, I’m alright,” they insisted unconvincingly. “It’s your decision whether you want the mask or not.”

“Ghost-“

“You don’t have to have this exact mask. They can make a different one for you, you could have mine, if you really wanted. We looked similar enough at first,” they said with a shaky laugh.

“Ghost,” Hollow tried again.

“Just- It’s- Please take a mask, if you die like this,” Ghost’s voice choked and failed. “You can’t die like this.”

“I will, Ghost, of course I will,” Hollow told them, gentle and low. “All is well, little Knight. I only cannot take this one. It is… More than I am. I am only sorry I’ve wasted the time it took to make it, to not realize such earlier.” They calmed.

“We’ve got time.” Ghost mumbled with their face still hidden in Hollow’s shoulder, and then felt a weak amusement they shared anyway at their own joke. “Hallownest will survive another few hours.”

Hornet nodded minutely to herself in silent agreement, as the void between her lungs slowly receded to leave only a persistent chill in its wake, an ache in her joints. Minimal, easily borne.

No, another mask would not be so time-consuming a thing to wait for; she’d cost them days of waiting for her while she’d been unconscious in Dirtmouth, something they’d suffered without complaint. It was only fair that she give them the same understanding while a mask Hollow could tolerate was made.

The air at her side grew colder, and when she looked down Nettle had drifted close and twined an apprehensive tendril around a bunch of her shawl, with Sonnet hovered close behind them.

There would be explaining to do. Neither of the littler ones were likely to have any sort of idea what the others were talking about, though much of it was fairly none of their concern. Sooner or later someone would need to tell them, though, what had become of their elder siblings and the kingdom they’d never known, and, with her luck, that someone would be Hornet. This was not a task she particularly looked forward to, given all else that had to happen before they could consider themselves truly safe, and even afterwards in their revived kingdom, yet she was the one with the most complete knowledge of all that had happened, beginning to end.

Then again, perhaps it would be better to let Ghost take that dubious honor, if the twins ever asked. The little ones needn’t know all the gory details. Ghost had learned enough of Hallownest’s past, and more of where it concerned the Vessels than she had, having descended into the Abyss where she could not, and there was little Hornet relished less than the thought of having to explain her own involvement.

No. No, she would face what she’d done, to back away from her guilt was cowardice she’d never accept of herself. When they were safe and had others to run to once they despised her, she would tell them all. She had to.

“Are they alright?” Nettle whispered the thought, as faint as they could make it and still hope to be heard. “Is there something wrong with the mask?”

“It doesn’t suit them.” Hornet told them, and then raised her voice to speak to the Mask Maker, who watched the proceedings with empty eyes and quick-tapping claws over their workbench. “The mask is not acceptable.”

“Not acceptable? It is perfect. Created with their visage to conceal, without crack or blemish, entirely sound. It’s- Ah, yes,” the Mask Maker stretched the word out, lilted with understanding. “Yes, my work is well-suited, but not to what the creature can bear. I was mistaken, hm? They would have not what tried to become them, but what might be wholly known. Easily remedied.”

“What do they mean by that?” Hollow asked, lowering their hand as Ghost pulled themself up to rest in the dip between their horns, hunkering down there as though someone might try to pull them off.

“Dunno. Maybe you got too tall?” Ghost offered, scrubbing at their eyes with a little loop of void.

“What of a younger mask?” Hornet considered. “Such as when I’d first met you. The third spoke of your horns had yet to grow in, and you must have been only a few heads or so taller than I am now. More akin to my mask as it is than to the one you grew as time passed. Different enough, perhaps.”

“That will do.” The Mask Maker exclaimed. “Still the creature’s face, but one that better fits. Not so grand, not nearly so princely, I should have seen. I should have known the broken creature would want to be remade. Lesser, yes, but perhaps more attuned to a self. No true emptiness could this face hide, but perhaps there is no need for such a thing.”

“None. I thank you for your work.” Hornet said evenly.

“More clemency is merited for your constant interruption, Protector, and all is granted. Share with me your hunt and I shall be in your debt.” The Mask Maker told her, picking up the mask of the Hollow Knight they’d made and propping it against the wall at the back of their den, and then taking their sharp-wedged tools in hand to begin the process again. “Before you ask, this face shall take only some handful of hours, and then I shall begin the rest. A lesser feat you ask of me, yes, but a kinder one.”

Hornet blinked at them, turned away from her as they diligently began their new creation. “I have more than enough caught to share. Much will be left with you, for my siblings cannot make use of it.”

“Wonderful, wonderful, now go.” The Mask Maker waved her off impatiently, which Hornet allowed to pass as a favor for their acceptance.

She glanced at her siblings, who looked back with identical white eyes and thoughts ranging from subtle gratitude to unsubtle appreciation to profound confusion. As though they were waiting for her approval, Hornet thought, not without a tinge of amusement. She inclined her head to the den’s exit, and made her way out to the little rocky outcropping it led to.

“You know, there’s no need to be so quiet. I’m the only one they can hear.” Hornet felt the need to inform them once the tapping of the Mask Maker’s tools had faded to a distant drum.

“I know, but it still feels a little rude to talk over them.” Ghost told her from atop Hollow’s head where they were still perched, once Hollow had followed her out, the looming shade quietly keeping to their own thoughts and trailed by the littler ones. “And though I know they can’t, I also can’t really shake the feeling that they’d be able to tell, anyway.”

“I am entirely certain they wouldn’t, but do as you will.” Hornet advised them. “Will you both be alright?”

Hollow gave no response but an absent incline of their head, and Ghost took a long moment to think before they answered.

“I think so. Eventually. It’s… Have I said how glad I am that we’re here?” Ghost asked.

“I suppose I’m glad we’ve made our way to the Mask Maker’s den as well. It took us long enough.” Hornet said slowly, not entirely sure what they meant.

“No, I’m glad we’re alive. Any of us, all of us. I can’t believe I hadn’t really taken a moment to realize, but I am. After all that, we’ll be okay. We’ll be okay.” They repeated, surer this time and less directed to answer her.

“… Of course, we will.” Hornet said evenly, watching inattentively as Nettle and Sonnet occupied themselves with more cheerful things, that seemed this time to be daring each other to poke the jutting mandibles of the wrapped dirtcarvers she’d left in a neat pile.

She gave a wry laugh. “We might as well be, having come this far.”

Chapter Text

And so Hornet was shown that there was more stirring in her kingdom than she’d predicted, and that this wasn’t nearly so grim a shape as she’d expected it to take.

Hornet became aware there was something amiss when a driving sort of tremor, fainter than her heartbeat, rose up from the stone she sat upon. It was change enough from this quieter corner of Deepnest that she cracked open an eye, having been trying her best to ignore the growing argument Sonnet and Nettle had begun not far off by leaning back against the curving wall of the Mask Maker’s home and attempting, with all the experience of one who’d spent a lifetime sleeping in odd places, to at least take a moment to recover from all the excitement.

She’d eaten well, and with their safety reasonably assured it was with more comfort than typical that she sought to catch a moment’s sleep, but even such luxuries weren’t unlimited in what they could smooth over.

She would face gods and death for her siblings, but Wyrm, if they weren’t nearly on her last nerve with their constant chatter.

There was at least some reassurance she could take from the fact that, now that the littlest of the shades had mastered void-speak in a way she could fully understand, they wouldn’t dream of wasting a blessed moment without exercising the ability. It was easy enough to drown out, more like the vivid, if detached, sort of steam-of-consciousness emotion and thought that would come with a very lifelike dream than the intent for communication the faint brush of their void carried, as long as she wasn’t trying to pick out what could pass for words.

And as long as they were talking, they weren’t wandering off to gods-know-where to be eaten by a passing beast. Again.

Hornet looked over the cluttered den with half her attention, noting that the thin shadows which fell over the Mask Makers shop were no darker than before, flickering transiently along to the flutter of the lumaflies’ wings in their lamps. All seemed unchanged to the best of her knowledge, the Mask Maker still hard at work across the room from her on what nearly looked like a finished mask by now, one of the last, nibbling occasionally at the prey she’d gifted them and mumbling to themself incomprehensibly, but almost content.

No change. Hornet closed her eye, and took a deep, mindful breath.

Her siblings, for their part, seemed to be entertaining themselves well enough; she could feel the faintest traces of their thoughts still, just enough to muddily discern that the littler two, with their bright, leaping enthusiasms, had drawn her purportedly more world-wise siblings into a very spirited conversation about nothing important. Spirited in the sense that Hornet could tell Hollow wasn’t backing down about something, at least, and unimportant in that none of them seemed especially peeved about it.

And by the time she’d convinced herself all was well, the shaking in the earth that woke her had stopped.

Dirtcarvers that hadn’t taken issue with them, or a distant garpede, or a far-off tunnel collapsing. Nothing to be concerned about.

Hornet huddled deeper into her shawl, tightened her grip on her needle, laid across her lap, and exhaled slowly.

She got to savor the quietude for almost a full minute more, when there came an unusual cascading tapping, a vibration she felt through the stone, out of the ordinary enough for her to blink herself awake and cast an reproving frown at the tunnel leading out from the Mask Maker’s den with half a thought to get up and see what the shades were up to.

Before she could, the energetic void-thought Sonnet was taking their turn to lecture the others with, a touch too far off to know what, exactly, they were talking about, juddered gratingly to a halt like claws scraped over screeching iron, and even before they shrieked with terror Hornet was on her feet and sprinting to find them.

The slender, draping sheets of roots, what remained of them, caught and broke on Hornet’s horns as she barreled past and out into the open air, just scarcely cooler out here than inside the den, and she spent just an instant to take in what lay before her and, once she had, to react without thought.

There were her siblings, clustered together as a single mass of impenetrable shadow at the roof above the short jut of stone leading out from the Mask Maker’s den, peering down with white eyes like gaps in black clouds, of which a quick count told her there were just three pairs.

One too few.

And Hornet was certain of both what had happened and what it was she had to do before she’d even cast her gaze to what they were all looking towards, something that crouched just before her, chittering and many-legged and shiny-black, had half-pulled its immense length up over the cliff face. Something she saw the sharp points of claws of, the menacing, shifting coil of its subtly-segmented shell, huge enough to cause death by mistake and mortal enough for her to bring to its end.

It could bleed, and she would make it.

Hornet hissed viciously around her battle cry, her claws clenched around the grip of her needle, and as the thing turned to face her there was a distant recognition at the back of her mind for the shape of the bug, for their face that didn’t seem like a simple beast’s, how they moved their long body. This bug was not a stranger, and any further knowing was muffled beneath the frantic pounding of her heart and the cold, clear rage, to know so plainly that she’d broken her promise, that she’d failed those she’d vowed to protect once more.

They’d killed her sibling. Hornet would kill them. It was all, for once, very simple.

Hornet lunged, her mind and claws sure and focused, with no thought other than to end the creature’s life before they took another of hers.

What her needle struck, however, was not rigid, breaking chitin or the give of exposed flesh, but the scrape of hard mask-bone. The creature dove with a startled noise to meet her blade head-on with their mask, the only part of their body that wasn’t folding, gleaming black, a move Hornet was fleetingly furious for having allowed to catch her by surprise. The opening wound she’d tried to inflict wasn’t nearly angled right to crack a mask thrust in the way, and the impact jarred up her arms even as the bug gasped and flinched away, a second move so surprising that Hornet nearly missed her chance to wrench her blade free of the shallow furrow it had made in the mask’s otherwise unmarred white, and it was only then that Hornet recognized who she fought.

“Midwife?” Hornet accused, low and cold as she gathered herself to strike again.

She hadn’t known the old centipede still lived, the friend to Herrah the Beast that Hornet had thought she’d seen the last of before she’d even earned her name. And she remembered her, just as she remembered her mother, mostly as a warm presence, huge and safe, of gentle words and gentler claws and soft chiding when she’d done some long-forgotten mischief. Yet another minor miracle, that she’d be living still.

Hornet would regret her passing.

“Gendered Child! I cannot – Oh!” Midwife said as Hornet dove for her again, skittering back and off the sheer ledge quickly enough to avoid the arcing sweep of Hornet’s needle. Instead of falling, she retreated down the abrupt drop as easily as she would over flat ground, all her dozens of legs hooking into the dark gnarls of old roots and outcroppings of shallow stone to move her looping body fluidly out of Hornet’s reach.

“Face your death like a beast of Deepnest!” Hornet cried down after her, where Midwife had stopped at what she must have thought was a safe distance.

A quick pitch of her needle, angled nearly straight down from her vantage point, would be inescapable.

“What below the earth are you doing, young spiderling? Am I not one fit to share your catch with any longer? I only wanted a bite, the smallest nibble, not much would I ask.” Midwife consoled, not sounding especially concerned, as though this were only a meaningless scrap over food. Hornet saw burning red, gripped her needle so tightly her claws creaked, raised it above her head.

“Get her, Hornet!” Nettle cheered gleefully as Hornet reared back to throw her needle with force enough to punch through anything it met, her silk thrashing around her in her intense focus that broke the moment they spoke.

Hornet froze, thrown off her warpath, and lowered her needle slowly to turn and stare at them, mystified and shaking with rage and retribution. Nettle, for all that they seemed entirely ready for Hornet to spill blood, did not sound as one who had just lost their twin could be expected to.

And Hornet saw that there were, in fact, four sets of white eyes imprinted upon the largely featureless black of her siblings where they clustered together, Hollow holding the littlest two in their arm and Ghost creeping away and towards her with, as Hornet thought to check, something very like bewilderment of their own in the void they told her of. Not shock, or horror, or even sorrow.

Hornet decided then that enough didn’t add up to assume there had been a misunderstanding.

Sonnet (still alive, Hornet noticed) seemed more shaken than even truly frightened anymore, and completely unhurt as they squirmed their way free of Hollow’s hold and fled to her, crashing into Hornet’s side as she stood and tried to make sense of it all, their utter absence of weight, though a far more bitter cold than even hours before, failing to make her so much as sway in place. The little shade hugged her as tightly as they could, which only amounted to an almost imperceptible press of their tendrils around her shoulders. Some of the iron-rigid tension left Hornet, and she twitched in surprise when Nettle launched themself at her in much the same way as their sibling.

“You scared her off!” Nettle crowed, as triumphant as if they’d been the one to bear the needle as Hornet brought her free hand up to pat Sonnet awkwardly, to still their speechless trembling and waning fear.

Hornet frowned down at them both and saw that Sonnet had hidden their face in her shawl, the brilliant, unmistakable white glow of their eyes completely muted by the fabric, apparently content to let Nettle express their gratitude for them while they recovered from their scare.

Ah. Yes, that made more sense.

They must have had their face hidden where they’d held onto Hollow when first she’d looked to see if they were all alright, and the lightless dark of their sibling’s void would have then completely concealed them from view.

What a foolish mistake to make. One that had very nearly cost her dearly. Perhaps, Hornet considered then, she ought to remember to take a moment of thought when next she faced a choice she could not unmake, before attempting to end her problems with the tip of her needle.

… Perhaps for her own sake, if nothing else. Even now her heart beat too quickly, and the headache she hadn’t noticed growing pounded in her mask, like she’d moved too suddenly with a head wound. She’d never truly been ill before, but more than anything wrong in specific, Hornet felt unwell. Cold.

No matter. It would be over soon.

“Hm.” She said aloud, tightening her arm around Sonnet as securely as she dared for a moment, the cold as biting and sharp as winter sleet and still reassuring enough to calm her racing heart some, and to allow her to shake off the dread she nearly hadn’t recognized as such, that had sunk its claws deeper than the void into her heart.

Then Sonnet glanced up, hearing the crunch of claws dug into loose stone and soil as Hornet did, and with an impression like a quiver bolted out of Hornet’s arms to take shelter in Hollow’s, instead, as her older sibling kept their distance and watched with only their usual solemn attention.

“Ah, my dear, you do keep such strange company. Such dark little things, so odd, so bleak. And they don’t have much to say, do they?” Midwife chirred, arching the foremost sections of her body up over the ledge Hornet stood upon, her bisected, smiling mask tilted down at her like a specter of family past. It was newly scarred, with a long, thin line over the half where Hornet’s needle had nearly met its mark. Hornet felt vaguely sick to see the indentation her blade had left, even as she recalled, fainter than her voice and her care, the vicious fangs Midwife’s mask hid.

How close she’d come to killing her. A nearness that, apparently, not even Midwife herself realized. Hornet’s claws loosened on her needle, and she spun the silk to secure it at her back before she dropped it altogether. There was no more need for it now, anyway.

“Yes,” Hornet said, her voice cracked and hoarse and with a trace of some unacceptable weakness. She swallowed, and tried again. “Yes, these are my siblings.”

“Oh, my. Not Herrah’s, I suppose. The Wyrm didn’t do such a good job with these, did he?” Midwife said sagely. “Not a mask among them. Terribly exposed.” She leaned in to whisper to Hornet, not quite quiet enough not to carry.

Hollow gave the impression like they’d wince if they could, while Ghost seemed more vaguely offended than anything else, and the other two didn’t react at all, Sonnet still keeping their wary peace and Nettle calmed but making no secret of how disappointed they were that Hornet put away her needle.

“They aren’t feeling well.” Hornet told her tensely, feeling the need to come to their defense.

“Of course, of course, how rude of me, terribly rude. My, you ought to feed the poor little ones, they have no substance to them. Ah! That must be why you’re so uneager to share your catch, spiderling. But, perhaps, just a bite? Your hunt has been so fruitful, surely you have some to spare...?” Midwife entreated, the halves of her mask shifting minutely with the repositioning of the maxillipeds behind.

This, too, Hornet found she remembered about Midwife; her voracity. “Of course. I’ve caught more than I can eat.” She offered stiffly, stepping out of the way so that Midwife could haul herself in her entirety onto the ledge, old roots and crumbling earth tearing away beneath the points of her many legs.

“Hornet? Who is this?” Hollow asked, while Ghost drifted nearer before Hornet could warn them otherwise and, fortunately, backpedaling just as fast when Midwife pulled the halves of her mask aside and crunched down the remainders of Hornet’s hunt, silk wrapping and all.

“This is the Midwife of Deepnest, a companion of my mother’s and respected guardian of the Den. And I had not known she lived, before now.” Hornet said pointedly.

Midwife, chittering appreciatively, nodded in approval for her introduction. “In all the time you’ve been away, dearest princess, you’ve not forgotten us entirely. Gendered Child, your home has missed you.”

“Hornet.”

“Bless you, dear.” Midwife said, cleaning shreds of torn silk and shards of chitin from her jaws.

“My name is Hornet.” Hornet repeated. “I’d left before it could be earned, but that is my name.”

“Oh. Oh, my dear,” Midwife breathed, folding the plates of her mask back together to croon down to her from behind them. “Such a beautiful name. So fierce, so frightful, it’s perfect. You have to tell it to the rest; they’ll be so cheered to see you alive and well.”

Hornet stiffened.

She couldn’t have heard correctly. Yet the mistake was as though all the world’s stability had been drawn out from around her, and what remained behind was airless and choking. “The rest?” She asked lowly.

“Yes, yes, not quite enough to be called a nest, per se, but certainly enough to throw a proper naming celebration for you, spiderling. Though, ah, you may need to provide the refreshments. No one can quite recall where all the storage chambers are, you see, so we’ve thus far made do with whatever crawls close to our webs.” Midwife laughed, as though she hadn’t said anything Hornet didn’t already know.

“But it’s the strangest thing; there’s been hardly anything creeping close at all! Good for the safety of a nest, mind, but not ideal for hungry mouths. Why, it’s as though the Nest’s borders lie a dozen miles, as the garpede tunnels, further out into the wilds than they did just a week ago.” Midwife chattered as Hornet stared at her. “We even had to leave the Den, just for now, you understand, in order to keep everyone fed.”

“Huh. I guess you were wrong, Hornet.” Ghost prompted happily, like they expected her to start cheering. “We didn’t even check to see if everyone was gone.”

“Everyone should have been dead. They should have been dead a hundred years.” Hornet snapped. “This doesn’t make sense.”

It didn’t. It couldn’t. She’d left them here, she’d left them all, she’d abandoned them to rot, Hornet had spent so much time ranging Hallownest from the surface to the Abyss, from the Kingdom’s Edge to the highest caverns of Greenpath and back, and never once had she returned here until the end. Never once had she been able to bear the thought of what she knew she’d find, and by the time Ghost had come to destroy her mother’s seal, the one they’d waited on ‘til the last moment at her request, what she’d fought through to get to her mother’s shrine had been exactly as horrible as she’d expected.

Garbed shrieks from rotted throats of spiders she’d known. Burning firelight orange and sickly sweet drooled from eyes that hated. Claws and fangs that should have defended, turned instead unerringly towards her.

She hadn’t stayed long.

“I’d thought much the same, dear, much the same. No healthy broods in a dreadful long while.” Midwife sighed. “Such a horrible business, that plague. There aren’t many of us left. Not at all. A pitiful end, but at least there is an ‘us’ to be left.”

“How many.” Hornet demanded.

“Ah, you know how tricky it is to take headcounts. It’s like herding weaverlings.” Midwife tittered at her own joke. “It is herding weaverlings, actually. Quite a clutter of them, and between our efforts I don’t think we’ve lost a single one.” She said proudly.

“Give me a general estimate.” Hornet said flatly.

“Hm, oh, some thirty or so, I’d wager. Thirty-odd weaverlings, five very young Devout, and oh, they’re terribly sweet, all oversized masks and downy fluff-“

“How many total.” Hornet interrupted.

“Patience, patience, little one,” Midwife chided gently. “It’s such a long way I’ve come to search for this bounty you’ve had here, smelling so sweetly, the mind must set itself back in its traces. Yes, yes, thirty or so little Weavers, five smallish Devout, a dozen-odd deeplings, a few more of unruly spiderlings of Deepnest’s lines, and a good friend of mine, a one Weaver by the name Plait.”

“A Weaver?” Hornet whispered.

“Yes, dear, that’s what I said. My, it was a trial getting all those rowdy little deeplings to-“

“A Weaver yet lives in Hallownest?” Hornet asked sharply.

“Perhaps you have forgotten all those manners I tried so hard to teach you. But then, you never quite learned them anyway. Proud little spiderling, fiercer than anything, but never one to sit down and read a tome. Oh, that takes me back the years. My dear, do you remember when you were newly being taught to spin thread, just your very first day, and we turned our backs for only a moment and-“ Midwife began with nearly tangible nostalgia.

“Midwife. The Weaver.” Hornet raised her voice some to say. “The Weavers left. They left an age ago. How can there still be a Weaver in Hallownest?”

“Well, she’s not quite in Hallownest,” Midwife hissed the word. “She is in Deepnest. You know, I never did ask why she stayed, when the rest of her kind took flight from this home we’d made so long ago, before all this happened. It never seemed quite like something she’d want to discuss, but if you’re so set on the matter, I’d wish you to bring it up to her. I’m sure she’d tell you, dear princess.”

“Aren’t you going to get her? She scared Sonnet!” Nettle whispered as though they might be overheard, hovering close at Hornet’s back.

“Of course not, don’t be dumb,” Sonnet said quickly, sounding like they’d rather Nettle stop talking about it at all. “That’s Hornet’s friend. She probably just got scared because Midwife… Caught me off guard.”

“I’m not scared.” Hornet told them distractedly as she mulled over Midwife’s words.

“Never, never, my dear! You’ve always been the boldest little thing, there’s never been a shadow or fight you’d back down from, even when we truly, truly wished you would.” Midwife consoled. “I’m sure the Weaver remembers.”

“Where are you staying, if not the Nest?” Hornet asked.

“As it happens, we’ve set ourselves up in the old trams just across the way,” Midwife turned to gesture with several sets of her short claws to the unfinished tramway’s vast cavern beyond, presumably to the other side of the unbroken layer of stone, the final hurdle Hallownest had never managed to surmount to finish Deepnest’s side of the transport. “Though we did have to rout quite a few of those damned ‘carver hatchers, and more than one corpse creeper, besides. Terrible many corpses for them to creep into, nowadays.”

This made sense. It was more-or-less furnished, and cleaner, at least, than camping in the intervening caverns and tunnels of Deepnest’s wilds. More defendable.

And yet. “Why not a further part of the village? Surely there was somewhere close enough to good hunting that wasn’t an abandoned piece of unfinished public transport.”

“And that, my dear,” Midwife lowered her voice to say, sobering for the first time since she’d decided Hornet wouldn’t make further attempts on her life. “That is the strangest thing yet. Anywhere much lower than the caves where we stand is… Tainted. The plague, that infection of the mind, it has utterly vanished, and that is cause enough for rejoicing. You’ve come from that way, haven’t you? From the Distant Village?”

At Hornet’s nod, she continued. “Well, you might have noticed that there’s not too awful many corpses littering the place. We had time to take care of that, at least. It was quite the task, hauling them all out of the Beast’s Den to drop to the lake, though Herrah herself… Oh, Hornet,” Midwife broke off to say, and she sounded so sympathetic that Hornet half-feared she’d have worse news than her mother’s passing to tell her.

There was little she could think of that would be so. “I know she’s gone. I’ve sat at her shrine.” Hornet said tightly. “I have mourned her.”

A long time since, and longer yet to come, and not necessarily a lie. At least now there was no sleeping body laid over the candlelit plinth to hope upon, the decision made and her debt, at least in part, repaid. She would not dwell, Hornet told herself. To think deeply of things she’d thought herself at peace with was proving to be a poor choice to take.

“Oh. Might I be so bold to, I’m very sorry, so very, very sorry, but if I could ask…?”

“Not long. Only a month ago, at most, was her seal in dream broken and her life ended.” Hornet said evenly. She clenched her fist under her shawl, where no one could see, so tightly that it ached.

“I see. My queen, I shall grieve.” Midwife dipped her head to say. “Though it may be for the best that she be gone, with what has crept into her nest in her wake.”

“I’ve been there not a handful of days since.” Hornet said abruptly. “There was nothing amiss, except the quiet.”

“No, no, there is something quite amiss in the depths of Deepnest, Hornet. The plague is gone, yes, but in its place is something… Colder. Something that freezes, and fatigues, and then kills. One can taste it in the air, but only by that there are no other scents. One can see it gather, but only when the dark is too deep to see at all. It feels… Very nearly like your siblings. So terribly cold.” Midwife said, arching stiffly back to peer closer at each in turn.

Sonnet blared alarm so potent that Hornet nearly reached for the handle of her needle on reflex, and when they ducked behind Hollow to hide again from Midwife’s stare Nettle hummed with concern and hid with them, seemingly for solidarity’s sake more than anything else. Then, as Midwife shifted her gaze to them, Nettle puffed themself up with a protective sort of fearlessness and lowered their single remaining horn just slightly around Hollow’s shoulder at her, just enough to tentatively count as a threat.

Hornet looked on, vaguely proud of them for their efforts as Midwife considered the tiny shade, not even of a size with her mask alone, without the twitching of her maxillipeds that would suggest she’d take a swipe at them.

She wouldn’t survive Hornet’s needle a second time if she did, no matter how desperately Hornet didn’t want to harm her.

“Well, perhaps not all your confidence comes from your mother, if your sibling is so courageous. Or is it the other one that took such fright when they saw me? Such dark little ones, hidden among the shadows. Difficult to tell apart, aren’t they? Only the horns.” Midwife commented, twisting her upper body to look at the others. “I’d hesitate to give any honoring to the Wyrm, though. Miserable, slimy little glowworm, your mother always called him. Ah, I’ve missed her.”

Midwife giggled to herself, raising her head to peer at Hollow and Ghost both, Ghost having taken up their customary spot between Hollow’s horns while she talked. “I believe I heard her call Hallownest’s ruler that more often than I heard his title, particularly during the height of the tramway debacle.”

“I do not think father knew that. I certainly didn’t.” Hollow offered, almost slighted on their father’s behalf even as they kept perfectly still while Midwife looked them over.

“If the Pale King didn’t know Herrah the Beast disliked him, perhaps prescience wasn’t the only authority he should have consulted.” Hornet said wryly.

Midwife shrieked a delighted laugh, leaving off her examination of Hornet’s siblings to beam down at her, to Sonnet’s unconcealed relief. “There’s our anarchic little gift, I’d nearly thought you’d softened on the old Wyrm, spending as much time at his palace as you did. Oh, Plait will be just pleased as anything to see your opinion on that overreaching worm hasn’t changed in the least.”

“Oh. You expect me to go with you.” Hornet said, frowning. “I cannot.”

“Of course, you can. They’ll not think badly of you for taking so long to find us; it’s not as though we left a note. All the woven scrolls were dry-rotted to pieces, somehow. Someone must have forgotten to put them away properly, and we couldn’t find any that had been put up before we had to leave. Such a mess!” Midwife tutted. “I’m sure your siblings will be fine to come along, too. They don’t seem like they’ll… Spread.” Midwife said, lilting the word like a question to which she hoped the answer was ‘of course not’.

“No, you misunderstand. My siblings are,” Hornet frowned, considered how well-received ‘essentially dead’ would be. “They don’t have masks yet.”

“Well, fortunate that we’re right outside the Mask Maker’s workshop, then.” Midwife said slowly, with the faintest touch of concern, as though she thought Hornet might have forgotten. “We’ll just pop inside, grab a few that suit them, and head back to the rest.”

“It’s not quite so easy a task. And, Midwife, I am glad you’re alive, and I… I can hardly believe there are others, but I’m glad for them, too.” Hornet said with difficulty. It was something she was unused to, to be edging around her point, but it felt wrong to decline Midwife’s offer as bluntly as she was accustomed to. Particularly when a part of her that needed to see survivors with her own eyes, to know for sure they weren’t somehow a mistake or a delusion, dearly wanted to accept.

She couldn’t. “But there is something wrong yet in Hallownest. Something I must fix, and to fix it I have to first know its cause.”

“Unn above, who cares in the least about Hallownest?” Midwife exclaimed. “It’s exactly their fault to begin with that we’re in this dreadful mess. A many, many things are exactly their fault.” She said darkly.

“I’ll come as soon as I can, to help. I… Don’t know if I can stay, but if you have need-“ Hornet ignored her to say, cut off before she could again offer her life.

“Need? No, no, Hornet, can I call you Hornet? That’s not why I ask if you’ll come with me. We are doing just fine, better than we’ve been in a very, very long time. I’m getting rather good at this pursuit hunting business, for all that I very much prefer a good ambush, feeding the hatchlings isn’t a difficulty at all. I don’t ask because I want you to jump to our rescue, though goodness knows I’d be grateful for a hand with the little ones. I ask because you look,” Midwife sucked in a worried breath, and hesitated as she clearly debated her next words.

“Well, my dear, you look awful.” She admitted.

“Thank you, Midwife. I knew this shade of red wasn’t becoming on me.” Hornet deadpanned.

“Very funny, spiderling, but I am not joking. You’re filthy. Your shawl is stained with things I can’t even name, and more than a handful I can. You look drawn, and so tired, and you haven’t grown an inch! You, goodness, you missed when you jabbed your needle at me, though I admit I’m glad for it. And to top it all off, I hope this trip to the Mask Maker is for you as well as your chilly half-siblings, because you’ve got these awful scratches carved into your poor horn.” Midwife fussed, looming over Hornet close enough that she backed away before Midwife could start cleaning her herself.

“I know, I’m aware, I- What?” Hornet frowned. “There’s nothing wrong with my mask.”

“You didn’t know?” Ghost said, and that Hornet could tell they were genuinely surprised was the only thing that saved them. “You touch the scratches whenever we’re a headache, I’d thought you just didn’t care. Or maybe that you were sensitive about them.”

“The Mask Maker offered to fix them, even.” Hollow added.

“I’d thought they were being needlessly esoteric, alright? Alluding to some flaw in my self or my lack of manners, or something equally ridiculous. I hadn’t realized they were being literal.” Hornet snapped, running her claws over her horns.

And as promised, right where she remembered the pain of striking the stone when she’d been thrown from the battle in the Black Egg to have been the most piercing, there was a set of deep grooves carved into the hard bone of her mask, a little less than halfway up her left horn. Deep enough that she must’ve been lucky not to have snapped the horn off entirely.

“It’s really not that bad, dear, and to get back to the other things,” Midwife prompted.

“I’m fine, Midwife. I am. And you’re right, it’s not as bad as it could be. It does me no lasting harm.” Hornet said, dropping her hands back beneath the fall of her shawl.

It was the truth. The scratches were a surprise, to be certain, and the only thing Midwife had to complain about that was any sort of unknown to her, but ultimately superficial. How strange to gain them only now, after all this time and all the abuse her mask had weathered, all the concussions bad enough that she’d had to stay put wherever she’d fallen and count backwards from twenty until she could make it all the way to one, hoping that nothing vengeful would chance upon her when the lumafly light was too bright to open her eyes to without feeling like it stabbed vicious claws through the sockets. How strange that it would be only now that something finally left a physical mark.

No matter. This would hardly be what gave her pause.

“Hornet, that’s all well and good, but when did you last sleep? Have you eaten at all lately?” Midwife asked worriedly.

“Recently, and yes. I’m fed and rested,” and wasn’t that a rarity itself that she could attest to both honestly, and rarer still that she be asked to. “And I am unhurt. I’m alright, Midwife.” Hornet insisted.

“Then why do you look so unwell? Are you sick? You never took ill when you lived with us, not once, not even a cough.” Midwife fretted, rising up on the legs further down her body to crane over Hornet, as though that would make her look less, apparently, half-dead than she did.

Hornet froze with the thought. Half-dead. Yes. That would explain it.

There was void in her chest. There was void in her heart.

Midwife’s voice warned in her mind, repeating again her words. It freezes, it fatigues, and then it kills.

“You… Do look worse than you did a while ago.” Ghost said tentatively, as though they were just now noticing. Hornet wouldn’t put it past them; they’d shown remarkably little understanding of how typical bugs functioned on more than one memorable occasion. “Before the Black Egg.”

And all at once, it was too much to bear.

“I’m fine, Ghost. Leave it!” Hornet snarled so viciously that even Ghost, used as they were to her meaningless bristling, flinched back a little from her even from their distance, still rested high up and between Hollow’s horns.

Hornet regretted it immediately, but the worried eyes on her were heavier than she could stand, now that she knew she couldn’t just brush them off as needless fretting. It felt wrong to be subject to such scrutiny, to have so many care enough to scrutinize at all, as though they were only joking and, as soon as she called their bluff, they’d laugh and turn away. Much of her hoped that they would, if only so there wouldn’t be such a weight in her chest to see three people she cared for looking at her like she’d done something wrong, and two more, the little ones, quickly catching on that something more than simple bickering was amiss.

It was too much. Too much scrutiny, too many people, too many explanations she couldn’t give, that she didn’t fully know herself, yet. Too much worry that might, this time, be warranted.

Revulsion thickened her throat, and she couldn’t have said if it was more for the situation or herself.

“I can’t come with you, Midwife. I will visit when I can. Go home, and do not touch the dark.” Hornet ground out, though she wanted desperately never to speak again, to simply be left alone to lick her wounds. To hide away and fix her own self, as she’d always done, as had always been enough.

“I’m fine.” She repeated into the heavy silence she’d left, the words sounding like they’d fallen from another’s mouth, and as she turned away and walked only just slowly enough that she mightn’t have said she fled into the Mask Maker’s den, for even now she couldn’t quite bring herself to run from them all, Hornet, for the first time, knew that there was no truth at all when she said so.

Chapter Text

And so Hornet was forced, at last, to come to terms with her own limits.

The Mask Maker made a noise that sounded like it would’ve turned into a dry comment when Hornet stormed into their den, which she silenced with a sharp hiss that came out more pained than she’d wanted. It added to the weight of watchful eyes, suffocating and overpowering and as tangible at her back as physical touch, almost as much as the conspicuous silence of the Mask Maker’s tools, their work halted as Hornet stood in the open center of the scant space between the stacks of masks and tried to even her breathing.

Like a cornered, cringing weakling. The thought came with a swell of shame that she couldn’t quite make out to be anger, and Hornet could not bring herself to turn to the slow-building chill from the den’s entrance.

The urge came to draw her weapon, fed by the creeping, prickling awareness of another behind her, even as whichever sibling it was that’d followed her inside kept their silence, only stared at her. Hornet couldn’t calm her racing thoughts, twisting into and over themselves with heated vitriol she couldn’t allow to be spoken, tried as hard as she could not to even feel, for she knew that if her resentment and recrimination scalded her so badly it must be obvious to a creature made of the empty substance of regrets and the watchful dark.

But it would be an admission she could not stand if she bore her needle now, just as much an expression of uncertainty, of fear, as when a hunted creature bares its fangs.

She was weak. She was allowing herself to be overtaken by something as inconsequential as too many people at once. Her siblings needed her, and she could not even stand up to their scrutiny. Midwife’s hesitant words played again through her mind, the disbelief they’d been spoken with, that Hornet had fallen so far as to miss when she’d struck.

Freezes, fatigues, kills.

There was foreign, aching weakness in her hands, and they shook as she clenched them tighter.

What must they think of her, fleeing from them like this? Hornet could not calm herself to see, to tell if the shade that had followed her had judgement to give, that she was at once sure would be terrible and expected, yet also could not possibly be worse than the spiteful reproach she had for herself.

Hornet’s breathing hitched, and it was only then that she became aware that the void within her chest had awoken again, becalming the fast rise and fall of her shaking shoulders and rising wet into her throat. And as she choked on it, numbing and sharp as ice water in the back of her mouth, Hornet could only wonder why it chose now to stir, out of all the days before when she’d been hurt, or horrified, or shamed.

There was silence from all the void not her own, or at least no thought loud enough to be heard above the rush and roiling of that within her. Nothing had called to hers, there was nothing else to blame.

Hornet doubled over, her head spinning and the lumafly lamps above far too bright, the shadows around her starker than she’d thought, and coughed helplessly, ragged and hoarse and speckling the hand she raised to her twitching chelicerae in wet black. It stung at her palm and kept flowing, and as her sight blurred it seeped into the joints and between her trembling claws.

Her heart began to stutter, and then to slow.

And then, just as the first time, there was the reach of another’s void, a different cold that still sapped the life from her gasping breaths, drawn desperate around the trickling ice that dripped from her jaws as she heaved. It met with her own, enfolded her like an embrace, and when compared to its clarity and solemn calm, deep and unknowable and yet tranquil all the way through, or at least as far as she could feel past it, Hornet newly realized how pained her own was, how turbulent and lashing like claws and fueled by all that she’d done wrong, all she couldn’t justify and all she hadn’t meant to leave behind.

Be calm, you’re calling, the void not her own said. It said so not with words, not with thought-shapes, only gentle intent. Be calm.

Hornet expected herself to lash out for the imposition, to disbelieve the gentleness and see past the intent to what they truly felt, the hate that if she only pressed just enough would rush to the surface like blood to a wound, but it was as Ghost had once told her.

Void was an honest thing.

What the other said, who she was too dislodged from things like awareness and names by now to recognize as anything other than her sibling, was what she had to do, and the gentle care they spoke with was the truth. It made her feel very small, and young, like she’d been functioning on a very basic, essential assumption that had all at once been proven entirely wrong.

It hurts. It hurts, I’m so sorry, Hornet said without meaning to. Her chest was all that wasn’t numb and it ached like the void drove nails out from it through her flesh, her eyes must have been closed because there was only an abyssal dark around to see, the lumaflies all gone out, and still the dark asked more of her.

I know it does, the other void murmured. I know it’s more than you can bear. But you must be calm, or it will consume you.

I can’t, Hornet despaired. I can’t be.

There was so much, too much, and in the darkness there was no escaping it. In the darkness, regrets show plainer than all else, and she saw them fever-bright and disjointed, all run together like they were painted on the inside of her skull.

Many-legged people she’d known, little spiders she’d met when there were minds still behind their burning eyes, when there were clicking grins and offered words instead of the wordless shrieks that fell with orange and melted without consideration, the drippings of their rotted fangs sick-sweet on the air and thicker than what remained of the eyes that she remembered dark and gleaming and now were only dead.

Wet cloaks drenched in rain, the endless rain of an endless city that so quickly washed away the burning, seething orange shed from her needle, dark and faceless people fleeing past her through the orange-muddied puddles and she was all that still stood her ground anymore, and there were so many dead that stood up and screamed at her with eyes that would still burn and still seethe until her needle brought them low, again.

Stop, the other void said.

Eyes and eyes and eyes, yawning so dark and shedding darker tears over white faces, little white masks of whom only the horns ever changed, void that dripped and numbed her hands and, this time, the sunlight wouldn’t ever be enough to warm them where they tightened around her needle and raised it again. And again.

And again.

Hornet’s heart slowed, somewhere distant and less vivid than the dark.

Stop, or you’ll kill yourself, the other told her, steady and drawing her to their quiet when she struggled and could not meet it herself.

That gave Hornet pause, for all that she had little control of the endless wellspring of regrets the void had to draw from and unhesitatingly did. I can’t die, she said slowly. The thought was something so deeply engrained within her that she could not escape it, even now. A simple fact as much as a vow.

No, you cannot. Not for this. Hallownest doesn’t need you anymore, and it doesn’t need any of us, but we do, Hornet. We need you.

No, you don’t, Hornet replied. It’s over, and you are safe. I’ve done what I was made to do.

The other void gentled impossibly further. So have I, as much as I could and more, it said. But that is not what I mean. To use your own words against you; we love you, no matter if you never have a purpose again but to live. I understand if you cannot think of a single other reason to stay, I understand far too well, but please, stay for us, if nothing else. What is left is better for that you’re there, too.

I’ve done things that cannot be forgiven, Hornet whispered.

It doesn’t matter, the other void replied. Would you accept forgiveness, even if it was offered? You’ve proven over and over that you will try again. Come, prove it one more time.

Hornet could think of no more arguments to give, and her void was at last responding to the calm of the other, so she allowed herself to be quieted by their soothing as they held her close, cold enough to make her mind hazy with lost soul and yet slowly, steadily drawing the lashing of her void to a mirror of its placidity.

The dark receded, and Hornet could breathe.

Chapter Text

Even so, her breathing was not easy.

And so when she awoke what seemed just an instant later, Hornet shot up, her hand flying to her throat.

It stung like she’d swallowed a fistful of needles as she twisted to the side to hack up what void remained collected in her lungs, that spattered soundlessly to the smooth stone below her. There it dissipated like mist, though the stuff left a dark stain where it fell.

There was the familiar bite of wrought iron under her, not nearly as cold as she remembered it to be when compared to the weak grip she had on the hardened metal, the chill of her own flesh. It had a faint dampness to it where she clumsily worked her claws into the whorls in the iron, like condensation or humidity or fever-sweat, and what air she got past her uneven hacking did not taste like Deepnest.

She was, somehow, lying hunched over a bench, and just to realize as much seemed a heroic feat past the distraction of moderate physical misery.

Hornet’s head throbbed, her lungs crackling like they’d been iced over, and she shivered so badly that it seemed a minor miracle she had the coordination to reach for her needle, disoriented enough that it wasn’t immediately obvious where it was. The grip was hard to get ahold of, her shoulder lacking the range of motion she recalled it having just hours before, stiffened now by cold.

And Hornet realized she could not defend herself.

She was so weak. Not once in her life, in all she’d suffered through, had her hands ever failed to do as she asked of them, stuttering like faulty mechanisms and so numb she could hardly tell if she held her needle at all. Not ever. There was a low thrum of panic building like static in her belly, something she could not afford, and Hornet tugged uncoordinatedly at the needle’s handle as she tried to summon the strength to push herself at least to sit up again.

“No need for that, no need. Take a moment to rest, dear, you’ve had a difficult time.” Someone told her quietly. Midwife, Hornet recognized as she gasped and shook, and then she was being picked up like a grub and set gently back down before she could think to struggle, rested upright and leaned against the back of the bench. The light, brighter than anything in Deepnest, shone thinly into her eyes then, and Hornet closed her eyes tightly against it, tilting her face down to hide in her neckguard with a discomforted noise that distorted in her sandpaper throat.

“Hornet, are you okay?” Ghost asked, sounding nearly frantic as her coughing tapered off. Hornet looked up a little too quickly, the world dipping and listing around her, slow and inexorable, and had to close her eyes again before she lost what little balance she had.

The wash of light that she saw in the moment her eyes had been open was greener than that of a lumafly, like it’d been filtered through and tinted by broad leaves overhead, or past mossy glass. She’d been moved. The thought rankled at her, tried to get her to open her eyes again and stand up and be ready to fight, to defend her siblings as they would need her to, but her stomach churned sickly, and her breathing was shallowed by her lungs’ failure to cooperate.

So Hornet only laced the claws of one hand into the grating of the bench beneath her, with all the force she could coax from her frozen fingers, and stiffly released her grip on her needle to press the other to the center of her chest to measure its rise and fall, to try to make herself breathe well enough to chase away the dizziness. With the cover of her shawl, it was a display of frailty that none would ever know.

She could feel the others’ worry like a tangible thing, four distinct threads of void-given concern, and hear Midwife’s tutting, beside. They were alive, and she was too. They were safe, though how safe they could be when she didn’t know where they were, where she’d been taken, prickled like a half-noticed trap at the back of her mind.

Still, Hornet doubted she’d be much use to them as she was.

How long had she slept? How many days lost, this time?

“Of course, I am. Give me a moment and I’ll be well enough to leave.” Hornet rasped, and cleared her throat. It didn’t help except to make it sting sharply, but she thought that price not the worst that could have come from another brush with death.

“No, you won’t.” Hollow said, very softly. “There is something wrong, and you have known there was. Haven’t you?”

“Oh, spiderling, you’re delirious,” Midwife fretted. “Stay here with your siblings, try to rest. I’ll be back very soon with some water and something for your throat. One moment, dear, just a moment.” She promised, and Hornet heard the rapid tapping of her many legs over even stone, growing fainter as she left.

Hornet took in a shaky breath, her chest panging sharply as she drew it as deeply as she could and, once her head stopped spinning, tentatively opened her eyes again.

She recognized the land immediately, this time, which boded well enough to dismiss the growing suspicion that she’d gotten herself another concussion. The ornate filigrees done in dull metal high over her head, spanning even the water-stained roof, were only native to the Queen’s Gardens. A place still chaotically, vastly overgrown and, as Hornet glanced out the ceiling-length window fogged with pollen and age, wider and more open than Greenpath had ever been, and far more somber, like it was refined even as its flora grew wild.

It wasn’t where she’d have chosen to spend her time, and never when there were more important matters to attend to than sightseeing, but there were far less hospitable corners of Hallownest to find oneself unexpectedly.

She doubted the mantises ensnared by the Infection would pose an issue any longer.

She’d been left in an ornamental sunroom, one of many the Gardens boasted to look out over the rolling, clustered fields. What the tall windows unobscured by plantlife oversaw was sown with immense blue flowers here, each boasting a half-dozen petals of a muted blue and sprouting a cluster of stamen, with rounded anthers like huge pearls no smaller than her joined fists, all washed over with the same placid green, like sunlight through a thick canopy. Flax, Hornet remembered as she watched a far-off aluba, a creature longer than she was tall, brush by a flower and measure half its diameter at most. The Gardens’ minder did not grow things by halves.

There was no flax planted above the depth of the Gardens’ stag station. They must be in the deeper plots, then, maybe low enough to be just a few dozen feet above Deepnest’s highest, most remote tunnels.

Hornet hadn’t been through the Queen’s Gardens for nearly a full decade before the Black Egg, and it had been overdue for her attention for half of that, but…

But the queen had been waking.

“Please don’t ignore me, Hornet.” Hollow tried again, and Hornet snapped out of her distraction to look to them, gratified that the movement didn’t cause another bout of vertigo.

Hollow was too tall for this place, too, though only just, nearly able to exist unbowed beneath the arching sunroom roof. It had been built for their mother, after all. The light from the window was as muted as the flowers, with no obvious source and all tinted green but still so awfully vibrant after the shadows of Deepnest, and even so it blurred the edges of the shades’ silhouettes.

Her sibling was gazing back at her as she raised her head to meet their stare, and they looked nearly brokenhearted. It tore at her to know that she’d made them so, and the void in her chest sank its claws minutely deeper.

“I’m not. I don’t mean to.” Hornet said, subdued and still as loud as her ragged throat would allow. “I’m sorry.”

It had to have been Hollow, the sibling who’d dragged her back from the Void’s second attempt to make her like itself. In the wake of all Hollow had said, and more concerningly, all Hornet had said back to them, there was little she could think to offer but apology, and less that could fix what she’d nearly succumbed to.

What they must have seen of her failures to the kingdom they’d left her to guard.

And to have very nearly given up after all they’d done, all she had left to do, all she’d promised. To have every deeply held regret held to the light, so to speak, and scrutinized in detail before them. And now, to have failed in her final duty to protect her siblings while they could not protect themselves… It was heavy at the base of her throat as though she were weighed down with iron, and twice as bitter, and beneath it, Hornet bowed her head.

“I overestimated myself,” Hornet said quietly. “There’s no reason to be concerned.”

A lie, that even she could hear was lackluster at best. She had to try.

“No, I think there’s every reason to be.” Ghost said and, gods, if they didn’t sound as Hollow looked. “Why? Why hide something like that?”

Hornet blinked at them, and began to think that, again, there was something she’d missed. “It was the same as happened before, after the Black Egg. I am awake now, and improving just as quickly, so tell me what’s happened in my-“

“No! You can’t do this, Hornet. You can’t pretend to be fine. When were you going to tell us there was-“ Ghost cut themself off abruptly, and glanced to the littler shades.

Nettle and Sonnet were, fortunately for all involved, looking about as lost as Hornet felt, though there were few enough ways to interpret even Ghost’s half-said accusation. This was about the effect of the void caught within her on Hornet’s living soul, then, or else they’d somehow come to the same conclusion she had about the drain the shades placed on the same. Hornet felt she’d rather have faced down a tunneling garpede than have this conversation, particularly with the littler ones present.

“I wasn’t going to.” Hornet said evenly. “There was no way to be certain, and what use would it have done if I’d told you? I would allow no weakness of mine to prevent what must be done.”

“You didn’t know there would’ve been no use. You don’t know anything about any of this, nobody does. Everything about this,” Ghost said forcefully and gestured to themself, and then the other shades. “It’s all an unknown. Whatever’s doing this to you, whatever’s wrong, it isn’t a weakness, Hornet! A weakness is something you can work with, something you can improve. This is killing you, and none of us know why it is, let alone why it hasn’t.”

Not ideal, but at least they didn’t seem to have realized what set off the attack. They also, Hornet noted, made no direct mention to the drain their proximity imposed, and didn’t even seem to talk like they knew the void caught within her was the constant danger it seemed to be. What it sounded like instead was as though they thought it was only something she was susceptible to, something that flared up in a deadly way sometimes that she’d just conveniently neglected to mention to them.

… Did they even suspect?

“It is only soul, and I am of gods. I have plenty to give until I see this through.” Hornet dismissed easily.

Hornet frowned. “Speaking of, for what reason have we come to the Queen’s Gardens? Has the Mask Maker finished your masks yet?”

They couldn’t have, or they’d be in them, unless they were being sentimental about who was fully conscious to attend the event or some other equally maddening triviality. If that was the case, there would be hell to pay, and she would be sure they knew her frustration.

Though, perhaps not for some time. It sat badly with her to be annoyed with any of them now, when Ghost, whose not-voice Hornet realized seemed almost furious, something they’d never been with her and that she’d never seen in them at all, for any reason, was resolutely turned away like they couldn’t stand to look her in the eye. When Hollow was still only staring at her.

“We can discuss what has occurred in the last few hours soon, but not before I again tell you something important, that you as yet do not seem to believe.” Hollow said, leveling her with their pale, steady gaze.

Hornet nodded once, stiffly. So they would be direct, then. Such was a respectable choice. Whatever judgement they saw fit to cast upon her, it was one she’d well earned. And however much it might hurt to have disappointed them so, betrayed them, even, Hornet would not flinch.

“I love you. And I am so proud of you.” Hollow said softly, and Hornet’s breath hitched in surprise, nearly throwing her into an inopportune coughing fit.

She looked up at them sharply, but they weren’t finished. “Not many might feel all that the Void is call them to its embrace and still pull away, even with aid. And when you called to your void, unintentional as the call may have been, there was little that might have broken past the regrets it grew from, particularly those as you hold so tightly to, save a resolve that proved itself stronger. A persistence unbreakable.”

They felt a faint, exasperated sort of fondness at Hornet as she struggled to know what to think of that, to come up with anything to say. “Little sister, you are more like us two than you realize, I think. It is only a particular brand of stubbornness that might reject the Void’s call because you think your siblings need you, or to tirelessly guard a dying kingdom long after all that made it a kingdom had faded, for that matter. The same sort of stubbornness that might lead one to refuse outright to die.”

Hollow tilted their head to indicate Ghost at the last, who glanced back at them, tense like they were debating whether to continue to be upset or not.

Then they sighed, as well as one could give the impression of such through void, and Hornet relaxed minutely as Ghost evidently gave in to the latter. She wasn’t sure what she’d have done if they decided her reticence was something they couldn’t forgive.

It was a vast trust that she placed in them, to care so for what they thought of her. Hornet prayed they’d never know of it.

Yet they raised a good point, one she did better to focus on than what Hollow told her that could not be true, that even so, she found she couldn’t honestly believe wasn’t, not when it was them. To dwell on her sibling’s words, the way she knew they did not lie to say them – and how neatly that matched to the gentle protection of the void that’d saved her from her own – might have caused her to confess to something she could not bring herself to hurt them with the knowledge of.

They didn’t need to know, and so they wouldn’t. Not when they cared so, when she might feel how badly it would hurt them to.

Far safer to think of what was to come next. When Ghost said that none of them truly knew what they were up against, they weren’t wrong. Perhaps there would be some abatement they could give next time, some aid they could grant her, however much the idea of sharing her weaknesses with those she sought to protect made her jaw clench, felt like a failure on its own.

… And if they couldn’t? The void in her chest hadn’t killed her yet; better to keep to what she knew she could survive, than to harm her family unnecessarily.

“The same stubborn that might make someone hold onto a raging god for an age, no matter what,” Ghost felt like they rolled their eyes to say, and drifted up with a flick of their dark little tendrils to moodily settle again between Hollow’s horns. “We’re all the same kind of unthinkingly obstinate. It’s the only thing that survives everything that’s happened to us.”

“And even that’s up for debate; one could hardly say we handily survived any of it.” Hornet said, remembering just in time to lighten her tone to what could pass for humor.

Ghost looked over their shoulder at her as they, almost unwillingly, gave that funny little thrill of humor they did, like they could hardly believe she’d made a joke, before they remembered they weren’t pleased with her. “Oh, I think we’ll be okay. Even if we did lose the masks.”

“You did what?” Hornet demanded.

“It wasn’t our fault! And they wouldn’t have worked, anyway.” Nettle defended, apparently glad to have a frame of reference for something they were talking about at last. “Hollow tried.”

“In a manner of speaking.” Sonnet mumbled.

“You tried?” Hornet exclaimed at the sibling in question.

She stood from the bench, hissing under her breath as her legs gave and threatened to buckle beneath her weight, and hid this as well as she could to stride to stand before Hollow. Her eldest sibling, though they felt something like admonishing concern at her, ducked their head obligingly close enough for Hornet to reach up and try to seize them by the horns to look them over, to search for missing pieces such as Nettle had lost. Hollow jerked away with a bolt of alarm before she could find a grip gentle enough, as insubstantial as a shadow slipping through her claws, and Hornet couldn’t contain a frustrated scoff.

“You ought not to touch any of us at the moment. We must be cold, and you seem to need all the warmth you can hold onto, Hornet.” Hollow said, eyeing her like they thought she might try again. “Midwife has told us that ailing bugs must be kept warm.”

“I feel better already.” Hornet said impatiently, gladder than she’d ever been to have the tension of a conversation broken, and just as glad for a reason to redirect her sibling’s concern back at them. “What do you mean, you tried?”

She scowled fiercely, claws itching for the needle she’d left resting on the bench, uncertain if she could again shoulder its weight yet. “If I ever meet that piddling, soft-shelled Mask Maker again, I’ll ensure they-“

“No, no, they did a really good job. They’d finished all of our masks before we had to leave, while we were waiting for you to wake up, and they were flawless, but…” Ghost said.

“The Void calls, Hornet.” Hollow began. “Not just to you. I tried to realign myself to the mask as a focus, but that would have required a near-total dissolution of how I am now, and I am, as we all are like this, mostly impression and memory. Very much like the Mask Maker explained, truly. I would still be myself as I am once I was contained within the mask, though a little shorter, I suppose, but between those two points I would be little more than void itself. Fluid, vulnerable.” Hollow explained.

“There’s this short transition period, where it’s sort of like you’re in the Void itself. Bodiless, senseless, nothing but what will you have as a guide. It gets easier with practice, and I’d nearly forgotten about it. I told Nettle and Sonnet all about how it works before Nettle’s mask broke.” Ghost added, and Sonnet nodded easy confirmation as Nettle conspicuously kept quiet, seeming a little lost.

“Simply put, we cannot remake ourselves without placing all we are at the Void’s mercy. It’s like…” Hollow trailed off.

“It’s like trying to wake up. When you’re tired enough that you have the choice between being awake and just settling in and going back to sleep, even if sleeping isn’t what you know you should do.” Ghost finished for them.

Hornet nodded slowly. She understood, tentatively, which she thought was about as far as she’d get. Even with how overwhelming and cold the Void seemed to her as a living creature, it had been a struggle not to simply allow the quiet that came with the cold to be all that was left.

“This would have been unimportant, but I’d underestimated the strength of the Void Sea’s call. If I’d fully allowed myself to fade, even to take up a mask… I could not have resisted it. The Void feels awoken, watchful, like it never did while we were in the Abyss, all that time ago.” Hollow said.

“Even as little as a month or two ago, the Void slept.” Ghost said firmly. “I know it did. I stood at the shore of the Void Sea, and heard… It’s peace, Hornet. Rest, at last. At the shore of the Sea, it’s nearly impossible to turn away from.” Their voice went distant to say, the almost-words only whispers of thought.

“It would be so peaceful, to succumb to the Void, to let it take me. But I’m not done here.” Ghost said, with such resolve threaded through the low assurance that Hornet couldn’t have believed anything else of them. “None of us are, or we wouldn’t be here at all. But if the Void keeps calling like it does, so much stronger than it did before, we may not have a choice. As it stands, we can’t come to a mask.”

“So something must be done to lessen the call.” Hornet concluded. “The Void is awoken, and it stands between you and life.” All that nonsense about dissolution and sleep, when they could have just told her it was a problem, as simple as that.

How ironic that the very stuff of their birth, the nothing her siblings were each made of that had given them their remarkable persistence after deaths that would have spelled the end of any other, would be what perpetuated how they existed now, hardly living as such, but not quite dead, either. Of course, it wouldn’t have been so easy as granting her siblings masks, however difficult such a task had become.

Hornet looked up at them both, a vague suspicion forming from the cagy discontentment they explained themselves with. “Ghost, why are we in the Queen’s Gardens.” She demanded. “Why not allow me to wake on my own, in the Mask Maker’s den?”

Ghost hummed thoughtfully. “Well, in the interest of not dragging out bad news, you were right about the Void rising.”

“It’s like it’s chasing us,” Sonnet agreed. “I suppose Midwife’s alright, though, because she carried you up here past all the thorns. She can stay, I decided.”

“But now that you’re awake, you have to tell us what happened! We waited while you talked with everyone, because it seemed pretty important, but now you have to! What,” Nettle trailed off, trying to set their thoughts in order. “What’s wrong with you?” They tried, more an open-ended question than a demand, and when Hornet only stared at them, baffled, they glanced at Sonnet with a silent plea for help.

“We want to know some things, and you have to tell us.” Sonnet picked up, determination flaring in their bright, gleaming eyes, less difficult to look at out of the gloom of Deepnest but no duller for it.

Hornet blinked at them. They had entirely too little time, with the how quickly the Kingdom was finding itself consumed, again, but the day still seemed bright. Midwife would be back soon, and surely by then Hornet would have strength enough to forge the way through the Gardens. And in the meantime, she could concede the two were owed explanations. Likely more than either Sonnet or Nettle realized, and more than she’d give until after this newest unexpected misery in her scarcely-revived kingdom concluded.

So, “Ask your questions, and if I have answers, I will give them. But hurry.” Hornet acknowledged.

Sonnet nodded seriously, and wriggled their tendrils a little as though bracing themself. “Okay. What happened to the Nosk?”

“I killed it. It was near death when we found its den, and I ended its life.” Hornet replied. Perhaps this would be a less difficult interrogation than anticipated.

“Was it the Void that was killing it?” Sonnet guessed. “The Void that’s following us now?”

“It can’t be following us, the Void doesn’t do that on its own. It’s just… Unbounded. Somehow, it must have always been held back before, and now it isn’t.” Ghost concluded firmly in her place, and Hornet sat back down on the bench with a reluctantly amused huff and let them take the lead. They knew more about the issue than she did, at any rate.

“And it’s dangerous, just like the Sea, isn’t it? That’s what’s hurt Hornet?” Sonnet confirmed, a slow, dreading sort of realization growing beneath their words, and Hornet wondered if she’d gotten away so neatly without her siblings realizing it was them doing much of the hurting after all.

“Yes. But we will stop it.” Ghost told them, as though they knew exactly how to accomplish such a thing, or else simply had no doubt at all that there was a way, and that they’d find it. “You weren’t around for it, but we’ve already seen through a lot that didn’t look like it had an answer, either, not a good one. Hallownest is our home, and it hasn’t managed to totally kill us yet, and it won’t. The Void isn’t the worst thing we’ve faced and seen the back of, sibling.” They reassured, nudging Sonnet gently.

They tilted their head when Sonnet only responded with the beginnings of fearful tears in their eyes, and when they spoke again it was with as much resolve as Hornet had always seen in them, when she’d warned them of the path they were set upon and they chose to follow it anyway without hesitation, as though they’d known the good that would come of it, though they couldn’t have. Not confidence as such, but an unerring will to see this through to its end.

And for a child of three higher beings, there is the strength to change fates set in stone behind such a will.

“We’ll be alright, Sonnet. I won’t let this be an end, if I have to unite the Void myself to make sure of it.” Ghost promised them, half-jokingly.

“And I wouldn’t let anything take you back to the Abyss. We’re out of it, now, and there’s nothing that I’d let happen to you, not ever again!” Nettle swore loudly, bumping bodily into Sonnet with entirely less care and a thousand times the enthusiasm, and the startled little shade would have gone tumbling if Hollow hadn’t quickly reached down to steady them.

Once they’d regained their balance, Sonnet gave a wavery laugh, a reluctant sort of hopeful, and instead of replying, braced themself midair, something Nettle had only a moment to prepare for before their twin headbutted with all the force they could muster into them as retribution. Hornet was sure Nettle was, at that particular moment, probably grateful that Sonnet’s horns curled down around their face instead of up, though if the thought crossed Nettle’s mind before they gave a delighted shriek and fled – with Sonnet in hot pursuit – was up for debate.

Completely sidetracked. So easily reassured. Had Hornet ever been so young? It seemed impossible, now.

Ghost, apparently just as surprised as she, stared after the littler shades for a moment, both nearly the exact same size as them but worlds different in all else. Then they turned back to Hornet, a smile in their thoughts. “There’ll be explaining to do later, but I think they’re satisfied for now. They’re glad you’re alright. I am, too, even if I’m… Not as sure. I’m glad you’re still here.”

They hesitated then, and then added, “Do you… Really feel better?”

Hornet scoffed gently. “Little Ghost, it would take more than some errant darkness to kill me. I am just as much a fragile, mortal bug as you are a bug at all.”

It was not an answer, but it was also not a lie.

There was something else there when they blinked a smile at her, something strange, that had as much an unfathomable weight of inevitability to it as anything else, some faraway isolation, but it was so faint and vague and gone so quickly that, though Hornet frowned thoughtfully at them when they drifted away to peer out of the walkway leading from the sunroom, likely looking for where the other two little shades had gone, she shrugged it off easily enough.

It was surely just her own thoughts that she’d misinterpreted as theirs, anyway.

And as with the first time she’d woken up after the Void had made an attempt on her life, presumably because she’d managed to cough up the frozen black that had surfaced in her lungs, she truly was recovering as quickly as she’d suggested. At least from the worst of the headache and the shivering, the warm humidity of the Gardens finally seeping into her to loosen the stiffness from her muscles enough to make them functional. Now that she knew what to pay attention to, Hornet could feel how the void in her chest dragged at her soul, how it waited patient and deadly cold between her lungs, but as before, now that she’d come back around and worked some warmth back into her limbs, they responded as they always did.

She was weakened, and tired like she’d rarely been since the worst days long before, and she knew there would come a point when the void within her would take too much if it was allowed to, but for now her mind was sharp and her hands obeyed her.

That would have to be enough.

All the same, what they needed now was information. There was only so much the three of them – five of them, she supposed – could intuit about what was happening and what they’d experienced, and everything past that was guesswork at best. At least with the Infection, she’d known exactly what she had to do.

And, though her siblings didn’t seem to have a doubt in their minds about allowing her to make the next decision as to where they’d go, and no particular anxiety about what they’d do now that the masks were out of reach and useless, too, Hornet had no such luxury, to simply allow someone else to do the planning. Ghost, like Nettle and Sonnet, might have honestly not realized they were at a dead end, but she’d have expected Hollow, at least, to have concerns.

The tallest of the shades had gone still enough to take for a lightless hole in the world where they hovered in the corner they’d fit themself into, their shoulders hunched enough that their horns wouldn’t catch on the roof, gazing out of the cloudy windows and, to all appearances, serenely calm.

Yes, Ghost might yet be waiting for this newest of Hallownest’s mysteries to unveil its next step, for what was Hallownest from their perspective if not a road laid out in lights to be followed to completion? Hollow, though, ought to have known there’d never been any such thing.

“What are you frustrated about, now?” Hollow asked evenly, tilting their head to look at her out of their searchlight-eyes, less contrasted in the level light.

“I’m not.” Hornet said, frowning. “I only consider how we intend to move forward from this.”

“Do you? I’d thought the answer obvious.” Hollow said, and that they seemed genuinely surprised was all that kept Hornet from bristling.

“It isn’t. I know of no plot to end the Void, I’d never considered it a power enough to merit fearing. It’s too deadly to risk backtracking through, and a waste of time even if it weren’t. We know nothing about this threat, nothing of use, and there’s nowhere to go but up, it seems. Nothing to do but run. Another hopeless cause, only I don’t know what to do about it.” Hornet said pointedly.

“Of course, we don’t know what to do. The Void is something we all return to eventually, but that’s a very… Final sort of action to take. So, we will go to one who may yet know what causes it to rise, at least.” Hollow explained without explaining.

“Who below the earth is left to go to?” Hornet demanded.

“The only one who I think might tell us what we want to know, though I’m unsure if I wish to beg her forgiveness or to never set eyes upon her again.” Hollow murmured. “Mother. The White Lady, the Queen. If she is anywhere, she’ll be here.”

“… The White Lady does reside in these gardens. She is Queen no longer, though. She has forfeited that right.” Hornet corrected coldly.

It would be a cold day in Greenpath before Hornet willingly went to the White Lady for guidance. In that, she had to agree with Hollow on the once-queen; if there was any single creature Hornet would rather never see again, it was the White Lady of Hallownest, perhaps preceded by the Pale King himself.

It wasn’t that she’d ever been unkind to Hornet, no, she’d never said a cruel word to her, had welcomed news of her travels and her triumphs. And for a time, one that had passed nearly as quickly as it’d begun, Hornet had gone to lengths to see her. Ventured up from Deepnest when she’d been supposed to be hunting or perfecting her needlework, taking daytrips when she could slip away from her minders and wander away to the Queen’s Gardens, just to antagonize Fierce Dryya on her way in and then sit at the White Lady’s side and regale her with youthful tales that, looking back, the Queen had already known too much about for it to be news.

She had looked up to the Queen of Hallownest.

She’d thought her bright and beautiful and wise and patient, her pale eyes, back then only just touched with a cloudy blue like her flowers, never displeased to see her arrive even as they also never smiled or closed. Thought that not all of Hallownest’s folk could be as bad as her guardians said they were, when she’d been too young to know better, if this was their Queen, kind and open and always willing to give the best advice, even if she was oddly detached about the strangest things.

It had cut deep when the Infection returned and, in desperation, Hornet turned to her and completely expected the Queen to rush to her aid.

Hallownest’s queen had betrayed her as she’d never been betrayed, when the White Lady had refused to have any part, to help or to harm, in the Kingdom’s downfall. And it did fall, while the Queen never moved for reasons it’d taken longer than the Kingdom’s end for Hornet to fully understand. It had died, and she’d stood aside and done nothing.

It had all happened a very long time ago, now.

Hollow only looked at her, saying nothing as Hornet considered and ran through every other conceivable option, briefly debated taking her siblings and leaving Hallownest altogether, and then resigned herself to the bending of her pride.

“If there is anyone left who remembers the Void, it is she.” Hornet begrudgingly admitted. “I’d just as gladly leave her to it to take, but what she has to say may be of some use.”

“What issue do you take with the White Lady?” Hollow asked, bemused. “Though she took me to be nothing at all, I never knew her to speak harshly or cruelly.”

“Better to be harsh than uncaring.” Hornet said coldly, and stood to find the others. If they were to meet the once-Queen of Hallownest, there would be no use in waiting.

The roads had only gotten all the harder since she’d last traveled them.

Chapter Text

And so Hornet was waylaid by an unstoppable force of nature before she’d even made it out of the sunroom.

Sonnet dove back inside at top speed, closely followed by Nettle, and then Hornet herself was crowded backwards and nearly into the bench in spite of her best efforts.

Midwife’s smiling mask spilled a constant, unfordable stream of honeyed rambling, just loud enough to give a plausible excuse for how all Hornet’s protests rolled off her like water from a durandoo’s back. The coiling segments of her long body, strange to see entirely removed from the tunnels of Deepnest and gleaming a dull, dusty grey in the sleepy emerald light, always seemed to be coincidentally blocking the way out just before Hornet could slip past her.

And though by this point she’d carefully considered it, Hornet could not bring herself to draw her needle against her again, even just to intimidate. Something Midwife, to Hornet’s frustration, seemed entirely aware of and entirely willing to exploit to its fullest.

“Very little running water in this land, spiderling, very little, but I’ve managed it! I do apologize for leaving you here to come to your senses all on your own, but, oh, you’ve got your siblings, haven’t you? You seem to have an understanding with them, even if they are a very strange bunch. Totally silent! It’s truly very impressive that they’re so committed to it, I only wish some spiders I knew back in the day had their knack for listening.” Midwife carried on, stooping down to set a very fresh half-shell of something that looked to have been a mosscreep on the bench, scraped clean and filled to overflowing with clear water.

In the same motion she pulled the back half of her body, creeping neatly in after her, around quickly enough that Hornet had to stumble backwards and almost into Hollow so as not to be swept aside by it.

“Plenty of good hunting though, oh yes, plenty to eat. And not more than a few very dead husks of mantids guarding the bounty! Dead bugs have no need for their food, and, hm, I seem to recall the Mantis tribe never was on such good terms with Hallownest, though we were never their favorite neighbors either. Bodes very well for us hungry mouths, doesn’t it, that there should be such an excess. Perhaps Plait and the little ones would fancy a little sojourn! Something exotic to punctuate all that dirtcarver.” Midwife hummed pleasantly.

“Midwife,” Hornet tried, exasperated.

“Yes, yes, it’s a little early to be planning field trips, and I’m not quite the one, historically speaking, to be responsible for the hatchlings. Not after they’ve, well,” Midwife chuckled to herself and passed a gnawed-off, thick section of pale-yellow root up her pairs of legs to be placed by the last set alongside the water on the bench.

“Not after they’ve hatched, at least. ‘Caretaker’ isn’t my name, and for good reason. I believe I’ll try my best for these, though, even if Plait’s the savvy mother among us. I quite wish I’d seen more like her from my days spent exclusively as a midwife!”

“Midwife,” Hornet pressed.

“Ah, ah, no complaints, this’ll help your throat. Now, it’s a dark day that I ask a young spider to eat a vegetable, but, oh, just listen to you! Like you’ve been gargling nails, I can’t imagine what that dreadful black goo has done to you.” Midwife scolded, and it was unclear if Hornet was the subject of the scolding, or the Void itself. “Now, I’ve never made a ginger tea, but this is ginger, and this is water, and I’m sure the rest comes naturally.”

“It’ll help your throat, she said. You should listen to her.” Ghost prompted, with entirely too much smugness at Hornet’s expense about the whole situation. “She’s making you tea.”

Hornet was absolutely certain they’d seen people make tea often enough to know that this wasn’t it, and just as certain that if they weren’t already dead, the heated glare she shot them would have let them know their life was very close to being forfeit. “Be quiet, we have somewhere to be and you know it.”

“Oh, spiderling, don’t speak to your sibling like that. They’re already so quiet as it is, they might never open their mouth.” Midwife tutted, sliding a needle-sharp claw under the skin of the knobby root with a slicing crunch, peeling it to place carefully in the half-mosscreep of water without a splash. “Drink your tea, young spiders should have a drink now and then with their meals.”

“It isn’t tea if it was never hot.” Hornet shot back, scowling. “I’ll drink it on the way, I have to-“

“No, no, I think you’ll drink it now, while I have you here. Let an old servant of the Nest reassure herself our daughter is well, won’t you?” Midwife cajoled. “I must meet Plait and the little ones at the climb up from Deepnest, at the easternmost limit of these very gardens, and it’s such a long way to travel. Give me something to keep my spirits up, my dear, just a little happy memory.”

“A happy memory.” Hornet repeated slowly.

“Yes, of course! To see you in good health before I begin my journey would soothe the soul as nothing else, knowing I’ve done my duty as caregiver. Ah, the title does just roll off the mandibles, doesn’t it? I like it! Midwife the caretaker, who’d ever have thought. Caregiver, caretaker, I suppose I’ll need to make a decision.” Midwife flickered her lower, unoccupied sets of limbs in quick, thoughtful waves so that the claws tapped against her raised carapace threateningly.

“Hornet, I think she would like you to drink the tea.” Sonnet said seriously from where they’d half-hidden behind her shawl, still skittish at Midwife’s presence. “I truly think she would.”

“I think Sonnet’s right, Hornet. Why don’t you want to? Does it taste bad?” Nettle whispered, though they had to have known by now that Midwife couldn’t hear them.

“It doesn’t look like it will taste good, to be certain. But, what do I know? This isn’t the White Palace. Perhaps that is simply what the proudest and most irritable spiders drink.” Hollow played along, frankly enough that if Hornet hadn’t been able to pick out the faintest thread of humor under the not-words, she might have thought they were being serious.

“Hysterical. I’m so glad you care deeply about my wellbeing.” Hornet ground out.

“Oh, no funny business, dear, but wouldn’t you indulge your old minder? And, while you’re being so terribly indulgent,” Midwife said encouragingly.

And there it was. Whatever she’d thought she had to corner Hornet here and soften her up to ask, which meant it couldn’t be anything Midwife thought she’d like.

“… Won’t you reconsider coming to visit Plait and the children with me? There’s not an awful lot to do in Deepnest while we wait for this darkness to pass us over, dear, and we’d worry very much if you take off on your own again. Why, even I hadn’t seen you in… Oh, one moment, I must be getting my calendars mixed up…” Midwife hummed thoughtfully, drumming a trio of clawtips against her downturned mask, and while Hornet knew clearly enough that leading up to this had been a guilt trip through and through, she seemed sincerely uncertain of the date.

Hornet sighed, though even she hadn’t kept up with the days and years as they’d passed in far too long. “You know I can’t. Even if you know not what I must do, you know it isn’t something that can be put off or compromised with. It cannot wait.”

“Can’t it, though?” Midwife wheedled. “Can’t it? What even is this all-important task, dear, and who’s there to make you do it? The way I understand it, there’s not many that could make you do anything very inadvisable anymore.”

“It can’t. It’s… I’m tying up loose ends.” Hornet explained haltingly.

“Is that us? That’s a little harsh.” Ghost said.

“You know what I’m talking about.” Hornet told them tensely. “Now shush.”

Midwife harrumphed and drew herself up until she towered over Hornet, and had to then stoop below the sunroom roof. “Excuse me? Princess or not, young spider-“ she began, with every apparent intention of working up to a full lecture.

“No- I was-“ Hornet cut herself off, took a deep, steadying breath, and let it out, to give herself time to think enough to not make the conversation more of an ordeal than it needed to be.

“I will come back. I promise that I will, only I must do this before I can.” Hornet said solemnly.

“Oh, my dear.” Midwife whispered, deflating. “Oh, Pale Gift to the Nest. That’s what you said the last time.”

Hornet found it all she could do not to drop Midwife’s stare, old grief an aching, half-forgotten scar.

She hadn’t remembered that. There was much of those early days that she no longer remembered, so comparatively stricken and unmemorable before she’d left to seek the White Palace, once it became clear Deepnest was in peril. Much of it bled together, the weeks and months after her mother had gone to dream, and of most of it, Hornet could recall nothing at all. She’d left Deepnest so long ago, there’d been so much else on her mind other than her home where, she’d once been foolish enough to know, nothing truly bad would ever happen that her people couldn’t weather.

It wouldn’t surprise her if those had been the parting words she’d chosen, a promise made that she’d been unable to keep.

Hornet was older now, had seen far more, was not nearly the spirited, vicious daughter of Deepnest setting off on her quest to save everyone, that she’d been so sure she could rise to because it was her trying, Herrah’s daughter, child of the Pale Wyrm, she who’d feared nothing, nothing at all. And then Deepnest had fallen, and the king had gone, and it was only Hornet, daughter of a killed kingdom, inheritor of graves and ghosts and broken vows.

Yet there was no difference in what had to be done. All that had changed was that there was more to regret, more to bear. Again, there was no real choice.

“Then you understand that I can’t stay.” Hornet said quietly.

“No, I don’t.” Midwife insisted. “My dear, the plague has gone, and it’s swept just about all of us away with it. What do we have left, but our nest? But the few of ours who survive? Whatever has happened to you between all that time ago and now, to make you forget that your greatest loyalty should be to Deepnest and, by extension, to yourself? The lands beyond it have not treated you kindly. You owe the likes of Hallownest nothing, spiderling, certainly nothing more than you’ve already given.”

“I owe it nothing because it exists no longer, not truly.” Hornet said simply. “My duty to the Kingdom is ended. Yet there are things I am indebted to still, by my own choice. It is still mine to guard, mine to watch, and while Hallownest is rotted in its grave, I will not allow those that didn’t rot with it to follow it there.”

“Those that didn’t…?” Midwife stilled and looked to the shades, waiting behind Hornet if the chill at her back was to be trusted. “Oh. This is for them, then?”

“They will not die here.” Was all Hornet said.

Not for any excuse, not even if the life her mother had given her was the cost to make it so.

The great centipede peered at the shades, to the faint, prickling fear that Hornet thought was likely Sonnet’s, and then, as Hornet’s claws tensed to unwillingly reach for her needle, Midwife heaved a sigh and lowered herself to just above Hornet’s eyelevel.

“And you’re quite sure this is what you want? To give all for them, for this?” Midwife whispered to her, her countless pointed legs held tight to her belly and sorrow wavering in her voice, like she was again watching her own hatchling leave without a chance of return.

“Of course. I owe them much.”

“That isn’t what I asked, dearest. Is this what you want? If it isn’t, you need only come home with me. Whoever hunts you, if they have strength you cannot match, there is nothing beneath the earth stronger than even the scant remnants of Deepnest, and we will not allow any spiderling of ours to suffer so.” Midwife offered softly. “You need only accept, little one. Deepnest is always a home for spiders, and those they trust.”

And Midwife’s worry felt abruptly like a mistake, like it had been offered to the wrong person.

It felt like a vow Hornet could trust in, relief at last, that if she closed her eyes and nodded it would be Herrah’s voice chuckling under her breath and crushing her into a hug, warm and enveloping and safe at last, where her mistakes might haunt her no more, where the unbearable burden of everything might be Hornet’s no longer. It was like a physical weight over her for a brief, lingering instant, all that she had accepted to shoulder over the years, and the promise of certainty again – of safety not won by her needle – was nearly too much.

It felt like an endless shame, to think to place herself among those she’d abandoned, who didn’t seem to understand that she’d abandoned them at all.

Yet even if it could have been hers again, in whatever sense was left, the home Deepnest offered was not one her siblings had ever known. A home at all wouldn’t be something they ever could have, if she did not fulfill her promise to them, this single promise out of them all that she refused to break. She could not leave them to their fate.

Shades did not last long.

It was a startlingly honest thing, to realize she did not want a home they weren’t a part of.

“It is. I’ll come back.” Hornet said, the words falling leaden from her mouth, and it sounded like neither a reassurance nor an apology.

Midwife hummed something gentle and regretful and unfolded all of the legs Hornet could see, and then wrapped all of them around her, to Hornet’s jarring startlement. The old centipede hugged her tightly, squeezed her once, strong enough that Hornet’s breath left her at the force, and then was setting her back down again and straightening her torn, darkened shawl around her shoulders before Hornet could finish comprehending what she’d done.

“Then my goodbyes from the last time you took your leave of us will do again, I suppose. Be safe, dear princess, be wary, be merciless. Come home in better shape than you’re leaving it, this time.” Midwife told her, busily dusting off Hornet’s front and picking imagined (or real, more likely) bits of debris from her horns while Hornet stood stiffly and tried not to seem outwardly uncomfortable. “And, goodbye.”

“… I will.” Hornet said in turn, and Midwife looked at her a long moment more, as though waiting for her to change her mind, before leaning away and curling her long body to take her leave with the near-frenetic tap of countless claws over the pavestones. “Goodbye.”

Hornet watched her go, and then she was all that breathed in the sunroom again.

The shades were waiting when she turned back to them, and all the sets of brilliant white eyes turned unerringly to watch her made her chitin crawl with discomfort that she pushed away before it could set in. Hollow had Nettle in hand, like they’d tried to make a break for the door at some point and had their efforts stymied, and Sonnet was perched on their other shoulder. Ghost, with an oddly remorseful look to them, was hovered just above Hollow’s head.

They all looked wildly out of place here, as much as they had in the beaming sunlight of Dirtmouth, cutouts of sightless black tucked between the greenery and slowly rusting window frames of the Gardens. Remnants, waiting in the ruins of an empty land for life to come anew, like the turn of the seasons resumed at last. No, she could not have left them to this.

Not them.

“We’re going to see the White Lady,” Hornet said to them, more subdued than she’d intended, and cleared her throat.

“We are going to meet with the White Lady, to see what she knows of what follows us,” she tried again, stronger. “And there is no reason to linger. Let’s go.”

Hornet didn’t wait for their response, and only reached for the silk that’d suspended their masks over her shoulder as she turned to go and, finding nothing, let her hand fall.

Of course. They’d been left in the Mask Maker’s den, likely along with the shades’ completed new masks. Their purpose had been served to completion, and they’d been left where they fell. It was only reasonable that they be gone, though it left her with nothing tangible to hold to, no remains to prove that the ghosts that now followed her out into the humid, leaf-dappled light and distant rising song of the maskflies had ever been more corporeal than they were.

Outside, there was no sight of Midwife, to Hornet’s stifled relief. It truly was a distance to the Gardens’ only other road down into Deepnest, the one that’d leave her nearer to the failed tram, and it’d be a stretch to expect to reach it within the day even with the quiet that had fallen over the Queen’s Gardens in the absence of its most threatening denizens.

The others were unusually quiet for a time as she walked, reorienting herself to the light and sound and familiar effort of hiking steadily upwards once the aged sunroom opened to the expansive garden beyond, and Hornet thought she could guess why. Yet the silence was a welcome one, even with the ever-present background hum of the shades when they had no particular thoughts to share or no particular desire to share them, and it allowed her space to collect herself.

It was exhausting in a way she’d rarely been exhausted, to need to be in the presence of others so constantly.

And knowing so, it was a wonder she hadn’t run out of words entirely; she’d used up more of them in the past week than in decades previous. Perhaps that was why she felt so wrongfooted, having grown so used to traveling across Hallownest entirely on her own, lasting years without a word said to another and, often, weeks without any said aloud to herself. She certainly hadn’t explained herself very clearly to Midwife, not to give any detail but that she had to do what she’d dedicated herself to.

But then, what could she have done, told her old minder that she was departing on a journey she’d never expected to be necessary, that at the height of the Infection she’d never have cared to accept? To bring her siblings back from the dead, ghosts held at its doorstep via some undying, unknowable substance she didn’t wholly trust not to be her end, that for reasons unknown was rising like a high tide from the depths of the earth? Wandering with no set path to her goal any longer, the only solid endpoint she’d staked all her focus towards set just out of reach?

If the shades could not take to masks, how much longer could they persist like this, open to the elements and all the cruelties of the world without any means to safeguard themselves? How much longer could she, as damnably unsteady as her needle had become, protect them in their stead? How long until some beast she could not best, some hazard she could not circumvent, some inevitable misstep that would cost them their lives?

Gods, what was she going to do?

“Hornet-“ Nettle began, distracted and intrigued by something, Hornet thought uncharitably, just as likely to be all the color and light and open air as anything important.

“No.” Hornet cut them off almost as soon as the thought was voiced, and winced for the sharp reply.

And then, with as little as possible of the mounting feeling of the ground disappearing from beneath her, for all that the grown-over pavestones ahead and behind were as solid as ever where they caught beneath her claws with the satisfying, grating clicks of a path well-walked, “I'm sorry. Grant me a moment to think. Please.”

They did, for once, with a tinge of hurt quickly smoothed over as they turned their attention to Hollow.

Hornet consciously evened her breathing and gazed out over the Gardens, up to where the roof overhead grew craggy with thick-barked root systems of trees that seemed older than the stone, small and winding from so far away but, she knew, far wider around than her arms’ length at their greatest. Beyond them, somewhere, waited the White Lady. They were not adrift, Hornet firmly reminded herself, and they were not hopeless or lost. She did not lead them to oblivion or a waste of time that would mean the same. There was a path forward. There was a goal.

She was not out of options, not yet.

For now, there was only the travel to focus on, to make it up to the height of the Gardens where the White Lady’s prison grew.

Chapter Text

And so the Gardens, the overtaken land that had meant many things to many people over the years, even now were beautiful.

The air, though more humid than Greenpath and fogged with mist lifting from the many cultivars’ massive leaves, was cool like morning dew and strikingly clear, with even the subtle rise of the Infection’s cloying rot, like flowers’ nectar turned putrid, gone without a trace. It carried just the crisp, heady scent of growing things now, of damp, untainted earth churned by delving roots and rich flowers and the faintest breeze, a rarity so far belowground. As though the land was as untouched as its namesake by all that had happened, a pristine, inward-focused oasis guarded by thickets of dense-twining thorns. No bodies littered the floor, at least not here, and Hornet suspected there wouldn’t be many to see; greenery such as this had a tendency to be hungry.

A patient hunter, briars were, but a hunter nonetheless.

The long hall of huge, burgeoning flowers and unrusted wrought iron past the sunroom was a familiar one, that wound through a dozen more before opening to the cavern the leaf-littered glass roofs promised. Hornet had rested there many a time, only a short walk from the road to Deepnest that her paths never turned down, though it had been decades since she’d last seen it. The stone was more broken than she remembered it being, more disrupted by the arching roots and overtaken from above by hanging, overgrown trellises.

Beyond the hall was the vine-choked courtyard, and at its eventual end the first set of steep, narrow gardeners’ stairs that would quickly take her further up, covered utterly by the creeping greenery though she’d cleared it when last she’d visited.

Hornet drew her needle and mounted the first step with a slash of the blade to cut away the vines, and the chill at her back deepened.

The quiet hadn’t lasted overly long, an hour’s walk at most to get so far, but the world was more settled around her than before, so Hornet supposed it’d been enough.

“Yes?” She asked, and found that keeping the cutting, impatient edge from her voice wasn’t as much a strain as it had been.

Ghost, for it felt too distinctly like their silence for Hornet to need to turn and check, hesitated. The chill lessened ever so slightly, like they’d backed off some, and Hornet decided it would be a relief when they spoke instead of an irritation. It’d take her mind off of the headache that grew to a threatening throb behind her eyes, and the stiff, slowly returning ache in her legs, the sort she wouldn’t have expected for miles and miles of strenuous running at any point before the Black Egg. Not debilitating, only an irritant, she told herself.

Though, perhaps she should’ve drunk Midwife’s tea after all.

“Spit it out, what’s wrong.” Hornet said, sterner than she’d intended.

“Nothing’s wrong.” Ghost replied, a little defensively.

“Did you have something to say, then, or are you only going to hover around like a beheaded aspid until I make you talk?” Hornet groused.

“I know you’re mad about having to go to the White Lady about this, but you don’t have to take it out on me.” Ghost told her.

Hornet grit her fangs, smothered the sound of her laboring breathing as best she could, and leaned more of her weight against the balustrade winding upwards with the stairs, the vines that covered it rustling as they flattened under her hand.

“I’ve told you a dozen times not to read my thoughts.” Hornet grumbled, though she knew full-well they didn’t have to. She hadn’t exactly been subtle about her distaste for the old god, though now she nearly wondered if she should’ve been, at least around the littler ones.

Ghost didn’t respond to that, but neither did they leave like she expected. This time, the silence was a painful one. What had she done to deserve their stubbornness, their refusal to snarl back when her bitter words got the better of her?

“I’m sorry. I am not upset with you. Only… Tired.” She relented. “Was there something you wanted?”

“Well, if you need to rest, Hollow’s already promised Nettle and Sonnet that they’ll show them around the greenhouses.” Ghost said, dodging the question.

Strange. Ghost did not, as far as she’d known them, make a habit of avoiding much of anything. “I don’t. And I wouldn’t recommend they do so; the greenhouses in this wing of the Gardens are Mantis land.”

“Still?”

“Would you like to go and check that all the Traitor’s tribe are gone? They’ve been Mantis lands since before the lords’ brother succumbed to the sickness. I doubt they would give up such a resource to something so mundane as death.” Hornet told them, hacking away another obscuring cluster of branches leaned over into her path. “I believe they grow tea there, among other things. Actual tea. Though with how easily Midwife snagged a cutting of ginger, their gardens could be undefended.”

“Oh. That makes sense, I guess. I didn’t really look into every greenhouse when I came through here.”

“They do all look much the same, overgrown like this. You likely wouldn’t have found much of interest there, not even to one such as you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Ghost, I’ve watched you spend weeks trying to worm your way into places you don’t belong. One might argue that’s all you’ve ever done in this kingdom.” Hornet told them, amused by their indignation. “You remember the thorn beds? The Greenpath thorn beds, with-“

“I remember.” They quickly cut her off to say. “Don’t tell Hollow?”

“Oh, now the tale isn’t worth retelling, is it? I think it one of your prouder moments.” Hornet burst into a half-stifled bout of giggles before she’d finished speaking, startling a flock of maskflies into panicked, whistling flight to the hazy heights of the cavern.

A proud moment, indeed. Proudly humbling, if nothing else.

“Hornet, please don’t tell them. You know they’d laugh, and then they’d feel bad about it.” Ghost lowered their not-voice to say, glancing nervously behind them.

Hornet glanced back with them, searching the undergrowth until she thought to look up, and saw Hollow dragged along like a woebegone, lanky fungoon after Sonnet, who had a secure grip on their hand as they towed their unresisting sibling along from flower to flower growing from the cavern walls. Still safe, following along behind her.

Hollow, in the light of day, was startlingly large in comparison to the little shade leading them, and vastly overshadowing Nettle as the tiny shadow darted alongside their siblings to draw the collective attention to better-hidden wonders as they came upon them. With the height they hovered at to patiently examine some of the higher outgrowths, and if Hollow could keep the twins more-or-less on track, it would be hours yet of the steep climb before they were in danger of losing sight of each other. Hornet scanned the spaces between the dense greenery as closely as she could, but as far as she could see there was nothing at all that moved, nothing to threaten. Not airborne mantids, nor loodles clinging to the roots overhead, nor even a drifting mossfly.

Even the peaceful aluba were nowhere to be seen, though Hornet could have sworn she’d seen one outside the sunroom above Deepnest’s road. No movement but that of the shifting grass, the waving fronds above, the living shadows she walked with. She might’ve mistaken it for a quiet day, before.

“Excuses.” Hornet dismissed loudly, mostly to see Ghost quickly check again to see if the others had heard. “I will keep my peace, for now. Keep that in mind when next you think to charge off into something that I’ll need to pull you out of.”

“That really didn’t happen that often.” Ghost defended. “And you didn’t ever need to get me out, I would’ve been fine.”

“I’m sure.” Hornet told them wryly.

“You should be! I can handle myself. I could beat you, after all.”

“Once. It won’t happen again.”

“Twice.”

Hornet huffed, side-eyeing them with half an unbidden smile twitching at her chelicerae. “I held back for our first clash, little Ghost. Once.”

“I’d make it three times here and now if I could hold a nail.” Ghost boasted with a pleased thrill of their own, something almost akin to a giddy laugh for the prospect of a good fight, all offense apparently forgotten. “With my hands closed and my eyes tied behind my back!”

“Empty words, shade. Save them for when you’ve the means to follow through.” Hornet advised them, climbing over where a bold root had delved into the pavestones of the path, that arched up high enough to wind around a vine-riddled column just to the side of the road.

“And if you’re finished starting fights you won’t win, did you have anything to ask? Or did I only look too at peace with the world to be allowed?” Hornet asked when Ghost only broadcasted a brief, lionhearted moment of surety in their own victory, like they looked forward to the idea so much it might as well be a certainty in their future, like the sun rising over the mountains.

“You looked broody. I supposed I would distract you before you convinced yourself we were all doomed, or that the world’s ending again, or anything like that. And also, to make sure you weren’t about to keel over.” Ghost rattled off, with a trace to their void like a faint smile.

“I’m touched.” Hornet rolled her eyes and cut through another hanging sheet of greenery, kicking it aside as leaves and springy branches fell to the path. “The world never ended a first time, only something far smaller. I would take one who wandered in from the wastes to know that well.”

“I didn’t say I thought it was ending, I said that you do. I mean, I wouldn’t put it past you.”

“Well, I don’t. What use would there be in fretting over such a formless, impossible worry, anyway? There are plenty enough concerns to deal with, without imagining more for myself.” Hornet said to that, without quite succeeding in keeping her scorn for the idea out of her voice.

The only reply Ghost had for that was an unconvinced tilt of their head, and the growing impression that they hadn’t said all they wanted to, like an impending dust storm on the horizon, unsettled enough that even Hornet picked up on it with some wariness. They didn’t express any part of it for long minutes as Hornet hacked through the undergrowth where it grew too thick to step over or forge a path through, long enough for the constant teetering on the precipice to begin to wear on her patience, sparking with deliberation that couldn’t have been hers.

“I wanted to ask you about what happened, too. In Deepnest. I told Nettle and Sonnet that you’d be alright, but I’m not sure anymore.” Ghost said slowly, drifting a little ahead to look sideways at her, like if they examined her closely enough the answer would reveal itself.

Maybe it would, if she wasn’t careful. They could be unreasonably perceptive at times.

“Nothing that will repeat itself.” Hornet told them. “Only a mistake I will not make twice.”

“Hornet,” they said, with more exasperation than any living creature should be able to inject into a single spoken word. “I can ask you what’s wrong now, and you can hear when I do, so you can’t ignore me when I say that whatever happened isn’t something you can shrug off.” Ghost said stubbornly, their tendrils flicking restlessly.

“It isn’t up for discussion; what befell me won’t happen a second time, and that’s all you need to know.” Hornet said stiffly. “I don’t need your help, and neither do I desire it.”

“But you have it. I’m giving it to you, even if it’s only so you aren’t on your own. And, who knows? Maybe I can help, after all, at least with making sure it really doesn’t happen again.” They said with the faintest undercurrent of resentment, gone as quickly as she heard it.

“No one told you what happened after you were knocked out.” Ghost said, with a grim resolution that made Hornet force herself to allow them to speak.

What was truly worrisome, whether it be the exact reason Ghost saw fit to push the issue or not, was that even she wasn’t entirely certain what had caused her to be caught by the Void’s call. A deadly lapse in judgement, surely, one that might’ve compromised all they sought after, and still she’d been too overwhelmed at the time to pin down what’d set her off. It was only a dim, half-recalled haze of too much and hatred like the bite of her own claws.

To dredge the memory up again was an exercise in futility, for it had surely only been a brief moment of incapability that need not be allowed to see the light of day.

Ghost, evidently, did not agree. “You wouldn’t wake up. Again. And this time, it didn’t happen a few minutes outside of Dirtmouth. It was in Deepnest, with the Void crawling up the tunnels behind us, and if Midwife hadn’t been there, we couldn’t’ve gotten you out. Do you realize how lucky it is that there was anyone there who could’ve helped? The Mask Maker left as soon as void began to claw at the stone far below and darken the air around us, and I don’t blame them.”

“I shouldn’t have needed her intervention!” Hornet shot back, clenching her claws around her needle’s handle. “I shouldn’t have allowed myself to fall in the first place. You’ve made your point, Ghost, and you needn’t worry; I will not allow what happened to do so again, and you are at no risk of any weakness of mine to endanger you.” Hornet said venomously, though she couldn’t have said if the venom was directed towards their assumption that it would or at herself, for making them believe so.

“I shouldn’t need help. I don’t need help.” Hornet reined in the spite in her voice to say.

Ghost went quiet at that, though Hornet could tell it was more a considering, baffled sort of quiet than anything else. Around them both, the calling of the far-off maskflies rang sharp and twittering over the deep foliage, that obscured the sound’s source as much as it kept it from echoing, the chatter dying amongst the leaves.

“Fine. Think that way if you want to, if that’s what you think is bothering me.” Ghost said, jerking their head away to stare resolutely at the slowly passing scenery, and it didn’t feel like a concession at all as much as a line drawn, as much a challenge as a brandished nail. “Doesn’t mean it’s true.”

Hornet scowled at them as they drifted with ease through the dewed greenery she had to push past, heated words lying like coals in her mouth. What at last allowed her to effortfully swallow the barbed retorts that kept trying to worm their way free was the realization that, for all their stubbornness and frustration, Ghost wasn’t angry. There was no blame in their thoughts as they told them to her, no vitriol or scolding. If they’d been speaking in anger, then that at least she could’ve understood.

But no, instead there was something more akin to confusion, or else wary distress poorly hidden, very faint and certainly not her own, and overshadowing that was the hectic spin of emotion and darting thought of what they wanted to say.

“Are you… Afraid?” Hornet ventured once enough of their thoughts had passed by, unknowable and just beyond her ken, not all the terseness gone from her tone but unable to stand the tension like the pressure before a rainstorm.

“I’m always afraid.” Ghost said without hesitation. “For you and Hollow and everyone else I care for, but you’re the one that keeps refusing to stop before it hurts you. And you’re the one for whom there’s no hope if you die. It’s like you just don’t get that this isn’t something you can brute-force your way through, and it’s frustrating like nothing else you’ve ever done, and I hate it because I understand!” They said all at once, whirling to face her.

“It’s so hard to be all that you have, all alone in the world, and if you falter there’s no one around to save you. It’s so hard to have so much riding on how well you can prove yourself, the lives of people you don’t want to see hurt, especially after you spend gods-know-how-long not caring at all.” They ranted with hurt of their own, a jagged, reaching wound reopened countless times welling in their not-voice, indistinguishable from their words.

“I don’t think you understand, though, how much I’ll give to not see any more of you die. It’s why I’m here,” they told her, gesturing with a jerk of their head to what could only have been Hallownest in general. “Because I remembered Hollow and I couldn’t let them die like that, not without at least trying. They’re a stronger person than you or me, and they’ve survived a fate I wouldn’t wish on anyone, and everything that’s happened, happened because they needed help.”

They sounded helpless, and agonized for it. Like they were watching her dig her own grave, powerless to keep her from it, instead of only dismissing the minor setbacks of her void-given weakness as they came (and of course they were minor, perhaps the stuff was deadly to a common bug, but not her, not when she was still needed).

It was a ridiculous fear, and a needless one, for Hornet would not allow herself to succumb to any call of the darkness. She couldn’t, of course she couldn’t, there was far too much to do still, a newly reborn land and family to see to, and the longer she stayed belowground, the more the warmth of the sunlight above seemed something she had to see again. Ghost and the rest would be left behind if she succumbed, and this final promise she’d made, the last duty she had to tie herself to, would be forsaken. No, Hornet knew that, even now, there could be no death she could bear to yield to.

And yet, Ghost didn’t know that.

They didn’t know how they and their siblings drained at her life, and she could not tell them. Of course they didn’t, they’d have been inconsolable. Instead, all they knew was that they’d seen her laid low over and over by what was nigh-harmless to them, with all but no idea why. Could she begrudge them their fears?

It would be unfair to. “I hadn’t realized you felt so strongly about this.” Hornet said quietly, with as little brusqueness as she knew how to give.

“I’m sick of watching my siblings die.” Ghost replied simply, stiffly. “I’m sick of it.”

They made a frustrated sort of hum and twisted away, roughly brushing a tendril under their eyes, and Hornet lost all the fight she had left to her.

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want you to be sorry, I want you to stop pretending nothing’s wrong. I want you to be okay.” Ghost said muddily, the thought indistinct. “I want us all to be okay.”

And what could she say to that? Hornet found herself at a loss, with no comfort to give that wouldn’t be a lie, or else a promise she couldn’t keep, now that their greatest hope had been dashed. It was jarring in a way she hadn’t expected, to hear them teetering on the edge of what could’ve almost been despair, had it come from anyone else. It couldn’t be, of course, she’d never known Ghost to so much as consider losing heart, and even now she wasn’t totally sure they were capable of retreating from anything they’d set their mind to.

The little Ghost of Hallownest, as she knew them, did not give up on what they’d decided to do.

Yet rarely had they set their sights on anything but what must be done, what could be done if only someone fought for it. And if she had no comforting words to give them, perhaps action could stand in their place.

“… Ghost?”

Ghost responded with an unhappy, questioning sort of shift, nothing that could be construed as a whole and directed thought, hovering just above Hornet’s eyelevel as the road flattened, the scant pavestones disappearing amidst the low-growing vines and sparse patches of grasses sprouting up in their places. The air was heavy and humid here, and through the mist that had risen up around them, condensation collected on the broad leaves and grass blades and darkened the hem of her shawl where she brushed past them.

“It would… Help me, if you’d go collect the others.” Hornet said, carefully keeping anything like demand from her voice. “We are nearly to a bottleneck in the road, and I do not wish to lose them as the roof dips low. It will be difficult to see through the mists.”

Something they could do that, with luck, they’d take as the peace offering it was. Something she could theoretically accomplish herself easily enough, but that would require her to backtrack, when she was already tired.

Hm. There was a thought, if they were so concerned with her wellbeing. “… And then we might take a break. There should be an orchard not far from here, with a fountain that may still run. The twins may enjoy it.”

The suggestion gave them pause, and she could nearly hear how they mulled it over.

“… Alright.” Ghost said. And then, “Hornet?”

Hornet hummed at them to say what they would.

“You don’t need to tell me what happened if you don’t want to, but you’ll let me help if I can, right? If you need it?” They asked. “For anything important?”

Hornet hesitated. Something poisonous that could never have been guilt twined itself thornlike through her belly, and she took a deep, settling breath of the dew-dampened air.

They didn’t need to know. So long as she dealt with her weakness before they discovered how they worsened it, she could spare them the knowing of it entirely. She’d be fine until a solution to the void in her chest could be found. Of course, she would, for no matter Midwife’s warning, it hadn’t killed her yet.

So, “I will try to. If it matters so to you that I do, I will try.” For anything else but this, she would try.

“… That’s good enough, I suppose.” Ghost replied with something that felt like a smile, faint and tired but genuine, nonetheless,

Even so, Hornet knew they still feared.

The guilt did not leave.

Chapter Text

And so Hornet found that simple peace offerings do not always soothe tightly-held fears.

The day dragged on into a sleepless night charmed by the chirruping tiny bugs hidden and singing in old, leaf-strewn eaves, and once she’d gotten them all up and back to walking the next day, they weren’t far from the White Lady’s retreat at all. It’d be only another few hours’ time at most of cutting through the dense greenery, that Hornet could only guess was becoming all the denser for how much nearer they’d come to the reclusive god. Yet for all that it’d only take a last determined push to find their way to the old queen’s hidden grove, Hornet found herself frustratingly exhausted, even with the break they’d taken.

She was familiar with physical fatigue, and with the more immutable tiredness that sometimes overtook her when the lands she’d ranged seemed too rote, sprawling but hopelessly unchanged, busy with hissing and orange-sickened folk but empty of familiar faces. The numbing, wearying cold in her chest seemed a potent combination of both, the uncertainty of her step and the feeble pounding of her heart cut through with a soul-deep, silent plea to sit and rest and sleep.

Simple enough to ignore, taken with all the practice she had to keep herself from dwelling on such things, but she’d also nearly tripped and landed face-first in more than a few bramble beds. And that, Hornet found, was harder to focus past.

Traversing her kingdom had never before taken so much out of her, but by the time she’d staggered into a small clearing, Hornet was nearing the end of her stamina, and was closer still to the end of her patience with her own faltering legs.

There were false lights blinking before her eyes when she finally leaned back against the creaking iron pillar of a pagoda to catch her breath, driving the tip of her needle into the crack between two pavestones to rest her sore arms over its looped hilt.

Of any part of the Gardens she could’ve chosen to rest within, this one was at least appreciably clear of snarls of brambles or thorns, the likes of which had been catching at her shawl whenever she dropped her guard for the last few miles. The ground of this clearing, right up to the shade of the pagoda she leaned against, was detailed in stonework too intricate for any plantlife of substance to find a roothold within it, and the edges loomed over by immense, vague-faced statues nearly too bare to seem fitting for their surroundings. The cavern roof here was vaulted-high, rising far enough above her that to squint up at it revealed no hint that it might exist at all, nothing but the thickening mist obscuring all past a distant height.

“Are you still doing alright?” Ghost asked patiently, with no indication that they thought her exhaustion was anything out of the ordinary.

Hornet thought that fair enough, and a fortunate stroke of luck on her part; they’d never traveled with her before, couldn’t know that it took far, far more than a relaxing hike through the Gardens to tire her to the brink of collapse under any other circumstances. Even then, they must have only the most barebones framework for guessing how quickly a living bug might become tired at all, if they thought a half-day trekking through the flowers and clambering over roots would make one so.

Though she, too, hadn’t traveled with another in the time that generations could live and die; in all honesty, they could easily have the right of it.

“Yes, Ghost, I am well.” Hornet panted, shuffling to the side to be able to rest her head against the spiraling metal and wait for the dizzy spell to abate. At least the Gardens were temperate, famously so; if they’d been muggy like Greenpath, the climb would be significantly less bearable.  “We near the White Lady’s retreat. Here is a suitable place to let the others catch up.”

Ghost drifted higher, craning to see past the flowering bushes and back down the path they’d followed this far. “That might take a while. I can hear them, but they seem… Distracted.”

“Do you think they will meet difficulty, to find us here?” Hornet asked.

“No, if I can hear them, then they can tell where we are. It just might take a little while before they realize we’ve stopped and come find us. I wonder what they found that’s so interesting?” Ghost asked, curiosity curling through the thought like they were tempted to backtrack just to find out for themself.

“You could go to see. I wouldn’t think badly of you for it.” Hornet laughed faintly at them, the air still seeming too thin for anything of more substance.

“Nice try. I’ll stay, and we can come back through the Gardens and see everything after this is all over.” Ghost told her, preemptive excitement as heady in their not-voice as the day-warmed flowers’ scent. “It’ll be wonderful, we can all go, there’s so much I want to show you!” They insisted eagerly.

“You might find a better audience with the others; there is little in any land of Hallownest’s that I am unfamiliar with.” Hornet prompted, feeling recovered enough to lean casually against her needle instead of using it to prop herself up. “I fear I’d be a disappointing tourist.”

“Oh, don’t worry, you’re all coming.” Ghost said like they might’ve tacked on ‘whether you like it or not’. “If you get bored, you can always tell us how little we know of the rich and fraught history of, oh, greenhouse three hundred fifty-nine, or something.” They offered, humming with too much genuine enthusiasm for the remark to be pointed. “And…” They trailed off, distracted unusually quickly by something, twisting midair to look closer around the clearing Hornet had stopped in.

“I’ve been here before!” Ghost exclaimed. “Look, up there!”

They pointed insistently at a patch of distant thorn vines, a rambling bed of them some sixty feet over Hornet’s head, growing like a red-tipped, prickling warning from the cavern wall. Hornet frowned thoughtfully up at it, and it took only a moment to place what it must have been, given where in the Gardens they stood, deep within Mantis lands.

Ghost continued anyway, coiling slowly like a curl of black smoke in the air, with their face turned upwards and away so that they were only a dark, soft-edged mar on the Gardens’ endless green. “That’s where the Traitors’ Child sleeps. I brought her flowers, once, for a friend.”

“Hm. That’s all?” Hornet said, surprised in spite of herself. “Most of your ventures tend to be far more… Exciting.”

Lethal, more like. If there was a challenge to be made of anything, the little Ghost would be the one to take it up with relish and, true to form, end with a number more deaths under their belt before they saw it through. A trip to the grave of Mysterious Ze’mer’s lost lover, only to take her a flower or two in remembrance, while an admirable service to offer, sounded nearly bloodless.

They did not disappoint. “It was plenty exciting, and it took a very, very long week to get here. They were special flowers, and if I moved too carelessly, they’d drop all their petals. I was too nervous even to keep the one the Grey Mourner gave me safe in void while I traveled, it was so delicate.” Ghost lamented.

“Ah. Those flowers.” Hornet said. “And she asked you to take them all the way here? Through the entire kingdom? That is quite a kingly service you granted, though I’d hardly begrudge her its completion. I wonder if she’s forgotten the perils of the world, holed up in her hidden home as she is.” Hornet guessed uncharitably, eyeing the loops of bristling, draping vine, the bitter points of the thorns half-obscured by the rising mists.

“She knew what she was asking.” Ghost said, turning their pale gaze down to her. “It was her last request.”

Hornet stilled. “She is dead?”

And Ghost’s shallow nod, Hornet sighed. “A grim thing she asked of you, then. Though there’s much bad blood between us, disagreements and misunderstandings as much a fault of the poor circumstances of our acquaintance as anything else, I am glad she found a measure of peace. Her and her lover, both.”

Ghost did not respond to that, not even in the wordless way she knew they could, but the clearing’s air seemed indescribably, subtly changed. Though the light still shone weak and pale, and there’d never been any stirring of a breeze to begin, Hornet couldn’t help but think the place darker and less welcoming, more uncomfortable in a way unrelated to either. Hornet pushed away from the pagoda and grabbed up her needle, somewhat recovered and with the change in atmosphere itching like a threat at her to move, plucking at some half-buried memory in the back of her mind that she knew, even as she couldn’t quite recall it with any clarity without effort, was not a happy one.

Another Vessel, in another time, with the same reticent silence. It set her on edge, and she strode to the edge of the clearing without waiting to see what else the shade’s quietude would pull to the forefront of her mind, hacking at the overgrown vines choking the path with a violence they did not necessarily merit.

Her arms began to ache almost immediately as she forced her way deeper down the greenery-shrouded road, but far better that than the alternative, to stay there and wait until there was nothing else to do but remember.

The little Ghost, by the cold suddenly creeping down her back, had dived back down from the heights to follow her closely, such that Hornet suspected that if she glanced over her shoulder, she’d find them just in her wake and lurking within her own shadow. Yet even as she waited for them to speak, to give voice to whatever had occurred to them to cause their mood to darken so abruptly, they did not. It was unusual for Ghost to keep any sort of strong emotion to themself, yet now they did so even as Hornet pressed on through the dense greenery, ducking beneath the wide-leafed ferns and around the twining grasses catching their serrated edges in her shawl.

And though they said nothing at all, Ghost was not nearly as skilled at wholly hiding the low, building distress turning over and over upon itself in their void.

It didn’t take long before Hornet couldn’t abide by it. “What’s wrong?” She asked, when it became clear they wouldn’t break their silence of their own accord.

Ghost hesitated. “… What happened to the Traitors’ Child?” They yielded to ask, something fragile in the question.

Hornet dug her claws into the breaking undergrowth she fought her way through with a scowl, forcing a rustling fistful of it to the side with more force than strictly necessary. Theirs was a strange thing to ask, nearly a non-sequitur, even though they’d only just left the mantis’ grave behind. She hadn’t taken Ghost for one easily disturbed by death, nor easily swayed by tragedy, at least not that which had long passed and had all but no connection to their own life.

They took too great a delight in battle to be so sensitive to its inevitable outcome, when all her kingdom was layered upon some tragedy or another. They’d seen too much to be able to give all their heart to every fate met too early, and still hope to survive intact.

So, “She died, as many did.” Hornet said simply. “I know not how. It has been many years, now.”

“Okay. That’s alright.” Ghost said, very softly. “It’s not important.”

And then, to her frustration and quickly-growing concern, they fell silent again.

“Ghost,” Hornet prompted, only keeping the worst of her exasperation from her voice with effort.

“… It’s okay, I’m only thinking. About what I left behind when I was a wanderer, when I forgot this kingdom ever existed for so long. I don’t think I’d ever considered it like this.” They said vaguely, like they were only thinking out loud and, even then, only sharing the tail end of what weighed on them. “Like something that could’ve been different, if I’d come sooner.”

There was a flicker of understanding she could draw from their words, a thread of comprehension that Hornet could grasp onto to coax them into telling her what bothered them, what ate at them so, what was so awful to consider that they nearly couldn’t bring themself to say it aloud. “There’s not anything you could have changed, not of this land’s ills. None might ever blame you for them, not you.”

Ghost hardly acknowledged her, just gave the impression of a faint nod to break up their quietude, and with them following behind her on the trail there was no way to know if it was accompanied by a real one.

“And however difficult the journey, we seek now to remedy the last of what we might. Already you have saved my kingdom, and we will do so again, sibling. Of this, I do not doubt.” Hornet assured.

Ghost faltered again, unnervingly, but Hornet kept the worry it inspired from coming from her mouth barbed and demanding.

“Are you sure that there isn’t? That there’s nothing I could’ve done?” They asked, very softly, like they were nearly afraid to, though she’d never known them to be truly frightened of anything that mattered. Not in a way they couldn’t overcome. “Are you sure you don’t?”

That quiet, almost indistinguishable thread of inevitability she’d first noticed the day before was returned to them, a rooted, lonely sort of dread. It clutched and swelled like a loathsome weed, and even now that she knew to look for it, and Ghost could no longer conceal it, she only knew its edges clearly enough to tell it ran far deeper than she could discern.

Hornet glanced to Ghost, now hovered chillingly close at her side and simply drifting through the strands of plant matter as they met them, leaving the twining vines darkened and frost-tinged. Here in the light and the constant sound of the shifting leaves, they seemed less. Less solid, less sharp and otherworldly, not nearly as unswerving or as fearless as they had before, or even as they’d seemed in life, though she knew well that there was a difference between bravery and fearlessness.

They seemed younger. Much, much younger, for all that they weren’t any smaller.

Ghost said nothing else as she frowned searchingly at them, taken off guard by the question. It was a strange one; Hornet did not consider herself an uncertain bug if it could at all be helped.

It reminded her of the scant few times, in the days leading up to the death they couldn’t come back from, when they’d seemed… Not wavering in their resolve, exactly, but more withdrawn than she’d come to expect of them, usually such a force of curiosity with their merciless blade to back it up. When they’d sought her out and hadn’t had anything to show for it, hadn’t asked anything of her, either, only waited until she stopped and then sat next to her in their silence, as still as though carved from stone while she’d tended her blade or her tools or tried to wash the day’s grime from her horns and hands.

They’d looked, in those times, like they truly felt the weight of the past they carried, the terrible fate they had to have foreseen to await them in the Black Egg. They’d shivered, they’d ignored her when she spoke to them and, once, they had cried. As soundlessly as anything else they did, such that she nearly didn’t notice until they crept close and huddled against her side as though to hide in her shadow from a storm.

Hornet had not been able to make herself push them off even then, though with the way their little claws shook as they’d curled into her shawl, it wouldn’t have taken more than a shove. Had only set her hand over their shoulder and reminded her claws to be gentle instead, and then let them cry and tried as hard as she could to know that she wouldn’t intercede for them again, she couldn’t.

She had. Of course, she had. She’d do so again, in a heartbeat.

Are you sure that there isn’t, they’d said when she knew there was nothing more they could’ve done. Are you sure you don’t, they’d asked when she did not doubt.

Were these the questions that had haunted them then? Only now could she tell that they dreaded, and possibly had all along, as obviously as any other living bug might express. It wasn’t a fear she was familiar with, not one they’d ever told her of, but it haunted them as clearly as they haunted her, present in the darkness of their face that did not reflect back the light they bathed in as they drifted between the plantlife, that they refused to turn to her even as she sought their gaze.

“I am.” Hornet said to them, as kindly as she could and far too late. “I am certain that the fate to befall my kingdom was no responsibility of yours, and I am as certain that we might undo what is done, inasmuch as fate returns again to blight us. What is this about?”

“But it’s… It’s not right. Is it,” Ghost balked yet again, their words failing them, and they sounded so young when they asked, “is it my fault?”

They were not referring to the cold in Hornet’s chest, nor even the longer-than-expected journey they were undertaking, nor the inexplicable darkness rising below them. Through the meaning their void gave alongside the words, Hornet knew they meant everything, all that had befallen her and her kingdom and all those who’d suffered within it, who they’d left before they could see and returned too late to know.

How easy it was to forget that they were still so small. That for all they’d seen and all they’d experienced, all they’d done and all they’d survived, they were still all but a child. They’d never grown. And it must have been with a brief succumbing to the logic of the hurt that they asked this of her, logic of one who’d never been told differently, that they had to have done something wrong because there was no other recourse available, no one else to blame for a blameless situation.

It was not a logic unfamiliar to Hornet, and that they’d somehow come to know it too, to hurt and see fault, real or imagined, in themself enough times to need to ask her now, tore at her worse than their tears.

They shouldn’t have had to, none of them should’ve, but how badly it threw her to have the little Ghost of Hallownest ask if it had all been their fault. How it froze the pit of her stomach to think that they might’ve thought the grisly fate of a beloved land was their wrongdoing even back when she couldn’t have heard them say so, how it made her abruptly aware that however little she’d had, they’d had less. No Herrah or Midwife or home, only a dark hole in the ground that had tried to kill them to the best of its ability, and a parent who’d put them there.

How their words made her blood boil, made her wish the Pale King had not lost his life an age before, so that she might find him and take it from him herself.

And Hornet knew very well that if she’d felt so protective back when her world’s fate rested upon her ability to prevent the Vessels’ destruction of the Dreamers’ seals, the Old Light would have taken what the Pale King did not.

But that time was gone, and her duty lifted, and there was nothing at all to keep her from acknowledging her sibling for what they were; too young to have ever deserved what had happened to them.

“No. None of it, not ever.” Hornet said heatedly. “Little Ghost, I know not what you have done in the lands beyond the mountains, but none of this was your fault.” She spat vehemently, with a sweeping gesture with her needle to the Kingdom at large.

“It’s not right because nothing has ever been right, and there’s nothing in this world you could have done about it. But it is better, Ghost. You’ve made it better, when those who should have been wiser or more careful or stronger failed to. You shouldn’t have had to, and this wretched, resentful kingdom shouldn’t have asked you to, but you did. No,” Hornet told them, gentling her voice. “It isn’t your fault that any of this has come about, yours least of any.”

“It feels like it is, though. It feels like I came in from the wastes and ended a world.” Ghost said.

“This land was already dead, rotted out of the shell of what it was. You allowed it to breathe anew.”

“It feels like I shouldn’t have this. Like it isn’t right, like it’ll be taken away.” They whispered carefully, like only saying it aloud would make some all-powerful god swoop in and make it so, and Hornet stopped walking in the shadow of a pale, crumbling statue, too massive and too broken to discern what it might have been of from so close, draped with an obscuring shroud of greenery and so colossal that to wait in its lee was to have the Gardens’ ever-present light all but extinguished.

“I feel like I should be alone again.” Ghost mumbled damningly, the white of their eyes turned away and towards nothing.

“You don’t need to be. You know that, don’t you?” Hornet asked quietly. “You know I would not let you take the worst of the new kingdom you’ve brought about, when the worst of fates was all the old one had to give?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to lose anything else. I’d take anything but losing any of you again, but I’ve never gotten to keep something like that before. What if they die, Hornet? What if Hollow dies? What if you die?” Ghost asked, increasingly desperate, and confirming to Hornet then that this was not a sudden fear that had overtaken them.

This’d had time to grow, to turn from fear to certainty, and now to be overturned again. The only wonder was that it’d taken them this long to find it irrepressible.

What must it be like, to be so sure there was nothing for you, that you’d be alone with your regrets for as long as you lived, and then to be offered something better, not perfect but still so different that it was almost unbelievable? It was the cruelest of fates, to have nothing and then be given something, something essential, something that could die.

She wasn’t certain she was unfamiliar with the feeling, however long it had taken her to identify it when it was another’s.

“I can’t promise we won’t. Of gods we may be, but death has taken stronger than the likes of us. But as long as I live, I will not allow it to take you. Any of you. And if I have any say in the matter, I will not allow it to take me.” Hornet swore. “You’re owed as much as any of the results of your deeds, and I will allow neither bug nor god to take that from you.”

“That’s a lot to promise.” Ghost commented faintly, sinking deeper into the towering statue’s gloom.

“I am in a good position to be making promises, even if I don’t intend to make this kingdom my own.” Hornet replied. “And I’d like to see anyone try to make me go back on them.” She offered, tossing and catching her needle just enough to make the metal impacting her claws give a menacing click.

That got a weak giggle from them, at least, before they lapsed back into the quiet, listening to the distant chirrupy trills of roosting maskflies and the yet-faint wind whispering through the vines, and the fainter hums of thought that foretold the rest of their siblings catching up to them at last.

Hornet sighed, and leaned back against the immense statue’s cracked marble. “My actions have not merited it, but do you trust me when I say I won’t let any of what you fear come to pass? What yet threatens is nothing compared to what we’ve outlasted. It’s nearly over, little Ghost. We have won, if there was anything to win but our lives. It will be hard, and disappointing, and it will be unfathomably foreign, but we will survive it, and we will survive it together.”

“Would you be happy if we did?” Ghost asked. “If we all stayed together after this, I mean. If-… When we survive it. You wouldn’t want to go back to Deepnest, or just somewhere else on your own?” Ghost glanced back to her from where they’d been meticulously tearing apart a leaf they must’ve plucked from the vines around.

“Of course, I’d go back to Deepnest. I swore I would, and whoever remains will have need of me, if only as another able needle to provide and a set of hands to rebuild. But if you and the others will not go, I won’t stay there. Deepnest is… Not what it was. It isn’t a home any longer, not mine, no matter what Midwife expects. Whatever they remake will not be mine to be welcomed within.” Hornet said lowly, watching the break in the greenery where the others would come through to meet them, once they arrived.

“I am used to solitude. I do not mind it, not like you do, little Ghost. But it would weigh on my mind more to be away, when there is little else I care for more than preventing any further loss of our lives. I’ll adapt, when the greatest hardship otherwise is choosing whose turn it is to beat the dust out of the curtains. I hear that’s quite a chore, when one lives in Dirtmouth.” Hornet said coolly, trying for a joke.

It fell flatter than usual. Ghost’s thoughts, as they told them to her, rang more of disbelief and grim, solemn expectation than reassurance as they selected another leaf to be disassembled.

“I mean it, Ghost. I know not why you expect me to, but I won’t leave. Not by death and not by choice. You need only trust that I can handle myself.” Hornet stressed, turning to face them. “You’ve told me we’ve been through the impossible together; why should I abandon those who need me, for whom I care deeply, simply because our predestined fates have been fulfilled?”

“You care about us? That’s sweet.” Ghost teased weakly, though they had the mulling air of one who’d not overlooked a word she said.

Hornet rolled her eyes and crossed her arms under her shawl, leaning her head back ‘til her horns tapped the stone behind, to look up at the gently waving leaves overhead that spilled down from the overhanging heights of the old monument. The light wasn’t bright, but it wasn’t dim any longer, either. It reminded her of a morning, crisp and empty and inevitably turning to brighter hours, fuller ones, where the pale filtered past the thin foliage.

And she startled at the brush of tangible cold at her side before she recognized Ghost for who they were, glanced down to see the curve of their shadow-sharp little horns where they’d drifted into her in a thin facsimile of rest, leaning into her shoulder though there was nothing to lean with.

“Thank you. I’m sorry, I’m…”

Hornet turned to them abruptly, before she could lose her nerve to, and pulled them into a tight hug, squeezing as strongly as she dared. They were as cold as ever, yet before her arms went numb she found they still shook, as though the very void of them was aware of how fragile it all was, how very easily all that they and their siblings withstood the slow limp of the hopeless years for could be torn away.

“It’s alright,” Hornet murmured fiercely to them as they buried their face in her chest and shook all the harder, curled all their little tendrils close like they expected her to scoop them into the folds of her shawl. She tightened her arms just a touch. “It’s alright. It’ll be alright.”

Ghost shook their head some, as though in weak denial.

“It will be. You know it will.” Hornet swore under her breath. “Don’t make a liar of yourself. Where’s all that nonsense from before, about being okay in spite of it all?”

“Is it nonsense or is it the truth? You have to make up your mind.” Ghost mumbled instead of an answer, the lights of their eyes still hidden against her as they wrestled with something she could hardly discern the shape of, even with their thoughts so loud and so close. Something vast and insidious, like a hundred years’ worth of unhappy memory come together to a single consensus, one single expectation that had never proven wrong, one they were gathering the courage to fight against.

What it was, what it was born from, even why they turned away from it, Hornet couldn’t have known directly from the call of their void to hers. But she did know Ghost, and the rest was inconsequential.

“Everything you do is nonsense, little Ghost.” Hornet told them matter-of-factly, and her chelicerae twitched up into a smile when Ghost headbutted her in indignation, the blow as light as the brush of moths’ wings.

Her hands began to prickle painfully, and over Ghost’s horns every short, strained exhale came fogged with the cold, so she gave them a last gentle squeeze and nudged them away. The little shade clung to her shawl some with a snarled tendril, but otherwise went easily enough, the jittery, unsettled jump of their void lessened.

“I don’t know why it’s so hard to think so, now. That I’ll be okay.” Ghost said, looking down at where fragments of light filtering past the vine canopy met with the dense grass below, growing darker and stiffly frosted where they hung low above it.

“I was so sure about Hollow and you and myself walking out of that awful place, right up until the end. Until I saw what it would take to make sure the Radiance was gone with my own eyes. Does it make sense that I knew, then, that it was right for me to die like that? Death, in any consequential way, always seemed impossible. I knew it so well and I knew it wasn’t something that I could allow, and so I didn’t. But if I’d died then, like that, for that… I think I would’ve been able to sleep, having done what I’d done. I think it would’ve been alright. And then it wouldn’t have mattered if I was going to be able to keep a happy ending or not.” Ghost told the falling leaves twirling down from overhead when the breeze picked up, the closest of which slowly drifting to rest at Hornet’s feet.

Hornet considered that for a moment. “It would have been alright,” she answered them. “I would have walked out of the temple with my mind and body intact, and begun my and my kingdom’s lives anew. I would have done much as I did, had you never returned; I’d have gone up to Dirtmouth and eaten and rested, and then set myself to righting the greatest wrongs I could. Hallownest would be well, in time. That godawful void you and yours hail from is a sort of peace, this I know, and any journey that ends there would be alright.”

“But it would have been alright in the same way that my mother’s death was alright.” Hornet said bluntly. “In much the same way as any whose death I watched come for them in the night, frothing and tinged rotten and saccharine, was alright, how the death of any Vessel to fall at my hand was alright. I survived. Time carried on. The world did not stop, and there was still something to fight for, and if only I did not think of it, it could be as though nothing had changed.”

“One can survive anything, little Ghost. But how desperately I do not want to.” Hornet said fervently.

“How much I would give to never survive anything again, and what little I have left to give for it. It would not have been alright if you hadn’t returned to try again, you foolish Vessel. Keep your hope, hold it close to your chest, for it has given you far more than any survival of mine. You were right to think you’d walk, living, out from the Black Egg Temple.”

Ghost nodded slowly, the shafts of light that should’ve run bright over their horns as they moved only petering out in their dark. “… I didn’t want to die. I only thought there’d be some satisfaction in it this time, like rounding off one story and stopping before another could get cut short, even if the first one ended badly. Symmetry, maybe. Coming into the world a little too late to deal with a problem and going out the same way. There’s really no way to say the Radiance’s death was timely for anyone, after all.”

“If you’d come back to Hallownest at any other point, and especially when there was still something left to save, it’s extremely likely that I would have killed you outright, as many times as it took.” Hornet said curtly. “Of all the sins for any to be accused of, tardiness isn’t high on my list. If I’m not making you feel better right now, just tell me so that I might try something else.”

“You’re trying to make me feel better?” Ghost tilted their head incredulously at her to say.

“I supposed, wrongly, that sharing my thoughts on the matter – opening up, as you’d say – would make you feel less like you ought to hide your own.” Hornet said stiffly, and raised her chin to glower stubbornly out into the undergrowth.

There was a long, tense pause.

“It didn’t make me feel worse, if that helps at all.” Ghost offered with a strange kind of tremulous strain, not grief or discomfort or sadness, that made Hornet frown and look over at them.

At her searching glance, as though it were the final straw, Ghost burst into peals of heady, slightly hysterical laughter, bubbling up out of them with as much inevitability as their worries had. Outwardly, as ever, they were utterly silent amidst the rising and falling rush of the trickling wind through the vines, but through void Hornet could nearly audibly hear the helpless giggling that made them curl slightly into themself, the formless black of about where their shoulders should’ve been juddering with ill-suppressed humor.

Hornet thought it fairly tactless of them, but supposed also that she had no real place to talk of tact, and only watched dryly as they laughed themself out.

“I’m sorry, I am, I promise I’m not laughing at you,” Ghost told her when they could collect themself enough to. “That was just the strangest, most convoluted way I think anyone’s ever tried to say that they’d miss someone if they were gone.”

“I’m out of practice,” Hornet insisted as they fell to giggles again, the locked set of her shoulders she hadn’t quite noticed tense falling some as they did, for there was no misinterpreting their unspoken words as anything but gently teasing, without any malice at all, not that she especially expected to find any from Ghost of all folk. And if she were to be honest with herself, which Hornet thought she was in the habit of being, for all the annoyance it caused it was far, far better to see Ghost laugh than despair.

If she had to put up with a moment’s laughter at her expense for that cause, then so be it.

“It’s okay, I am too.” They said through what felt like a smile, when at last their laughter faded. “I do feel better, so I guess it’s a roundabout kind of win. I think you misunderstood me, though; I don’t think it’d be alright to, I don’t know, give myself over to the Void when next it calls, for example. I’m only here in any way at all because I left the Void, and it won’t get me back anytime soon. I don’t want to sleep there, not yet.” They reassured.

“I just… I want for this to turn out like you say it will, like I hoped it would. I want that so much it nearly hurts. But having the worst behind us like this, it’s so strange, Hornet. Maybe it’s a dangerous way to think about it, but even the Void itself doesn’t seem like too much more than a bump in the road. Maybe because there’s a sort of logic to it, or because I’ve been there, now. It mostly feels like we made it, and it would be so easy to lose it all again.”

“But we won’t. You’re right that we won’t, because once I get my mask back, I won’t let anything happen to us.” Ghost said, and from anyone else Hornet would’ve taken the surety in their voice for conceit, blatant and untenable arrogance at best. “And before then, I know you won’t.”

But this was Ghost, and she’d never won any battles betting against them, and their certainty wasn’t quite boasting, anyway; only just as calm a fact as their hold on their nail when she’d watched them walk into the opened Black Egg without a glance behind, like they knew better than her what they’d find there.

“I don’t doubt it,” Hornet told them with a huff that was almost a laugh, something they likely beamed up at her for just as much as the honesty she couldn’t quite bring herself to hide, and pushed away from the cold white monument crumbling eternally at her back to go and find the others, to make it true.

Chapter Text

And so Hornet found it a grim sort of irony that as many of them as had collected before the White Lady’s retreat, the shades and Hornet and the god herself, were more likely than not the closest to a family reunion their kin had ever come.

It was a fairly painless walk through the narrower, higher tunnels almost completely overtaken with the climbing, pale-flowering bushes’ and reaching vines to come there, the god’s cavern closed off from the rest of the winding fields. A little meadow from which all the Gardens’ light seemed to come, brighter-lit with the white-pale roots twining overhead like the veins of the Kingdom itself, and tucked into its recesses and hosting all manner of creeping, flourishing overgrowth over a deadened, lightless shell of cast-off roots would be the god they sought.

Hornet had not visited it in years, hadn’t wanted to in longer, but though the plantlife died and regrew and died again, the White Lady’s final domain was everlasting.

“So, who is the White Lady?” Nettle asked once they and their twin had finally been ushered into the dead-ended meadow, though Sonnet all but pushed them out of the air in their haste to get them to shut up. Nettle squawked as they twirled midair to avoid them, more baffled by the attack than affronted. “If we’re going to see her, we have to know what to say! She’s a Lady.” They stressed.

“She’s not a shade, Nettle, she couldn’t hear you say anything.” Sonnet dipped close to whisper, as though wanting to spare Nettle the embarrassment of being reminded in front of Hornet and not quite realizing that she could hear their every word. “They don’t want to talk about her.” They followed up, tilting their head meaningfully in Hollow’s general direction.

“You didn’t tell them.” Hornet said flatly.

“Should I have?” Hollow asked, cocking their head to stare beseechingly down at her. “I have little memory of the Queen, less that isn’t retold from Father’s eyes. I thought it wiser to admire the Gardens’ many blooms and wonders with the little ones, rather than give false impressions.”

“False impressions, hm. Is that how you consider the Pale King’s words?” Hornet said.

“It is how I consider my own perception of her.” Hollow replied with as much tolerance as tired resignation, as though it would have taken more effort than they could give to contend with her thoughtless jab. “I met with the Queen only once, when I was very young, and she spared me no speech.”

“I see.” Hornet frowned to herself, dropping their gaze.

“Have you?”

“Have I what?”

“Did you ever meet the White Lady, Queen of Hallownest?” Hollow asked, and if Hornet hadn’t been paying attention, she might’ve missed the way they’d gone stiller even than they usually were, in body and soul drawn taut like a light-starved thing straining for the sun. It did not match with how casually they spoke, their composure too unfalteringly at-ease to be truly so.

Her frown deepened.

It felt wrong to say that she had, for that to be the end of it. What a particular brand of unintentional cruelty, to admit to receiving another’s mother’s affection when even they, her child, had not. There was no painless way Hornet could conceive of to tell them that she’d turned to the White Lady in the months after her own mother had gone to dream, for a soul in the world to speak to that held no pity for her and a creature not of Deepnest to advise her when she couldn’t admit she struggled.

Yet there was no true kindness in a pacifying lie, not unless the one gifted it would be dead before a falsehood could matter, and that was not the case with her sibling.

Had they been anyone else, anyone whose silent, hermetic prison she had not watched be forgotten, and then abandoned, and then desiccated and waiting until the shells of those who died around it turned to the dust over its walls, Hornet wouldn’t have hesitated. It did not come naturally to her to take care with her words, when only the cutting force of a blade could affect a fading land in its stasis. What did it matter if her voice was barbed and vicious or soft as moths’ wings, if it did not change what she had to defend, what she had to do, regardless of anything else she cared for?

Yet the stasis was lifted, and their prison was opened, her duty dissipated as easily as a wyrm’s corpse fell to ash on the wind, and what she said in the aftermath carried weight as it never had.

“I have spoken to her, over the years. When my guardianship brought me to her wilds and before that, when I, too, was young.” Hornet decided on.

“Is she nice?” Sonnet spoke up in their hushed voice, as though they couldn’t keep themself quiet any longer. When Hornet looked to them, small and blurry-edged in the brighter light outside the White Lady’s rootbound cocoon, there was a keenness to how they asked her, like the answer meant more to them than they’d said.

Aware that Hollow’s attention hadn’t shifted and feeling the crawling itch of their combined scrutiny, with Nettle drawn off into some brief distraction by Ghost and unable to contribute their own, Hornet responded as best she could. “She is not unkind,” she told them, the words falling harder-edged than she’d intended. “But she is not given to action for any reason. What we hope to gain from her will not be direct aid.”

“Will she help us because we’re hers, though, maybe?” Sonnet asked.

Hornet blinked at them, and then at Hollow, her first thought that even if they hadn’t been able to bring themself to speak of the god they went to meet, they might’ve at least told Sonnet their relation to her.

Yet Hollow seemed slightly taken aback, the settled, withdrawn sort of quietude their void had turned to over the hours past disturbed only faintly by their surprise. It could have been Ghost, Hornet supposed, but they had spent much of the days previous at her side. And if any of them were more reluctant than her to claim their heritage, it was the little Ghost.

At Hornet’s pointed, considering stare, Sonnet recoiled some. “We are, aren’t we?” They inquired softly. “Hollow’s father is ours, and he is the light in the Abyss from when we were born, and he is the Pale King of Hallownest. The White Lady is the Queen, you said, so she’s the other ruler of your kingdom. And we were her children, too. That’s why you don’t want to talk about it, isn’t it?” They explained, trailing off into void-speak so faint it was more a hesitant echo than anything else.

Clever. Little wonder they and their twin had crawled free of the jealous dark, if Sonnet had been as quick to make connections, accurate connections at that, as they were showing themself to be now.

“If you want to know, I will tell you.” Hollow said gently, a non-answer if Hornet had ever heard one.

“But not now.” Hornet interrupted, and spent the barest instant to hope that Hollow appreciated the intervention for what it was. If the little shade had questions, she’d had the longest of them all to make her peace with their answers. There would be time to catch them before their curiosity grew strong enough to ask about their shared past again, once the newest apocalypse had been dealt with.

And the more she considered it, the more likely it seemed that there was true merit to the White Lady’s aid, even if drawing upon her familial ties for sympathy would be a futile effort at best. If the once-queen had seen enough details of what had been done to the Vessels to still stay in self-imposed confinement all these years later, sealed in place by shame or resentment or whatever it was that was still not enough for her to stir herself when Hornet-

When her kingdom had needed her. If whatever cowardice that let her remain where she was for an age was still intact, drawn from whatever it was, exactly, that she’d done, then it was entirely possible she remembered enough to be of use. It was not a vague understanding of sacrifice and loss that made a creature seal itself away, in any sense of the word.

And they’d lost enough time to considering, when there was only the single path forward.

“I’d prefer to get this over with as quickly as possible. I won’t be caught unawares by what follows us again.” Hornet told the shades decisively, and turned from them to search over the tops of the lushly overgrown topiaries, that had decades since lapsed into formless bushes towering high in the distance as though the typical limits of vegetative growth didn’t matter, not to things bathed in pale light as they were.

It was a tense moment before she spotted Ghost and Nettle darting through the vast flowers, indistinguishable at this distance as one chased the other around a jutting, crumpled greenhouse, that even so far away could be seen to have massive, thorned vines growing up like spined and reaching arms from its broken windows. Even though they were much too far away to hear, they didn’t move like creatures pursued, and the green-tinted caverns of the Gardens were ever empty, so she supposed she could forgive them a distraction or two.

Hornet cleared her throat, still raspy and given to breaking whenever she spoke above a calm, collected voice better suited to a nearly-civil high-society discussion than the constant living rustle of the Gardens, and called out to them.

And then, when neither shade responded, she huffed with impatience and shrieked Ghost’s name at the top of her lungs.

One little black smudge against the greenery stopped short in midair, and the second collided with them and sent them both careening into a bush, from which a small, frantic flock of maskflies exploded.

“I would have gotten them if you’d asked.” Hollow informed her with what could’ve meant a faint, amused hum.

“I can call them well enough myself. There’s no need to trouble you to.” Hornet rebutted quietly, swallowing down a coughing fit with a grimace. How bugs spoke and yelled and laughed every single day was beyond her, if a sore throat was common enough to have a cure even Midwife knew of. Every word she spoke, she regretted not accepting her old minder’s ill-made tea that little bit more.

It was only another minute or so before Ghost and Nettle made their way back, darting over the wild-grown groundcover to where Hornet and the rest waited at the crest of the hill that wound down to the once-queen’s retreat. Ghost bombarded her with wordless questions as soon as they were near enough to, all watchful concern and with the lack of hesitation inherent to those who spent long enough living by their nail.

Nettle, for their part, seemed far less on-edge than intrigued. Something they put voice to as soon as they’d drifted to an ungainly stop next to Sonnet and bonked their single remaining horn to their twin’s.

“I didn’t know bugs could make noises like that. Does it hurt? Can you do it again?” Nettle asked Hornet, intrigued.

Hornet consciously did not acknowledge the question, as she had only unnecessarily unkind responses to give to it. “Nothing is wrong, Ghost. I only do not want you wandering while I am distracted.” She said instead to Ghost’s increasingly insistent, still-unfocused search for anything amiss.

“You could’ve just said that.” Ghost said at last, as close to annoyed as they ever got. “I’ve only ever heard you sound that way when someone’s about to meet a bad end.”

“It’s impressive, isn’t it?” Hollow couldn’t seem to help but add. “Like a furious Weaver. She made that sound daily in her youth, for every reason imaginable. The shrillness drove Father up the walls.”

“Is that so?” Hornet scowled, torn between irritation at a joke made at her expense and relief for the first glimpse of anything lighter than the intentional, obscuring nothing from Hollow since they’d left Deepnest, the sort of distance one never uses to cover happier thoughts. “I’m certain whatever he did to provoke me deserved it.”

Hollow narrowed their eyes at her like a fond smile while Ghost, the only one of the smaller shades to have the context to know what was funny, burst into bubbling, helpless giggles. Of the littler two, Sonnet seemed distinctly confused, like something didn’t quite add up in their mind, and Nettle latched onto the buoying mood with delight, though they couldn’t have known what caused it.

It was a nearly offsetting mixture after all the grimness, the tragedy inherent to void and to the shades, but as Hollow elaborated on an occasion that must’ve been more memorable to them than to her, Hornet couldn’t quite see a reason to subdue a huff of her own amusement, made under her breath and without half the enthusiasm Nettle asked after details of their story with, and still louder than anything but the shifting grasses.

It was tempting to leave them there to their happiness and good mood, as Ghost dropped in with their own anecdote angling off a tangent of Hollow’s, and to get the interrogation of the god they’d come to meet over with without needing to involve them. Ghost, she knew, had already met the White Lady, with little but a more resolute quietude in the encounters she’d had with them in the days following to show for it. Though that meant little, given that resolute quietude had been their baseline state before the Black Egg and all the changes it’d wrought. Nettle and Sonnet were likelier to react badly, knowing the White Lady as she did, and Hollow…

Hornet did not consider herself unduly skilled at picking up on subtle hints, and there were a dozen possible reasons to choose from for what had caused it, but Hollow had grown withdrawn. Exhausted, almost, the sort of blankness that comes from too much changing too quickly out of one’s power to stop it, a kind of shock that numbed before the intensity of rational response could set in.

Was it a long-delayed reaction to the end of the Infection, or the prospect of meeting the White Lady, or something else, something she couldn’t even begin to guess at? Were they feeling unwell, had what they refused to mention of their lifetime’s-worth of unspeakable, impossible hardship finally become too much to bear?

She was of no use to them for any such thing, and she couldn’t just ask what was wrong, when they’d been very clear how they felt about being made to think of what had been done to them, anything of the vast, silent centuries they’d been lost to her in the Black Egg.

Consulting the White Lady would not be pleasant, and if they were not well, it was not something Hornet wanted to force on them.

“I’m the only one that needs to speak to her.” Hornet said aloud, to which the others glanced up at her as though they weren’t totally sure what she was talking about. In all fairness, Hornet had allowed herself to completely drop the thread of the conversation; it was likely as not that she’d interrupted something.

“The White Lady. You cannot say anything she will understand, and over the years she has lost her sight. It will make no difference to anyone, nor to anything but your own experience, if you decline to see her.” She said meaningfully, looking to Hollow and hoping they understood.

They said nothing, went all but silent where there’d nearly always been their steadying background hum, turned their pale gaze elsewhere.

Hornet beat down frustration, more at the guesswork of it all than at them or herself, and took a deep breath in and held it for a beat. “I won’t make you stay or go, but I will not postpone this any longer. If you will not come, then stay here.” She told them, and strode past them and down the gentle slope of the hill, to where the greyed cocoon waited.

Behind her, two void-given threads of thought lifted in respective uncertainties, another with an understanding that made Hornet grit her fangs for how easily it came to them, and the last so subdued and inward-turned as to be nearly completely unnoticeable. None of them followed, the chill around her ceding to the Gardens’ humid warmth, a change so sudden it made her give a violent, relieved shiver. She’d very nearly forgotten what it was to be warm, even the return of the tepid greenhouse-warmth of the Gardens was almost too abrupt to suppress the shivery twitch of her claws.

Whatever the consequences of her choice to leave Hollow there to sort themself out away from any perceived pressure to follow, she would accept them and make amends later. There was a reason they’d ventured to the Queen’s Gardens, and for her eldest sibling to torment themself with visions of what their visit might become was not it.

It was always better to act, to not draw indecision out into paralysis, when all options would hurt.

The walk was not long; they’d reconvened just a nail’s throw from the massive, twining cocoon, wreathed in grey and grown through with living white roots. What was left of Dryya still guarded the entrance, her claws dried around the handle of her nail, and the corpses of the mantises fallen to her blade were, though desiccated and frail should she disturb them, untouched by hungry root or climbing stem. As they had been for more of Hornet’s rounds through the Gardens than not, without any new change. The Great Knight still sat leaned against the cocoon’s entrance, untouched by time or plague, propped up where she’d once died of her wounds defending one who would never avenge her.

She’d known the White Lady far better than Hornet ever would, and Hornet thought she’d never quite understand why she’d stayed. Hornet inclined her head to her as she passed without slowing her stride, and ducked into the narrow hole in the bounding roots, laying her horns back so they wouldn’t catch on the aged wood.

As with her mother’s Den, the White Lady’s last sanctuary held more than it seemed. The entryway was as cramped as she remembered it, a tight a fit as any tunnel of Deepnest, but she knew well that it would open up quickly. Hornet had once taken delight to scramble through the narrow part before Dryya could haul her back out, the stern Knight of the Queen never one to let her slip past without a lecture to behave in the god’s presence, a lecture Hornet listened to maybe once and completely disregarded every time after.

It’d been almost a game, using her new-mastered skill with her silk and her needle to dart past the knight as she’d sworn colorfully after her and promised swift retribution when Hornet showed her face again, retribution conveniently forgotten as soon as Hornet reemerged to slip away back to Deepnest.

The cramped tunnel, though no more so than it’d once seemed, felt like it was missing an echo, for all that it’d been long enough since she’d crawled through it to almost forget how deep it ran.

Within the cocoon there was no light but that of the living roots, pale and blinding to look directly at. Hornet tried to touch as few as possible as she wormed her way through the gap in the old wood, smooth and blunted enough that, when the tunnel finally dropped, it was nearly difficult to keep her footing. She climbed down and deeper, not quite trusting memory to tell her how far the bottom was, the thick roots as cool and solid as even-grained, polished stone beneath her claws. Little humidity pervaded here, and little of the heat of outside, the pale light reflected off the bark more like that which she remembered of the White Palace than anything else, or else like the chilling gleam of moonlight.

And then she was at the hollowed center, the godlight shining gently bright enough that Hornet had to narrow her eyes as they adjusted, and she stepped into the White Lady’s chamber.

It was changed from when she’d last seen it, as old and clouded as the memory was. The dangling ornaments still hung around the pale being’s head, tied about and draped over the faultless white branches that curved ever upward, through the deadened roots above. They should have been ringing, was the difference, Hornet thought. They had once jangled against each other when the White Lady moved to look at her when she came in, turned her shining eyes towards her in greeting, too blue to be untouched by blindness even back then.

Now, though Hornet stood and waited to catch her breath, the White Lady neither opened her eyes nor turned to acknowledge her at all.

She was as she’d been. Ever strange, for however gentle a creature and however unmenacing her demeanor, the White Lady had no chitin. She had no joints at all, only smooth, pale bark that, like her roots, was cooler to the touch than any bug with coursing blood might be, even when the light above had been stronger and her cocoon less complete. She was as still as any of Hornet’s siblings, as though she slept deeply or at last had died like a wintering tree, a being without breath or inherent movement save the eternal growth of her roots.

The silence stretched on, until Hornet began to wonder if the once-queen had become only the shining growths she cultivated, that perhaps in all the time she’d spent alone and confined, she’d fallen asleep, and would not wake.

The thought rankled at her, and Hornet scowled fiercely up at the White Lady’s peaceful, downturned face. It would be a characteristic final betrayal, just the kind of elegant, craven nonaction that she kept to, to deny them even the meager help she could finally give without moving from her prison. Hornet pulled her needle from its place at her back and tightened her claws around the worn handle, familiar in her hand. Even if it would be a trial to hack through the thicker roots here, grown stonelike with age and still too resilient to shatter, Hornet would ensure the god acknowledged her. This time, she would not be turned away.

“Do not ignore me.” She commanded coldly, loud enough to wake her if she could be awoken.

And, nearly to Hornet’s surprise, she did wake. The White Lady’s eyes blinked open, dimly aware, though her head didn’t turn. With how deeply her branches had delved into unmoving roof above, this wasn’t unforeseen. Her binding was absolute, her roots sunk deep.

“Not at all. I only did not notice you enter. I must have a talk with Dryya, about how many she allows past her guard.” The White Lady said mildly. “Have I not only just spoken to one of your kind? I sense the Old Light is smothered to ash, surely there is nothing else one such as you would hope to achieve in this fading land?”

Hornet’s frown deepened in disbelief, but the god was not done, unhurried and meandering. “I do not ignore you, only I am distracted by much. Time has clouded my eyes, but I have never been ignorant of that which my roots know, that one like you knows just as well. A voracious darkness, cold and mindless, must I now contend with. Social calls may be better left to another day.”

The pale being paused then, hummed a slow and thoughtful tone. “But we have met before, haven’t we? I cannot quite place the feeling of its presence…”

“We have met.” Hornet said flatly. “And I am not a Vessel.”

If she went to stand before the god’s bound form, where the White Lady’s face was forever slightly inclined as though in repose, she could address her directly and look her in the eye when she spoke. Hornet did not move to afford her that respect and thought it largely Hollow’s fault that she kept any worse contempt, however much it appealed to express it, to herself. However unlikely it was that they’d barge in, considering the narrow entryway and their own reluctance, it would be more pain than it was worth to be caught cursing the quiet god.

Particularly with how very mild she was nowadays, how she endeared herself to those who did not know her. Powerful, bright and entrancing, imperturbable but utterly declawed. It could only look from the outside like Hornet was shouting down a polite old lady, and experience told her that wasn’t a situation she wanted to deal with.

Hornet’s claws clenched on her needle, her shoulders stiffening as the White Lady’s eyes shot open abruptly.

“Oh,” the once-queen breathed. Her pearlescent eyes widened, shining and reflective of her own light, and if her head hadn’t been long since locked in place by the subtle growth of her form, Hornet thought the god would have finally turned her faultless, pale gaze down to examine her where she stood amidst the gnarled reach of glowing roots.

“You are the Gendered Child.” She said in her gentle, breathy voice, distant as wind through the rushes.

“My name has been Hornet for long enough. I expect you to remember it.” Hornet reminded sharply.

“You are not as you were. Nearly, I did not recognize you at all. Child,” the subdued god sighed. “What have you wrought?”

Hornet frowned. “You will need to be more specific.”

The White Lady seemed no less shocked, but now it edged nearer to astonishment, as though she’d expected Hornet to respond in any other way, or to at least have an answer for her. Like she knew something that she’d simply assumed Hornet knew, too, that of course took precedence over all else. It didn’t sit well to notice shock so easily from the famously tranquil god, but there were many more things she could be referring to than surprise could narrow down.

She was blind, yes, but that meant little to a being whose roots spread throughout the Kingdom, could be unearthed at any of its edges if one knew where to look, if they could sense the sleeping, limited drone of soul that they shone with, and if one had any desire to do so. Hornet rarely had, save in her darkest, most isolated hours, when a reminder that anything, anything in her ruined kingdom wasn’t running with slick orange and hating her for daring to not do the same was enough to make her claw at the earth where she knew the roots ran, until the pale, softly gleaming growth revealed itself from the earth, a meager lifeline. Someone familiar, who was not gone.

She was certain the White Lady knew of those times, and equally sure that if ever she mentioned it, the pale seals of protection that burned bitterly, astringently faultless in the air around her would be broken by her needle.

“You are consumed.” The White Lady said simply, as though noting the cleanliness of Hornet’s shawl was less than it should be. “There is little enough left of you that it could hardly be recognized.”

“Speak plainly or do not speak at all.” Hornet said coldly, nearing the end of her patience.

“You are dying. No, you are dead already.” The White Lady told her. “There is no plainer a truth.”

There was enough austerity in her voice, quiet and lyrical as it was, that Hornet had the absurd desire to make sure she did still live, to raise a hand to her chest to check that her heart still beat. It only lasted a moment, just long enough to be annoyed with herself for considering it.

Hornet considered, a thought occurring to her, and then she laughed.

Long and harsh, relishing in how little guilt there was to laugh in the face of a god undeserving after the days of relentlessly checking her every word and thought around her siblings, who deserved so much better than her rough edges, even as laughing like this grated at her throat, still raw from cold and the constant talking.

“It does feel that way. You have terrible sense for timing, as usual, to learn to care for lower beings now of all days.” Hornet said, as darkly amused as she was bitter. “But so long as I keep warm enough and retain more soul than I lose, I will not die.”

“Is it possible that the child does not know? That she hasn’t noticed her own fading?” The bound god mumbled, seemingly to herself. “Knows she not the cost accepted, her own trade?”

“Trade? I’ve traded nothing but my allegiance for an opportunity, one that grew to more than I could have hoped. I am still alive.” Hornet said firmly. “And I intend to stay that way.”

“Less a trade, then, and more of a sacrifice. You have met with that vast nothing, haven’t you? The silent dark.” The White Lady did not ask, and didn’t wait for a response. “It remains in you still, and soon it will be all that remains. It has consumed your light, Gendered Child.”

“I have soul left to me, or I wouldn’t still live. And I am alive.”

“But your ascension is not. A god you once were, nearly a higher being in your own right.” The White Lady told her. “A god startlingly independent, that paced the bounds of her rule and took no worship. An ever-wandering guardian chained to a failed kingdom. A restless light caught where all else sleeps. It is how I have seen you grow to your land, it is how I thought you dead when your fierce light faded. I thought you dead, Protector, when the darkness came for Hallownest. I still do.”

“You’ve lost more than your sight. I am no god. This land might be mine, but not to rule.” Hornet said. “In that way, it’s neither of ours any longer.”

“Be that as it may, I will mourn you. A fiercer pale being there may never have been, now only an ailing child. What afflicts you now will take more than your life. To have lasted so long…” The White Lady trailed off.

Hornet took a deep, steadying breath to keep from saying something she’d regret, felt how it snagged in her lungs when it shouldn’t’ve and tried to make her cough. Felt how her hand ached from the force she gripped her needle with, force she wouldn’t’ve thought twice of before. How, from standing still so long, her legs had grown faintly unsteady beneath her. How even away from the chill of the shades she was colder than she’d ever been before void had nearly taken her.

And had it not? Was she recovering at all, or was it truly an unshakable poison in her veins, lodged pulsing in her chest, watching for her mistakes?

And when she reached for her soul, to reassure herself with something so standard and vital it was as easy as reaching out a hand to touch, to spin into silk that’d never failed her, there was so little to grasp that her stomach went icy with dread before the soul responded, weak and frail and flickering like firefly-light around her. A pitiful, impulsive display, one Hornet was glad the White Lady couldn’t have seen.

“You are consumed, Gendered Child. Even her soul, half-born of my Wyrm’s, burns so low. It can only be the doing of the consuming dark that lurks beneath, even now, that has succeeded where the Old Light could not.” The White Lady said quietly, undirected like she’d forgotten Hornet was listening, or simply did not care to address her. “That has brought her low where naught else could.”

Hornet clenched her fist so tightly her claws creaked against her palm. “I am not gone yet,” Hornet grit out slowly. “And I am not done. Speak a word of this to my siblings and I will sever you from the earth ichor-bleeding, god or no. I will not have your mourning.” She promised.

“She still holds anger for me.” The once-queen observed, again vaguely surprised.

“I would kill you if I could, and you know why.” Hornet told her. “Yet now I’m at least glad I never managed as much. There are things you will tell me, if you’re done pretending prescience is a gift the Pale King left you.”

“You go too far, child, to speak of the Wyrm. You,“ the White Lady’s dulled gaze narrowed as she trailed off, dimmed further. “Siblings. You have no siblings, none that ever lived.”

And then the pale blue of her eyes blew wide. “I feel them. Beyond my binds, I feel what is no longer mine. Wholly unsullied, without mind or voice, yet failed in their purpose. They are nothing, weak shadows of children twice-killed. They should not be, but they are.” She murmured. “Oh, little Protector. You have allowed for something terrible within these lands you guard.”

“The Void. You know it, and you know how I can prevent its advance. Already it rises from Deepnest and kills all it touches.” Hornet pressed.

“That it does. It hungers, and that is all I feel. From the failed Vessels’ pitiful kind to the pure abyssal substance they are risen from, only ever have I known the empty chasm of that dark. Endless, hollow, it is all I can do to shine brightly enough now that it cannot gather densely as it could, to amass enough of itself in the empty, resentful corners of this land to consume us utterly. It shall do so regardless, if nothing is done.”

Hornet’s claws scraped tighter over the handle pressed to her palm. “What can I do.”

“Fortunate you are, that the remedy requires only the strength with which to hold a flower.” The White Lady observed placidly. “Truly, the matter is a simple one to resolve. Take one of those most delicate blooms, the palest flowers, and gift it to the dark.”

“And that will…?”

“Burn it away, as though it never was. As I am, I am not enough to hold it at bay any more than I have, not any further than the bounds of my own gardens, and I cannot allow myself freedom to combat it.” The once-queen told her. “Destroy it for the salvation it failed to grant us and for all it will now, in our hour of weakness, strive to take.”

“A flower. And this will destroy all of it? It cannot be so easy.” Hornet argued.

“I imagine that vast emptiness may well end itself in this way, if given enough time to grow complacent. It would take only a drop, a single stain upon the petals.” The White Lady promised somberly. “Though much more would be lost to it first should you stand aside.”

Hornet drew a sharp breath in past her fangs and in a smoother movement than her tired arm could stand, leveled the White Lady’s impartial, shining gaze with her needle. She glared down the blade and hoped that the hatred, fury that could no longer be betrayal, burned hot enough to see past the old god’s blindness, heart pounding and ignited like an ember in her chest, that the failed queen would dare, after all she’d done, all she’d allowed, to accuse Hornet of ever doing the same.

There had been no clemency when the fates of the Pale King’s children were doled out, but for all that she regretted and all she hated of her part to play in them, Hornet knew herself to be innocent of the worst of crimes; complacency. To simply give up, to cut her losses, to stop fighting and let the end take whoever it might find unable to escape its claws while she walked free. There was nothing tangible to stop her going, nothing at all that’d kept her from turning away from her kingdom as it burned and nothing but her own promises keeping her at her siblings’ side now, but she’d never gone.

And she never would.

“You do not get to imply I would allow any such fate to befall my kingdom. You who stood aside and watched me lower myself to plead with you, once, you who allowed it to die without intervention in the first place.” Hornet hissed dangerously.

“Would you rather I unbind myself now? Take it from you as easily as the brambles choke the earth? I am the only god left whole in this ravaged land, child. Never forget that I am the equal of the Pale Wyrm.” The White Lady said, very softly.

Hornet stabbed the point of her needle with a resonating crack into the stony floor, nicking a single pale root. It bled sluggish, faintly glowing sap, but Hornet did not look away to see it. She braced herself, raised her head high, narrowed her eyes in challenge.

“You won’t. Coward.” She called the god’s bluff without a flinch, for this at least she did not fear. “And you couldn’t.”

The god was silent for long minutes, long enough that Hornet began to wonder if she’d make good on her word, and the gentle illumination of her roots grew to a near-burn, cool and stinging like glints of harsh light off of the rooftops in the City of Tears. She leaned more of her weight against her needle’s pommel, pressing her palms to it to steady the exhausted shake in her claws that she couldn’t force away, but she did not move the blade’s tip from where it dug into pale nearly-flesh.

And then the White Lady closed her eyes as though fatigued, and the slow brightening of her roots faded with her will.

“There is nothing worth what I would bring about by my freedom as ruler of this land, this no-longer Hallownest.” She murmured, as wistful as a cradle song.

“Seeds I would sow, new life I would grant, and all would be of my own light and pith. My reign would be plentiful in the fallowed kingdom you have cleansed. All would benefit, and you, weakened, killed little god-protector of a faded land, could not stop me for all that you’d try. It would be beautiful, vibrant, growing. And I could not bear to see it so, tainted in the wake of the hollowed firstborn that precede it.” The White Lady told her.

“And now you will burn away even their memory, the shadows they cast upon your land, with their strength granted by the awakening of the Abyss. It is only right that I am sealed away alongside my actions.” She told Hornet, an afterthought. “I would not see them remembered.”

Her words hung in the then-silent inner chamber like a death knell, more damning than any preceding them.

“… What will happen to them.” Hornet demanded, feeling as though all the breath had been drawn from her lungs, all the tension she’d lost for the god’s concession returning to her at once. “White Lady, what will happen to my siblings if I do this?”

“A name without formality, and without Dryya’s good humor. Such a strange thing to hear. I ought to call Dryya in for a chat, she must be getting lonely out there. Perhaps she’s fallen asleep.” The god hummed.

“My siblings. What will happen to them?” Hornet asked again, an unwanted, pleading crack forcing its way into her voice.

“Gendered Child, they are nothing but imprint and shadow now, that reaching, unsettled darkness that only my Wyrm’s light in your blood keeps at bay. They will be forgotten, the darkness undone, and there will be light and warmth in this land again. You, too, will be renewed. Are you not pleased, child? Your kingdom will live.”

“You shall be whole.”

Chapter Text

And so Hornet left the White Lady to her own company, perhaps never to be spoken to again.

She climbed stiffly out from the cocoon’s entrance and blinked in the unhurried return of the light outside it. Dryya was still there, of course, and Hornet kept her gaze fixed steely ahead once she caught a glimpse of her bone-white armor.

The day outside continued as pleasant and green as she’d left it, as though she had not been given an unforgivable ultimatum, a choice that, at last, she could not make. One very nearly like the first, the only difference that now she knew the consequences by name.

Hornet uncurled from the crouch the cramped tunnel forced her into, stood straight and immediately had to lean back against the cocoon’s entrance, the world tilting on its axis. She closed her eyes and counted backwards from fifty, steadying her breathing as well as she could, in time to her stumbling heart. Her head ached in that peculiar way it did before she lost consciousness, all the sound of the rustling leaves near and far going faint, blurring together with the rushing of her pulse.

Hornet took a slow, even breath in, and sat down before she fell, drawing her knees up and resting her forehead into her crossed arms.

Abstractly, in a way that couldn’t be muffled by the staticky roar in her hearing, Hornet heard Nettle shriek with laughter, and what could only have been Ghost’s not-voice, buoyant with mischievous delight, telling them some last quip that was only unclear for the distance. If she focused on it, she could just make out Hollow’s calming hum, more settled than their siblings and still a lighter pitch than when she’d left them, far less grim, and then Sonnet spoke up with something subdued but laughing nonetheless that made their twin give what, even from this distance, Hornet could tell was supposed to be the most emphatic full-body eyeroll they could.

They must be too far off to see her, perhaps still at the height of the hill she’d left them at, and her around the side of the White Lady’s root-bound cocoon. All the better.

The air around her was balmy and humid, and her claws still shook as she latched them over her forearms and evened her unsteady gasping. Slowed it bit by bit, drew air in until her sides burned and let it out quicker, so that the sparking dark wouldn’t crowd over her vision. Slowed her heart as she did, listening to her siblings talk to each other and letting the murmur of unworried thought soothe her own, as questions and answers and duty and care warred.

They would want to know what the White Lady had told her.

They would ask if there was anything that could be done, anything she’d learned, and Hornet would not be able to lie to them even if she could’ve. It was weakness to do so to spare herself the fallout, worse to avoid the discussion altogether, as dearly as she wanted to.

If she said nothing to them, only brought them somewhere safe and searched for an alternative, would they know her guilt regardless, her shame that she could not bring herself to disregard the White Lady’s answer outright? For what did she know, a nearly-forgotten god with only a brief experience with the stuff her children were born of, one tinged by shame that, even if it made absolutely no difference to what she’d done, she’d never entirely shake and would never try to rise past? Who was to say that, if Hornet brought them far enough from the Abyss, the Void’s destruction would even affect them?

But she’d sounded so certain.

She’d sounded utterly sure, and the old god had no reason to lie. And even if she had cause, to lie outright was not what the White Lady did. She never broke a promise because she never made any; only allowed others to assume the best of her, the immense and kindly equal to the Eternal Kingdom’s shining light, and then quietly proved them wrong.

It was a risk Hornet could not take, to hope that the once-queen was mistaken. There had to be another way. There was always another way, Ghost themself had proven as much when they’d destroyed the Old Light instead of usurping Hollow as its containment, as Hornet had always assumed would be the best outcome to hope for even as she’d wished for better.

Yet what of her kingdom? What of Dirtmouth, what of the damned Nailmasters cringing in their respective corners, what of the fools in the City of Tears? What of Midwife and her adopted brood, and the Weaver, and everyone Hornet had lost track of over the past months, torn between a thousand different things that needed her, who might yet live? Could she sacrifice them on a hope, could she allow them to come to harm knowing that, at any point, she need only pluck a flower from a grave and toss it to the black below to prevent it? Neither could she let this happen, for whatever had become of Hallownest and whatever had become of her, it was still her kingdom.

It was hers to guard, and it always would be.

Hollow said something quiet. They were not unhappy. Sonnet spoke again, unusual for them, and they were not unhappy either. A flock of maskflies landed with a hectic flutter nearby her and chirruped to themselves, running their delicate mandibles with rasps like a fine-toothed comb over their filamentous wings and through blades of the grass they’d landed in, rooting in the loam, something Hornet recognized she could clearly hear again. The soundless rush had faded from her hearing, her heart at last evened out.

She wasn’t dying. She couldn’t be. Of course, she wasn’t, it was only the hyperbolic imaginings of an untrustworthy god, who had never been able to fully understand how beings that walked and slept and cared and died did as they did. Only a fate inescapable for weaker creatures, and better she take it on her shoulders than they, for she could survive it.

She would survive this.

There were more important things to consider.

Who would she condemn, this time? Who could she bear to give to save the other? The last remnants of her devastated kingdom, who would not survive another gods’ struggle, or her siblings, who deserved so much better than she could give them, whom she’d promised to save?

Hornet thought then of Midwife and her offer, of home and safety and at last letting another make the decisions she never could choose right for, and her eyes burned, the carefully even in-out of her breathing disrupted by a hiccup too subtle for another to notice. Not subtle enough to keep away the burn of resentment for her own weakness, when she was needed, when she could not be weak. Hornet buried her face deeper into her arms and kept her eyes closed, and did not cry.

The tears burned, though, and then stuck like little gems to her mask as they froze, and stayed there until she rubbed a fistful of her shawl over her cheeks. The fabric was cold in her hand, though none of the shades had been near her for upwards of an hour by now, as though she had made it cold, instead.

And Hornet was suddenly, uselessly revolted by the futility of the whole miserable situation. She ground her face into her covered arms, the rustle of fabric almost enough to smother the ragged, frustrated sob she choked on, and balled her fist so tight that her knuckles ached from the sudden strain and struck out blindly at the grey, dried cocoon at her back with a loud, solid thud. The old wood didn’t give, but it didn’t matter.

It hurt, but she was far too angry to feel it. Hornet curled tightly into herself with a muffled scream that pulled at her lungs as it wrenched its strangled way free, made her fall into a brief, painful coughing fit that, if she brought her face away to check, she was near-certain added new darkened stains to her shawl where her face was pressed. It was all too much, seemed far too close to how it’d been at the very beginning, when she’d been handed another easy, impossible choice.

And it was unfair.

As quietly as she could, Hornet raged as she cried. Without any real focus for it, not on the decision or the cold or even the White Lady herself, as much as at it all. At everything that had happened to them, to her, all the failures of gods and parents that should never have made her siblings, herself, the last-ditch efforts to atone for it all. Shrieked curses she couldn’t dare to fling to the idyllic garden around her instead simmered bitterly in her mouth and roiled in her stomach and none of it was fair, none of it was right. There was still so much to do and cause and see to, she could not succumb to something so unnecessary as an accident, as having the misfortune to collapse in the wrong place at the wrong time and be too weak to see it through while the fate of her world was decided.

She couldn’t die. She couldn’t kill. What else was there?

Her head was light again from the strain, blinking sparks scattered over her sight, though her eyes were closed. There was a warmth at her side, against her chest, a persistent heat that sparked like wrath. Ghost’s damned charm again, more likely than not.

No, she would not die. If ever there was an end fated for her, it was not to some slow, ironic decline to the very stuff that she’d cleaned from her blade so often. Even if it was, Hornet was not at liberty to allow it. Her siblings needed her to keep them safe. And they would have her, until the trying spent the last of her godhood and her soul and she fell.

Without saying as much, the White Lady had made a request of her; that she again put aside what she knew was right for what she knew mattered more. To kill in the name of her kingdom, to again force a pulse into its rotted veins.

And this time, Hornet could give nothing but a refusal.

For not this time would she make others’ sacrifices for them on the behalf of the many, never again would she make that impossible, impossibly cruel choice. She would make an alternative, force it bloody and screaming from the ether if need be, and they all would live, just this once. Only this one time, not a one of them would die for something greater.

The Vessels would not die. Her hopeful, destroyed land would not breathe its last. And she would not surrender to inevitabilities any longer.

Hornet raged, and dried her tears, and prepared to keep fighting.

Chapter Text

And so Hornet came to an easy, impossible decision to an easy, impossible dilemma.

She did not move yet, though, did not budge from where she’d curled into a tight, defensive ball outside the White Lady’s cocoon, just out of sight and behind the curve of the wall. Hornet could not have been certain how long she stayed there like that, hiding her face in her shawl and letting it soak up the tears that hadn’t quite run dry, but it was long enough for the cold to abate some, for an ounce of warmth to chase away the numbness in her hands and leave them only aching again.

She needed the time to think, to mull over her options now that she’d landed on a tentative decision, and to consider how she’d break the news to the others. That there was something to be done, but nothing she was prepared to do.

Hornet wondered if they’d believe her.

Lost in thought as she was, she only noticed Hollow when they loomed close enough over her to block out the light, dimming the filtered red that came through her shawl where she still had her face pressed to her crossed arms. Even then, she had no wariness left in her for the familiar, steadying press of their worry.

When Hornet raised her head, she glowered without heat to see that they’d lowered theirs nearly to eyelevel and inches from her face, their huge glowing-pale eyes trained with intent concern on her, that only grew as they saw her expression.

Her eyes still burned and stung with tears, and there was a new, though small, black spatter on her shawl about where her mouth had been, where she’d coughed into it, so Hornet imagined that whatever they saw, it was not the visage of a happy, healthy bug.

Yet as Hollow reared slowly back to their full height to look over their shoulder, towards about the direction where Hornet could still faintly hear the others, though there was significant and tender concern to their thoughts, it was not as intense nor directed as she’d half-expected it to be; as though they only knew she was upset, and it did not quite register that living bugs do not often cough up void.

The rest hadn’t seemed to notice their absence yet, so Hollow settled themself over the grass alongside her and was quiet for a time, while their siblings talked about far-off things and the maskflies came back from wherever they’d scattered to when Hollow frightened them off. Hornet appreciated the peace, undemanding and patient as anything her eldest sibling did, and used it to scrub away the wet burn of her eyes with the back of her hand, and to subdue the desperate, wide-eyed indecision she was so unused to before they could take notice.

“What did she say to you, to make you fear so?” Hollow asked at last, hunched over themself with their trailing, edged tendrils relaxed and insubstantial amidst the grass. The length of their horns, towering over her even as Hollow tried to be less than imposing, cut a soft-edged silhouette against the light when she cast them a half-hearted glare for the imposition.

“I’m not afraid.” Hornet said thickly, and cleared her throat before she could cough.

Hollow inclined their head some to look at her, even now more than Hornet’s horns’ length over her eyelevel. “Alright. But something is wrong.”

“I’ll be fine.” Hornet said and eyed the direction she suspected the rest were left in, half-expecting Ghost to spontaneously materialize to combat her.

“I have no doubt.” Hollow said calmly. “But for now, there is something wrong. Was it what she told you?”

“Of course.” Hornet admitted, too tired and too unsure to cling as tightly to her newest burden as she otherwise would, not with them. Of all of them, Hollow knew the best what an impossible choice looked like, what it felt like to shoulder it alone.

Hollow waited, then, and when she glanced sideways at them they were only lifting their face to the soft and greenish light, letting it blur their sharper edges and staring out at the cavern’s hills of mounded foliage, and behind them Hornet’s eye caught on the glint of light reflecting off of the wings of an aluba, so far off that it could’ve been the size of a maskfly. Bright and coasting on warm updrafts off the plants below, content to fly in a land gone empty and passive.

“… Hollow?” Hornet whispered.

They looked back to her with a measured, attentive dip of their head.

“I don’t know what to do.” She confessed, very quietly. “It feels as though there is nothing I can do. I must make a decision, but either way, there is loss I cannot accept.”

She could not be the end of the Vessels, not again, but oh, how the option gnawed at her. How easy it would be. How tempting it was to take the path of least resistance with so much on the line again, though she could not live with its inevitable conclusion.

Not this time.

Their eyes softened, or perhaps the carry of their void only gave a similar impression, and they craned down to tap their forehead soundlessly, reassuringly against hers, sparking an immediate headache as though she’d sunk her fangs into a block of ice. Hornet closed her eyes, and stubbornly did not move even when they pulled back. Then she rested her chin again on her knees, pulled close to her chest beneath her shawl, and wished for a brief, selfish moment that they could have held her safely again like when she’d been very young.

She wondered what would become of her, if they tried.

“I trust you,” they said then. “And any choice you make, I will support as best I can. But if it burdens you so, there is no need to make it alone. I’m sorry I could not accompany you to meet the Queen.”

“Don’t apologize, I pressed the issue.” Hornet mumbled to her crossed arms, laying her horns back to watch the maskflies in the high cavern walls as they took flight.

“It needed to be done. We would have been here a very long time, had you awaited a decision.”

Hornet nodded very slightly, without tearing her tired eyes from the little insects overhead.

It was strange that out of all the creatures large and small to fall to the Infection, it was the maskflies that were untouched, Hornet thought in place of anything else. Belflies, the tiny things only different for the buildings they chose to roost in instead of the vines and waving flowers of Greenpath and the Gardens, were not spared. Not the mosscreeps, or the tiktiks, or the vengeflies, who all were overcome with hateful orange rot and hissing dreams.

Just the maskflies. Why?

“If you’d had another option, all that time ago, would you’ve taken it?” Hornet asked softly. “If your choices hadn’t been limited to the Black Egg or death, would you have accepted a third? If you’d hoped it would be better than either, even if you didn’t know?”

Hollow stiffened beside her and their shoulders squared, seemingly more reflexive than anything as they straightened from their tired slouch, before they caught themself doing so and crumpled in some imperceptible way. They were getting better at hiding what, exactly, was wrong, far more skilled by now at keeping memory and pain to themself, remembering again how to muffle emotion as they had long before. Hornet thought she might’ve been glad for that at one point, yet now it only led her to frown tiredly up at them for their reserve, though she reluctantly felt there was little more of such things she could take before it became too much.

Hollow said nothing, but there was a muted sort of agony in their thoughts that they couldn’t quite hide away, some resilience growing strained.

And then, “I cannot think of that, Hornet. Not now. Please don’t ask me to.” They said, tension clear beneath their words even as they were unaccusatory, only a statement as much as askance.

“Okay. I’m sorry.” Hornet said, and she was. “You’re right. It’s foolish of me to question what’s long passed.”

“You want my opinion on something similar, though.” Hollow guessed. “I am afraid I’ve little experience with such things. Though I’ve learned from the best, I suppose; I do not think there was anything in the world that the Radiance didn’t have an opinion on.” They said darkly, which was a good enough subject change for Hornet to latch onto.

“Yeah?” Hornet asked, burrowing her face back into her shawl where it was draped over her knees. The relative dark was settling, the familiar red a balm.

“Yeah.” Hollow repeated, the faintest thread of their tension replaced by tentative amusement. “Little wonder I find thought and emotion to flow so easily now, with her as an unwilling tutor. All that’s new is that both are wholly my own.”

“You should try writing. I’ve been told it’s good to rid oneself of excess emotion.” Hornet suggested, muffled by fabric.

Hollow considered that. “Perhaps I will learn to. It’s… It is very much to deal with, sometimes.”

“Isn’t it just.” Hornet grumbled. “Remind me of it when this is all over, and I’ll teach you.” She offered, and immediately regretted it.

The Deepnest and Hallownest writing systems weren’t altogether complicated, or even unduly difficult to learn, but it had been a very long time since she’d actually written anything, or even read anything more complicated than a dead wanderer’s memoirs, when their departed authors had the courtesy to write them in glyphs she could puzzle out.

It was a good warning system on occasion, to read through the last words of the recently departed for clues to what’d killed them. On others it was a reprieve to read earlier entries, those of the excited journeyer’s start to their adventures, all they saw and hoped to see, the happiest days of their life jotted down and left for her to find. In the centuries past the dialect must have shifted, changed from what she’d been taught as a spiderling, requiring hours of focus and guesswork to pry the meaning from the glyphs. She never quite gave up on reading them, though; there was meaning in the true accounts they recorded, far more than any happy story an ancient Hallownest author could pen.

The things the journals spoke of, sunlight and change and laughter and companionship and other impossibilities, were easier to believe when they were misspelled and scrawled in cramped handwriting, with too much emphasis and too many inkblots.

Difficult to understand, difficult to decipher, but worth the effort to keep the inevitable at bay. Perhaps Hollow would overlook her fumbling with it, if they thought the same.

“I’ll look forward to it.” Hollow told her with something like a tired smile.

The quiet was more comfortable, then, and Hornet felt she could’ve stood if she wanted to, a welcome relief. Of all the things to have failed her over the years, her body had never been one, her very soul ever bright enough to bind her wounds in silk with plenty leftover. She’d never been sick before, or felt herself weaken in any way not directly and immediately related to excessive blood loss or grievous injury, never without springing back the moment she’d hauled herself away for a trip to a hot spring and a good meal.

She did not like it. There was an alien, panicky niggling of a thought in the back of her mind about what was becoming of her, one she could not entertain if she hoped to press on. Yet still it shrieked and asked, over and over, a question of permanence she couldn’t answer.

“It was not promising, then? What the White Lady had to say?” Hollow said after minutes of peace, again relaxed into the grass.

“… No.” Hornet said, fully aware that any falsehood she spoke wouldn’t go unheeded.

“And you don’t want to say what it is.” Hollow mused. “Are you in danger?”

“From the choice presented to me? No.” Hornet answered. “It would be a far simpler decision if I was.”

“Little victories.” Hollow said as though they hadn’t heard the last.

“And you aren’t going to ask? You don’t want to know what she said?” The words came too sharply, a challenge as much as a question. Yet it seemed ridiculous not to want to know, to have every detail they could to act upon. There was mild-mannered, and then there was willfully ignorant, and however unwilling she was to start a fight with Hollow of all people, she would not allow the latter. To turn away from a threat was as deadly as to lie down before its claws, after all.

Hollow let the offense pass, and angled their grand, dark head to narrow their eyes in fond exasperation at her, as though they somehow understood her indignance. “Be calm, little sister, I only bide my time. The Knight will not be able to contain their curiosity, and there is no need to make you tell the story twice. They can be very… Stubborn, about what they want to know.”

Hornet snorted at the understatement. “And here I’d expected you to have some sagely wisdom to share. No, I’ve no doubt Ghost will try their damnedest.”

But what could she tell them when they did? They deserved better than a lie, or even to be kept in the dark, so to speak, about their newly looming fate as it rested squarely in Hornet’s hands.

They wouldn’t allow her to end the Void, of course. All they’d done, they’d done for their siblings, not some dead kingdom’s abstract justice or its faceless people, something they made no secret of. Even if Hornet could’ve brought herself to do again as she’d done for an age of stasis, to end every nearly-living sibling of hers in a single devastating choice, Ghost would do everything in their considerable power to stop her. A frail shade they might be, but there was strength to kill gods within them, mask or no, and resolve that did not depend upon ephemeral things like life or death.

And she could not ask that of them, even as she knew their response. Their words and fears hung starkly in her thoughts, as though in lacking a conscience of her own, Ghost had taken up the mantle to replace it.

They reminded her of another, with their will and their unshakable care, whom she hadn’t thought of for a very long time.

Hornet huffed a soft laugh and rested her chin over her folded arms. “I know what they’d do. Something foolish and impossible that I’d never think to, and because it’s them, it would stick.”

“That does seem to be the pattern.” Hollow agreed.

They fell silent again, and Hornet realized all at once that the world was far too quiet. The maskflies still sang to themselves, the slow breeze still disturbed the countless green growing things, but aside from Hollow, soft-spoken as they were, there was silence through void. Hornet frowned, listening hard.

Nothing.

It was nearly as easy as she was used to, with that as motivation, to lurch to her feet and reach for her needle, every nerve alight with the awareness that this was the first true absence of the shades’ soundless voices since she’d awoken in the Black Egg, and unexplained silence was one of the few things to truly be wary of in any land. There was always a good reason for it.

She’d yet to meet a painless cause for inexplicable peace.

“The others. Where are they?” Hornet demanded as Hollow rose to follow her, inquiry in their not-voice, drifting close behind as she backtracked to the crest of the hill where she’d left the rest in order to speak to the Gardens’ bound god.

She’d told them not to wander. Hornet was absolutely certain she’d told them not to wander while she was distracted from keeping watch, and yet they were nowhere in sight as she paced up the shallow slope and searched out over the wild-growing garden from its crest. Prickling irritation rose hot in her chest to see that the cavern was fogged over by now as though with a morning mist, the light dimmer than it’d been just hours before. Side-effects of living in a kingdom not bound to stasis, Hornet decided grimly, which could not have come at a worse time.

“They are not far, though I cannot hear them. We would know if they had come to any trouble. They’ve gone this way.” Hollow said, tilting their head to indicate the winding footpath they’d taken to come to the White Lady’s retreat in the first place, that took a turn and disappeared into the undergrowth just a stone’s throw away.

“If they aren’t in any trouble yet, they’re about to be.” Hornet promised wryly, unconvinced by their reassurance. “From me if nothing else. You were there, I did tell them not to venture off. And you!” She realized, swiping her needle in their direction, fully aware they were far out of reach.

“You were supposed to watch them! You’re the only one I trust not to do something monumentally stupid while I’m not looking, what possessed you to think that Ghost wouldn’t get distracted the moment you turned away?” Hornet exclaimed.

Hollow stopped in their tracks, more caught in the spotlight than concerned about having a weapon gesticulated wildly at them for a moment before she turned decisively away to pace down the path, their trailing tendrils flicking guiltily. “To be fair, we are technically of the same age. Born from the same egg, even. I told them to come and find me if anything happened and, apparently wrongly, assumed they would do so. I cannot imagine why they’d just disappear like this, knowing it would worry us. Especially since I can tell they are not hurt.”

“If the little Ghost has any mortal weakness, it’s not knowing when to leave well enough alone.” Hornet said wryly, ducking through the foliage and leaping entirely over a mossy set of worn descending stone stairs that likely predated the Gardens as they were. Moss and old stone were an unsteady combination, and there was no telling if her legs, already as tired as if she’d hiked the mountains down to Dirtmouth and back, were steady enough to bounce back from a fall.

“In their defense, it is also their greatest strength. But yes. There are times where, when faced with an insurmountable task, I do wish they would choose to take a nap instead. Or even to see something vaguely intriguing and think twice before charging off after it, like a moth after a light.” Hollow agreed.

“You understand, then. Wyrm, if we find them and it turns out they led the twins so far out on a whim, I’m going to-“ Hornet declared as she forced her way through a dense thicket of ferns reaching taller than her horns, cutting off as she stumbled into a grassy clearing, longer than it was wide and ringed with white-flowering bushes growing up around the bases of old, patterned monoliths erected ages past, all dappled with light and casting long shadows.

There were shades in its far end, blurred by the thin illumination and just far enough away that Hornet couldn’t immediately hear what they were saying. And as they turned their soul-white eyes to her crashing through the undergrowth, only just within shouting distance and too far removed feel the wintry bite in the air they wrought, Hornet’s blood still ran cold at the silhouette of the fourth pair of eyes that met hers.

“Hornet? What’s wrong, are they- oh.” Hollow said, delicately extricating themself from the frosted-over thorn bushes they brushed through, a deep chill at her side. “We will need to make another trip to the Mask Maker.” They observed, though Hornet hardly heard them.

Ghost, Nettle, and Sonnet were all there, recognizably even at distance by the curve of their horns, and Ghost gave an excited, slightly sheepish thrill to see her that she heard even across the field, darting back through the waving grass to greet her.

“Hornet!” They laughed. “I was just about to come and get you! Look, look who I found, they say their name is-“

“I know who they are.” Hornet told them, and then blinked at the dullness of her own voice. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Take the others and leave.”

“What? They aren’t dangerous, and I’ve already told them to be careful around you.” Ghost objected, audibly digging their metaphorical heels in.

“I know they aren’t.” Hornet said coolly, not breaking from the distant shade’s stare.

They still hadn’t moved, gone still as though they were only a Vessel-shaped hole neatly punched out of the dewy greenery behind them into an emptiness the Gardens’ light couldn’t touch, and their eyes burned darker spots into her vision like she stared into the sun. The contrast of their odd, upwards-curling horns was impossible to misplace, unmistakable.

A shiver ran up her back to count three of them.

“I don’t want you here to see this, Ghost.” The words came out clipped, tenser than she’d wanted.

Their void spiked with frantic alarm, and Ghost grasped at her shawl with an icewater-frigid tendril as though to stop her. “You won’t-“

“I won’t harm them-” She said roughly, and cut herself off before the sentence could continue. “Go, and take Hollow with you. I will send the rest your way.” Hornet instructed, indicating where she felt the cold at her back to be the strongest with a curt nod.

“… Are you alright?” Ghost asked slowly without moving an inch to do as she’d asked, with the air of someone who was very close to a conclusion she wished they wouldn’t come to yet. From just behind her, Hollow wordlessly mirrored the sentiment.

Hornet sighed, and dared to be the first to turn away to look Ghost in the eye, instead. “I’ll be fine, little Ghost. We will speak later. But this is not a conversation I want any of you to witness. I ask only that you allow me a moment alone.”

There must have been some giveaway in her tone, or else they were simply far better at reading her than she’d prefer, as Ghost’s eyes widened and they let go of her shawl as though they’d been shocked. “Oh. Oh. They’re one that you… Are you sure?”

Hornet sighed harshly, patience running dry. “No one will die today,” was all she could say.

“Come, Ghost, I do not think she’ll be long.” Hollow said gently, with an ounce too much easy acceptance to not have at least an idea of why she wanted them gone, however almost-subtle Ghost had tried to be. There was an unspoken promise in their thoughts though, an undercurrent of pointed expectation, an undeserved unwillingness to draw conclusions as Ghost had.

Hornet grit her fangs and said nothing, and stepped away from them and through the grass, the highest isolated strands catching in her shawl at shoulder-height. There was a path just beyond the tallest of it, of broken stone interspersed by thick, flowering moss, and the scrape of her claws over the pavestones was louder than she’d have liked, every step feeling like it’d cause the frozen-stiff shade she walked towards to leap forward and strike her.

It wasn’t as though she’d deserve any less.

Sonnet and Nettle were beginning to seem truly unsettled by the new shade’s silence by the time Hornet stood close enough to speak clearly to them, and latched onto her arrival like a lifeline.

“Hornet, do you know what’s wrong with them? They won’t say anything else, they only froze up when you and Hollow got here. Do you think they’re scared? I told them how nice you all are, and that they shouldn’t be – scared, I mean – so you can tell them I’m right, right?” Nettle asked rapid-fire. “You don’t need to worry though, Ghost and I let them know all about you already, and how they’ve got to be careful. We can get them a mask too, right? I mean, the Mask Maker’s probably not too far away, once we figure out whatever’s wrong with the Void, and all. If they can carve Hollow’s horns no problem, then another mask shouldn’t be hard at all! Right?”

“There should be no difficulty, if that is what they desire.” Hornet mumbled. “Ghost and Hollow are back up the path. Wait with them for a time, little one.”

“What? Why?” Nettle questioned, drawn up short from their frenetic pacing where they’d been dipping back and forth through the air around the other shade, who was perhaps twice their height and, floating as they were, tall enough to stare fixedly down at Hornet.

She met their gaze unflinchingly. “Go. I will meet you there soon.”

“Nettle,” Sonnet cautioned with the awareness of one who’d picked up on the unsaid enough to know when the time had come to leave, already edging away. “Let’s go.” They linked a shadowy tendril with one of Nettle’s and gave them a tug as their sibling only cocked their head, perplexed by her dismissal and very much without that awareness, and allowed themself to be dragged off, going easily enough when Sonnet didn’t wait for an answer.

And all was quiet again. The shade before her hovered and stared, pushed gently to-and-fro by forces that paid no mind to the slow breeze that blew heavy with humidity and the syrupy scent of the flowers, the curves of their irregular horns sharper, more pointed than she remembered them to be. Hornet stared back, scowling as the seconds ticked past without change. Her claws itched to raise her needle, still clutched tightly in her hand, if only for how little she knew of what could happen next once the shade inevitably made the first move.

Her stomach turned at even the impulse to draw her weapon to them, to them. She knew she might need to defend herself, saw nothing but anger in the curl of the shade’s edged tendrils, how their phosphor-bright eyes bored into her face.

But how could she?

Chapter Text

And so, like many things, Hornet’s greatest regret came at the clash of best intentions and worst circumstances. And, like regrets so often are, it was only an accident.

Though the Dreamers were newly asleep and the Kingdom settling into something like an uneasy rhythm, recovering by inches as the rampant spread of the Infection slowed, already Hornet, newly-named, was familiar with the ash-scattered precipices of the Kingdom’s Edge. Familiar enough to clamber down them with little difficulty and slay the guarding beasts without a second thought, a precisely aimed throw of her needle well-suited for both trials.

The ash was difficult to see through, irritating where it blew into her face when she turned to the harsh gale that let it settle in only the deepest crevices, but she picked out the darkened gape of the cavern she sought easily enough. Here, in spite of all the changes the stasis had made to the Kingdom and the less easily-stomached ones it made to her own life that, of course, were not too much to bear for one such as her, was something that had held steady through it all.

This, at least, was still reliable.

It was carved like a wyrm’s tunnel into the far side of the Edge’s canyon, the vast chasm that they said gouged deep enough that there was no excuse not to complete a prayer to the King, should one fall from its heights. The tunnel she searched for was far below the Wyrm’s husk she was newly tasked to watch and just a hundred feet or so above the acid-line, near-impossible to see with the eternal windstorm but there, nonetheless. Low and remote enough not to draw attention, just high enough that the acid never flooded it when the tides rose.

Though they hadn’t risen at all in some time. All going according to plan, with the world frozen in place, Hornet supposed she’d never need worry about the acid again.

She considered the distance and bounced her needle’s weight in her hand. Then it was a brief run to build up speed and bound over the cliff’s edge, and then long, weightless moments midair, wholly certain of her strength and her judgement, to fall low enough to pitch her blade with a huff of effort lost to the whipping wind and wait for the silk to go taut.

It did, wrapped twice around the resilient chitin of her forearm and held for stability in her other hand, and sang like a note to her as she yanked at it with just the force enough to make her freefall a leap once again, her shawl billowing and snapping in the gale. A moment more of narrowing her eyes against the blinding ash, though by now she thought she could’ve made the jump blindfolded, and she landed exactly on the side-hollow’s crumbling ledge, bending her knees to the impact like the Weavers had taught her.

And then she had only to stand straight to shorten the silk she’d called, coiling it around her hand to dissipate until she could tug her needle out from the dusty stone over her head. It grated itself free with a fall of ash, and Hornet caught it and replaced it at her back without a thought, striding quickly into the tunnel nearly before she had it in hand. She couldn’t afford to waste time (no, she could, only she didn’t want to), however patient her sibling was with her frequent late arrivals.

Inside was darker than much of the Kingdom’s Edge, the tunnel wide and open but the floor angled just steeply enough that most of the wyrm’s ash blown into it remained piled at the entrance, a further protection. As with every time she ventured here, Hornet checked the ash, to see that the mounded substance was undisturbed. As with every time before, it was left untouched as she stepped carefully between the drifts and followed the trail within.

Into the mountain bedrock it delved deeper, deeper still, until at last the light was so low that only a denizen of Deepnest, or else somewhere entirely darker, could’ve possibly seen well enough to know where to put one foot in front of the other. Where the tunnel branched she took the right path, her footsteps echoing in the dim and far enough from the wind that there was only the dry silence of empty caverns, excavated and then forgotten to the earth, as the angle of the floor shifted and began to draw her down on a decline.

A familiar descent, that still felt as encompassing as though she’d ventured into Deepnest’s underbelly, or else into the lowest, loneliest mineshafts beneath the Crystal Peaks, down below the furthest glow of pink. A little homey, a little like a safe road to her nest, but Deepnest was far from here.

And then up ahead was a light, a distant speck that grew to a lumafly lantern as she approached, illuminating someone else sat beside it. They rested lounging with their head lolled lazily against their shoulder, propped up by a hand, the other picking flecks of splintered chitin out of cracks in their nail where it was laid over their lap. The Vessel looked up at her approach, without even the good sense to act watchful as she neared them, and the pale of their mask flickered half-lit in the lanternlight.

Though she couldn’t think too harshly of them for it; they were plenty vigilant when it mattered.

“I could have been anyone, you know. Folk are getting adventurous these days; I had to hide from a pack of boofly-trappers on my way here. One day they’ll think to look into all the little crevices they forgot about during the plague, and then you’ll be sorry.” Hornet admonished, though she tossed down her needle and sat lightly within the clean white glow of the lumafly.

They shrugged and set aside their weapon, apparently cleaned to their satisfaction, and leaned forward instead to watch her attentively.

Hornet crossed her legs and frowned, glancing back the way she’d come. “No, I think you’d better start. I have… Something I want to talk to you about, and it’s,” she trailed off, and scowled at her own hesitation. “You go first. How many do you have for me?”

The Vessel stared at her for a long moment, then shrugged again as if to say that she could have it her way and held up two fingers.

“Just two? No more?” Hornet repeated. “I’d have thought you’d meet better success, now. They’ve relaxed the guards around the Basin, it should be far easier to leave. No one’s looking for you anymore.”

The Vessel gave an exaggerated eyeroll, impressive given as they had no eyes to speak of, and pulled a scratched-up, half-empty inkwell from nowhere Hornet could see. As long as she’d known them it’d always been half-empty, and whatever ink they used ran darker than any she’d seen, but she was long past the point of questioning what didn’t quite add up about her odd, dark sibling. The Vessel unstoppered the ink and dipped a pointed claw into it, and traced glyphs she’d taught them directly onto the smooth stone floor.

“I got you a whole scroll of spidersilk so you wouldn’t have to do that.” Hornet interjected, and only what she’d come to speak to them about, that circled like a hunting aspid in her thoughts, kept her indignation in check when they waved a hand at her to be quiet.

She scooted closer to read over their shoulder as they added the finishing touches to their scrawled writing, that she took a moment to translate to something coherent.

“More next week, hm? Well, where are the ones for today? I can handle two.” Hornet asked.

Now it was the Vessel’s turn to hesitate. They wrote another line.

“Oh. That’s not ideal. Do you know where they went? I may be able to head them off before they make it anywhere too bad.”

Another line, this one scrawled in the dialect Hornet knew best, a word she’d taught them with all the pride in her heart. Deepnest.

Hornet leaned back, considering. No, whatever road the wayward Vessels they spoke of walked, there was desperate little likelihood they lived still if they’d found their way to the spiders’ home.

The cave’s atmosphere turned solemn, in that peculiar way it seemed to whenever her sibling felt especially strongly about something, regret nearly tangible in the air. The Vessel let their hand splay over the last glyph, brushing their claws almost tenderly over the black stain on the floor, and looked to her hopefully.

Hornet didn’t meet their gaze. “I can look. I haven’t been home in a few days, I can ask around the lower tunnels if anyone’s seen anything. But, Vigil, you know Deepnest kills.” She told them tonelessly. “When did they leave?”

Vigil curled their fist and made three sharp knocks against the floor, with a pause in between each.

Hornet sighed under her breath. “I’ll look.” She repeated without enthusiasm, knowing as well as they did that three days’ time in Deepnest was far, far longer than most could withstand its fangs. “Have you held up alright? How are the rest?” She asked, to change the subject.

Vigil nodded their gratitude and, after a moment to think, tilted their hand in a half-hearted so-so gesture. They dipped a claw into their inkwell and wrote out another line on the floor.

Hanging on. You?

“Surviving, and that’s all any can do.” Hornet said in her best replication of her minder’s stern, nasally voice, with as straight a face as she could.

Vigil’s shoulders moved like they giggled, though as ever they made no sound save the rustle of their overlong cloak, and they sat back as though shoving themself away from the murky writing on the floor while she worked to keep her chelicerae from twitching with humor, and knew she’d failed to when the atmosphere lightened in some indefinable way. They’d been through this song and dance before, Hornet and Vigil, in their shared efforts to do whatever there was left to, now that it was all over, the Kingdom preserved for now and forever.

They two had seen the backs of enough silent siblings to know when it was better to let a loss go.

Especially when there were still so many to be sprung from their inhospitable birthplace. There was doing all one could, and then there was languishing over what had gone irretrievably beyond her reach, and Hornet had had more than her fill of the latter before she’d left her mother’s den for the last time.

It was something she respected about Vigil; they wouldn’t tell her exactly how many Vessels were left past the imposing door emblazoned with the Pale King’s mark, a greyed passage that she’d only ever seen from the outside and even then only once, but whoever remained were few enough to know that Vigil was familiar with death, as familiar at least as she was. It set them apart from most Hallownest bugs she had to deal with, who only ever seemed surprised whenever it came to knock at their doors. They understood, as she did, that sometimes there was nothing to be done.

And they understood, as she did, that they would always have to try.

“But really, I’ve been okay. The Weavers are thinking about leaving again, but I’m sure I can talk them out of it. Isma took me to the surface to see the mountains and the stag nest, and they’re okay, I guess. The stags are too loud, and all that open space is overwhelming, but I can see why she likes it. It was sort of overcast, though. We ate at this rickety little inn with good dumplings, ones with tiktik in them.” Hornet relayed the major events of her week to them, ticking them off with a claw as she went.

Vigil cocked their head at her and wrote another glyph onto the floor. To share?

“I didn’t think to bring you any. Are you hungry? I have rations-“

Vigil shook their head quickly, seemingly tickled by her asking like she’d stumbled into a joke they didn’t intend to explain, and traced out a few more glyphs.

Not to eat. Don’t eat. Just curious.

“Hm. Alright.” Hornet acquiesced, willing enough to tentatively accept one less thing to worry about. “Well, did anything interesting happen down here recently?”

Grew wings. Annoyed gods. Played cards. Was fun.

Hornet frowned down at their writing and then at them, and Vigil only gave her their most innocent expression, their hands folded mock-politely in their lap and their head tilted just towards the side of their largest horn, as it tended to when they were distracted by something more interesting than good posture. There was a subtle energy in their careful stillness, like they were only just barely better than she was at holding in amusement, that told her without a doubt that they were messing with her.

Hornet gave an exasperated scoff and shoved at their shoulder, and they let themself be bowled over by the blow, clutching theatrically at their chest even as they silently laughed, momentary seriousness evaporated like it’d never been.

Kidding, Vigil wrote when they hauled themself back to sit cross-legged at her side, bumping her shoulder with theirs to get her to look. Only kidding. Don’t have any cards.

“Hilarious,” Hornet told them dryly. “That you spend your time thinking of things you can say to antagonize me.”

Not all of it. You said earlier, something to talk about?

And just like that, the air turned grave, and it was impossible to have guessed if it was her own darkening mood or Vigil picking up on it to make it so. Hornet scowled fiercely and drew her knees to her chest under her shawl, burying her face in its warm red neckguard, all the easy levity Vigil always seemed to bring with them to their meetings gone as soon as they reminded her of what she’d come to say.

“Yes,” she agreed. “There’s something that’s been bothering me for a while. I wanted to ask your opinion before I… Before I made a decision.”

She didn’t turn to see what Vigil did, keeping her eyes locked on the fluttering of the lumafly in its scuffed glass container as she mulled over what had consumed her every waking thought for the better part of a month, but the air seemed to grow almost imperceptibly clearer, like they were waiting for her to fill it with whatever she would. Hornet nodded her distracted thanks for the gesture.

“You know I’ve been speaking to the Pale King? About my new responsibilities?” She began.

At Vigil’s slow nod, that she knew by the familiar brief rustle of their cloak, she continued. “He’s told me he knows some of you are escaping, because of course the unhappy bastard knows everything except how to handle matters himself,” Hornet grumbled, kicking out a foot to nudge at the lumafly, which gave no indication it cared one way or the other as she rolled its container back and forth. “I didn’t have to tell him. It’s one of those things he just knew. I suppose we’re lucky he didn’t learn earlier. And I suppose we’re luckier that he didn’t even consider that I would know, too.”

Vigil nodded again from across the lantern, more quickly now as though to ask her to hurry with her retelling, the light casting ghostly shadows over their mask and illuminating the tops of their eyes where the mask ended and the dark began, as though they were only wearing it as another layer overtop their face.

Yet there was nothing else, Hornet knew, nothing but abyssal emptiness hidden beneath the bone, not flesh or blood or breath. Void that was meant to smother, the Pale King had told her now that his Pure Vessel was safely sealed, now that the sibling she’d known longest was locked away to never know anything at all ever again, save whatever lay behind the closed temple door. Void was meant to seal and consume and contain, an impenetrable dark that killed mortal bugs and, when properly purified, could not be breached by even the gods.

It had fulfilled its purpose, the Pale King told her with all the solemnity of handing off a terrible burden, and still it was lethal.

“I have new orders. All the Great Knights already have their own duties, but given that I’m from Deepnest, and there isn’t really much specific that I’m tasked with as Protector yet besides the King’s Brand, I’m supposed to deal with this. It’s efficient, to keep it in the family.” Hornet told them sardonically, debating if she was angrier at herself for accepting the task, even just for pretending to, or at the Pale King. The more productive answer was her father, as always, so she decided that was the case.

“I’m supposed to kill you. Me, of all those he could’ve asked. Can you believe it?” Hornet laughed incredulously.

They couldn’t, evidently, as Vigil relaxed all at once and their shoulders shook with humor, even raising a hand to loosely point in her direction and incline their head, as though to ask if she was sure she’d heard right.

“Trust that if I’d any less self-control, I’d have had the same reaction, and then we’d be in far more trouble than we are.” Hornet assured them with a giggle, half a grin tugging at her chelicerae to see them dismiss the Pale King’s command utterly and without a moment’s concern.

It was a heartening thing, and she briefly felt a little ridiculous for worrying herself so over telling them. “It has never been more difficult not to call him something my mother used to, when someone made her really mad. How lucky, that he thought I’d do what he asked.”

The smile faded as soon as it came, and Hornet reached for her needle to set it closer at her side, the cool, familiar grip settling in a way little else was. “He said… Worrisome things after that, though. Everyone I know has been ecstatic since the Black Egg was sealed, but he seemed more tired than ever. Beaten down, maybe, and it serves him right, but it’s strange. It was almost like he’d gotten the wrong news, like he thought Hollow had failed. As though they could ever fail at anything.”

Vigil motioned for her to get to the point.

“… He said you could break the seals.” Hornet said quietly. “Any of you, if given the opportunity. You could open the Black Egg.”

Vigil shuffled closer so they could edge into her line of sight, tense as a live wire, and shook their head quickly in denial when they were sure she was paying attention. The lumafly light behind them cast their pale face into shadow, made their edges blur bright with its halo. This close, she could feel the faint and scentless waft of cold that they always had in place of body heat, like they were made of chilled, dark-stained marble. Hornet was accustomed to Deepnest’s chill, had never found a reason to think anything of Vigil’s, but now it bothered her for a reason she couldn’t pin down.

She shook off the feeling and dropped their gaze.

“He did,” she mumbled. “And then he all but kicked me out of the palace. I’m not worried about that at all, I can just go stay at the Nest if I need to, but there was this… Finality about it. He escorted me to the gates himself. He’s never done that before. It was strange.” Hornet repeated to herself, subdued like she was talking about someone who’d died.

There was no real need to talk louder in the echo off the tunnel’s smooth stone, so she didn’t make herself speak up. Vigil would understand.

“But that’s not necessarily what I wanted to talk to you about. After he said that, I’ve started noticing your kind around Hallownest more often. They’ve been there before, of course, but I pick them out of crowds in the City, and creeping around the outskirts of Crossroads towns, and there were even a few I had to guide away from the Kingdom’s Edge before there could be trouble. Some were more determined to do whatever it was they came for than others, but your kind are not heavy. I carried them out of Hallownest a second time, and you’re welcome for it.” Hornet said shortly.

“You tell them why they must leave, don’t you? That as long as this kingdom stands, they are at risk within it?” She demanded.

Vigil nodded once, pointedly, a clear indication that they thought her needing to ask a little unnecessary.

“Well, you need to be clearer about it. I’ve recognized every single one that I’ve caught so far, and it isn’t only their safety I worry for anymore. They all came back, Vigil.” Hornet accused. “What are they trying to do?”

They went still then, deathly still, like the littler ones they handed off for Hornet to lead out of the kingdom that would see them dead tended to when overwhelmed. Yet Vigil didn’t seem bewildered by what she asked as much as carefully considering it, maybe wracking their own experience of the Vessels they guided for a reason they’d choose to ignore their advice and stay. After a tense minute, Vigil slowly shook their head and looked up to meet her stare.

Hornet sighed and rested her chin over her crossed forearms. “That’s alright, I can’t think of anything either. We’ll just have to tell them again. No, I’ll give them a better reason not to come back; I’ll just scare them off at the border. Experience always wins out over a toothless warning.” She decided with a weak smile to reassure them, a little thrown by the intensity of their reaction.

Vigil reached back over for their inkwell, and briefly hesitated before writing again.

You think it’ll work?

“It will. I am a spider of Deepnest, Vigil. There’s nothing more terrifying.”

Two months more found Hornet back at the cave, pacing with agitation before the lumafly lantern. Vigil was late, and it was unlike them to be. For all the calm, almost lazy sort of ease they comported themself with, they were always the early one of the two of them.

Hornet had been waiting for nearly half the day, and by that point had come to the conclusion that they were likely just dead in a hopper’s stomach somewhere. It was the only reasonable explanation she could come up with for why they simply wouldn’t arrive, no matter how many increasingly-annoyed (not worried, never that, fretting like that was useless when there was nothing to do for it) glares she cast down the tunnel echoing with her measured footsteps.

The change only came when the lumafly was just starting to settle down to sleep, the disruption of Hornet’s pacing losing out to the draw of rest.

Hornet’s head shot up when there came a muted shuffling from down the tunnel, and out of the darkness she could just faintly pick out the pale of Vigil’s mask, listed heavily to the side of their largest horn like they were too tired to hold it up any longer. It was an instant more to recognize the way they held themself to be how a mortally wounded creature shambled towards its demise, and then she’d run to their side to take the weight for them.

They went nearly limp the moment she had their arm around her shoulders, the same temperature as the stone beneath her claws where their chitin lay cool over her shawl, slumped against her side like a dead thing, though they were so light they might’ve weighed nothing substantial at all. Hornet grit her fangs and ignored the uncanny reminiscence to carrying a corpse, the disregarding made all the easier by how easy it was to heft them upright.

She’d carried bugs living and dead before, and this was no different.

Hornet hauled them back to the lumafly’s glow and sat them up where she could see them, though they swayed dangerously when she let them go. Vigil shook their head weakly as though to clear it when Hornet pushed aside their cloak to check beneath the tattered strands, but their thorax was as deep a black as any other part of them. Though she looked as closely as she could for the glint of light off the wet of a wound, it was impossible to see the source of the dripping black that rose buoyantly into the air even as it pooled on the ground, as though too ephemeral to remain where it fell.

“I need to find the wound to bind it. Don’t move.” Hornet told them coldly, unable to spare the effort to soften her voice with her claws already running down their side, feeling for the flaw.

They nodded wearily, so unnaturally still that she nearly snapped for them to move instead, just so that she’d know she wasn’t working to save a cadaver, and it was in the brief second she considered doing so that her hand fell upon a breach in their chitin that ran with black.

Hornet hissed a sharp cry and yanked back her hand at the unexpected pain that sank, aching, into her knuckles from just skimming her palm over the wound, a cold so deep it burned, and Vigil twitched and reflexively, needlessly, reached to push away her hand. The sting faded the moment she shook the clinging blood from her claws, the darkness of the spattering drops a far cry from the muted blue she herself bled, yet even so her fingers still buzzed and prickled painfully like she’d left them in icewater.

Vigil looked up, confusion in the tilt of their mask, as though they had no idea why she’d reacted that way. Before she could stop them, they ran the claws of the hand they weren’t using to hold aside their cloak through the wound and, with the black unnoticeably staining the equal dark of their scuffed claws, wrote out shaky, nearly illegible glyphs on the smooth stone before them.

That bad? Heal soon. Don’t worry.

They made to continue, but the darkness over their claws had run dry. Hornet caught their hand before they could refresh it.

“Stop. Just,” Hornet took a quick, deep breath, and exhaled forcefully. “I know you’ll be fine. It just needs to be bound, to stop the bleeding.”

She’d be the last to know if it needed more, but if she was wrong then it soon wouldn’t matter. Hornet called a storm of her silk, and in the near-complete darkness the soul-light was blinding as it whipped around her, the strands too quick to see except when they gleamed the brightest.

“Raise your arms and move your cloak out of the way.” She gritted out, the focus to keep the spell’s momentum nearly as draining to uphold as the spent soul itself.

Vigil did as she asked, though the arm over the gaping wound in their side didn’t lift as high as the other when they tried to move it and hitched as they gathered the long strands of their cloak over their shoulder. Hornet let the binding snap into place with a gasp, all the white flashing as brilliant as the sun as the silk tightened like a spool around their chest. Vigil jolted as it did, the brightness fading quickly as they dropped their cloak, and then it was long seconds before Hornet’s eyes readjusted to the dimness enough to see anything else.

And with that, the crisis was over in all the ways that mattered, leaving Hornet to wheeze to catch her breath in the slowly-returning light of the stunned-dark lumafly, Vigil so quiet, save the brief rustle of their cloak as they tested their range of motion that, if she hadn’t been watching for them, they might’ve vanished into the shadows altogether.

Hornet did watch, though, as though they’d fade if she let them out of her sight for an instant, staring as the lumafly regained the wherewithal after the flash to cast its soft white glow over the tattered edges of their cloak again. It at first made the dusty grey strands brighten just barely lighter than the pitch of lightless mineshafts, growing clearer until she could see all the blackened stains spattered over it, faint but never to be cleaned.

It was a small blessing that Vigil was still turned away from her as she flexed her hand, still aching ever-so-slightly around the joints, and looked down to see it was the same scratched-up black as always, all the little scores over the chitin of her palm catching the light as she turned it over.

She was nearly surprised to see that she still had the substance to reflect it, as she’d almost expected the stain to have left behind the same fathomless dark as Vigil’s blood.

Hornet glanced up as Vigil brushed their cloak’s ragged strands aside again and craned their head to look at her handiwork, running questioning claws over the thick lacing of pale spell-weave crisscrossing their chest. The silk she’d spun had come out just as strong and thick as she’d wanted it to, each strand more like a piece of yarn than the fine stuff the Weavers produced, but the finished binding was more than she’d anticipated. Better too much than too little, she supposed, and far better than a first attempt at patching up a wound not her own could have gone.

“I’m not supposed to do that around someone’s chest.” Hornet panted. “The silk winds too tightly to breathe. That won’t be a problem for you, will it?”

Vigil shook their head again, watching as the pale silk covering their thorax from armpit to waist lost its soul-shine, became a dull white slowly staining to grey. This time they spared the thought to retrieve their inkwell to write with, though Hornet had her doubts about what ink they truly kept within it.

No problem. Don’t breathe. Thanks.

“Of course.” Hornet said stiffly.

Of course, they didn’t, and she’d known that. Nothing that breathed had blood so cold. It didn’t matter, it must only be the void the Pale King had warned her of. Yet if a little cold was the worst his dreaded darkness had to offer, he must have been overreacting in his caution; Hornet knew herself well, and she knew she could handle being chilly. There were more important things to be worked up about.

Like, “What happened to you?”

Vigil froze like a moth in lamplight just long enough for her to notice, and then shrugged easily with their good shoulder and freed their worn nail from their back, dropping it with a piercing clatter to the ground beside them with something like disgust, as though they were glad not to have to touch it any longer. Hornet considered shoving them to get their attention when they didn’t elaborate, didn’t even deign to look at her to give a solid negative, but they had the arm on the side of the wound curled protectively to their belly like it still hurt.

The burden of their dead weight leaned against her, as wholly exhausted as it was light, burned on her palms like a brand, so instead she only curled them into loose fists.

“If you won’t tell me, I’ll start guessing.” Hornet threatened. “I’ve been waiting here for hours. If you were going to get into a fight, you should at least have come and gotten me to help.”

Then Hornet realized something she’d missed in the circumstances of their arrival and glanced back the way they’d come, searching the ungiving darkness for a glimpse of any pale masks. “You didn’t bring any this time. Last week you said there’d be five or six.”

All the better, as the news she’d come with was not the kind that she wanted any of the other Vessels to hear, but unusual. More unusual was the way Vigil flinched subtly when she mentioned the absence of any of their siblings, with what might’ve been just a casual shift if they’d been a creature of flesh and blood. Hornet knew better by now, knew that no move they took was truly without cause, even the ones that for all intents and purposes mimicked a bug at ease.

Vigil dipped a claw into their inkwell and dragged it across the floor in small, cramped writing.

Don’t want to talk about it.

The sentence was unusually complete, like they wanted no misunderstanding. Hornet stiffened, affronted.

It wasn’t like them to be cagey about such a minor issue; there wasn’t a beast or bug below the earth that they two couldn’t take down together, but she could not help if she didn’t know where to direct her needle. She watched as Vigil curled in on themself some as though in pain and trying, almost successfully, to hide it, a stab of concern climbing sharp from her stomach. It wasn’t like them to keep what hurt them to themself, either, and she’d thought they knew that they were stronger together, as a unit. What reason could they have to hide?

“You’re going to, though. So that I won’t find your empty shell picked over by the vengeflies, you will tell me what got the better of you. Laugh if you will for me being the one to tell you it, but now isn’t the time for pride. Was it some errant kingsmould? I can call them off, now that I’m in charge of what happens to your kind. Just show me to whichever ignorant guard is causing you issue and-“

Vigil smacked their palm against the ground with a jarring crack of chitin on stone, drawing her up short. It took them moments more to regain themself enough to try writing, and what they did write was shakier than usual.

Won’t happen again.

Hornet huffed at them, annoyance finally overtaking worry. She preferred it so, didn’t like the unfamiliar, confined helplessness the latter held, especially when this wasn’t something she could fix. If they wouldn’t tell her what hurt them, then there was nothing to run through with her needle, and whatever the danger was could very well still lurk out past the tunnel, as Vigil did not have the air of someone who’d won the fight that brought them down. If she couldn’t kill what had hurt them, then there was no use being bothered, she told herself, especially with their wounds already dealt with.

It was useless to worry, useless to feel betrayed over something she couldn’t change or secrets she couldn’t be trusted with, so the only viable option was to ensure in a way that she could that it didn’t happen again.

“Fine. Be stubborn, if you will. I’m going to walk you back when you leave.” She informed them.

Vigil was shaking their head desperately before she’d finished speaking, already reaching again for their ink.

No. Not safe.

Hornet sighed harshly. “I promise that none I meet will come to harm, if you’re worried about that.”

Not safe for you.

“I can handle myself.”

Not with this. Don’t come close. Void calls.

The writing they used for ‘void’ was clearly only their best approximation of something she’d never taught them, nearer to a compound of ‘quiet’ and ‘waiting’ than anything else. It sent a chill up her back, calling to mind the Pale King’s last words before sending her away, and that alone was reason enough to ignore the warning.

“I’m not going to do-” she began, but they hadn’t stopped writing.

Please don’t. Please.

And when Vigil finally turned their face to her, uncurling their arm with jerky, pained movements to clutch at her wrist as though she’d leave just to spite them if they didn’t, Hornet saw the ink-black tears dripping from the holes in their masks where their eyes should have been, where they would’ve been had they been any other creature, and the assurance died before she could speak it. There was a tremor in their corpse-cold hand, and tears like dripping rot running down the pale of their mask, and the eyes that looked beseechingly into hers were not eyes at all and maybe never had been, and Hornet thought in that moment that if there was ever a nearer mirror of what her father saw in her siblings, she’d never find it.

And it all didn’t matter in the slightest, because Vigil was crying.

It was easier to abide by being touched when it didn’t really feel like another bug, so Hornet scooted close enough to Vigil’s side to carefully knock their horns together, the clatter that rang through the silence like a quiet declaration of gentler things than argument all on its own.

“Okay,” Hornet agreed softly with her head leaned up against theirs, as black dripped from Vigil’s face and they bowed further, nudging the bone of their horn to hers. “Okay, I won’t go. It’s alright.”

There was a quiet scrape of their mask, scratched-up and coated in dust, against her own, a faultless white and cleaned by her or her guardians daily, as Vigil inclined their head to trace a thin glyph onto the floor next to Hornet’s knees.

Promise?

“Yes,” Hornet reassured as soon as their hand moved to let her read. “I promise. Don’t make me regret it, okay? Don’t lose anymore, you little weakling.”

Vigil butted their head weakly against hers for the insult, and then leaned away to write something more complete.

Didn’t lose. Should see other.

Hornet snorted, unable to contain a surprised giggle as Vigil hoisted their nail as though at an enemy, waggling it ineffectively like the heavy blade was a rapier, apparently giving a rendition of their winning battle strategy.

The conversation drifted to lighter, unimportant things from there, but Hornet couldn’t help but feel like they’d come close to something truly terrible, something that they couldn’t’ve taken back if it had come to pass. Vigil never did tell her what had hurt them, nor what had shaken them so badly that the very possibility of Hornet doubling back on their trail to see it for herself was enough to bring them to tears, and Hornet never asked again. In time, she nearly forgot they’d been hurt at all.

They made it easy enough to, after all, and other wounds mounted.

And when she left that day, she hadn’t mentioned what’d been on her mind when she’d come; a dozen Vessels that she knew she’d guided to Hallownest’s borders, set loose with a little nail and a copy of an old, old map of what lay beyond to make what they would of themselves. All back again, all unwilling to go and unable to tell her why. Seven she’d caught in the pious crowd outside the Black Egg Temple, three more at the gates of the locked-up Teacher’s Archives, and one standing drenched in the lee of the tall new statue at the center of the City of Tears while the crowds milled around them. They had not wanted to leave again, but they were young and inexperienced, and there was a creeping, insidious suspicion growing in the back of her mind about their purpose in her kingdom that would not allow her to let them stay even if it’d been safe for them to.

A suspicion that asked why it was always in these places that she found the wayward little wraiths.

She did not mention the last Vessel, the one whom she’d caught at the mouth of the Dirtmouth well, who’d recognized her and raised their nail in challenge, who had not been strong enough to survive it. Perhaps if she had, then it would have been different.

It was a little less than three months after that when the situation became too much to hide.

The Infection was still not gone. It was slowed, weakened, but the sick still died and the dead still woke. The Weavers had abandoned Deepnest, and her mother still slept, and Hornet was alone.

She wasn’t afraid, though many of the spiders she spoke to had begun to startle in the middle of conversations, as though abruptly awoken from deep daydream. Most were much quicker to show their fangs and snarl at her these days, but she snarled back just fine. She wasn’t afraid, though they’d begun to ask her to stay away when she could, to fulfill her duty as newly-established Protector and keep her distance from Deepnest for a time. To come back, always to come back, but not when she was tired.

Not when she bled.

She was always tired, now.

Hornet had only taken the advice when a Devout who’d half-raised her, dripping orange from behind their mask as they spewed muddied accusations, had not allowed her to end their argument without death.

Hallownest was growing panicked again, the slow kind of panic that comes when one thinks they’ve long-since escaped a threat, that then shows itself to have been growing unchecked like a mold when rediscovered. Nothing had grown worse, exactly, not worse than it was at the Infection’s height before the Black Egg was sealed, but now the king had gone nearly silent, only resurfacing to give some last-stand order or another, and still people died. Her job, as the remaining Great Knights suggested in the few and far-between times she saw them, when they weren’t frantically busy deescalating this tense standoff or that shortage, was to help as she could.

So that was what she’d done, because in spite of all the panic the Hallownest bugs could muster, Hornet wasn’t afraid.

If she caught the illness then that would be that, but as of yet she hadn’t had a single burning dream. No, Hornet was a princess, and a Protector, and Hallownest’s people were quickly growing to seem very like her own, and with all that relying on her there was no room to fear. As she lent her needle where she could to keep safe those who couldn’t fight, and brought supplies and news to those who desperately wanted for both, and wore down the chitin of her hands digging deep enough graves alongside those who yet survived, Hornet became very, very certain of two things she had only distantly considered before.

The first was that this was her kingdom to keep safe, as much as Deepnest was. The second, that she would not allow it to die the miserable death it teetered on the brink of.

The Pale King’s last warning to her haunted every grave she dug, every rot-spewing corpse she cut down; that there could be something worse than this. That if the seals were ever disrupted, if the Hollow Knight was ever disturbed, everything that was left would be devastated by an old god’s blistering, undiscriminating rage.

It would be months yet, years, before all would truly seem lost, and decades more for Hallownest to hollow out to a husk of itself. But for those weeks, perhaps half a year after the Hollow Knight was sealed away, all seemed to hang in the balance. Hornet would not know what awaited her kingdom for a long time, but from nearly the beginning she knew what would happen if she ever failed it.

Around and between it all, the Vessels had not stopped returning.

She’d found twenty-seven more, and of those she’d had to raise her needle to ward off five, where shouted warnings and threats hadn’t been enough. Of those five, two hadn’t survived; one by complete accident, slipping off of an unstable ledge into jutting thorns, and the other when she’d been just a little too tired, hadn’t checked the force of her blow enough, and the little sibling paid the price.

Vigil hadn’t had more to let her take up to the surface since they’d gotten hurt, and Hornet could only be grimly glad for the lapse. Even if she’d had the time or the energy or the patience to maneuver a set of their siblings up past quarantine zones and blockades and the towns where she was a household name by now, where she’d doubtless be called upon to help, Hornet was not certain she could allow herself to let them go.

More than what could not ever be called fear, because she was the princess of Deepnest and she did not fear, Hornet hated to be uncertain.

But she still made the trip every week, even when exhaustion nearly pulled her to an early fate in the acid pooling at the base of the Kingdom’s Edge. In many ways it was the highlight of a very grim existence, when she could sit in the safe, familiar darkness with her dearest friend and the little lumafly light between them and talk of anything but the grisly kingdom over their heads, to poke fun at each other and laugh when they could and judge Hornet’s uneven stitching as she perfected the mending of her shawl. Vigil never brought any more Vessels hoping for a life to live, and Hornet never mentioned details of why her hands shook after she’d dug so many graves that her wrists ached, or why sometimes she was so exhausted she fell asleep on their shoulder while they doodled things they found amusing on the stone, dozing off listening to the scratch of their claws and the clink of their inkwell when she couldn’t keep her eyes open.

Vigil only sometimes mentioned the others in passing, and never said anything about leaving the rest down in their wretched birthplace, and didn’t even seem despondent enough to have abandoned their efforts to get as many out as they could, but they, too, always came to their weekly meetings anyway, and always alone.

Though sometimes the question that would spell the inevitable burned in Hornet’s mouth, she never asked. It was all too delicate, too precious to hazard with questions that neither of them could stand to answer.

Her sibling never quite lost their calm even as the weeks wore on, whatever it was about them that always set Hornet at ease. They wrote long, disjointed paragraphs about whatever the day’s topic of interest was, helped her with sewing up the endless rips in her shawl when the tiny needle shook in her fingers, let her try to scrub the dust and stains off of their mask and bind their wounds in return. She found them a shabby pack of cards somewhere to replace their old one, which had been worn to pieces a year since, and they taught her to play new games.

It was bearable, and reliable, and Hornet would rather have chewed off a limb than miss a chance to see them and not see everything else for a while.

She was becoming accustomed to what it looked like to be tired beyond rest, though. Hornet knew that that was what she was, and she knew Vigil was growing very close to that point, if they weren’t at it already, and between them it was only so long before someone slipped.

It was Vigil who made the fatal move in the end, dipped a claw in the placid water to reveal the riptide currents underneath, and in doing so spelled their own fate.

Seen them? They asked one evening and traced out the distinct shape of a Vessel’s mask, one with four wide, blunt horns, two to each side. An unusual configuration, with most of their siblings’ horns longer and upwards-curling.

Hornet scrubbed at her eyes to keep awake and peered at what they’d drawn, took a moment to think, and frowned when she couldn’t recognize the sibling they described. With how much the question of what to do about the Vessels showing up where they couldn’t be abided kept her from finding sleep more often than not, there were none she’d seen that she didn’t at least vaguely remember. This was not one of them.

“No. Should I have?” Hornet asked to be certain.

Left yesterday. Very fast. Vigil wrote idly, taking care not to overlap any previous writing. Left alone. Couldn’t wait. Hope they’re okay.

“And you told them not to return, right?”

Always.

Hornet scowled, awareness sharpened with the dismissive head tilt Vigil gave, as though the answer were obvious and she was wasting her time to ask. “Forgive me wanting to be sure. I’ve dealt with enough of them underfoot to be untrusting of whatever advice you give them when they go.”

Underfoot?

Hornet realized her mistake as quickly as she’d made it, but it was too late. Vigil turned to her, all sleepiness forgotten, and nearly dashed their next words onto the open stone.

Still here? Still coming back? Didn’t tell me?

The last was punctuated with a sharp, accusatory look that took Hornet slightly aback. “I was going to,” she defended. “When the Infection lessened, once it was less dangerous.”

How many? Often? Thought you scared off? Vigil demanded, the scrape of their claws nearly hectic as they wrote.

“It didn’t work, alright?” Hornet snapped. “Nothing’s worked yet. Whatever they’re coming back for, it means more to them than anything I can say. That they’re willing to risk battle and death for what they seek is… Unnerving. I’m doing all I can.”

Death? Vigil asked, fixing her in their empty stare. How death?

“How do you think?” The words came harsher than she’d wanted, brutal and bitter, and echoed like an ultimatum off the bare rock around, and Hornet nearly didn’t recognize them as her own.

The air, in that indefinable way they could cause it to, fell like the instant one realizes they’d tripped off an edge, in the moment before the drop, almost painfully present and as shocked-still as Vigil themself. They haltingly dipped their claws in their inkwell and hovered them over the stone, and then soundlessly laid their hand flat against the ground and looked back to her like she’d done something terrible, something unforgivable, something they could hardly believe.

Like they’d trusted her without reservation or doubt, and in the face of her breaching that trust they could only stare.

It was unbearable.

“I will not be made to feel as though I’ve done something unnecessary!” Hornet snarled and rose to her feet, furious so that something awful, cloyed and creeping in her throat, wouldn’t cause her to say what she couldn’t mean. She wanted to apologize, she nearly wanted to cry at only the look they gave her, and she could not.

“I don’t,” she swallowed thickly, unable to turn away from Vigil’s dawning, blank mask. “I’ve never sought a fight with them. I don’t want to resort to that, Vigil! There’s too much else to do, too many vicious dead howling at the gates to want to pick fights with,” she scoffed. “With children!”

But? Vigil wrote what she’d left unsaid, very slowly, and stood to be eyelevel with her.

“But,” Hornet snarled. “I cannot allow them to kill my mother! I cannot let them destroy the Dreamers’ seals, and they cannot be allowed to open the Black Egg. I do not want to kill them, Vigil, but if they will not go, they leave me no choice. Not when I know what they’d try to do, and what would befall us if they did.”

Vigil stared at her so long that Hornet nearly had to blink, and then knelt suddenly to dip their claws in their inkwell and write.

Smaller than you. Weaker. They don’t understand. Isn’t their fault.

“I know!” Hornet despaired. “I know it isn’t, I know they don’t! But if I cannot make them understand, I will not allow their ignorance to be the doom of my kingdom!”

Vigil kept writing, the glyphs going scrawled and unclear. Hear the call, want to help them, have to help, don’t want them to suffer-

“Them? The Hollow Knight? And you think I do?” Hornet asked, incredulous. “I can’t hear any… Any call, but I do need to live with knowing they’re in there, same as you. I know as well as you that they’ll never leave. It’s useless to waste our energy wishing to help what can’t be helped when there are so many that we can. Those the Hollow Knight makes their sacrifice for. I am betraying the Hollow Knight,” Hornet said harshly. “By allowing what they give to be in vain. And I will not do that. No matter who the cost to keep it takes.”

Not their fault. Just want to help.

“I don’t care if they just want to help, I don’t want my mother to die! I don’t want Deepnest razed to the ground, and I don’t want her sacrifice to be for nothing, and I don’t want to see my world burn when I could’ve stopped it!” Hornet shouted with all the pent-up resolve she’d been slowly, effortfully building for what she’d done – what she’d had to do and could not think otherwise of. “I won’t allow it. I will not allow it to end this way! I will do anything.”

You’ll kill me?

“I- What? No,” Hornet breathed, all the anger and the frantic energy that couldn’t have been terror drained in the scrawl of the shaky lettering, leaving her empty. “Don’t be ridiculous, why would I ever hurt you?”

Me before them. Choose.

Hornet scowled at them, more annoyed than anything else for the needless distraction. “I’m not going to kill you. It’s not as though I go out of my way to kill any of them; I only won’t allow threat to what I guard. If they raise their blade to me, their life is forfeit. That is how it works.”

Then you won’t kill any.

“I can’t promise that. Sentinels aren’t known for their mercy, and I’ve given all of it I have to offer.” Hornet said coldly. “It’s too late to, anyway. The time for moral dilemmas has passed. There’s only what is left, and who will die to keep it.”

No. Don’t need to die. No one needs to, Vigil wrote.

There was a pacing, frustrated rage growing in her soul that she’d hardly recognized before they spoke, a desperate, fretful, viciously resentful thing like a cornered hunter. It crept tense down to lock her hands into fists and hung like something helpless and malicious in her mouth, and though it wasn’t Vigil’s doing, not in part or in whole, something about their clear-cut conviction, their certainty that their instant, gut solution was a viable one that wouldn’t cost blood and suffering and more lives of those she was responsible for than she could bear to think of, made words not meant for them, that she didn’t even mean to say, fall like blows.

She’d thought they understood. There’d never been a life she’d relished taking for the killing’s sake, not prey and not enemy and not Vessel, but to suffer mercy wasn’t a weakness she could allow. From the moment Herrah of Deepnest, the strongest, cleverest, most capable leader anything had ever known, had found no alternative from her and hers’ fates than to accept an end, accept to give up and to leave, Hornet had known she could not afford any lapse, not a single moment’s doubt.

Her mother hadn’t been able to find a way out, not one that didn’t take either her or her hard-won world as payment, and what hope did that leave for Hornet to do differently?

It was simply the way things were that, inevitably, anything worth fighting to protect would take a terrible cost to keep. And what her mother had left her to guard in her place was worth far more than what she took to protect it, however many nightmares it gave her, however frighteningly numb she had to be to stomach what needed to be done.

How infuriatingly, intentionally ignorant Vigil seemed, to not know that truth as starkly as she did, that terrible, inevitable conclusion that would take far more lives than her if they ignored it.

“What does it matter,” Hornet said cruelly. “If it is by my hand that they fall? I know what they’d do, and I know what would come of it, and so do you. If any Vessel kills the Dreamers and opens the Black Egg, we will all die. We will die in agony. They’re weak, Vigil, too weak to replace the strongest of them, and too determined to allow to do as they please. One day, one will slip past every defense if I do not act.” Hornet stressed, low and bitter.

“I will kill as many as it takes, and in that, you have no say.” Hornet swore, already with the low simmer of regret for her words pulling at the base of her throat.

Vigil did not deserve the venom in her voice, and it wasn’t meant for them to begin with. It was a cruel way to lash out, one Hornet immediately wished she could’ve taken back. Already the anger itself was less anger than dread, a bowed, resigned dread for the grim future she’d laid out. It felt like a trap, like what she owed to her kingdom and her family closed in around her with claws and thorns and threats until, like a spooked mosscreep, she could only take a path that she’d never choose. Yet she had to be sure.

She was.

Vigil stood abruptly, flicked excess black from their claws and glared at her wordlessly, the abyssally dark holes in their mask fixed. There was a rage of their own written into every line of their body, Hornet realized with a start, from the unnaturally shifting strands of their overlong cloak to the stiff way they held their nail as they picked it up with a long, drawn-out rasp of metal over stone.

A desolate sort of rage, the sort she’d seen in mothers with their clutches lost to plague and on the faces of the grieving in the towns and villages scattered throughout the Crossroads, their graveyards filled in to the last plot.

And the worst was that Hornet understood it. She’d raged for that first Vessel to die, the one whose death had been the purest accident, and for the ones thereafter who would not go and would not relent. The one, the most recent, that had tried to run. That one she’d found first trying fruitlessly to drive their nail into the pale seals of the Black Egg, and then again deep in the Archives, just outside Monomon’s chambers. Clever enough to know when to flee, and far, far too dangerous and resolved to be allowed to live.

She wished she could tell Vigil that, wished she could only say that they could look for another way, that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed, that it was only a few and only those they’d never have convinced, but Vigil brandished their nail and Hornet reflexively flared her silk and stood her ground.

Their last words they wrote on the flat of their blade, wet black against the iron.

No more.

“Are you going to kill me?” Hornet asked lowly, the thought only occurring for the very first time that Vigil, of anyone ever to live, could ever be driven to try.

Vigil gripped their nail, and beneath their overlong cloak twitching like writhing shadows, Hornet saw that their shoulders juddered as though they were crying. And then they struck.

A weak blow, glancing at best, but Hornet only barely brought her needle up to stop it from cleaving off her arm. Their nail’s jagged, dull edge grated with a forceful shriek against the fine-sharpened blade of her needle, and Vigil did not let up and stumble back like they would for a spar. They used their nail like a shield, pushing the flat of it against her with all their might to throw her off balance, and if they had, the fight could well have fallen in their favor; Vigil was a powerful combatant, if unrefined and young, far stronger than her on her best days even if they weren’t nearly as fast.

In close quarters like this they were evenly matched, and that more than anything was what let Hornet narrow her eyes and fight back, to react instead of think, even if only with the intent to end the battle. For Hornet fought as she always had; not as quickly, nor as powerfully as she could had it been any but her sibling she bore her needle against, her closest friend, and yet as surely aimed to kill as her mother had taught her.

She was so tired, and it all seemed so impossible, and it was so easy not to think when a wide swing of their nail caught her over the thigh, the corroded blade edged in a deep wet blue when they brought it down on her again and she again caught it with her own, and the air was so still and heavy like it weighed her down with chains, and Vigil’s hands were tight on their nail’s handle and the flash of white silk she’d bandaged their left forearm with not an hour before shone brighter than the dust-pale of their mask flecked with blood, with Hornet’s own blue, and-

She could not die here.

Vigil stumbled, slipped somehow as they tried to sidestep the driving lunge of her needle, and all but Hornet’s heaving breath stopped when her blade finally found purchase with a grating, sickening crack that when they jerked their head in agony turned to a shattering, many-faceted snap like something that never should’ve had broken away regardless, as the impact jarred up her arms like she’d thrust her needle into solid rock when she pulled her weapon back.

The tunnel air was thick and the lumafly dim, and Hornet could neither breathe nor see more than the newly-broken edges of their mask, the brutal crack spidering down to one empty eye contrasted against the pale, the black behind it falling and overflowing from the empty dark where there’d before been another of Vigil’s horns. It was dark like void and dark like the wound she’d sealed for them months before and all Hornet could think, as she stood frozen with her dark-dripping needle still raised, was that it was a wound worse than anything she’d seen in a long, long time, one she knew as clearly as the aching cold of void running down her blade to bite at her clenched fist that no one could ever have survived.

Hornet blinked, and Vigil was dark-stained and crumpled on the ground, and there was blood on her hands as she waited for them to get up. She lowered her needle, drove the tip into the ground to lean against it and keep her footing as her balance wobbled wildly, and watched them while her pounding heart settled.

She’d always thought them quiet, but they’d never been silent. They tapped thoughtful claws against stone or their inkwell or their own chitin, they spread and shuffled their cloak, they scraped their hand over whorls in the rock as they wrote. She waited for them to do any of it, and the seconds stretched on.

It was horribly easy to watch them now, in a distant, unreal way, the fragments of bone scattered over the floor half-drowned in a chilling dark so deep it made her head spin to look into the spreading puddle too long. She waited, and their eyes were as vacant as ever they’d been, as though they’d been gone for months and months and all that was left was a hollowed shell, and Hornet’s stomach turned sickly not for the gape of the sockets or the eroding bite of their frozen blood on her hands or even the unbroken silence, filled by just the far-off flutter of the lumafly’s wings against its glass, but because it felt so very like any other life she’d ended. Vigil (though it didn’t feel like it was them she stared blankly down at, a corpse looked nothing like them) had felt no different to break open beneath her needle than any other Vessel, any rotted and seething husk, any small creature she’d hunted to feed another.

They hadn’t deserved this.

Hornet waited for them to move, because it couldn’t have been that easy to kill anyone she needed so much. And if they were gone, truly gone, there was nothing left. She’d be truly alone, and Hornet did not know if she could stand to be.

But waiting had never brought anyone back nor undone any mistake, and her sibling was no different.

It would be a very, very long time before enough Vessels had fallen at her hand for her to wonder why she never saw Vigil’s shade.

Chapter Text

And so Hornet found what became of them, hundreds of years afterwards.

“Hi, Hornet. You look terrible.” Vigil remarked, the cadence somehow jarringly bringing to mind the joking way they’d gestured once, unimpressed like they’d been looking her up and down when she’d been young and running with aspid burns all over her shawl and her mask to meet them. And yet their words were only that; the plain thought necessary to convey what they wanted, without any of the accompanying emotion or meaning that Hornet had become accustomed to from Ghost or the others.

It was nearly like talking to someone entirely new, speaking to the tall shade, taller than any of the little ones even if they weren’t even half of Hollow’s height, their trailing tendrils lightless under the gentle gleam of the Queen’s Gardens’ luminescence that glinted soft and silvery off of the thick greenery around them. It was strange to hear the rhythm of their thoughts, though it somehow matched her blood-tainted, dulled memory of them so neatly that it set her on edge.

They had all three of their horns.

Even if they were only solid black against the green, Vigil as dark now as any of the rest where she remembered their pale, dusty mask, the tattered shuffle of their equally dusty grey cloak, she could never have mistaken them for another.

“I’ve been made aware.” Hornet replied.

“I guess that’s a little flattering, if it’s because you murdered me. Guilt tearing you apart from the inside, and all.” They commented idly, and didn’t wait for her to recover before continuing. “I doubt it is, though, and not only because it looks to have been a long, long time since I died.”

“It isn’t,” Hornet tried and failed to keep the reflexive sharpness from her tone, wholly caught off guard by their bluntness.

Vigil’s head was tilted heavily to the side of their largest horn, as though even as they’d been dead long enough for her to nearly believe that she’d forgotten them, they still felt the weight of their uneven mask. Hornet couldn’t look away, all else she wanted to say caught in her throat like the words had congealed there.

“Yeah, I thought so. Guess you got your way, huh? How’d that turn out?” Vigil asked with a mock-sincere incline of their head. Into the side with their biggest horn again, almost looking down at her now.

“I-“

“No, be quiet before I change my mind about killing you. It was pretty convenient of Nettle to let me know I’d win this time if you tried anything.” Vigil told her, fixing her in the brilliance of their pale, unmoving stare, though their not-voice was as animated as she’d once imagined it would be.

“It’s really kind of amazing, I don’t think I’ve ever been this mad at anyone, not even the king. But you did kill me, so in my opinion, it’s pretty fair. In fact, I should be a whole lot angrier, but we’ll get there. I didn’t exactly wake up this morning expecting to meet my murderer; you’ll have to give me a minute to shake off a brief eternity of nothing much.”

They gave a short, humorless laugh. “Surprise.”

Hornet said nothing, caught on how they blithely gestured with a tendril like it was a hand, that she very suddenly remembered seeing them do a thousand times before. There was something unpleasant creeping in her chest, something with claws like chilled iron, coiling itself into knots.

“So, since I’m holding all the cards here, I figure I’ll get to the point when I’m good and ready. Believe me, if I’d thought I’d find you here, I’d have just headed straight up to the surface.” Vigil informed her. “But you can’t kill me a second time, not before I’d get you first if the little ones weren’t overexaggerating your own nasty reaction to what we can do, so I think you owe me a little catharsis if nothing else.”

Hornet found she had no breath to disagree, and only bowed her head.

Vigil seemed to have been expecting some other response, and as Hornet set the point of her needle into the ground to lean wearily over the blade's pommel, their beacon-bright gaze dimmed like they’d lost their momentum, and the sarcastic, leaping hum of their thoughts stilled to something almost like worry before they shook it off.

“No, you’ve survived this long, you aren’t allowed to die dramatically for five more minutes.” Vigil said sternly. “Do whatever you want after that, but I want a verbal confirmation that you’re still awake and I’m not ranting at a corpse.”

Hornet took a deep, measured breath that came out as a puff of cold mist, and stoically ignored the rising chill that swept low into her lungs. The shade had said they would not kill her, and any reaction of her void had to be born of an unintentional call. Yet she couldn’t hear any call of Vigil’s void to her own, not even as the world quieted to a buzz of silence, nothing save Vigil’s voice and the very faint hum of the others, nearby but not close enough to understand.

Not quite quiet like she was about to pass out, but a sidelong glance at the nearest pale-lit flowering vines, swaying in the breeze, proved that all the world hadn’t gone still, either. There should still have been sound from the rustling of the overgrown gardens around, if nothing else.

Hornet shivered.

“… Hornet?” Vigil asked with what could only be concern, as sincere as if they’d just nudged her awake while she recovered from long, exhausting days spent with a shovel in her hands and a murmured plea in her mouth, that the infected people she buried stay down so that she needn’t kill them again.

Like they were still holed up for a few safer hours in their cave with the lumafly-light between them, pretending that there was still something to be done.

Hornet’s stomach turned over, and for a brief moment she feared she’d throw up. The awful something that coiled, lurking, between her lungs caught suddenly like a snarl of wicked-thorned briars, twisted deep into her until she had to tear her eyes from Vigil, the familiar and horribly wrong silhouette of them, to curl into herself and give a ragged sob as her chest froze solid. The tears that tracked coldly down her face even as colder void numbed her throat took Hornet as much by surprise as it seemed to take Vigil, who she heard rear back with shock like she’d done the only thing they’d never expect from her.

To be fair, Hornet had never expected this from herself; she’d known already that Vigil would have the upper hand, and any memory of them beyond the most deeply entrenched – by familiarity or importance – was something she was well-practiced at avoiding.

Hornet pulled in an effortful and shaky breath, and it left cold-fogged and shakier.

She considered the situation distantly as she shook, noting how even though she tried as hard as she could to even her breathing, it still came in harsh and left wet, how now a drip of black fell from her unfeeling chelicerae to the grass below and stained it dark. Her heart struggled like she’d never used it before, racing and ungainly and felt, not heard, where she absently pressed the hand not clutching onto her needle’s grip to her chest to feel it pounding.

Vigil had gone quiet, or perhaps now all the world finally had, and even if Hornet had wanted to drop to her knees, she couldn’t’ve. Her joints felt burned by the frost, her claws would barely bend, very abruptly Hornet realized, between one blink and the next, that she could see nothing at all. The next breath she took snagged in her throat, and Hornet coughed a spatter of icewater black over her shawl.

The void rose, called by what she’d done, what she knew she’d never mourned (she’d tried to forget instead, she’d tried so hard) and how the knowing howled through her like the whipping winds off the wastes.

She’d killed them. She had killed her best friend, and she’d never so much as mourned their passing, not as she should’ve.

She’d buried so many, but she’d never buried them.

It hurt more acutely than the void ever had before, as though it was closer to the core of her than it’d ever crept, seeping in through cracks long ignored like it was trying to force all the remembering through a heart too small for it. As both times before, though, there came the touch of another’s void.

It wasn’t kind, and it was not familiar. Though her heart stuttered to think so, it was not Vigil.

More than anything, it felt searching. Patient, like all void was, but not as placid and entreating as Hornet knew void alone to feel like. Yet it was also not as lively as any of her siblings’ thoughts, even at their most restrained and turned away. What found Hornet was something else, something not quite the awareness of a single shade and not nearly the comforting apathy of mindless void, something she herself had called to. What encircled her, pacing in watchful circles like a light-footed stalking Deepling, just close enough to begin to dull her thoughts to nothing and just far enough away for Hornet to fight to keep herself, was almost unbearably excited by what it saw.

We’ve found you, the other void said. We have finally found you.

It was incredibly focused, but the focus wasn’t wholly unified; it was as though it gazed about itself in wonder with too many eyes, that couldn’t possibly all see her at once. Hornet had the sudden impression, as she struggled to draw breath and to pull away from the dark, to find some unsteady reason not to succumb, that she was being eagerly watched by an endless crowd, one that stretched off further than she could know. Countless eyes, but as Hornet tried in vain to single one out to lash at, with wrath for what it again tried to take from her and rigid, raw refusal to bow beneath the Void’s call if nothing else, each melted away before she could try to force them into the light as a singular soul. Like figures painted onto a wall, that only appear from a distance to be separate from the whole.

It was a disorienting effect that left her too thrown off-balance to respond, feeling like if she responded at all, she’d only be talking to the shadow of what observed her.

Still it paced with delight, circled closer and touched wonderingly at her very mind before lurching away like the pull of waves on a shore. It had searched so long, it told her earnestly. It had spent so very many hours waiting. Waiting. Watching, eyes turned high to see her come home, her and all the rest. There were more to find, of course there were more, but it had found her, it said, layered over itself like the feat was a thousand surprises and a thousand reliefs.

It had succeeded.

Come home, the Void urged with a voice like it’d never had. Come home, come sleep, come and be safe.

The offer was very similar in content to what the Void had offered her each time before with its call, but this was not the Void, exactly. The Void only ever implied that there would be rest if she allowed it to take her, like the covers pulled back from a comfortable bed that was hers, only hers, a thoughtless and secure end that she could sink into if she allowed herself. The Void itself had never spoken, and it had never asked her to come home.

Already her grief seemed distant. Yes, she’d been grieving – Hornet fought to think through the thickening mire, the deadening, mindless cold – and the grieving itself had been nearly enough to tear her heart from her chest, borne on enough savage, biting remorse that it couldn’t have hurt more if she’d plunged her claws between her lungs to try the same.

She had done something terrible, something unforgivable that’d happened so long ago, that had only loomed to a wrathful horror of itself for the years, far from blunted by all the time for which she’d never turned to face it. And the act itself, whatever had been so awful that it called upon that darkest nothing, void’s endless, empty regret, Hornet could not know with the dark as near as it was, though she grasped for the simple memory with the desperation of one who, more than anything, wants to know why they hurt.

What had she done, Hornet wondered in slow, soul-sickened revulsion. What had she done, gods, what had she done?

Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter anymore, the Void soothed. Always hurts, there are always regrets. It’s over now, over now, long, long over. Come with me, be with us, to sleep and sleep and sleep. Easier, sibling, it is so much easier here.

And caught between her awful grief and her confusion, Hornet could find no reply within herself to give. For she’d been doing something, speaking to someone, someone important, someone she could not leave behind, not now. Not again, something deep within her panicked.

The Void empathized. Hard to leave, it said. So hard, hard to leave them behind, all alone, don’t worry. We will come for them, too.

Her answer was as immediate as it was absolute. Never, she swore with all the life left to her.

The many-and-one, the roiling desolation, it did not seem to have expected that from her in the least, but Hornet did not stop to consider why. It wavered, turned inward upon itself like her refusal had destabilized the very solidity of the minds it was made of, and the watchful dark fractured then, in some incomprehensible, fundamental way. It retreated just far enough for Hornet to regain awareness of her lungs, enough to know they screamed and throbbed at her, like she hadn’t taken a breath in minutes. Past the dripping cold, ephemeral and tasteless and numbing in her mouth, Hornet drew in a small gasp, just a faint inhale.

No, Hornet told it harshly with a voice for which frozen lungs and shattered throats did not matter. No, you will not take them.

The Void murmured with malcontent, deliberated amongst itself. Then it reconvened all at once, and the glimpse of escape was gone.

It is safe, no danger ever again, the Void reassured her. Don’t be afraid, not for them, not for you. Come home.

No, Hornet repeated, and she braced the thought with all the severity she could muster. I will not.

It is sleep, the Void cajoled. It is rest, rest forever, and you tire. You are hurt, hurt so badly, the world above has hurt you. Come home.

But the Void was no longer sure, not nearly as inexorable nor as inescapable as the call of her own void when it arose, and not nearly the infinitely pervading, careless, vastly implacable force it had been when first it had drowned her in the Black Egg Temple. It was changed, it sought when it never should have, it was anything but absolute, even as she was only spared its cruelty, Hornet knew as though she lay caught between a garpede’s immense, crushing mandibles and was not at once ground effortlessly to nothing, because the Void did not seek to destroy her.

Though if that were because it chose not to, or if it simply hadn’t yet realized, in the wake of her refusing its offer, that it could, and could so easily, Hornet did not wish to discover.

So while it puzzled, infinitely and innately unable to understand why she’d ever not want to become like it (dead, she thought wildly, she could not die here), Hornet pulled with all her might, and as the will of the Void lessened upon her, utterly disorganized like it had exhausted all the reasons it could think of to explain why she wouldn’t go willingly, Hornet clawed herself free as though emerging from a nightmare, one that held her as fast as any waking beast.

The dark melted away all at once, accepted her retreat with a quieting cacophony of collective disorientation, and her thoughts were her own.

And everything hurt.

Hornet effortfully opened her eyes, and around her in a messy, spattered circle, the tall grass was frozen-brittle and stained an abyssal black. The clearing was empty when she raised her head from where she’d bowed it over the loop of her needle’s hilt, and though the pale Gardens’ light still cast what was not void-touched in distinct, soft contrast, Vigil was gone. And before she could know anything more, she choked on the breath she tried to pull in and stumbled away, letting go of her needle with a chorus of snaps from frozen-over joints that flared vengefully with a burning ache as she moved them, but begrudgingly held up.

Hornet half-fell against the nearest thing to poke itself out of the greenery, an aged garden gazebo almost wholly consumed by the vines and only exposed in a single cracked stone pillar to support its roof, over which her claws scraped gratingly against the rock when she threw out a desperate hand to catch herself. She coughed violently until her lungs burned and her chest ached too badly to continue, her head throbbing and her vision clouding with each new mouthful of frigid black that she spit into the grass.

The silence rang clear, empty of soundless voices and with only the steady rustle of the greenery as accompaniment for the pained, soft noises she couldn’t help but make whenever she moved. It took some time to muzzily understand what it meant.

Her sight blurred and twisted, but what she saw was devoid of the dark, aside from the splatters of void like clean-edged scorch marks she'd cast into the green. Hornet pressed her forehead to the pillar she leaned against to wait out the scalding cold, that retreated so slowly from her breast, slower than ever it had before. Breathing was hard, listening to her heart try and work was hard, but she grit her fangs and shivered through it.

Something brushed her face, and she wearily opened eyes she didn’t remember closing to find that she’d slumped far enough for a twisting coil of ivy to have been disturbed by her horn, hanging over her shoulders with its broad leaves wax-shiny and glinting in the Gardens’ luminous glow, like moonlight unfamiliar. Beyond it, the clearing was dimmer than she remembered it to be, the darkness throughout the undergrowth and huddled beneath the crouching bushes seeming closer than before, as though all the world had forgotten the sun, shone upon only by the starless, moonless night.

A parting effect of what haunted her, or only the slow turn of the evening to nightfall? Both seemed equally unlikely. Hornet slumped further into the cushioning, snapping greenery, and waited.

As she looked back to where she’d stood, where the ground was stained the deepest black and smoothed over like it was wet, her needle was still wedged haphazardly between the moss-crowded pavestones.

She watched as bubbles and little transient specks of void detached themselves from the pool gathered at its base, and from the dark trail she’d dashed over the overgrown path and onto the nodding grasses rising up around her knees. The drops were perfectly dark as they rose though the faint light, mostly only what glowed ever-so-faintly from the opalescent flowerheads on the vines that hung low above her horns here, as though the light had simply forgotten to catch on them, and the only way Hornet could watch them hover and then gradually fade at all was because they moved where other shadows did not.

Her hearing returned in full very slowly, and the tremors she couldn’t stifle began in her chest and radiated out to her claws, and it was so quiet and dark with the slow breeze just scarcely stirring the leaves to rustle. It could have been night, she supposed, for it was only the dark.

She did not remember ever seeing night within the Queen’s Gardens.

And, very suddenly, Hornet understood that she was all alone.

It had never troubled her before to be so, but this solitude felt different. The nighttime clearing had no particular claustrophobia to it, mostly open and airy and with the skeletal remnants of what could have been a trellis arching over the far side, from which all the ornamental wood decoration had been broken and the iron bones trawled over by lush and leafy things that scented the air with pale, nectar-rich throats. Even though it’d been forgotten and left to the weeds, the Gardens were, first and foremost, designed to be open and living.

No, it wasn’t the sort of aloneness that came from quiet or confinement. It was more akin to knowing that no matter where she went, whatever corner of her kingdom she traveled to, they would all be exactly the same as this.

The wind would brush the stone or the leaves or through the collecting mists, but there would be no other sound, no rustle of wings or stir of laughter. She could wander as far as she wished for as long as she could, and there would be only a lightless and empty kingdom to greet her, a shallow grave that had finally found its rest without her. It was a loneliness born of failure, and an empty shell she could walk until she became one herself.

Hornet looked again to her needle, slowly so that what awareness she had, that felt so tentative and narrow-focused as though she’d already passed out and simply hadn’t realized yet, wouldn’t snap under the strain.

The blade was stained dark again, like it had been a hundred times or more, though now the darkness began at its handle and seeped down to the tip, to the soil, where even now it was already fading into the air, lifting away from the stain she’d left by droplets and wisps.

And there came a terrible thought, as Hornet waited for the shades and they did not come, that the distant, lonesome chirping of the maskflies resting somewhere high and far asked of her to think. That the clearing was empty, and so was the Kingdom. That it would remain so, and her within it. That she had finally tripped over a line her family could not overlook, and here she would stay, because they would not willingly come back knowing fully, entirely what she’d done, with the evidence again living to haunt her.

Hornet stared at her needle while the color faded back to shining, immaculate silver, and was unconscious between one heartbeat and the next.

Chapter Text

And so Hornet awoke to find that it simply wasn’t the way of the world anymore, to expect the worst and then have it come to pass.

There was a murmur of voices that weren’t voices, quiet enough that even as Hornet sluggishly shuffled back onto the mortal coil, she could tell that they were making every effort to be unobtrusive. They weren’t especially successful, and though she could hardly blame them for thinking too loudly, she spent a brief moment wishing they’d learn to.

Tallying them up past a headache was second nature by now, so as Hornet laid still, curled up in the sighing grasses and other feral flora she'd fallen into, and waited to remember whatever had taken her down for the count this time, she took a headcount with her eyes screwed shut.

Ghost, and it had to be Ghost with their worry, potent and intense like everything they did, overshadowing whatever they were trying to whisper about. Hollow, replying with what could honestly have passed as a whisper of void-speak, soft and patient. Ghost again, and then Nettle, stage-whispering something unsubtle enough that she could nearly make sense of it. Sonnet on their heels, almost as loud but cautioning like they were trying to shush the both of them.

They were alright. They were there.

Hornet lurched to sit up, heart hammering, and Ghost startled badly from where they’d been just a few feet from her side, hidden amongst the tall, now partially-frozen grass that she’d passed out in. There was a reason she’d expected them to not be there, one that had a kind of dream-logic to it that’d at the time seemed irrefutable and damning, yet now whatever it was faded like she truly had only dreamed it.

And there was Ghost, recovering from whatever shock her abrupt awakening had caused, hovering before her as she scrubbed blearily at her eyes, the dark little remnant drifting dangerously low to peer at her more closely.

“You’re alright,” they said with breathless relief. “I thought-“

Hornet cut them off with a low, slightly despairing laugh, and lunged forward to haul them into an airless hug, crushing the little shade to her chest as tightly as she could stand to.

Ghost went willingly enough, or perhaps was too taken off guard to do anything at all, but what Hornet understood most starkly was that they allowed themself to be held, confused and suddenly worried all over again and trusting that, as easily as she could have crushed them, their void with all the solidity of a sigh, she wouldn’t. She’d never.

They were cold. They were horribly, unbearably cold like they always were, but it was somehow easier to bear this time. Perhaps, Hornet thought as she tucked them under her chin and clung to the biting creep of deathly frost sinking into her chest like it meant a truth she’d give anything to keep, it was the desperate relief that they were there at all.

It didn’t matter. Of all the things to ever not matter, by truth or falsehood or necessity, whatever void did to the soul it took mattered the least.

“It’s okay,” Ghost said, and butted their head into her shoulder, strongly enough to be felt. “Whatever happened, it’s okay. You’re alright. We kept you safe.”

“I am not the one I worry for,” Hornet coughed, annoyed by the rasp in her voice. “We have much to speak of, little Ghost, and I will not set it aside any longer.”

“… Is one way to put it, yeah.” Vigil said from nearby. “You know, it’s sort of amazing you haven’t died, yourself, going around hugging shades like that.”

Ghost stiffened and then wriggled in her arms, and Hornet let them go as abruptly as she’d grabbed them. “That’s right,” Ghost told her like they’d just remembered. “It is a little reckless, even with how warm the Gardens are. The plants around you are frozen, your shawl might not be warm enough.”

“Forgive me my hesitance to accept your warning, to be called reckless by you, of all people.” Hornet said flatly, skirting the issue.

“I’m not reckless, just uniquely qualified to do reckless things. Would a reckless bug fight a god and win?” Ghost challenged, some of the stiffness falling from the curling of their tendrils, as their thoughts spoke of relief as much as put-upon, good-natured goading, perhaps reassured that if she could argue, she couldn’t be too badly off.

Ever was she bitterly grateful for their confusion about how, exactly, living creatures functioned, and more so for whatever remarkable resilience the Pale King’s blood in her veins gave to rely on, no matter how the White Lady seemed to think it was all worn away.

“Yes. Exactly that.” Hollow replied to Ghost, mystified. When Hornet looked up, it was to see them blocking out most of the light filtering past the huge, flowering plants, her sibling hunched over to squint down at them much like Ghost had, from where they hovered midair, and still easily high enough that she couldn’t have reached up to touch them even if she’d been standing. “That is, perhaps, the single most reckless act you could ever have committed, Ghost.”

“I knew what I was doing!” Ghost told them, darting up to what had become their customary place between Hollow’s horns. “It’s only recklessness if you’re careless about getting into trouble, not the trouble itself.”

“I mean, I guess. You did go in and come out knowing exactly what all went into the trouble you went looking for. I guess a better word would be ‘audacious,’” Vigil suggested.

“What’s that mean?” Sonnet spoke up from, when Hornet glanced their way, where they and Nettle had busied themselves setting up some complex construction of broken twigs and little round stones for no obvious purpose.

“It means Ghost is a reckless fool, without any conception of just how reckless they are. I am certain it’s how they’d survived as long as they did.” Hornet informed them, taking the distraction for what it was to spin the silk to re-secure her needle at her back, and then to vigorously rub feeling back into her wrists.

The soul-silk didn’t come easily, and what manifested was vanishingly thin. Hornet soundly ignored the implications, once she’d tested that it would hold up well enough for travel.

“It’s okay Ghost, I’m a reckless fool too,” Nettle supplied distractedly, apparently taking their turn in what Hornet now guessed was a little makeshift game they and their twin had set up. “Sonnet says so all the time, so it can’t be bad.”

“Do they, now?” Hollow said without inflection, but with a pointed glance to the shade in question, who Hornet did not have to look up from flexing her claws free of stiffness (painful, but functional, to her relief) to notice was now conveniently focusing on whatever they and Nettle were doing, to the exclusion of all else.

“Anyway,” Vigil deflected on Sonnet’s behalf. “We have something a little pressing to consider here. And then it’s my turn in, ah,” they trailed off, casting Nettle a lost sort of inquiry.

“Checkers. Or maybe chess, if you promise to remember which ones are the knights.” Nettle replied, pointing out a lumpier rock of the countless spread out before them.

“Is it a knight now? Where did your rooks go?” Hollow asked, narrowing their good eye along with the confusion coloring their words.

“No, that’s a pawn.” Sonnet said as they carefully picked it up and set it down over a little divot in the soil, pressing it there to make it stand up. “It’s my pawn, actually.”

“Oh,” Nettle said, dismayed. “That’s not good. Hollow, can they do that?”

Hollow reared ponderously back, taking Ghost with them, and floated like an imposing and narrow black sheet in the wind to look more closely at the littler shades’ game, considering it dutifully and with solemn attention while Ghost did the same. Vigil leaned forward from where they’d settled down perhaps two arms’ lengths from Hornet’s side, close enough that the sudden movement had her looking sharply at them while they pretended they didn’t notice, and they, too, considered the playing board.

“I think so,” Ghost said, surprised. “I think that actually is their pawn. Hollow?”

Hollow nodded stoically. “Sonnet has your queen pinned. But if you move here,” they suggested, reaching down to delicately indicate a tiny pebble with their wicked-sharp claw. “You will have them in check.”

“That isn’t fair!” Sonnet said, with more ferocity than Hornet thought she’d ever heard from them as Nettle brightened, delighted by their imminent victory. “You can’t help!”

Hollow took their hand back and considered that gravely, as though they were truly thinking through the ethics of helping their little sibling win a game of improvised chess, for long enough that Ghost came to their rescue.

“It’s their first time, the point isn’t really to win as much as to get better at playing.” Ghost told Sonnet reasonably. “And it’s more interesting to have the game go on longer.”

“It’s my first time playing, too.” Sonnet said, affronted.

“They have you there, Ghost,” Vigil gave a playful laugh, and Hornet took a deep, steadying breath for having heard it.

It was familiar, in a disjointed, indirect way. Like having seen only the moving outline of a nail, the shadow it casts, and then having the blade itself set into one’s hands, to run claws down the gleaming metal and test the sharpness of the edge on them, to feel the reality of its weight and understand how it can exist. Hornet had vague recollection, dulled by time and guilt, of seeing Vigil’s shoulders shake like the formless dark of them did now and having known it as laughter. But to hear them do so, even if, ironically, their actual body was little more than a shadow itself, was as painfully familiar like something long past as it was startlingly new.

“Calm down, there’s no need to get worked up, you big wimp.” Vigil told her, so softly that Hornet nearly mistook their void-speak as thought of her own. “We’ll talk about it, and soon. If we distract the little ones well enough with this, it should buy us some time.”

“Do not listen to my thoughts.”

“Don’t think them so loud, then.” Vigil shot back with a sidelong glance, as though she should’ve known as much already. “You’ve been part of this for longer than the average lifetime one of us can look forward to, you know full well that’s not how it works. I didn’t need to hear them, anyway; you always scowl exactly like that when you think too intensely about something that really isn’t that intense.”

“You don’t know,” Hornet defended. “You have known nothing of the world for centuries.”

“Believe me, I do know that. You weren’t out cold for too long, but it was long enough for us out here in the waking world to have a pretty in-depth chat. Consider me up to date. Maybe more up to date than you, actually.” Vigil said. “But we’ll get to that in a minute. First, I have a bunch of kids to teach go-fish to.”

And without another word they swept out through the crackling grass, the blades frozen stiff enough by now that they broke before they bent, and set to doing exactly as they’d said, leaving Hornet to frown after them and get herself up.

It was difficult, but not impossible. Her limbs cooperated, her head ached only in an ignorable way for the quick movement, the meadow she stood at the leafy border to didn’t seem to slide this way and that any longer. She was no less stiff and no less cold, but the former felt more like the natural, familiar consequence of sleeping collapsed to the ground in the position she had, and the latter was not unduly painful. Numbed, even, though if that was good or bad remained to be seen. Hornet settled her shawl evenly over her shoulders, and grimaced at the addition to the dark stains crowded over its front, a wide, uneven spot like she’d brought her hands up to cover her mouth, and what she’d coughed up had collected in the bunched fabric between them.

There was no use fussing over it. All else failing, there were other shawls back at the Nest, and a handful more stuffed into hard-to-reach crevices around Hallownest, durable things of Weavers’ make that could handle being kept somewhere dusty and forgotten for a decade or two.

She’d liked this one, though. She’d gotten some twenty or thirty years out of it so far, and it now had far more inner pockets lining the front than most of her others. That, and the wear-lines around the collar were ideal to keep the City of Tears’ rain from running down her back.

And it was familiar. Reliable. A little comfort, when she was not expected to change out the clothes she wore save to clean them, with none around to ask it of her.

“- and that’s it!” Hornet looked sharply up to Vigil, some dozen feet away across the now darkly tinted, frosted-over meadow, under the corner of shade cast by a pavilion that hadn’t yet been entirely consumed by the plantlife.

They were holding a handful of the hard, waxy leaves from one of the curling vines overhead, with little symbols painted black on the undersides. They showed them to Nettle and Sonnet, who watched keenly as their sibling shuffled them as skillfully as if they’d been actual cards and they’d had actual hands to shuffle with. Once Vigil had the pile ready, they held the ‘cards’ close to their chest and divvied them up, using formless tendril after tendril to separate them out as though they’d had them instead of hands all their life.

“But I don’t know what cards they have, how do I ask for the right ones?” Nettle asked once they’d been given their hand.

“You have to guess, and I’m not allowed to lie.” Sonnet told them matter-of-factly.

“… Was that a lie?” Nettle dubiously glanced up to Vigil for judgement.

“Nope, they’ve got it right, that’s how the game works. The first one with no cards left wins.” Vigil explained patiently. “’Course, you can always make up some house rules if it makes it more fun.”

“What prevents one from simply waiting until all their cards have been fished?” Hollow asked, quiet fascination unhidden.

“I guess you can’t skip turns, and you can’t just not go-fish either.” Ghost mumbled thoughtfully and half to themself, looking curiously over the setup like it was a puzzle to be undone. “And the number of pairs made may have some value.”

“We are gonna have a blast when I get to uno,” Vigil predicted with delight. “It’s timeless, you’ll love it.”

Hornet gave an unwilling snort of humor, chelicerae twitching at the thought; she’d weathered enough ash storms with Vigil and the ever-rotating cast of freed little Vessels to remember, like a warm haze just out of reach, that any game they were so excited for rarely went without inviting even the most reluctant to bring out a competitive spirit. There was no individual event she could recall that did, but they’d always seemed to end in her laughter ringing through the cave systems, and Vigil’s own as well, silent but always present.

Hollow inclined their head, distracted from their focus, and as they caught her eye they straightened up some, as though to remind themself there were other things that required their attention. From where they were sprawled between Hollow’s horns and leaned perilously far forward to watch the game, Ghost gave a chirp of complaint for the movement before Hollow quietly indicated what they’d noticed.

“Tell me who wins, alright? I’ll play the best, uh, twelve out of twenty-three.” Vigil asked as they twirled midair so that they could drift backwards and out of the way. Nettle scrutinized their cards like they held the secrets to the universe, Sonnet nodding absently in response while they did much the same, and both gave wordless, distracted acknowledgements as Vigil made their escape.

There was a gallery some ways away, beautifully wrought from stone into the White Lady’s favored swooping, arched pillars and, if one followed it where it delved through the dense and leafy overgrowth smothering the cavern walls and then through the cavern stone itself, it led to a small and ornate dining room built into an overhang and looking down onto a yard long-since lost to its most vivacious plantlife. The room was long emptied of anything valuable, left to just the bare, detailed metal of the table and a scant handful of chairs strewn with dry leaves.

Hornet thought it had likely once been a quaint place for the Gardens’ staff to take meals or breaks, the cracked glass roof too low for the Lady of the land to duck into. Not a far spot from the littler shades, but far enough that they wouldn’t be concerned by anything said within it.

“Are you alright, Hornet?” Was the first thing Hollow asked of her, gently, like they’d rather have carefully looked her over as they did, kept back only by their consideration for her comfort. They stooped low to follow her into the circular little room, dappled by the light falling past the vines over the windows. “What happened? We were waiting for you when Vigil came to find us, and what we found of you instead was,” they paused. “It was not a reassuring scene.”

A crime scene, more like. Hornet remembered the grotesque splatter of black on the mossy pavestones, how it had dripped and dissipated from the hard metal of her needle.

“I am well. What occurred was nothing that hadn’t before. I grow used to rebuffing the dark; there is no danger in it. Only momentary weakness.” Hornet said carefully. Not technically lies, though not nearly whole truths.

Yet so long as the Void continued to behave as it had, painfully cold and entreating and only drawn close by her own irrational call, then perhaps it would be an easier time keeping her mind and soul steady before it. She had survived every contact with it thus far, after all. Hornet was no stranger to pain or discomfort, but she thought she could safely say that few would have the experience to tell how much loss of soul and warmth was too much to bear, or whether it could be better tolerated by repeated exposure, with only enough practice, like venom or the weight of a weapon. Particularly concerning one such as her, who drew her ancestry from creatures harder to kill than most.

There was only one person who ever could have known enough to prove her wrong, and he was long dead. Moreover, the White Lady had underestimated her before.

“Huh. I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.” Ghost said, to Hornet’s indignant huff.

“Yeah, that tracks.” Vigil mused. “That you’d downplay the Void like an idiot I mean, not that you somehow got used to it. That part’s extra dumb, even for you.”

“A little bit,” Ghost agreed apologetically. “Like saying you’re immune to water now.”

Hornet sat down at one of the little tables, the hinged seat giving a rusty shriek under her weight but holding fast, and ignored them both. “That is neither here nor there. I am alive, and so are you, and I would have you listen to what I’ve learned from the White Lady.” Hornet told them.

“I think you and I can both agree that you aren’t really in the position to tell me what I should or shouldn’t listen to.” Vigil said, their voice going hard. “I’ve kept my mouth shut while the kids were in the room, but, Hornet, the last thing I clearly remember is your needle through my head, and I haven’t made up my mind what I’m gonna do about it.”

“You won’t kill her.” Ghost said immediately, darting between Hornet and the larger shade, their cutout-dark silhouette dwarfed before them. There was understanding in the little Ghost’s thoughts as they told them, but also iron-clad will, and how very strange it felt for that will, what had led her to spare them in the first place, to be bent towards her defense.

More than anything, it left a bad taste in Hornet’s mouth.

“I’m not going to. That isn’t what I meant.” Vigil said calmly. “Unlike someone, I can’t just decide I don’t care anymore.”

It was all Hornet could do not to flinch, to hold Vigil’s pale-glowing gaze steady over Ghost’s head where they still hovered protectively before her.

She grimaced, and set a light hand on Ghost’s bitterly cold shoulder, a touch they twitched in surprise for. “Sit, little Ghost. I’ve told you before, this will not be my end.” Hornet told them softly.

They turned to give her a look, blank on their featureless face but roiling with unwillingness and indecision that they didn’t quite voice in their void, touched with flares of a fearful sort of unease they couldn’t quite quash. At her nod to the nearest seat and Hollow’s brief thrum of encouragement, given as they reached out to take one of Ghost’s ephemeral tendrils in their hand and guide them there, they relented at least that much.

Vigil watched them go, their own void indecipherable, not for any attempt to hide it as much as how they couldn’t seem to land on a single emotion.

“I just have a thing or two to ask, before I get into why I’m here instead of anywhere else, and why we have to hurry and leave as soon as we can.” Vigil began. “I have to get some things straight in my head, or I won’t… I just need your answers. And I guess you’ve already figured out that it’s hard to lie to us.”

“Ask what you will.” Hornet agreed evenly.

“Sure. I just…” Vigil fidgeted fitfully, even now debating with themself.

“… Was it worth it?” They said all at once. “Sort of a useless question, I know, but I can’t,” they hummed uncomfortably. “I gotta know. The argument, killing me, whatever happened after; was it worth it?”

Hornet took in a deep breath, and held their stare, the bottom of her stomach dropping out to be reminded of what she’d almost buried deep enough to forget.

“… I don’t know.” She said. “If I only count my own consequences, it never was. But that has never been a factor, not any time I made the decision. I regret your death, yet I cannot say if my own would have allowed for any less tragedy. So I don’t know, Vigil.”

“I wasn’t gonna kill you.” Vigil said quietly, intensely, as though she’d asked. “I wasn’t. Just… Keep you from hurting anyone. You didn’t- you weren’t listening.”

They hummed a tense sigh before she could respond. “I guess it doesn’t really matter, now. What we’ve got is what we’ve got and, well, what we’ve got isn’t great. We’ll make the best of it. Okay, next question. Given the circumstances this one’s a little obvious, but, well, I’m worried. Are any of us safe with you?” They asked.

“I will not hurt you. There’s no reason to-” Hornet replied, and briefly clenched her jaw for the lie. There was reason, wasn’t there? Only, none that was worth it. Nothing left that was worth her family’s lives.

Had there ever been?

“Well, geez, if you put it like that,” Vigil said dryly, having apparently noticed none of her brief moment of turmoil.

“- and even if there was, I would not. I have done what was asked of me. In the end, my protection has saved few. Hallownest is gone. Yet it is my kingdom to guard, and if the Kingdom is beyond hope, then those left to it are my priority.”

“That is why you are safe, though I imagine you were looking for a more… Personal reason.” Hornet said stiffly, feeling entirely out of her element. “If that is the case, know that even if I should be called again to do as I once found necessary, I could no longer kill you, nor allow you to die. I don’t,”

Hornet gave a short, harsh sigh, scowling for her own reluctance. “I don’t want to.”

The words felt foreign in her mouth, the sentiment alien, to act only on what she wanted. “I’m not beholden to the needs of the Kingdom any longer, and I don’t want to kill those who have done me no harm, and so I won’t. I have done you wrong. I will do what I can to atone.”

“Wow, Hornet. That was the most effort I think it’s ever taken someone to say, ‘I think murder’s wrong.’” Vigil said, though half-heartedly.

Hornet’s frown deepened, but they cut her off before she could say anything. “I know, I know, that was kind of unnecessary, and I did ask. You just caught me off guard.” Vigil rambled. “I didn’t think I’d ever see the day you did something just because you wanted to. And, really, I guess I still haven’t, but it’s a start. I just… Wish you’d decided that a little earlier.”

There was a heavy silence, thick enough that the scratch of the leaves over the windowpanes, blown by the tentative breeze filtering in past the broken glass of the skylight, grated on Hornet’s nerves.

“I’m sorry.” She said quietly.

“Hm?”

“I never apologized. I’m sorry.”

“That’s nice.” Vigil said lightly, staring fixedly out of the fogged-over, dusty window they leaned against.

“You’re still upset.” Hornet ventured.

“Yes, I’m still upset!” Vigil exploded, and immediately began to pace as though they’d been fighting down the urge to for as long as they’d spoken. “I’m furious, and hurt, and I missed you, and I can’t decide if I’m happy you haven’t died or pitying what’s happened to you to make you look like this, or if it’s a shame you didn’t get your head knocked off by a hopper walking out of the cavern you killed me in!” Vigil exclaimed, raggedly exasperated. They threw up a few of their longest tendrils like they couldn’t believe they had to spell it out, their brilliant white eyes burning bright.

“I don’t know if you followed through on what you said you would, but I can take an educated guess that you did. I’m still upset, Hornet, because for the past few centuries you’ve been running around doing gods-know-what to gods-know-who, and you started it all off by killing me! Of course, I’m still upset, you lunatic! You killed me!” Vigil said.

“… You killed me, Hornet.” They wavered to say again, like they’d only just realized what it meant.

Then Vigil gathered themself, and their not-voice was again light and plowing resolutely ahead.

“But it doesn’t matter right now. If we really get into the weeds here, we’ll never get back out, and I still need to be able to function around you so that we all survive this. And the kids you’re carting around really, really idolize you. If I’m upset with you, they’d want to know why, and that way lies nothing good. You’re not a bad person, Hornet, but gods, I wish you’d remember that when it counted.” Vigil laughed, a little miserably.

“I’m sorry.” The words came softer than Hornet had thought she’d known how to say them.

“I know.” Vigil said, just as soft, and their saying so hurt far more than if they’d kept shouting. “Just… You’re my best friend, and I love you, but I don’t think I can forgive you. Not for this. Maybe we can talk about it someday, when I don’t remember it quite as clearly. Once you’ve got me that mask you promised, and I can think it over properly. And feel again; being dead is so weird. But for now, the issue I’ve put off long enough; we have to leave as soon as possible, or we won’t be able to anymore.”

It was more than Hornet felt she deserved, especially with Ghost and Hollow as witness. At least the two had the good sense to pretend they hadn’t heard, both only loud enough with their not-quite-words to indicate that they’d now begun listening again, now that the conversation had been forcibly directed back to what they needed to know.

And so Hornet nodded with just a shallow incline of her head, and allowed Vigil the distraction they wanted. There was little else to do, even if she was fairly sure she knew already what they had to share that they considered so important. “How so?”

“I take it you’ve noticed the Void’s acting up?” Vigil offered, steamrolling ahead with only a valiantly muffled waver to their voice.

“I have.” Hornet said.

“Well, I just caught the last stag out of Hallownest, so to speak. I think it might be literally everywhere but here, or everywhere stretching outwards from here at the very least. Everywhere below. As of a day or two ago, it was all fathomless black goo everywhere I looked, right up to the top of the Archives. You’ve been there, you know, the acid bog with all the jellyfish.” Vigil prompted when she only frowned, bemused.

“It can’t be so high already. We’ve been in the Queen’s Gardens for no longer than a week, it’s impossible.” Hornet argued.

It had taken a week at least past the Radiance’s destruction to rise as far as the lowermost tunnels of Deepnest, and most of another to crest her home’s highest caverns. It made no sense to have taken just another few days to fill nearly all of Hallownest, to leave only its highest lands untouched. The City alone was enormous, the Kingdom’s Edge’s canyon vast and immeasurably deep.

“Not necessarily,” Hollow considered slowly, as though only just dredging up the memory to. “Father’s experiments with the substance extended long into my nymphal days, and I was at his side for the last of them. Void does not function like water or air or stone. In many ways it is nearly living. He once left a flask of it in an unlit room, and in hours the void had somehow covered it, floor to ceiling. It rises in bubbles as though heated and drips like thick liquid at the same temperature and may, by conditions unknown, expand like a gas to fill a space.”

“Did he mention what caused it to do any of that?” Hornet questioned.

“I believe he knew at least enough to keep it in line, but he did not mention. Father was not one for repeating his conclusions out loud.” Hollow said ruefully.

“And if that’s your threshold for impossible, this is gonna blow your minds,” Vigil forewarned the room at large. “I took the scenic route to get here from the Abyss partly to have a look around because, wouldn’t you know it, Hallownest’s looking pretty empty these days, and I didn’t get out much way back when. But mostly I had to check for survivors, because the Void is looking for someone.”

“What? Why would it do that?” Ghost asked, more curious than skeptical. “Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure. It’s not particularly soft-spoken, and not too shy, either. I just had to get within shouting distance, ‘cause much closer would be a little dicey for keeping my void separate from the Void, capital ‘V’. Not known for being horribly loquacious, but it’s always been convincing, and I’m not ready to give up the ghost just yet. No pun intended.” Vigil said. “At any rate, we really do need to go before we get closed in here, since it doesn’t seem to like the Gardens much. I give it another day, maybe two.”

“And go where? The surface? If the Void is seeking someone in specific, I do not trust that it will be dissuaded by a dry well, not if it’s covered all of Hallownest in its search. This must be dealt with, and very soon.” Hollow shifted, their horns brushing against the roof and nearly too tall to fit under the low glass, to peer out the window like they’d see the edges of the pale-flowering field beyond go dark. “I doubt it can be handled as the Radiance was, if only because it is simply too immense.”

Hornet took in a deep, slow breath, and looked out the frosted-over window, running her claws mindlessly up and down her arms to warm them.

“The Void can be killed.” She said plainly. “And it can be done within the day.”

“Sure, sure. And while we’re just throwing wild ideas at the wall here, why don’t we just wait for it to get bored and go home. Or maybe trek on down back to the Abyss and seal it yourself, or something.” Vigil suggested.

Hollow turned their head just enough that they could give Vigil a pointed look out of their good eye, without the space to do much more, and it was with a disquieted, unamused turn of their void that they said, “No one is sealing anything.”

The room grew very slightly colder for long seconds, the windows nearest to Hollow faintly frosted-over until the light they let through was only a filmy, off-color grey, and Vigil glanced away.

“’Course. Sorry.” They said, and shuffled the lay of their sharp-edged tendrils, which surely couldn’t have been as long as their cloak once was (though Hornet couldn’t have said for certain, not with how very long it’d been since she’d seen it). “I guess you’re serious, though?” Vigil told her with significantly more skepticism.

“Deadly.” Hornet said flatly.

“Cool. Care to explain?”

“I would drop a delicate flower into it, that need only come into brief contact to be effective. I knew the Great Knight Ze’mer well, and she often spoke of the fragile, foreign blooms she propagated. They have… Recently spread to the Gardens, not more than a few hour’s walk from where we stand. This could be over very quickly.” Hornet told them tersely.

“Great! Problem solved, let’s try it.” Vigil prompted. “Flowers for the Void. I’ve been lost for a little while, is the nearest way out of this hedge maze up or down?”

Ghost, however, seemed as though they were thinking it over, slowly coming to the conclusion she’d known they would.

“You didn’t say ‘stop the Void,’” Ghost said slowly. “You said ‘kill.’ What do you mean?”

“I mean exactly what I said,” Hornet replied grimly. “It would be destroyed. All of it, and then its vestiges that you are innately of. I do not mention this option as a suggestion. You deserve to know that there is a power in this kingdom that could destroy you utterly and instantly, and that I will destroy it before it can.”

It seemed the only viable option; she would destroy the delicate flowers to remove the temptation and the danger they presented, and then focus on what else could be done. Though perhaps even that wouldn’t be necessary, if the Void sealed the White Lady in an airless tomb of her own making, one that needed to be fled before it caught them with her.

“This is what troubled you so?” Hollow said in dawning understanding, with conflict that, through the unsettled imprint of it that they told her of as they spoke, mirrored her own.

It made sense that it would. They, too, had spent a very long time placing the needs of the many above their own, if Hollow had ever in their life intentionally taken care of themself at all. Of all her siblings, Hollow was the one Hornet thought would need time to come to terms with what now lay before them; it was, if she were to be brutally to-the-point, a chance to martyr themself.

Her eldest sibling was not the sort to have any compunction about self-sacrifice. Hornet understood that, in a way, yet at the end of the day she knew the value of her own life. It was a very simple thing to know; if she died, she could not do what needed doing.

Hornet was not certain that Hollow understood this, not in a way that they could apply to themself. So long as the flowers existed, no matter what happened to Hallownest and to the Void, they would haunt her sibling, and there was every chance that the delicate flowers were the only possible way to totally reverse all that the dark had wrought upon her kingdom. Hollow would never take that chance, this she knew, if only because to do so would also hurt their family alongside themself, yet it would haunt them still.

They had already given their life in every possible way to the perpetuation of her kingdom, and no matter what they wanted to do with it now that they found themself free, Hornet would not allow them to give it again for the same hopeless cause.

And now that she’d made the decision to spurn the salvation the mourning flowers offered, there was no reason but petty sentimentality to keep them around. There would be other options to beat back the dark, or perhaps there’d be none. Either way, the Vessels would live, and all the other folk of Hallownest were not nearly so tied to the Kingdom as she. There was life to be found past the mountains, should the worst come to pass.

It couldn’t be so terribly hard; Ghost had found it, after all.

“I had intended to destroy them before we left the Gardens, but that does not appear to be a viable option any longer. I doubt the White Lady will allow her influence to wane enough for void to drain into this land, but neither do I wish to be trapped in it with her. One of us would not survive the encounter, I imagine.” Hornet said.

“Are you sure that is wise? Perhaps there’s a way to-“ Hollow began, fretfully flicking a few of their knife’s-edge tendrils, lain coiled nearly half again around the molding beneath the windows.

“The Grey Mourner has delicate flowers.” Ghost exclaimed, uncharacteristically interrupting.

They shot up from where they’d been unhappily sat across the aged, debris-dusted table from Hornet, as though this was an earthshaking revelation. At Hornet’s blank look, they cast a quick glance around the room at the others for understanding, their void jittery and the little shade seemingly too overcome by the realization to put their thoughts into any more detail. Vigil gave more of an impression of concern than anything else, that rose laced with what felt like the soothing words one might give a small grub as the little Ghost looked to Hollow to back them up, and instead was met with faintly alarmed surprise without an ounce of comprehension.

Ghost gave a little thrill of frustration and darted up so that they were eyelevel with the great, looming shade. “The Grey Mourner has delicate flowers, and she’s not in the Queen’s Gardens.”

Hornet frowned, searching for the connection, which apparently became immediately apparent to Hollow, whose eyes widened huge and glowing-pale in their dark face.

“Oh, no.” Hollow said with dismay, to which Ghost nodded fervently.

“What?” Hornet snapped.

“Oh. Oh, that’s not good.” Vigil said, forcibly light, having drawn the conclusion she hadn’t.

“What?” Hornet repeated, just barely keeping the tense snarl from her voice.

“Whatever power the Queen holds, she has not extended it to Hallownest beyond her gardens. Wherever the Great Knight Ze’mer and her flowers reside, if it is below the surface soil of the Kingdom, is in immediate peril.” Hollow told her with a forced sort of calm.

It drew Hornet up short, the implications very suddenly abundantly clear, and she heard again the White Lady say that she expected the Void to inadvertently end itself upon the flowers, given the time to find them.

“I’ll get the kids.” Vigil said weakly.

Chapter Text

And so it was with no small amount of dissatisfaction that Hornet led the shades, still only shades, up from Hallownest’s deep as quickly as she could.

There was confusion from the twins for the haste with which they all left, questions she let Hollow and Ghost field while they encouraged the littler shades to hurry onwards after her, while Hornet wracked decades-old memory for the quickest way from the higher orchard where they stood all the way down to the stag station. Once she’d reoriented herself, the path was fortunately a straightforward one to follow, and the greatest trouble from there onward became how unreliably her own legs responded to her will, how Hornet’s own body felt infuriatingly like it was already halfway to throwing in the towel, regardless of what she had to say on the matter. It was only monumental effort and knowledge of what awaited them if they stayed here that kept her from collapsing by the side of the road, too tired and in too much pain to go on.

The Void had taken a greater toll than she’d known upon waking, that only became obvious as she tried – aware of the apparently imminent doom Vigil had told them of – to travel as quickly as she was used to, and utterly failed. If she’d been a lesser bug, or perhaps a less grimly determined one, Hornet knew the winding, descending miles to the station would have been more than she could’ve taken, particularly with how she pushed herself to go faster whenever need came to stop to breathe.

There’d be a price to pay, she knew, but it wasn’t so difficult a thing to trade when threatened with staying here and waiting out the end.

It was nothing she could condemn, then, when Nettle and Sonnet were constantly finding themselves distracted, reeled back in and kept on course only through Hollow’s diligence and Vigil’s equally distracting efforts to keep them engaged enough to not try and find their own entertainment, as mile after mile of the same fascinating, concealing greenery fell away. At worst, the diversions allowed her to lean heavily against a moss-grown wall or ornate lamppost and convince her shaking limbs to only work for another mile or two, only a little farther. At best, it kept the shades keeping pace, more-or-less, with Hornet as she mulishly pushed on through the tall grasses and reaching ferns.

Better, it kept Ghost occupied, so that they might not find cause to ask her what they intended to do. The thought whirled in her mind like a caught hiveling, loud enough to drown out the pain of a shell far too cold, too close to lifeless (she couldn’t think so, she was fine, she only needed to rest once they’d gotten ahead of the Void); what would they do? What would she do?

She’d go to the Resting Grounds, to Ze’mer’s final resting place, and she would destroy the flowers there utterly. That, Hornet knew with absolute clarity. It wasn’t worth the time to seek those in the Gardens, that the White Lady already guarded, and she hadn’t the effort to spare.

But what then? After the flowers were gone, what would she do?

What could she do?

Something Vigil had said, though she couldn’t have said if it stuck with her for it having been them to say it or if the idea truly held merit, vaguely answered a memory of their voice every time she asked herself the question. Like an echo, or else a half-formed plan, a desperate, awful idea that she could hardly entertain long enough to know what it was. Not for the horror it posed, but because if she thought of it too closely, Hornet could not force away the paranoia (unfounded, inescapable) that, somehow, her siblings would know.

And if they knew, if she tried it, if it worked, they’d never forgive her.

The thought, Vigil’s not-voice suggesting it to her over and over again repeated by her own mind, circled until she at last staggered into the stag station, where she found the strength to strike the bell and to climb aboard the Stag when he arrived, and then to lean wearily back in the saddle in relief, certain that she couldn’t have taken another step.

As expected, it took more time than it had for the last stagride to settle everyone down safely, and Hornet found herself pressed as close as she could get to one of the handrails so that Ghost and Nettle could sit beside her, with Hollow resigning themself to much the same awkward craning over the top of the saddle as their last trip through the stagways, already with their immense horns ducked as low as they could get them. Vigil sat beside them and behind her, squeezed into their own corner with Sonnet on their lap. Once all the fussing and strategizing to give them all the lowest possible chance of being thrown overboard was done, Hornet instructed the Stag to go to Dirtmouth.

The Stag grunted his somewhat downhearted affirmative, Hornet having foregone the pleasant chat he seemed to have been expecting in favor of catching her breath, and they were off.

“Why there? I thought we’d need to go straight to the Resting Grounds?” Ghost asked as the Stag broke into an only slightly stiff-legged trot.

“I will not take them into such danger.” Hornet said, raising her voice over the Stag’s quickening gallop and with a nod to Nettle, who perked up even as they seemed a little dismayed to be denied the opportunity to see something ambiguously dangerous. “We know not if the Void’s reach is pervasive across Hallownest, or if it’s only methodically searching for… Whomever it seeks. Already it rises further than ever I’d have guessed, and far sooner than expected. It could be there already, or it may take weeks more to drip all the way through the caverns and catacombs and find the Grey Mourner’s well-hidden home.”

“Dirtmouth is the safer option for the little ones. The others are not needed upon the path we seek.” Hornet frowned. “And neither are you.”

“I won’t stay behind.” Ghost told her, as though to remind of a simple fact.

“I did not expect that you would. Yet you must know there will be only needless threat for you, to accompany me. You could not destroy the flowers, and I would not allow you to try.” Hornet sternly said.

“Even so, I wouldn’t leave you to go alone. What if what you think might happen does actually happen, and the Void finds you there? I’m only worried that I’ll rejoin it too early, but it could kill you.” Ghost insisted. “I won’t let it, if I could do anything to stop it. I couldn’t wait behind, if I thought I could. And I do.”

Hornet bit down a harsher answer than needed to be said. “And what could you do, little Ghost? By your own admission, it is something far vaster and more powerful than you.”

“… I don’t know. But it’s not the same anymore, is it? This Void isn’t what I met in the Abyss, when I found it there. Back then, to say it spoke or sought at all would be like accusing the mountains of reaching so they could touch the sun. But I don’t disbelieve Vigil at all, so the only other option is that something has to be different. Maybe ‘different’ can be reasoned with.” Ghost considered.

“You wish to talk to it? To see if, because it’s grown a voice, it’s also grown a conscience?” Hornet asked, only mostly successful at holding back her tired impatience for such a ridiculous idea.

“Not necessarily. Void does not do well to be alone; that’s why it’s so hard to resist when the Void Sea calls. If it could be distracted by me-“

“No. I cannot keep you from following where I must go, but I forbid you from offering yourself up as bait.” Hornet hissed the word. “I have survived many things, Ghost, and I will survive this. Trust that I will not give up my life so easily, and hold your own in better regard. We will see this through to the end.”

“We will, Hornet, I know that. And I know you can survive it, and that you have, but I… You don’t look well.” Ghost said slowly, uncertainly, and Hornet stiffened. “Ever since Midwife mentioned it, I haven’t been able to stop thinking so. I can’t… I haven’t been uncomfortable in the least since I died. Not soulless, or cold, or even tired, really. Not much of anything at all.”

“By all means, rub it in.” Hornet said dryly.

“And it’s so strange,” Ghost continued with a curious tilt to their head, as though they hadn’t heard. “But it’s very hard to think of any of it like it’s real. Like being tired doesn’t make sense anymore, not in any way unconnected to… To what the Void offers. Like being hurt is something I can’t quite imagine. Logically, I know that you might still feel things like that, but I only noticed you didn’t look right when Midwife pointed it out.”

“I’m fine-“

“I’m worried I’ll miss something. Something important. You’re not like us.” Ghost insisted.

“I can take care of myself.”

“I know that, you’re not listening,” Ghost agonized. “What’s wrong that made Midwife so concerned? Are you that worried? Do you need something you can’t find? Are those attacks you have, whatever void does to one who is not of it, are they worse than we’d thought? You always shake them off so easily-“

“Little Ghost,” Hornet interrupted them gently, something tight in her throat and twisting tighter with every word they said, falling closer to what she could not allow them to know, not until it was all over. Perhaps not even then; how would it pain them, to know how dearly the cold dark caught in her chest cost her? It would. They cared so impossibly dearly for her, for their family, she could nearly again hear them say how very sick they were of watching their siblings suffer.

The very thought of causing them to have to worry for her, when they’d already done so much, was unacceptable. If she could withstand it, and she could – she would – then there was no need to hurt her sibling so. She’d never hurt them again, if she could help it.

“Know that I will do everything in my power to save myself. I will not die, not to this,” she said, and gestured to her chest with the hand not locked around the saddle’s seat, and was briefly cut off as the Stag leapt with a lurch over a break in the road. “Not to anything. I won’t go, little Ghost, not forever.”

Ghost only stared at her, as though they weren’t quite certain if they believed her or not, and then looked away and down, their thoughts dim like they tried to keep them to themself and still clearly filled with unrest.

And the stag ride was silent but for the drumming of the Stag’s many claws over the stone below, though Hornet was not at ease for it.

That, and the shouting contest Nettle began with Sonnet, craning around in their seat to yell over the roar of the stagways when they certainly did not need to, being in possession of a voice that did not rely on sound at all, apparently for the sheer enjoyment of having a normal conversation at top volume. Hornet, far too tired to care in the least, let them go on until Vigil helpfully began to sing roadtrip songs, culminating in such a gleefully shrieked rendition of every single bottle of the ninety-nine that she had to abruptly throw out an arm to keep Nettle from flying out of the saddle when the Stag turned a tight corner.

The stagways proved clear enough to travel, at the very least, as they ventured further into them. Hornet nearly expected the Void to come flooding through any of the countless turns they passed, yet it never did. Only where the road dipped low, to curve and snake through the solid earth to avoid some unknown, ancient obstacle, as bug-made tunnels tended to, did the tunnels grow frigid like lifeless winter mornings, and even if Hornet couldn’t have seen the whipping tendrils of the searching void past the stagways’ darkness, she’d imagine it to be reaching upwards still.

They had to be skirting close, very close, even as it never seemed to breach the tunnels.

Even past the chill, the old Stag himself was a good indicator that the empty dark had come close to finding them again. Whenever the tunnels chilled and the dry breeze that Hornet narrowed her eyes against turned as cold as the shades huddled next to her, the Stag would slow in his gallop as his gait turned jumpy, presumably because he’d begun to pick his feet up higher, though if there’d truly been void lining the stagways, he would not have been so whole when they arrived.

Even so, it wasn’t nearly so long a trip as the one down to Deepnest had been. They climbed steadily, and Hornet could taste the lightness of the air that only came from higher caverns, those that opened to the sky above sooner than it’d take for the air to turn stale.

What took Hornet by surprise was how dark the Dirtmouth stag station had become.

She felt recovered enough from the trip spent sitting to waste no time vaulting down from the Stag’s weathered saddle, though Hornet had the good sense to catch herself before trying to leap to the upper level of the station. She begrudgingly took the lift instead, to scout ahead while the shades sorted themselves out to climb down from the Stag’s saddle, and conscientiously sent it back down once she stood before the old, dry-rotted bulletin board, still crowded with the last posted warnings from before they hadn’t mattered any longer.

Perhaps the little Ghost’s friends would pin it with cheerful reminders and cautions again, if they weren’t taken by the dark. Ghost, at least, would likely appreciate being told what the corkboard was, what it could be used for; she imagined they’d be the sort for whatever obscure community functions might be offered there.

Not yet. Not yet, but soon, maybe.

“Come on, Ghost.” Hornet called impatiently down to the shades still lingering below, already disquieted by the bright turn of the lumaflies, just as lively in their nighttime fluttering as they’d been throughout the years of the Infection.

There was no possible way the stasis had returned, nothing left in the world that could’ve brought it about again, yet hearing the gale off the mountains howl outside the open door, kicking up dust as it always had every single time she’d found her way to the surface of her kingdom, made Hornet cross her arms tightly and scowl out into the night.

For it was only the night; the stasis and all it had meant were long gone.

“I’m coming, we’re just saying goodbye to the Stag. He says he’s tired; I hope he gets a good rest before he needs to go anywhere again.” Ghost said as Hornet stood stiffly at the doorway, drifting up to meet her and completely ignoring the creaky lift. No need for it, Hornet belatedly understood.

“And the rest?” Hornet asked, having more-or-less assumed that the other shades would have followed them up.

“I could not keep them down if I tried,” Hollow said with quiet amusement, carefully poking their dark head up through the gap in the landing to keep from catching their long horns on the edges, tall enough that they only needed to straighten their back from the floor below to do so. “I don’t believe they realized until just now that-“

They were cut off by a wordless shriek of ringing glee, as Nettle dodged neatly around them and shot out the door, immediately lost to the whirling dust storm kicking up outside. Hornet took an alarmed step to follow, and reflexively side-stepped back out of the way as Sonnet barreled out after them, nearly buzzing with pent-up excitement.

There was a moment of peace as Hornet stared out in their wake, baffled, and Hollow coiled themself unhurriedly into the station’s upper level, the space just barely large enough to hold them with the longest of their tendrils dangling down over the landing. Vigil followed them up and ducked around their gangly arm braced on the floor, waving off Hollow’s muted apology, to lean against the doorframe opposite Hornet and stare outside, their void a distant mixture of unfettered curiosity and an unfamiliar kind of wonder, that they were evidently happy enough to experience on their own.

Ghost tilted their head and peered around her to look outside while Hornet debated whether she was amused or troubled by the twins’ disappearance, the unsettled dust past the stag station door dully reflecting back the lumaflylight as a swirling, desaturated wall of earthy grey. Though there was no sign of the little shades, Nettle hadn’t stopped broadcasting their blinding, overwhelmed amazement, that rang out as lofty and pealing as a struck bell. Sonnet had gone conspicuously quiet, yet with none of the other shades concerned, Hornet only shifted the weight of her needle on her back and waited.

“They haven’t seen the surface before. I guess it’s probably a little like seeing the ocean, or watching a snowfall for the first time.” Ghost whispered, as though to speak would ruin the experience for the little ones in question.

Hornet was certain there was little wonder in a snowfall, not if it was anything like the ash of the Kingdom’s Edge, and wisely, she thought, kept her skepticism to herself. “You’ve seen an ocean?” She asked instead.

“Well, I… I think so. No, of course I have, I’ve been all over. It must have just been a long time ago, now.” Ghost decided for their apparent forgetfulness. “But it’s sort of heartening, isn’t it? It’s just another day up here, not even much different from when I first got to Hallownest, but compared to the dark and the tunnels down below it’s incredible, at least to someone.”

“Look,” Vigil said, their void-speak hushed and tinted with something nearly bittersweet, that Hornet intentionally did not think deeply about the cause for. “Look, up there.”

Hornet looked.

It was the sky. Just a glimmer of it, growing wider as the sweeping winds began to die down some, as though they’d been just a passing nightmare. The dust cleared from overhead as it never had during the stasis, and the night swooped in like it’d only been waiting in the wings.

There were stars. Countless, scattered so fine and close in places that Hornet, for one illogical moment, thought that they must be the backdrop of the world, and the black heavens only filled in the spaces around them. They shone so coldly and so brightly and so vastly unlike anything she’d ever seen in her kingdom, anything she’d seen above her before during an age of life when she’d surfaced from the caverns, that for the briefest instant she could only stare up at them and wonder how far away they could possibly be, for things that burned like white sparks of flame, like glints of quartz embedded in stone far off but still not out of reach.

“Did they ever see this, do you think?” Vigil asked as though under their breath, and there was no resentment or bitterness in their words, though Hornet knew them to be talking about the Vessels they and she had fought for so long before. Instead, Vigil sounded only wistful.

Hornet looked away from the night sky and towards them, and something a deeper dark than what lay between the stars curled achingly in her heart, that made unpracticed words of comfort burn in her mouth.

“I do. This, and far more.” She told them instead, as softly as any reassurance. “Many, many bugs have ventured here from outside the Kingdom. They leave memories of other places in their journals, other lands, and all have stars.”

It was one of her favorite things to read of, when she deciphered the left words of fallen travelers; their descriptions of their own lands, written out of homesickness. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, as she’d once heard, and for those wanderers who penned down their travels, it made their memories faultless and turned their brief rambles to poetry. These passages, Hornet had searched out with the most interest, the imageries of places that were not Hallownest, where time went on, where the sunlight was something taken for granted, where, if one looked overhead in the early hours, they would surely see the stars.

Though as she turned her face back up to them, Hornet thought the writings had never once gotten them right; the wonder of the night sky was not that it shone, nor that it guided, nor even the pale face of the moon.

It was that, within hours, it would be gone. It would turn to day, to sunshine. And then the night would come again, and she would see it do so.

There was such promise long-forgotten, Hornet thought to herself, in change.

Chapter Text

And so Hornet discovered that refuge can be found in unexpected places.

At her side, where they’d before been peaceably quiet, Ghost tensed all at once, and behind her Hollow lowered their gaze sharply to stare out into the lingering cyclones of disturbed dust, and nearly before they had, Hornet was striding outside and into the dust storm with her needle drawn.

The little shades had only disappeared into it minutes before, making a game out of hiding in the storm as it picked up again, and until that moment, as Hornet heard their thoughts turn abruptly to fear a split instant before she reacted to it, they’d been calling back and forth in an impromptu game for the open air and all the space that came with it. As she went, Hornet admonished herself for letting her guard down, even for an instant; how foolish of her, when they couldn’t be safe, not even here.

Especially not here, the most sullen and suspicious part of her pointed out, given the impression she’d left the town with when last she’d visited.

Sonnet was the first to reappear out of the unlit haze, their void-speak a jumbled mess of undirected, low-simmering fear and jittery alarm, that only settled somewhat when they darted around her and back into the safety of the stag station like they thought they’d be eaten alive if they didn’t. Nettle followed soon after, equally frightened and thrilling with terror when they ran directly into Hornet, making her draw a tense gasp past gritted fangs for their cold and knocking her back a step.

Third to emerge from the dust was a figure just beyond, taller than Hornet and with a blade in their hand, glinting in the starlight as the dust storm began to rise into a gale.

“Behind me.” Hornet told the shade sharply once she’d recovered, readying her silk and herself to fight.

The effort made her wince and her chest go prickling-numb for the loss of soul, but flashes of needle-sharp white flared around her as she bid them. Nettle, instead of fleeing as she’d hoped, lost nearly all their fear as though she’d banished it with her instruction and instead pressed close at her back, icy and shaking, and immediately ensnared every tendril they could in her stained shawl.

Hornet hissed in frustration, yet before she could think to retreat to remove them the winds shifted and the figure that’d frightened them was blinking down at her, loosely holding their longnail.

“Huh. Wouldn’t y’know it, the last person I expected to find creeping around here in the middle of the night.” Iselda said, raising her voice to be heard over the rushing wind. “How’re you doing, Hornet?”

“She tried to get us! Sonnet was… Only a little scared of all the space out here, but then she came out of nowhere!” Nettle explained, unusually frazzled. “I think you should get her. And then we should go inside. But first, you gotta get her.”

“I don’t ‘gotta get’ anyone.” Hornet said irately. “This is Iselda. She is not our enemy.”

“Touching.” Iselda said. “Is this how you introduce all your friends, or am I a special case?”

Iselda squinted through the dust and down at Nettle then, who hummed with anxiety and hid further behind Hornet. “Wait, that’s not the same kid. The horns are kinda different. What’d you do with the other ones, Hornet?”

“Lower your blade unless you intend to fight me,” Hornet warned. “And then we can talk.”

“Sure, when you lower yours. I’m on watch, and our heartwarming past isn’t quite enough to get you into town without a little bit of an explanation.” Iselda clicked her mandibles in almost-believable apology.

“I don’t trust her.” Nettle hissed dramatically, which was so close to Hornet’s unsaid gut response that she spared a moment to worry for her influence on them.

Hornet considered, eyeing the tall bug as she shifted her weight casually, though not casually enough to offset the longnail in her hand, still unlowered. If it came to a fight, there was every possibility that Iselda would best her, as much as the thought smarted and however much the unfairness of the idea bit at her. Hornet knew herself more skilled, by long and constant practice if nothing else, than most who had ever lived. Once, she’d thought herself the equal to any that might dare to threaten what she guarded. But even now her hands shook, the weakness of her needle-arm warning that if she kept her the weapon raised so, she might be forced to drop it. There was a pounding, growing headache behind her eyes that she was unsure had ever truly left, one that pulsed with her sluggish heart.

And there was Ghost to consider. If she hurt one whom they considered a friend, there would be consequences. They might be upset. Wyrm, they could cry.

No, a conflict now was ill-advised by any metric.

“Fine.” Hornet said, to the surprise Iselda made no effort to keep from her expression. Hornet lowered the tip of her needle, her arm aching dully for holding it aloft, and shooed an indignant Nettle from her back with her free hand so that she could replace her blade there instead.

To her credit, Iselda immediately lowered the tip of her weapon to scrape against the grainy dust, as though reflexively pointing it away when Hornet stood down, before slinging it with ease to rest across her back. “Great. I was expecting a whole lot more fight than that; that grub must be a good influence on you. Hey, let’s not talk out here in the storm, are you staying long? Corny and I’ve got just about enough room for two or three more.” She offered.

Hornet glowered tiredly at her. “I have a few more than that. We may speak in the stag station.”

“May we?” Iselda mumbled sarcastically, though she followed as Hornet motioned to Nettle, who had settled for being loudly, if wordlessly, discontent with the situation, and led them back the way she’d come.

Past the obscuring dust of the storm, they’d only made it some two-dozen feet from the station door. The rest were waiting for her within it, their glowing-pale eyes like little lighthouses turned to her as Hornet stepped back inside and began to methodically brush off the collected grime from her shawl. Hollow, she saw, had Sonnet tucked securely against their shoulder where the little shade hid their face, though their trepidation seemed more discomfort than true fear anymore. A common response of a life-long tunnel-dweller when exposed to the open sky, even inasmuch as a dust storm allowed it to be seen.

“Gods below, how many ghosts you got in there?” Iselda gasped as all their eyes turned to her at once, when she ducked to follow Hornet inside. “Are you collecting them or something?”

“Unintentionally, it seems.” Hornet said. “These are my siblings. Keep your weapon away, or I will not hesitate to kill you.”

Hornet belatedly realized that might not have been the best way to open the conversation as soon as she’d said so, yet it still seemed only fair to express the limits to which the bug could behave. Particularly if it became clear to her that shades, especially so many, could dull the life of even one without void of their own, as Hornet suspected they might. Iselda, Hornet decided, did not need to know that unless it would become an issue; she had no particular loathing for the bug, but in spite of Ghost’s fondness for her, she was a potential threat. What must a being of void seem like, to one who could not hear them defend themselves? Particularly with the Void itself steadily rendering Hallownest uninhabitable.

In Iselda’s place, Hornet mightn’t have taken the chance.

“Uh huh,” Iselda said distractedly, evidently not taking her at her word, as she scanned each shade in turn.

When she got to Ghost, staring blankly back and internally, Hornet could hear, all but absurdly overjoyed to see her again, Iselda stopped with a surprised hum. “There you are, kid. I’d thought she’d dumped you somewhere, when you weren’t outside. It’s a little hard to pick you out of a crowd.”

“Though your big sibling, I think I can manage.” She offered conversationally, waving a brief hello to Hollow, who hesitated before stiffly waving back, like they’d copied the unfamiliar motion just like she’d done it.

“I guess you know her…?” Vigil prompted, cocking their head and making Iselda jump nearly into the bulletin board.

“Gods! Another one. Didn’t see you there,” Iselda laughed. “No, I don’t think we can fit this many in my shop. You might be better suited to just staying in the station for the night, and we can work something out in the morning, if you’re going to be hanging around.”

“… Yes, I think that would be best.” Hornet said. It would make the leaving easier, if she knew her siblings to be resting somewhere safe. As loath as she was to admit it, and in spite of the ongoing question of what she might discover of the shades, Iselda had proven herself trustworthy. To an extent.

And though it grated on her to, knowing what waited below, Hornet could feel exhaustion gathered in every inch of her, slowing her thoughts and her words. What would follow was too important to allow weakness of any kind to interfere, and so if it would take a night’s rest in order to wait out the storm and find her siblings somewhere to stay, all the better to knock out two aspids with one stone.

“Iselda, you know Hollow and Ghost,” Hornet briefly introduced each, gesturing to them in turn. “Accompanying me now are Vigil,” at their name, the shade in question flicked a tendril like a joking salute. “Nettle, and Sonnet.” Hornet finished.

Nettle, she saw out of the corner of her eye, only huffily turned away with a vaguely insulting jab of their horn and a lift of their chin, very much in a mood.

“Where’s that last one, I only count- Oh! Yep, there they are.” Iselda said as Sonnet risked a glance over their shoulder to hear their name, the shine of their eyes distinguishing them from the faultless dark of Hollow’s void.

“Six, huh. I think we have a few houses left about that size. Hm. Well, there’s one that I think you’ll really like, bruiser,” Iselda said to Hollow, who minutely inclined their head and inwardly stilled the quiet hum of their thoughts for being addressed directly. “Vaulted ceilings, eh? Only one floor and a basement, and it’s got a draft and a dust mite problem, but it’s just about the last one that’s tall enough. Believe me, you’ll live to regret settling for a low roof, even if the storefront is in great condition.” She said conspiratorially.

Then she shivered, folding her arms. “And a working tap, that draws from a hot spring. Maybe we should brave the storm for it anyway, it’s freezing in here. The cold must be wafting up from the tunnels. You know, yeah, I’d feel bad leaving you all here in the station to wait it out all night, how about it?” Iselda decided.

“The cold is no difficulty, and we have traveled far.” Hornet said.

“Are you sure you’re okay? We’ve got to be cold to be around, right? And a hot spring would be nice.” Ghost said, almost wistfully. “The soul might do you good, too.”

“I say we go,” Vigil declared. “If it has a hot spring, then I’m in.”

“I like them, too. Hornet, are we going to another?” Sonnet spoke up, and Nettle nodded their enthusiastic agreement, offense apparently forgotten in favor of more important things.

“On second thought,” Hornet interrupted as Iselda began to reply, too tired to argue and with Ghost’s worries fresh in her mind. “We would appreciate what you have in mind. Will you lead us there?”

“Ah- Sure. I’m not doing anything else; the watch duty was mostly just to appease the mantises, and it’s not like anything’s gonna come crawling up out of the well that they can’t handle. That problem’s over and done with, just in time for the apocalypse of the week.” Iselda said with a cynical laugh. “Well, no time like the present. C’mon, let’s go.” She prompted, and shaded her eyes from the wind as she stepped back outside.

“Mantises? The Mantis tribe is here?” Hollow said quietly, like they’d just recovered themself enough from being in the spotlight to do so.

“We can discuss it later, once we’ve rested. I suspect that there has been much that’s gone unaddressed in the Kingdom as of late.” Hornet told them, though the same question circled in her mind as she stepped outside after Iselda, trusting that the rest would follow.

It would make sense if the mantises had come here. It would be ideal, even, if the majority of Hallownest had the good sense to seek safety aboveground. If what Vigil had to report was true, then the Mantis tribe’s territory would be untenable by now. That even the Mantis Lords were not stubborn enough to stay and die when something as implacable as the Void threatened was a good sign, Hornet thought. It meant that the most entrenched among the survivors had fled, and that they hadn’t simply taken Dirtmouth and run off its residents boded well. She did not know the Mantis tribe to be overly cruel, but had they felt it necessary, there would have been no hesitation.

With any luck, Midwife and the Weaver would have decided the same as the mantises, along with all the rest scattered throughout her kingdom. The thought filled her with unease, walking past all the low-slung houses of Dirtmouth, their doors shut tightly and their windows darkened and empty. It was a waste of time to run off and check them all for those she worried after, and dangerous to leave her siblings alone, besides, yet the desire to itched insistently.

Even so, it would be remiss of her not to be sure. Tomorrow she would be able to check the town for all those who she’d known to be alive before the Black Egg before she did anything else, and if any were gone…

Hornet hissed as a gust of wind threw dust into her face, but blinked the grit from her eyes and kept going, following Iselda’s retreating back through the gale. They were on the outskirts of town by now, several minutes’ walk from the stag station, and Hornet thought they had set out in the direction of King’s Pass. They had to be nearly to wherever she was leading them; there was little to be found so far out before the Pass itself.

“Stay close,” Hornet shouted, the words nearly lost to the wind, and listened carefully until she counted five voiceless affirmations of varying degrees of exasperation. Good. If she lost them in this weather, she did not like her chances of finding them again.

As though sensing her hesitation and, knowing them, perhaps because of it, Ghost appeared out of the gloom at her side and twined a tendril around a bunch of her shawl. “Don’t worry, Hollow has Nettle and Sonnet, and Vigil is right behind me.” They said, their void-speak untouched by the howl of the wind.

Hornet nodded her gratitude and pressed on. It was only minutes more before a larger house, its rounded carved-chitin exterior looming and hunched in the haze, appeared from the darkness with Iselda stopped before it, fiddling with the door.

“What’s wrong?” Hornet raised her voice to ask.

“Nothing, it’s just got rusted hinges. It takes some-“ she grunted and yanked bodily at the handle, and the door flung open with a grinding shriek. “-elbow grease. Alright, file in, let’s go,” Iselda called back to the others.

Hornet stood aside, and Ghost went with her as Vigil dove gratefully through the door, followed closely by Hollow, to whom both the littler shades clung. Then Hornet tapped at Ghost’s back to urge them on, and followed the rest in, and Iselda closed the door behind her.

The hinges squealed like struck spiders as it slammed shut, pushed by the wind, and the clamor died down all at once into a stuffy sort of silence. It was dark inside, with only the faint, shifting beams of starlight illuminating just about where the windows were, and it smelled like old dust and dry decay.

“Excuse me, scoot aside,” Iselda murmured into the sudden hush, and Hornet saw her wince and curse under her breath as she walked directly into what could’ve been a crumbling umbrella stand. “Move it, grub.”

“What are you looking for?” Hornet offered belatedly, realizing that however much Iselda could make out of the darkness, it was less than optimal.

“Just the lumaflies, they must be sleeping,” Iselda whispered heatedly. “One would think they’d be up right about now, but I guess everyone’s hunkered down for the storm.”

There was a lumafly light fixture directly over Hornet’s head. She reached up and tapped sharply on the glass, and the dozing insect within fluttered its wings and began to glow, scuttling around its container until it was awake enough to take flight.

“There we go. Thanks.” Iselda sighed.

Then she clapped her hands smartly, as though to reboot the conversation. “Okay! Here’s the place. It’s a mess, but just about everything around here is. I think there’s about four bedrooms, a kitchen-slash-living room, a handful of closets and bathrooms or whatever, and the big bath’s in the basement. This might be the house with rotted floorboards, so watch out for that. If you turn the tap on and leave it running, it’ll probably heat the place up some ‘til you can get the fireplace working.” She suggested, crossing her arms tightly. “And if you need anything, better ask now, because the storm doesn’t look like it’s letting up and you’re just about as far from anyone to hear you scream as you can get.”

“This isn’t what I’d expected, but I like it.” Ghost said admiringly, glancing up at the ceiling as it creaked beneath the pummeling windstorm outside. “It has walls and a roof and everything.”

“C’mon Ghost, we’re not shooting for the stars here. Lower your standards a little.” Vigil advised.

“Thank you. It will suit us well.” Hornet said over them, perhaps a little too loud.

“Hornet,” Sonnet whispered, glancing sidelong at Iselda like she’d overhear. “Hornet, ask her if she’ll stay the night. It’s a long walk back.”

“No way! She scared you,” Nettle said plaintively. “She even has her own house, she said.”

“I wasn’t scared. She’s nice, and she should stay.” Sonnet said firmly.

Their twin considered this. “… Hornet, I think Iselda can stay.” Nettle decided solemnly, like a switch was flipped.

“They make a good point.” Ghost added. “It is a little harsh out there, I’d feel better if she waited it out with us.”

Hornet sighed. “Iselda, it would give them peace of mind if you rested here.”

“Sorry kiddo, I’ve got a husband to get back to. If I disappear overnight, he’ll be diving back into that well to look for me by noon.” Iselda swore. “Don’t worry about me, I’ve made the walk a hundred times. On a clear day you can still see the stag station sign from here; it’s far, but it really isn’t that far.”

“And if it’s not overly rude to say it, this whole situation here,” Iselda gestured at the room at large, and mainly to the clutter of shades mostly occupied with exploring it by now, their silent, black-trailed drifting illuminated by the disrupted starlight and punctuated, to Hornet, with fascinated exclamations as one or the other discovered something interesting, like working cabinet doors in the kitchen the entryway opened into. Only Hollow stayed essentially where they’d started, watching the conversation with rapt attention, and Ghost at their side staring with their huge, unblinking eyes at Iselda with, from their perspective as far as Hornet could tell, polite interest.

“This is the nightmare scenario. If I stayed the night, I’d wake up with extra mouths or sworn to a haunted circus or something. I’ve probably already been marked for possession by some creepy Hallownest god, just standing in the foyer with you and yours. Anything you need before I head out?” Iselda asked, amused.

“Nothing at all. Be safe.” Hornet said, without keeping quite as much indignation from her voice as she’d tried to.

“Great. Come find me tomorrow, if this isn’t just a ghostly trick to get me outside to be picked off by scavengers. You know the drill, I leave, I come back in the daylight hours, I find the place totally empty and hear your disembodied snark in every dust storm afterwards. Typical ghost story.” Iselda grinned. “Get some rest, and if you still exist in the morning, we can meet the neighborhood. There’ll be scones.”

Against her own will, Hornet perked up some at the last, the promise of baked goods calling to mind half-remembered meals from years and years before, that even now she couldn’t have said had been simple bread or pastries or something in-between, only that they’d made her mouth water. “There will?”

Iselda blinked down at her, something confused and nearly concerned caught in the thoughtful shift of her mandibles at Hornet’s intensity. “… Yeah. Yeah, we had a baker move in a while ago, he started making anything and everything on day one and hasn’t really stopped. His husband says it’s to keep his mind off it all, but, well, no one’s about to complain. He’s pretty good.”

How strange. She’d eaten last only days before, a week on the outside, yet now that it was brought up, Hornet realized she was hungrier than she could remember being since the early days of the Infection. Was it from the lifting of the stasis, the persistent lack of soul, something else? Could she safely leave the shades to hunt, even here? It could be hours wandering around the Crossroads before something still leftover from the Infection presented itself, and it would be hours more to try the better odds in Greenpath.

And that was all assuming she had the energy to hunt at all. Frustratingly, even now, all Hornet could think of in the relative safety of Dirtmouth and with the halt on travel the storm meant was rest. The allure of a secure corner to collapse in and steal a few hours’ sleep was becoming increasingly hard to ignore, and she thought she mightn’t’ve even minded the piles of silt collected in all the corners of this house in particular. They looked soft enough.

“I see.” Hornet said, a few beats too late, narrowing her eyes in consideration. No, it was better to hunt for herself and sleep later; there was too little information to work with, to place her bets on some unknown bug who could possibly, according to Iselda, have food to spare. And with how little Sly had in stock before, anything useable left in Dirtmouth would be better put towards its residents. “I will not be in town tomorrow morning. I would ask that you watch out for my siblings, if you can, in my absence. They will need nothing but your protection.”

“What? Where are you going?” Ghost asked, their head turning to direct their unsettling focus towards her.

“Yeah, I remember, one of them holed up in my shop for a couple days last time you were up here, they’re ghosts or what have you, who cares. See, I can’t really do that, spider. I’m kinda the de facto leadership around here until everything gets settled down in the ruins again, and I don’t have the time to spare to babysit a bunch of creepy kids. No offense, kiddo,” Iselda said offhandedly to Ghost.

“None taken.” Ghost puffed themself up a little, as though proud for the title. “But Hornet, we’re in Dirtmouth! We’ll be fine. It’s always perfectly safe here, and the mantises like me. I’m sure they’d recognize me before there was trouble, and no one else was ever anything but friendly.”

Ghost hesitated. “Anything but nonaggressive.” They amended.

“And there is no need to be looked after, even if they aren’t. Ghost and I are wholly capable of defending both ourselves and the others.” Hollow nodded lightly to Ghost to say. “On the contrary, I worry most for your wellbeing. She brings up a good point. It has been some time since you have eaten that I’ve seen, and you must be tired.” Hollow said pointedly.

“Your concern is noted.” Hornet said, sharper than she meant to. “But I will not leave you unprotected for what could become half a day to track down something to hunt, when the Mantis tribe have already found their way here. I do not doubt your ability, I doubt your chances against some of the greatest warriors Hallownest has ever known.”

“Geez, if you’re that worried about the mantises, I can just talk to them. Me and the Lords have struck up a little bit of a rapport; they’re a decent sort, if you get to know them.”

“I know them well enough.” Hornet said coldly. “Forgive if I do not take you at your word.”

“I only mentioned because you look kind of-“

“I know! I am well aware.” Hornet clenched her fists, stifled frustration flaring hot in her chest. “Do not give me your pity, witless wanderer, I do not want it.”

Iselda seemed startled by the outburst for just a split instant. “Ah, I was wondering why you were being so tolerable. You were making me uneasy there, spider.” She said casually. “But the prickly bullshit isn’t going to fly. Listen, I’m calling the shots around here for now, and if you start shit, I’m not stepping in for you. I respect you. I like your siblings. But I’m not going to risk messing up this cease-fire because you couldn’t keep from throwing down the gauntlet for something stupid.”

Hornet bristled, but Iselda wasn’t done. “I’m just trying to keep it civil around here, okay?” The shopkeeper insisted. “Whatever’s brewing down below has been hard on everyone, especially everyone new to town. I’m not trying to start a fight here, but I’m also not going to let you screw this up for us. So, try not being an unrepentant jerk for a little while, and we’ll go from there.” Iselda said calmly.

Hornet took a deep breath, aware that she’d drawn the attention of the twins peeking worriedly in from the other room, though Vigil had disappeared to elsewhere. “Fine.” She conceded, for their sakes if nothing else. “I apologize. You have been nothing but kind to my siblings and myself, and I… I suppose I am out of line.”

“Apology accepted. If the problem’s just food, you don’t even need to go anywhere farther than down the street, so any whole trip down below and all the histrionics attached isn’t really necessary. We’ve got a pretty good stockpile going, the mantises are beasts when it comes to tracking down anything crawling in the lower levels.” Iselda plowed on as though nothing had happened. “If it suits you, we can go now. I’m technically off-duty soon, if we go wake up my replacement then we can drop by the pantry and grab you something. The night’s young.”

Hornet blinked at her, nearly too caught off guard to be mistrustful.

“Go, we’ll be fine.” Hollow said gently, their eyes bright and steady through the dark.

“I know.” And she did, so long as they stayed here. Yet it went against every instinct, to leave behind those who relied upon her. They were so vulnerable, and of all the countless hazards Hallownest had to offer for all of its many lands, Dirtmouth and its folk were the one Hornet had the least experience with, and the least trust to give. What use was a spell, the slow-incapacitating dark, against a Nailmaster, a mantis, an armed wanderer?

It was just down the road, Hornet told herself, frustrated for her own indecision. Even in Deepnest, she hadn’t been so reluctant to leave them just long enough to sustain herself.

“We will be, Hornet, nothing will happen.” Ghost stressed, drifting before her to catch her attention. “And if you won’t go, I will.” They threatened, tilting their head stubbornly. “I could carry something back.”

Hornet snorted an affectionate laugh, though she knew them to be deadly serious, and lifted a hand to scratch carefully at the base of one of their horns, dually to reassure them and gently push them away, which she hoped was indication enough that their intervention wouldn’t be necessary. The effort, though brief, made her hand throb up to the wrist.

“I’ll return soon. Keep an eye on them until then, little Ghost.” She told them, only half-joking. “Stay inside.”

“I will. Everyone in town will be asleep right now, anyway.” Ghost acquiesced. “We can see them in the morning.”

They thrilled with delight then, as something had occurred to them. “I can introduce everyone to Myla! And Elderbug, and Cornifer, and… Do you think Quirrel is here? I haven’t seen him in weeks, not since the Blue Lake. No, of course he is! He’s so smart, of course he’d be around here somewhere. I wonder what he’s been doing all this time?” Ghost asked, their trailing tendrils flicking keenly.

“I imagine he’s found something suitably pedantic to turn his attention towards. He was one of Monomon’s, after all.” Hornet predicted.

“She did have a certain scholarly infamy, didn’t she?” Hollow added, curling themself into a relaxed pile like a long, stringy millipede, apparently content to wait and rest now that the excitement for the evening seemed to be wrapping up. “I can only wonder what there is left to study.”

“We’ll look for him tomorrow and find out.” Ghost decided. “Hurry and go, and then come back. And be safe!”

Hornet quirked a small, tired smile down at them. She could have done without the insinuation that she’d ever be anything but, but their void-speak was underscored with such sincere care that it was difficult to take their request as anything like an affront. “I will, little Ghost.”

“Done?” Iselda asked, though not impatiently. “The wind’s died down some, now may be our best opportunity.”

“Yes,” Hornet said, turning to go. “Lead on.”

Chapter Text

And so Hornet left her siblings unguarded, with more reluctance than she thought she’d ever turned her back on anything that could not be trusted to stay safe on its own.

Iselda wrestled the door open so Hornet could follow her, as the two shades left undistracted by the promise of something new to explore watched them go, like they thought she’d skip back inside and change her mind if they didn’t see her leave with their own eyes, and then the door slammed shut behind. To Hornet’s relief, the storm had slowed to just around how the wind had always blown through Dirtmouth before the Infection’s end, only the occasional tearing squall and far-off dust-devil that she could see twisting through the wastes beyond the edge of town.

She could pick out the scraped-clear path now, already filling with dust thrown over the cracked pavestones by the storm, as Iselda led her down it. It seemed new – or at the least, newly uncovered. Had they the numbers and the means to work on such things, now? When Hornet had left last, the fading town had been as decrepit as all the years before, save the little spots of habitability where the wanderers and residents had cleared homes from the neglected ruins for themselves.

Perhaps the recent influx of refugees from below had brought with them enough industriousness to do a few odd jobs, or perhaps, like herself, they found there was little worse than sitting around listlessly with the kind of dread that’d caused them to surface.

Regardless whether the reasoning behind a lookout for a town bordered by very little at all was justified by watchfulness or boredom, all waking up Iselda’s replacement as watch entailed was when, only a few mounded houses down the road, Iselda gestured for Hornet to wait and stepped over a line of small, dried carapaces of the sort that littered the wastes outside the town, ever covered and uncovered again by the wind and silt. These ones were placed end-to-end, the largest no higher than Hornet’s knee, in a wobbly circle around a smaller building like a grim property boundary. Iselda jogged up to the door, gave it a few sharp raps with her knuckles, and jogged back, already motioning for Hornet to keep walking.

“That’s old Oro’s place, sorry you got him for a neighbor. He’s a real grouch. Kind of reminds me of you, actually.” Iselda explained.

Hornet found she had no energy to be properly annoyed, needing already to focus on where she was putting her feet to keep from tripping over them, and only flashed the shopkeeper her most withering glare, to which she got no response.

Iselda led her back towards town a ways then, until they met what could have been a recently-uncovered road, the rounded stones a less unsteady ground than the shifting dust, and from there she turned again away from the town’s center and slowed to walk unhurriedly at Hornet’s side.

“So,” Iselda said, the winds low enough that she didn’t need to shout anymore. “It’s a bit of a touchy subject I suppose, but you look… Different.”

Hornet sighed, and resigned herself to the conversation. “It has been a difficult month.”

“Sounds it. You know, part of the reason I picked you all out that specific house is that I thought you might appreciate the connection to the spring. In the interest of not scaring anyone, you might want to clean your shawl.” Iselda advised.

Hornet frowned. “Why?”

“Hornet,” Iselda said flatly. “You’re covered in blood.”

Hornet cast her a dubious look, and then glanced sharply down at herself, stretching her shawl down to examine it, though she thought she knew already what Iselda meant. The rich red weave was darkly stained like she’d remembered, dappled all over with uneven splotches of black. She could see the faint illumination of the starlight softening the marks, though; they were from void, but only the discoloration it’d left behind.

The difference was an easy mistake to make. Blood had a tendency to dry dark.

“There would be little use in it; stains such as these will not come out.” Hornet told her.

It was a lesson she’d learned the hard way over the years, and part of why she’d put such effort into perfecting her needle’s throw. Shed void could stain all it touched, though inconsistently, and could not be removed if it did. There was a stash of cloaks and shawls in a hide in Greenpath that had fallen victim to this, that she could no longer stand to look at without feeling the cold darkness drip through her fingers and hearing the sharp snap of a breaking mask.

At least this, on the whole, was void she’d spilt of herself instead of a Vessel.

“Great.” Iselda intoned. “Can’t you… Turn it inside out, maybe? I cannot stress enough how much it looks like you’ve just finished messily murdering someone with your bare hands.”

“All the better, if the Mantis Lords are around.” Hornet noted.

“Do you have a problem with them or something?” Iselda demanded.

“Not at all.” Hornet said. “We have often been allies over the years, and we know each other well. That is why I have the wariness I do for them; they are fair, and noble, but ruthless. It is not for myself that I worry.”

“Maybe you should be worrying for yourself.” Iselda said lowly, with intensity. “Don’t get any ideas, I don’t like you overmuch, but… There’s something wrong here. It’s too cold in that house. You left all spitfire and determination, and you’ve come back-“

“Be careful what you say.” Hornet said quietly.

“-and you came back run-down.” Iselda carried on stubbornly. “Exhausted, starving, trailed by ghosts, paranoid beyond reason, though that one’s not too much a surprise. You’re haunted, Hornet, in every meaning of the word. And from where I’m standing, it all adds up to look pretty bad. Pretty worthy of some worrying.”

Hornet said nothing, hadn’t the energy to say anything to that that wouldn’t be less sure of herself than she’d allow, and without a reply, Iselda didn’t seem to have anything else to say to her. And so they walked in tense silence for several minutes, until Iselda turned a corner and at the end of the path was a huge building, carved a smooth grey and round-edged like the rest of Dirtmouth and set into a small hill like a bunker, that had, over the years, collected enough dust from the wind that the hill’s stone could only be seen at all on the leeward side. Iselda led her to it and unlocked the door with a key she had hanging from her neck.

“It’s just to keep the beasts out,” she explained, subdued. “I’ll get you a copy of the key. Just try to put back what you take, if you can.”

Hornet nodded wordlessly, gritting her fangs in anger she couldn’t have honestly said the source of. Part indignation on the behalf of her siblings for what the simple bug implied, part fury that she’d allowed herself to fall so far, part prickling fear that, if Iselda of all people could notice what ate at her from within, no amount of pushing through could save her.

She could not allow herself to think so. There was too much that relied upon her, upon the perpetuation of her life.

The door, a massive two-paned thing, opened smoother than the one to the distant house and with just a protesting squeal of the hinges, and the lumaflies inside were already awake and fluttering in their glasses. Beneath them, what could’ve been generously called a warehouse was not nearly full.

It was, however, respectably stocked with just about anything Hornet could think to want; stacks of blankets, extra furniture, a reasonable pile of cloaks of all sizes and styles, another of weapons of all varieties, a corner that seemed dedicated to anything that wouldn’t fit elsewhere, all more-or-less neatly separated into half of the building. The other half had its floorspace almost wholly taken up by what Hornet could only assume was meant to be food.

It was easy to spot the mantises’ handiwork; creatures beheaded, dressed, and left to dry, of just about every kind she could think of that lurked within a few days’ trip of the town. There were also, true to form, more than a few that could only have been hunted for sport. Hornet thought she saw a duranda’s broken shell, and the last few spined body segments of a goam, both placed front and center where the impressive carapaces would catch the eye. Kept thoughtfully separate from the gore were shelves, stacked high with baskets of fruits and roots and cloth-wrapped bundles of the general shape of baked goods, and others with jars and pots of different sizes and makes with little handwritten labels attached to each.

The warehouse was well-supplied even if it wasn’t full to bursting, and seeing it eased something within her that she nearly hadn’t noticed grow grimly anticipating. In the last years before Hallownest had gone quiet, it had been very, very rare to see a stocked larder; seeing so many alive, hearing tell of more gathered all in one town, she had assumed the worst.

“Impressive work.” Hornet spoke up when Iselda kept her silence, leaned against the wall with her arms stiffly crossed as Hornet looked back to her. “I’m glad there’s been no difficulty with supplies, here.”

“Yeah, we’ve gotten by alright. Like I said, the mantises more than earn their keep. And it’s been pretty easy to wander through Greenpath and the like, collecting whatever grows in arm’s reach; there’s no real danger in it anymore, or in straight-up scavenging. Even the squits and vengeflies aren’t inclined to bother. The Nailsmith and his husband, they’re a dab hand at cooking, and good thing, too, since Corny and me could burn water. If we had an herb garden or something up here, we’d be set.” Iselda mused.

“Go ahead, grab whatever you want. I know what folks eat can vary. Don’t worry about pitching in quite yet, just rest up a while, grab a new cloak, maybe.” Iselda told her, gesturing widely to the warehouse at large.

Hornet swallowed her pride and ignored the last, rigidly stepping deeper into the warehouse to examine what was stored on the shelves of preserved food, with Iselda’s presence prickling uncomfortably up her back. There was too much to comb through to find something she especially liked, and she wasn’t entirely sure she remembered anything she did anymore, anyway. Hornet eventually only looked over her options until her stomach ached too much to give it any more thought, selecting what, upon inspection, smelled like a stockpiled basket of salted tiktik, and a jar labeled as blackberry preserves. There were few ways to lastingly poison such things save by sheer incompetence, and none she wouldn’t know by the first bite.

By the time she’d picked her way out of the narrow aisles between the shelves, Iselda had sat herself down on the floor near the closed, wind-rattling doors and gotten two big mugs of something, which she offered one of to Hornet when she came close enough. When Hornet only peered at its contents without reaching to take it, Iselda laughed softly at her.

“It’s water. I can get you some cider if you’d like, but I figured you’d want something simple. Here,” Iselda said, and took a swig of the mug before offering it back. “Not tampered with. Gods below, how’d you end up with such a sweet sibling like Ghost, or someone as gracious as Hollow? It’s like pulling claws, giving you anything.”

Hornet uneasily accepted the mug, and, narrowing her eyes at Iselda, took a sip just to be contrary, before sitting approximately as close to her as she’d seen bugs do while eating as a group, before. She awkwardly set down the acquisitions that she’d hefted under her other arm, wordlessly nudging the basket to rest between them with a foot.

It felt almost unbearably strange, to be receiving what, for as long as she could remember, she’d dedicated herself to providing for others.

More than that, it felt unsettled in a way, like if she took a wrong step, she’d be trusting a slick patch of moss to bear her weight over an acid stream. Hornet thought she couldn’t have borne it if Iselda had refused to share what she’d picked out, as though, illogically, if the bug hadn’t then shrugged at her and set about uncovering the basket and taking her pick of the strips of meat inside, Hornet would have stood up and left, regardless of hunger.

The impulse to do so anyway made no sense, yet there remained a growing and inexplicable urge to run.

It was all very close to being too much, though the only sound was the muffled, whistling wind outside, and Iselda wasn’t even looking at her as she chewed thoughtfully at her food.

And Hornet realized only at that exact moment the precise weight of the pressure upon her every instant she was her siblings’ only protection and guide, every moment they looked to her for help and direction and reassurance, how only now, when it was momentarily lifted, could she understand just how near to overwhelming all the uncertainty was. How very unprepared she was for any of it, and how inadequate she had surely shown herself to be, when asked to be anything but what she had always been. This was her kingdom, and it’d been so for lifetimes, and yet being here in this building on the outskirts of Dirtmouth was foreign, and accepting food from a bug whose life was not reliant upon Hornet’s ability to provide was even more so.

Everything had changed, and almost all for the better, but it was so strange that it was nearly too terrible to look directly at. Too much, or maybe too little, and so different that she didn’t know what to do with it at all. It felt like she’d skipped a step down the stairs, like the quiet buzz of the lumafly lamps was too loud and present by far, it felt like she was dying.

She was adrift, unmoored, here, at last, she had no purpose or goal or watchful others for whom she had to be strong. This was all the eye of the storm, the split instant before it all went horribly wrong, she knew it was, and finally there was nowhere to run, nothing to do.

What would she do, to save herself? What would she do, to save her siblings? Her kingdom, again? What could she do? She didn’t know.

She didn’t know.

It was too much.

Hornet’s stomach grumbled, and there was food in her hand that she didn’t recall picking up, and Iselda was gazing thoughtfully off into the middle distance, lounging as she gnawed without complaint at her own piece of tiktik, and though there was no reason, no reason at all, Hornet couldn’t bring herself to eat. Her jaw felt wired shut, her chest so cold and heavy, the shadows so patient and inescapable.

Instead, she carefully put the food away where she’d found it, and recovered the basket with a slow and shaking hand, and pulled her knees up beneath her shawl and against her chest and hugged them there, and buried her face into the bunched, black-stained fabric, and with everything far too pressing to begin to dredge up the presence of mind to think better of it, began instead to cry.

What started as tears too hot and sudden to stop became too-labored breathing as she pressed her forehead to the damp spot she’d made in her shawl, turned to shuddering, whining sobs that felt like they’d each been torn bloody from her lungs, that hurt her throat as they left and as she gulped air to replace what they took. It hurt, and every thought she had, everything she had to do and should have been doing instead of this, all came too fast and weighed too much, and the crying hurt just as much as the not knowing.

Though void was still leaden as an iced-over coal behind her heart, what Hornet felt instead was like heated blood rushing in her hearing, over the harsh sound of the crying as uneven and irregular as if she’d forgotten how to do it. Too much, there was too much wedged razor-edged and straining in her chest like it sought to gash its way free, too much something snagged needle-like on the hiccupping, jerky jumping of her shoulders, and she could not have forced it back down even if her siblings had burst through the door at that very instant.

Maybe it was nothing at all, and that was why it hurt so much to finally feel in full.

Hornet pressed her face tighter against her knees and wailed, as loud and as long as she could, and when that didn’t feel like enough, she screamed.

The screaming tore like nails at her throat, and with each, her chest squeezed so tight she thought it would break under the pressure. It hurt and she hated it and she shouldn’t have needed to, she knew, and she could not have stopped herself.

Hornet screamed for the kingdom she’d let fade and the siblings she’d killed and for her mother and for herself, and all the things she’d had to watch die or end with her own hands, everything that was asked of her that she knew, so deeply that she’d never, ever say it aloud, and knew it regardless, never should have been. She’d never been able to scream before, never been able to cry like this, there’d always been something more important that pushed it down, and then she’d forgotten to cry at all.

She’d forgotten how to mourn.

And then there was a hand on her back, warm and steady, and she flinched hard, scrambling to get away without even a thought of her needle.

“Don’t touch me!” Hornet shrieked, and it came out more like the sort of grating, screeching noise the Weavers might make than words.

She sounded terrified, even to herself. Nothing like the vicious hiss she’d expected, nothing of any substance or strength or use at all. Useless, useless, and she couldn’t afford to be, the only thing she couldn’t survive, and she had to, she had to do this, she had to live-

“Okay! Okay, I’m sorry,” Iselda said, though Hornet could hardly see her through the tears when the shopkeeper raised her hands in surrender. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Hornet stared at her, shaking so violently she had to keep a hand on the floor to stay upright, expecting the tall bug to lunge at her, shrieking her wet-rotten throat to pieces and causing orange to fall from her mouth and collect in her eyes, expecting Iselda simultaneously to laugh low and mocking at her for the weakness of her arms as they trembled and the low, pathetic noise she couldn’t stop making, and the frantic pounding of her heartbeat and the damp of tears spread across her mask and stinging in her eyes. That Iselda could see it all, and was disappointed by every piece.

She was weak, it was finally too much, and Hornet was so very deeply certain that she was about to die.

It didn’t matter that it was Iselda; it might as well have been anyone. That was the first thing she’d learned, the first thing to engrave itself into her soul; it could be anyone, and it would be everyone.

Instead, she and Iselda only stared at each other across the spilled basket, Hornet’s harsh, gasping crying the only sound echoing through the warehouse. Time hung still, held in place by Hornet’s fever-pitch, disjointed expectations and the weight of Iselda’s stare that – as minutes passed and her breathing hardly slowed – never tinted orange, never narrowed with cruel glee.

Iselda’s eyes were only wide, and shocked, and – as Hornet gradually understood that she was not dying, not to this – conflicted. Between what, Hornet couldn’t have said at the best of times, but Iselda stayed very carefully still and only kept vigil as Hornet slowly quieted, evened her own ragged breathing, calmed the painful, rapid-fire tempo of her heart and eventually collapsed to sit on the floor instead of crouching there like a hunted thing, still unsteady in every limb.

“What do you need, Hornet?” Iselda said eventually, her voice soft and tentative in the quiet, and this time Hornet didn’t flinch.

Hornet took in a slow breath, and then let it go, and then she caught a fistful of her shawl to furiously scrub the tacky, drying tears from her face. There was no answer she knew to give to Iselda, so she gave none, just tucked herself into a loose ball beneath her shawl and focused on the solidity of the stone below her, the faint buzz and scraping flutter of the lumafly lights overhead, the familiar brush of careworn fabric over her shoulders as she still took breath, still hadn’t died, for of course, she would not go so easily.

Of course, it was foolish to fear to.

“Alright. That’s alright,” Iselda said, just as soft. “Hey, look at me for a sec?”

Hornet did, and only then did Iselda move, scooting awkwardly across the floor and handing her back her mug of water, half-emptied. Hornet unfolded only enough to accept it silently, without taking her stinging eyes off Iselda until she’d retreated.

“Take a drink. It’ll help.” Iselda prompted. “I’ll bet your throat hurts.”

Hornet blinked wordlessly at her, and then down at the mug she held in her lap. It was cool in her claws, ceramic and colored a light blue, the glaze cracked and darker on one side like the crafter had fired it wrong. The water rippled slightly, upset by the tremor in Hornet’s hand, but in the light it was clear and through it Hornet could see the blue of the mug. It was the same mug as she’d had before, with the same amount of water as she’d left it.

She raised it and took a long drink. It stung in her throat, but Hornet drank down the whole cup like she’d never drunk before.

“There you go, kiddo. Here, take the rest of mine, I’ll just grab another.” Iselda edged closer again, this time dragging the basket with her, and set her own mug, a light, speckled green, within arm’s reach.

Hornet had seen her drink out of it, but she hadn’t been watching the entire time. This mug she accepted as well, and looked harder at its contents, nearly full, before tasting it.

The same as the first. Hornet drank half and set the rest aside.

“Have something to eat.” Iselda suggested, pushing the uncovered, righted basket closer.

Hornet felt sick to her stomach, but she picked one of the smaller pieces and examined it closely. The size and color was what she’d expect from dried tiktik meat, with dark little flecks of what could’ve been flavoring scattered across it. This she was less sure of, but Iselda grabbed one of her own to gnaw half-heartedly at, so she nibbled at a corner.

It was good. Better than good, even. It was made by someone who knew what they were doing, and when she’d last had something like that, Hornet couldn’t have said. Before she knew it, she was swallowing the last of the piece and reaching for the next.

“Weird choice, tiktik and blackberries,” Iselda said. “Never would’ve thought of that one. Can’t say I’ve ever tried it, though, so you could be onto something.”

When Hornet looked up, Iselda was unscrewing the jar of blackberry preserves she’d picked out, which she poured a few globs of out into her hand. Iselda tasted it, her mandibles working thoughtfully, and hummed. “Or maybe not. You try, you’d probably like it.” She said, and offered the jar.

Hornet intentionally did not hesitate before taking it, dipping her claws into the sticky purplish stuff and cleaning them one by one.

It wasn’t bad. Sweeter than the berries themselves, but not unbearably so. “I like it well enough.” Hornet croaked, and swallowed to clear her throat.

Iselda grinned at her. “Do you actually, or do you just not wanna admit I have the right of it?”

“I like it.” Hornet said more firmly, feeling so hollowed out in some odd, new way that it was real effort to do so, though the feeling eased even as she did. “Honey is better, as far as sweet things go, but it isn’t bad.”

“You’re a honey kind of bug, huh? I think we have some of that. Not much, but it’s mostly Sly that likes it, anyway. You can fight him for his stash; I’d love to see who wins.” Iselda grunted, hauling herself to her feet, and walked back to pick through the shelves as Hornet watched.

She noticed that Iselda had left her nail behind, propped up by the door.

“Yep, just a few jars. You want some?” Iselda called.

Hornet did.

They passed what must have been another half hour or more sitting on the floor of the warehouse, talking about nothing of any importance at all while Hornet steadily consumed an entire jar of honey and emptied the basket of tiktik and recovered enough to shake the last of the implacable dread, and Iselda largely kept to the dry cookies she’d liberated from a higher shelf. It took no prompting for Iselda to begin to talk about what was on her mind to fill the silence, which was, overwhelmingly, the town she’d admitted to being loosely in charge of. From her, Hornet learned that Dirtmouth had started to fill in almost immediately after she’d left with Ghost and Hollow, first with a couple of straggling wanders filing up from below, looking for a place not wholly abandoned to settle down for a while, and then with a few Hallownest residents, and then, recently, the entire Mantis tribe.

At some point, two more Nailmasters had sheepishly made their way up as well, and been raucously greeted by Sly. One of those, who Iselda understood was the Nailsmith’s husband, had proven himself the masterful cooking counterpart to the Nailsmith’s precise baking. Conversely, his brother Oro had promptly taken up residence in the farthest house from town, and had spoken to no one he didn’t absolutely need to since.

Even the Mask Maker had crawled up from the well, hauling a huge block of something white like stone, a little pack of tools, and a curiously lumpy rucksack tossed over their shoulder, and then promptly sequestered themself in the other farthest house from town, opposite from Oro.

And as it turned out, Quirrel had made his way to Dirtmouth. He’d been one of the first, and then he’d taken to disappearing and reappearing with other wayward bugs in tow, the most recent of which was apparently none other than Emilitia of the City of Tears, whom Iselda laughed knowingly at Hornet for pulling a face at.

A flurry of names she didn’t recognize followed. Cloth, Tiso, Willoh, Tuk, Millibelle, Lemm, more even than she’d known still lived. That stung a little, to have so many unknown to her roaming her kingdom, but Hornet couldn’t muster the indignation to care any further.

When she asked quietly after Midwife, Iselda expressed no recognition for any giant black centipede, with or without a clutch of spiderlings and a Weaver, though Quirrel had apparently repeatedly made mention of some ‘huge tittering thing creeping about the Crossroads, taking swipes at me whenever I drop my guard,’ that he nonetheless was yet unable to prove existed, which Hornet thought likely meant Midwife was alive and well.

And then, just as Hornet had begun to relax, the conversation turned to the shades.

“It isn’t their fault,” Hornet said sternly. “None of this is their fault.”

“I’m just saying, Hornet, the circumstantial evidence isn’t in your favor on this one.” Iselda said apologetically. “What happened to you down there? You love these siblings of yours, why don’t they seem to c-“

“Don’t you dare,” Hornet snarled. “All that has happened, has happened to them. In spite of them. This,” Hornet gestured hotly to the stocked warehouse, to the town, to the Kingdom as a whole. “Is only because my siblings are stronger and braver, better, than I’ve ever been. My siblings are fools, and they have earned far more than I can give them, and they care more than I will ever deserve.”

“Then why do you look like you’re dying?” Iselda demanded. “How come you can barely walk across town, why’d you look at me and look at my nail and give up when you got here? You make it to Dirtmouth and fall apart, you act like you haven’t eaten or slept in weeks. Gods, Hornet, I hardly like you and I was worried. Am worried, honestly.”

Hornet took in a steadying breath. “It is unfair to judge them so. The issue is my own ignorance, and I will not allow it to best me again.”

“And just what, exactly, does that mean?”

“It means I’ve been distracted.” Hornet said crossly. “I’d thought I had more time. With the end of the Infection, my land is changed, and I am changed alongside it. As though all has begun again to live as it had long ago, yet I find I forget what that entails.”

Iselda sighed heavily. “I have no goddamn idea what you’re talking about. Lemm’s the historian, not me.”

“I am used to needing less.” Hornet enunciated clearly.

“Cool it with the attitude, short stuff, just because I don’t have a doctorate in Hallownest’s lore of old doesn’t mean I’m an idiot. So, is that your official excuse? You’re all messed up because you forgot to take care of yourself?” Iselda clarified.

Hornet scowled at her. “That is the simplest reasoning I can give, though it excludes much. It would take more time than I have to spare to tell all, and better reason than curiosity.”

“Alright, I’ll give you that one; it kinda isn’t my business.” Iselda admitted, scrubbing tiredly beneath an eye.

“It isn’t.”

“But even so, I don’t think I can let this go without at least an empty promise that it won’t happen again. This,” Iselda groaned histrionically. “This is why I didn’t want kids. Okay. Back to your little posse. If they can and do care to look out for you, like you claim, how the hell have you kept a total physical breakdown from them? It’s not like you’re good at hiding it.”

Hornet considered the insult and decided that the conversation would be over more quickly if she disregarded it, just this once. “What do you know of void?”

“Well, when you stare into it, it stares back.” Iselda said drolly. “Listen, I only came to town like, a few months ago. Every kingdom had its quirks and legends, and they’ve all got something unique to worry about after you figure out the daily hazards of life. Yours isn’t any different, it’s just got fewer people to talk about the details. Heap it on, kiddo, I’ve got all night.”

Iselda crossed her legs and leaned back on her hands, watching Hornet with unimpressed expectation as the wind howled and rasped at the solid warehouse door outside, and Hornet decided that she was just tired enough to acquiesce.

It would be unfair to let her lose her home without knowing why, should the Void prove inescapable. Knowledge of it, after all, was fundamental to the shades themselves. And Hornet felt as though she owed it to Iselda to explain herself at least this much, for the shelter she’d given her siblings if nothing else, for she didn’t quite have the stamina to think too deeply yet about whatever new failing she’d just weathered through. Still, the shopkeeper’s approach was more consistent with one who expected their answers to take the form of a personal problem instead of a doomsday scenario, something that Iselda suspected Hornet to have taken as a bigger issue than it actually was, or at the least a problem that could be solved.

What she seemed to be expecting was the reason why Hornet’s throat was still throbbing and raw from screaming, and in all reality, Hornet would rather speak of doomsdays and darknesses. Even so, Hornet found she couldn’t be disgusted with herself for her weakness, or frustrated, or even regretful. Only painfully, unfathomably relieved.

And far, far too tired to try to know why.

“All you need to know is that it is what drives the Kingdom to abandonment. It is what my siblings are of; the empty, waiting darkness, the embodiment of regrets and ends. It comes. It kills what it touches,” Hornet said around a jaw-cracking yawn. “It must be avoided.”

“Noted. And your siblings-“

“They are not it.” Hornet said, with just the dregs of energy necessary to hiss the words. “It endangers them as it endangers you and I.”

“I know I said I had all night, but feel free to get to the point so we can both get some sleep.” Iselda prompted with a yawn of her own that she at least tried to muffle behind a hand, and Hornet found she could still be annoyed. “How does this relate back to you?”

“Fine. Even alive, my siblings are not bugs.” Hornet began irritably. “They are good people, but they are not living creatures. They never have been. Not a one has ever spoken, all without faces, without throats. They don’t know hunger, nor breath, nor the beat of a heart. They are full-blooded gods, killed and hollowed before birth, and they are not like us.”

“They care,” Hornet stressed. “They love more deeply than any creature I have ever known. But they do not understand. They live on soul alone, they don’t know to eat. They have always been cold, they can’t truly understand that one can freeze. They don’t need to rest, even, not to survive, so how could they know I don’t?”

“I cannot leave them for long, for they might easily be killed if I do, and there is little time to sustain myself.” Hornet said tightly, uncomfortable with the admission. “I’d forgotten the consequences such omissions may have. I’d expected it to be more sufferable than it is.”

She did not need to know of the cold in Hornet’s chest, though little else could be blamed for the exhaustion pulling her head low and causing her hands to shake, the joints aching with cold even now, to the same extent as the void lying there could. Hornet had not survived so long by telling anyone, anyone at all, of her greatest weaknesses. Better to place the blame upon her own ignorance, or else unfortunate circumstances, something Iselda might take as temporary. It was not even a lie; by now, Hornet was fairly certain that she had neither eaten not slept nearly as often as she should have, and that she’d then confused the lesser weakening the lack caused with that of the void draining at her life.

She couldn’t quite remember how such things had gone, before the stasis.

Iselda sat up to attention, frowning thoughtfully as she mulled that over, and Hornet saw the moment it clicked.

“Oh… Oh, Hornet,” Iselda breathed with dawning comprehension and a wideness to her eyes that made Hornet bristle. “They don’t know any of that, do they? Not what it means.”

“You must not tell them how this wears on me.” Hornet said severely. “Already they come too close to realizing how it does, in spite of what they are. I will survive it; I know what I can do, and I have so little time to waste. And tomorrow night, when I leave, you must promise to take care of them, whatever comes.”

“No, Hornet, that’s-“

“Once I’ve dealt with the flowers, I think I know what I must do to fix this. I’ll- I will try to come back, but I think I understand what I must do. I am going to stop all of this, all the Void, I am going to do what I must.” Hornet said, with the sudden clarity endemic to the exhausted and the desperate, those half-asleep in spite of all their straining to stay awake, who finally are too tired not to see the events that line up to lead them on. If she’d remember the certainty when she woke up, she could hardly think clearly to hope.

“Hornet, listen-“

“I will not change my mind. Promise me.”

“No!” Iselda raised her voice above the howling wind outside to say. “No, gods, I’m not going to do that, Hornet! Whatever is going on that you’re so worked up about, we’re fine up here. You’ll be fine up here. You don’t need to do literally any of this, none of it! Kid, it’s okay,” she soothed almost frantically. “Whatever the hell you’re going on about, it isn’t your problem anymore.” She insisted. “Whatever you or your siblings need, just let us help you. You’re not alone in this unless you choose to be.”

Iselda took her carefully by the shoulders then, though Hornet tensed and glowered tiredly for it, and looked her directly in the eye. “What you’re saying is batshit, and you need to sleep. Do you even realize how batshit you sound?” Iselda asked gently.

Hornet only frowned mulishly at her. Iselda sighed, and while she did not let go of her shoulders, leaned back a touch to consider Hornet like she wasn’t sure how best to proceed. What she seemed to land on, eventually, was that persuasion had reached the end of its usefulness.

“I’m sorry, but I’m not going to be party to you destroying yourself.” Iselda said frankly. “Listen to me carefully; you’re going to eat and sleep every day. You’re going to stay in town, and come by my shop every single day, and let me and Corny be embarrassing while you complain about whatever doofuses most recently got on your nerves. You’re going to explain what’s going on, in simple and quantitative details, when you’re ready to. And nobody is going to go anywhere they won’t come back from. Okay?”

“I was born for this. I owe too much to accept any other path,” Hornet insisted, too exhausted to reach for anger to give her words bite. “Your town is fine now, but it won’t be. Do you not understand what it means, that all the Kingdom has fled its lands when not even the plague of a god could rout them before?”

“I was born to serve a purpose,” Hornet said, and her voice broke.

Maybe it was the grip of Iselda’s hands bracing her shoulders, blazing-warm and steadying and threatless in spite of it all, or all of the impossible things she’d laid out like they could be hers, like they were anything but windows into another’s life, but Hornet thought she’d never wanted so badly to have never been born at all. Her life she owed to her mother, its living she owed to her kingdom, her protection and her needle and any chance she’d had to be able to live with herself, all given towards something more important than her.

For an instant, Hornet wavered whether to accept what selfishness Iselda laid out for her. Would it be so bad to rest, finally, to wait in the surface town while the darkness consumed what lay below? While it searched her out, and she awaited it and lived, just for a while, as though it were not her responsibility to face?

… It would be hell. She could not. Could never.

“I was born to serve a purpose, and if I come this far only to abandon it at the last, I could not live knowing all I’ve done in its name.” Hornet whispered.

“So you’ll storm off and die with it, is that it?” Iselda accused, though without anger, as though she was only running out of excuses to try to change her mind with.

“I don’t want to die.” Hornet said quietly. “But I need for them to live.”

To atone for all she’d taken, to give something that would stay, some final worthwhile thing at last. She could not be the end of any more of the things she loved, not anymore. To even think so seemed unbearable, though that might only have been how anything that had hurt before was like salt in an opened wound now, as tired and scrubbed-raw as she felt.

Iselda only stared down at her, her face inscrutable and her eyes glazed over and wetly reflecting the lumafly light above, like it pained her just to look at Hornet then. Hornet, for a fleeting moment, wished she’d never said anything, that when Iselda had offered to lead her and her family to a house to rest in, she’d instead bared her needle and warned her away.

“Can I hug you? You look like you need a hug,” Iselda sniffed, and chuckled humorlessly, apparently at herself. “I know I do.”

Hornet swallowed thickly, aching and exhausted in every inch and far, far too tired to be brave, and nodded. She was not certain she remembered how to receive a hug, and the effort to try to was beyond her. So she made no move to help or to make the process easier past leaning slightly into the tall bug as Iselda bundled her up and squeezed her close, just leaned her head against her shoulder when it became suddenly far too heavy to hold up, and closed her eyes.

It was warm, or perhaps Hornet was only cold. Iselda was not a bulky bug, but the way she held herself felt sturdy, same as how she held Hornet tight and stood up with her, and Hornet couldn’t muster the energy even to make any kind of protest as she was carried off like some grub.

“I never thanked you,” Hornet mumbled instead, half the words slurred and unclear. “For the help. We need it.”

“Don’t mention it. You’re a good kid, and I like to think my nail didn’t take all the decency in me.” Iselda replied, and then grunted softly and shifted her grip, and then the howling of the wind drowned out anything else she might’ve said as she shouldered open the door and let it slam shut behind them.

Ghost trusted Iselda, was nearly Hornet’s last muddled thought as she fell asleep so abruptly that she was gone between one even breath and the next.

Ghost trusted Iselda, but they were a poor judge of character.

Chapter Text

And so when Hornet woke next, it was to find herself burrowed deep into a hammock, weighted down by so many thick, sweet-smelling blankets that she nearly curled even deeper into the cushy pillow and dropped back asleep, lulled by the safety of the close covers, heavy like the enveloping press and airlessness of Deepnest that had once meant the same.

It smelled strangely, however, though not badly, so Hornet grimaced and squirmed beneath the duvets wrapped cocoon-like around her, blinking herself awake.

There was someone murmuring quietly nearby, audible and low, and when Hornet surfaced and winced at the fire-warm, reddened light falling over her, that same someone made a surprised noise that drew her attention.

Iselda was stood in the open doorway to her shop, leaned nonchalantly against the frame and lit in such a way that Hornet didn’t think she’d ever seen, the angle of the light and its dusty red-orange ruddiness calling the firelight glow of the Infection to mind, though this she dismissed out of hand even before she was awake enough to recognize the sun. There was another there in the doorway, peering in with the light reflecting off his glasses and a hand raised sheepishly to his face when Hornet squinted groggily down at him from her hammock.

“Oh, apologies, so sorry!” Cornifer blustered in a stage-whisper. “I didn’t mean to wake you at all.”

“Sorry there, Hornet. Thought I was being quiet enough, but I guess I’d have been smarter to just take it outside. How’re you feeling?” Iselda asked, so intentionally mellow that Hornet sat up and considered her, as the shopkeeper crossed her arms casually.

And then it all came back, and Hornet briefly battled the urge to hunker back down beneath the covers and pretend she hadn’t heard. There was, however, something far more pressing to consider, as Hornet glanced briefly around at where she’d been taken.

The cartographer’s shop was the same as she’d seen it last, though in considerably less disarray. Beneath the hammock strung up for her, the nooks in the walls had just as many stored scrolls, though now they were interspersed with little pieces of this and that that’d found their way inside. Things that by and large looked like nothing so much as hunting trophies; tarsal claws as big as her hand, the serrated tip of a mandible, the thin stinger and dried venom sac of something once large enough for its remains to be used as a page-holder. There was a new metallic thing on Iselda’s counter, its surface covered with rows of numbered buttons – a register, she thought.

And in the corner, propped up with a set of elytra-carved umbrellas, was her needle.

She tried to stand up, wobbling in the unsteady hammock, and almost immediately overbalanced with a startled shriek. Cornifer gasped, but Hornet had already snagged the drooping edge with a hand to keep from falling on her face and only landed a little less easily than she’d have chosen, unevenly draped over with the blankets that followed her down.

Less sure on her feet than she was used to, but when wasn’t she, now? Hornet pushed away the duvets and stiffly grabbed her needle, slinging it back over her shoulder.

“Eh, more graceful than me in the mornings. Though you’ve overshot ‘morning’ a little, kiddo.” Iselda commented with a grin.

“My siblings. Where are they.” Hornet demanded.

“Woke up on the wrong side of the bed, hm? Don’t worry, spider, they’re just fine. They spent all day with Quirrel! You could call that an educational way to pass the time, they certainly won’t be bored hanging around that one.” Iselda assured, setting a staying hand on her husband’s shoulder when Cornifer seemed a little perturbed at Hornet’s bluntness.

“Use my name, shopkeeper. Where is Quirrel?” Hornet asked, though with less urgency as the pieces of what must have happened began to slot into place.

“Hey hun, could you give us a minute? I’ll be right out.” Iselda said with a brief kiss to Cornifer’s forehead instead of answering her, patting his shoulder playfully.

“I’m not sure I should!” Cornifer huffed, swelling with affront on his wife’s behalf regardless. “I can’t say I’ve ever met someone so, so…!”

“You’ll get used to it. If you mentally tack a few trivial niceties onto everything she says, like ‘please’ and ‘excuse me’, she’s downright polite.” Iselda laughed. “C’mon, I can handle it. You know you don’t need to worry. Look, she’s under the weather; you wouldn’t yell at a sick bug?”

“I certainly would, if they were rude enough.” Cornifer sniffed, somewhat mollified, and was fortunately looking elsewhere as Hornet fixed Iselda with a withering stare. “But I won’t, this time. Next time, though, all bets are off!” The round bug declared, though he seemed lighthearted enough as he gathered his stack of scrolls again and shouldered his pack.

“Mhm, I won’t hold you back.” Iselda smiled, and giggled like a newmolt as Cornifer lovingly dropped a kiss onto the back of her hand. “See you later, Corny!”

“Until tonight, my love!” Cornifer exclaimed pleasantly, and he was gone.

Iselda watched him go with her smile still bright in her eyes, and Hornet wondered for a very, very brief moment if she’d ever know another that would make her so happy, like Cornifer made Iselda. It seemed an unnecessarily dreamy line of thought, so she discarded it.

“Ah, I do love that bug. He wants to leave, you know. Or he’s thinking to. Not much left to map.” Iselda sighed to the open door, and Hornet assumed she must be talking to her. “Normally I’d be all for leaving this dump, but it’s really grown on me, in a way I didn’t expect it to. There’s a lot of meaningful work to be done, and I’ve been missing that since I put down my nail.”

“… I’m glad. That you want to stay, I mean.” Hornet said carefully. “My kingdom is not what it was, but it still holds meaning. There is still value within it, for those who care to look.”

“Thanks, k-… Hornet. I think you might be right. Just this once, mind you.” Iselda joked, and brushed past to begin picking up the blankets Hornet had brought down with her.

Hornet frowned for the gesture, which itself seemed to cement the imbalance between them. She owed Iselda much, and she was uncomfortably aware that she hadn’t even been decent in return. “Let me help.”

“Nah, it’s not a big deal, I’ve got it. If you want to help out, though, I’d appreciate someone sweeping the shop. Plenty of dust got in last night.” The shopkeeper suggested, and Hornet found no reason to decline.

So she found a broom, tucked against the back wall near what must’ve been Iselda and Cornifer’s bed, and got to work. It was rote, and easy, and it worked some of the stiffness out of her still-cold limbs, and Hornet had always found a measure of peace in tasks with immediate gratification like this. Things she could do, and do well. And with the warm evening sun shining in at just the right angle to soak into her shawl and make the dancing dust motes kicked up by her work seem to burn as they swirled, it was easy to let herself think over what was still to be said.

“The little Ghost had a map,” Hornet told Iselda instead of anything else. “I have seen it. They have explored the Kingdom thoroughly, delved as deeply as it goes, and even then, they haven’t managed to record all its secrets. They are the most determined explorer I have ever known; even should your husband be nearly so dauntless, he could not have found as much.”

“Are you… Insulting my husband?”

Hornet narrowed her eyes thoughtfully down at her broom. “If he left Hallownest now, he would leave much unmapped.”

“Oh. Oh, I see,” Iselda said, and Hornet could hear the grin in her voice even without looking up and swept a little more forcefully than strictly necessary. “Guess we shouldn’t leave then, huh?”

“It would be premature to.”

“And you wouldn’t get to see us slouching around town anymore, either. Don’t worry, Hornet, I wasn’t gonna let him cart us off back into the wasteland just yet. Maybe not for a long time. Though if you could point him towards something uncharted, you’d have my gratitude; he gets stir-crazy, my husband.” Iselda hummed fondly.

“It should be no issue.” Hornet said, resolutely ignoring the smugness Iselda made no effort to hide.

She swept quietly for some time, taking care to clean as she went, working methodically to keep from backtracking dust. Iselda finished folding the blankets and set them back onto the hammock, and then picked up a shallow sheaf of paper and flicked through it until she got about a quarter-way through and settled in to read. And all was peaceful for a time, as Hornet searched for the words to say what she meant to.

“Lighten up there, soldier, you’re gonna bend all the bristles,” Iselda drawled without glancing up, and Hornet realized she’d been sweeping much more forcefully than when she’d been last paying attention.

She stopped, with the floor about as clean as she could make it, anyway, and huffed in annoyance, mostly at herself.

“Something on your mind?” Iselda asked lightly.

“What do you want?” Hornet asked shortly.

“In general, or-“

“Why are you- why are you kind. To me. I have done nothing to deserve it. I understand if you feel it owed to my siblings to tolerate my presence, but that does not explain what you have done for me.” Hornet turned to say to her directly.

“I would have been fine, had you not intervened. I don’t understand why you did.” Hornet said, in a voice smaller than she’d intended.

Iselda’s face twisted, and Hornet thought for one brief, paranoid moment that she was about to be laughed out of her shop. Instead, the bug put down her reading and stood up, just to walk behind her counter and lean over it just as she usually did, resting her chin in a hand with a heavy, pensive sigh. She had an air about her like she was going to talk, but for a long moment she only stared tiredly at Hornet, consideringly, like she was deliberating something.

When she spoke, it wasn’t lightly.

“See, I don’t think you would’ve been, but that’s not really the point. It’s not about deserving, Hornet, none of it is. I don’t owe you anything more than I owe anyone else, and if you say you owe me for last night, I’ll kick you out of my house.” Iselda said with half of a smirk.

“In not as many words, you just seemed like someone who needed a moment to process. I know the look; you’ve got a big family that needs you more than ever, so you haven’t taken a moment to freak out since way too long, right? It feels a little like betraying them, doesn’t it? Just walking away long enough to breathe. Like, since they need you, you shouldn’t have to anymore.”

It did. It felt like a betrayal even to think it, but it did. “I shouldn’t have fallen apart like that,” Hornet argued without heat. “I should have gotten what I came for and gone back to them.”

“No, you did exactly what you should’ve; you got them here safe. I can’t babysit a whole flock of ghosts, but I sure as hell can make sure nothing happens to them while they’re here. You were right to do what you needed to do to take care of yourself. You’re worth taking care of too, you know.” Iselda said gently.

The assurance didn’t sit right, felt like it could’ve fit with anyone but her, because she didn’t need to be taken care of. She never had. Hornet only vaguely remembered what she’d said to Iselda before falling asleep, but this felt directed, as though in contention with something she’d told her. Her whole life had been spent weighing others’ and her own on a scale, measuring odds and consequences to choose which was the lesser evil. Every action had a defined worth, every life a defined value, even if she couldn’t have said what either were, and everything came at steep cost.

There was what was right, what did not give her screaming nightmares and burden her waking soul, and then there was what was real, what had actual consequence. Kindness, gentleness, compassion, all so rarely fell as things she could allow, when the space they took was in turn taken from what needed to be done.

“I was the oldest of my clutch, is how I know.” Iselda continued, ignorant of Hornet’s disquiet, or else decent enough to ignore it. “Or rather, I was the one leftover from the clutch before that. Parents weren’t the kind to hang around. It’s why I took up a nail; someone had to be handy with one, and I wasn’t going to ask any of them to do it. For a while I was a lot like you, running ragged trying to keep everyone fed and happy. And it took me just as long to figure out that that wasn’t sustainable. You can’t do it forever, Hornet, it’ll get you killed. It’ll get you all killed.”

“… I’m sorry.” Hornet said quietly, and she was. She remembered how she’d felt the night before, the too much that crashed over her so suddenly that she nearly didn’t notice that it’d been there, like an old battle-soreness, waiting for such a long time that she’d been able to look past it and ignore it while it grew. She did not wish it on anyone.

“Don’t be. Wanna know why?” Iselda said without waiting for her to respond, leaning meaningfully over her counter as though to share a secret. “I got help. I put down the load for a while. I had friends, and I leaned on them. And soon enough my kid siblings were growing up and taking off into the world, time passed, I met Cornifer, and the rest is history.”

“Now, your situation is a bit different, but you’ve got the responsibility and you’ve got the friends who’ll help with it, so you’ve also got no excuse not to catch some goddamn sleep once in a while.” Iselda said with a peculiar kind of affectionate exasperation.

It sounded like how Ghost did, when they told her of things that she knew couldn’t be true but that they took for granted to exist regardless, like love unearned and hope. It put her in mind of Hollow, looking down at her with a smile glowing in their void-speak and words of comfort in their thoughts, of nostalgia and lasting, unconditional care.

“Are we friends?” Hornet wondered aloud.

“Yeah, kiddo, we’re friends.” Iselda said with a laugh. “You prickly little weirdo, that’s what happens when you bond with someone over a jar of blackberry jam. Friendship forged in fruit. A pact printed in preserves. Buddies born of berries-“

“Thank you.” Hornet spoke over her when it seemed like Iselda would ramble on.

“Don’t mention it.” Iselda hummed warmly. “Now, are you doing alright? Got enough sleep? Gods know you’ve been down long enough to have me a little worried.”

“I am well,” Hornet said, and in spite of it all, it was truer than it’d been in weeks.

She felt lighter, somehow. Like some oppressive weight had been taken off of her shoulders, like she hadn’t been able to fully expand her lungs for so long she’d forgotten she couldn’t, and now the very air was easier. The cold still ached at her, gathered loosely in her chest and pinprick-numb in her hands and blinking in dizzy spots behind her eyes now that she’d been stood for so long, and she still felt like she’d been cut open and left to bleed dry, but she was not tired. Not as she had been, at least. Resting somewhere safe always did worlds more than sleep stolen on the road.

She’d been desperate, Hornet realized now. Not for food or for rest as much as for something to rely upon, some intangible pillar to prop herself against, to get her feet back under her. There was so little to recognize in her kingdom now, like a theatre play for which everything had been switched out but the backdrop, and for what newly resided within it, Hornet did not know the lines.

“Good. I’m glad.” Iselda said genuinely. “I talked to the Mantis Lords while you were out like a light. Wouldn’t you know it, explaining the situation went well. They’ve agreed not to hassle you while you’re recovering, and not to mess with your siblings at all. It did take a quick spar to convince them about your siblings, they’re not blind, but hey, I needed the exercise.”

“They have sworn to do them no harm?” Hornet asked directly. The Mantis tribe was honorable, a vow given from their lords could as well be written in stone.

“Pretty much. You’d better be right about your family being harmless and not like the, ah, Void,” Iselda said awkwardly. “Because I’m really sticking my neck out for this.”

Hornet shifted her shawl uncomfortably, and set the broom back against the wall without making eye contact.

“… They are harmless, right?” Iselda prompted.

“So long as one does not come in direct contact with them or stay too near, there is little they would do, intentionally or otherwise, to any who stand to be harmed.” Hornet explained unwillingly. “But no. In this sense, they might easily kill a weaker being.”

Iselda dropped her head into her hands and sighed.

“Okay,” she said with defeat. “So death comes by excessively friendly miner. Myla and her lot are the excitement-hug types, and she adores Ghost. I’m not going to survive the week.” Iselda despaired, half-jokingly.

“I find it a miracle she hasn’t done so already. If my sibling is to be trusted, we resided in the miner’s home for several days when last we were here.” Hornet mused.

“How could I forget. Great!” Iselda exclaimed, her voice pitching sarcastically high. “And I guess she never told me because she’s truly, honestly just that polite. Makes sense. That kid would never talk about someone behind their back. No, okay, this is good, assuming we can run damage control before anyone else catches wind.”

Iselda brought her head up then and peered at Hornet consideringly. “And I guess you know what happens if you touch a ghost from personal experience, don’t you?” She assumed dryly. “What’s the deal with that?”

“I am a special case.” Hornet said stiffly. “I have the soul and the strength to tolerate it for a time, if need be. You, on the other hand, would risk losing a hand or your life.”

“Unbelievable. You’re unbelievable.” Iselda groaned, pushing herself back from the counter and walking around it, grabbing her keys from where they hung on a hook. “What’ve I signed up for?”

“You don’t actually have to have done any of this. I do not need help.” Hornet reminded her.

“No, I’m gonna. I’m in too deep, and I don’t back out. C’mon Hornet, let’s get you some breakfast for dinner.” Iselda said, gesturing for Hornet to follow at the door. “How does leftover scones sound? I know Quirrel’s got enough to share at his lab.”

Hornet followed behind her outside to where the sun had all but disappeared, leaving only a thin red glow over the jagged, far-distant mountain range. The air was still and clear, the storm blown over hours since or more, and above her was the ground-diamond glitter of the strongest of the stars, unshrouded by dust or cloud, and the claw-thin crescent of the rising moon. The walking paths snaking through Dirtmouth weren’t all unoccupied, and as she kept up with Iselda’s long, unhurried stride, Hornet caught glimpses of the townsfolk.

She saw in the moments she passed between the buildings as a trio of mantises hauled something big and spiny up from the well, presumably the results of a hunt. Walking the other way, with their spirited chatter rising into the gathering night, were a handful of miners like Myla that she thought were likely on their way home. Elderbug was sat on a bench as she and Iselda passed it, shelling what looked like a sort of fruit from Greenpath with a young, giggling beetle helping him, and Hornet only caught enough of their conversation to know it was not strained.

Another two mantises, these young enough to still have their stingers, perched atop a massive, many-eyed, many-fanged creature cloaked in greenery, lounging over the roof of one of the sturdier buildings with its dark arm trailing off, long enough to brush the silt below with its claws.

It looked familiar, in a way that made Hornet reach for her needle and watch it warily.

“Oh, don’t mind the Hunter, the mantises have him in check.” Iselda said, upon noticing her discomfort. “He’s promised to kill us all fairly when circumstances are better.” She added brightly.

“And this does not concern you? That creature has twice attempted to eat me.” Hornet said with irritation, finally able to place where she remembered him from.

“Sure, you go tell him to scamper off somewhere else. Back down into the dark, maybe, where he can hold a grudge? Or maybe off into the mountains, where we can’t see him.” Iselda suggested. “I like keeping him where someone’s always watching. And who knows? He could have a change of heart. He seems to like the mantises fine.”

“I have little trust for a being whose existence is devoted to chronicling the demises of those he hunts.” Hornet said simply. “If you also have such mistrust, I could kill him?”

“Stand down, short stuff, I’ve got it covered. What I said back at your place still holds true; if you mess up this weird little peace we have going, I won’t be responsible for the consequences. And I would really, really appreciate if you learned a go-to conflict resolution that didn’t involve wholesale slaughter.” Iselda said as they ventured farther from the center of the town, nearing the outskirts.

“You say so, and yet the conflicts I face keep going away. It is efficient to skip to the end and deal with problems at their source.” Hornet reasoned.

“Well, you’re just gonna have to get used to taking the long way ‘round, because that isn’t how we do things around here. And you better get over the learning curve fast, if your siblings are staying.” Iselda advised her, and turned onto a winding, narrow path between a cluster of boulders and old stony carapaces, that led up to a modest, decrepit little house that nonetheless had a warm glow of firelight in the windows and a narrow stream of smoke curling from the chimney.

“If it will allow them sanctuary, I’ll suffer through.” Hornet said grimly, trying for a joke.

“Geez, I don’t think it’ll be that- Oh.” Iselda snorted with amusement. “See, humor’s a good defuser, keep it up.”

They were before a door now, with a friendly, animated sort of voice muffled behind it, just the one. It cracked and rasped as though its user wasn’t used to speaking so much, though it had a flow like one who knew how to talk, like a lecturer in a classroom. When Iselda rapped her knuckles on the shellwood, the voice tapered off, and then the door swung open.

Standing there was a pillbug of indiscernible age, his dark eyes lined and tired like one very old, but his movements as sure as a bug in his prime. He looked very familiar, though Hornet could not place where she’d last seen him.

“Ah, Iselda! I was expecting you earlier, yet I’m glad you took the time you did. They’ve been a delight, and so interesting to talk to. The hours pass effortlessly in good company.” The pillbug, Quirrel, said with good cheer.

And then his eyes fell on Hornet, and his smile was less easy. “Oh. Hello again, guardian. If you’ve come to finish the job, you won’t find much sport. I’ve left my nail elsewhere.”

Chapter Text

And so Hornet found that she’d been missed.

“Hornet?” Someone called with a soundless voice from inside the wanderer’s home, and any introduction Iselda might have given for her went ignored as Hornet pushed past the pillbug with her heart in her throat, abruptly sure that something terrible had befallen her siblings in the time they’d been out of her sight.

Inside was a scene both oddly welcoming – one tangibly lived-in and disorganized – and irrevocably touched by the uncanny. Quirrel’s house, already crowded with countless sheaves of paper and wells of ink and quills left out amongst the many complicated little instruments of meticulously hand-carved shellwood and chitin and glass, strewn over the table and beneath it and atop the roaring fireplace wafting a haze of heat out into the room, was crowded also with shades.

Five of them, as Hornet did not relax until she had counted, all looking towards her, and the only single uniting emotion among them and the varied greetings they all tried at once to shout for her to hear was relief, profound and elated and subtle, depending upon which shade any part of it originated from. Hornet stopped in her tracks just inside the door, the return of all their thoughts raised to a clamor to greet her making her blink hard in surprise as much as it pulled a smile to her face, born of a reflexive release of tension she hadn’t known she carried to see them, too. That, as much as a sense of rightness, that she find them as well as she did and under better circumstances than she’d left.

Ghost was the first to rise, and they darted through the air to slam bodily into her chest, their void-speak bubbling over with delight and finally-quelled worry and simple gladness, as though her very presence had soothed some nameless fear, had alone brightened their mood. It was worth any aching cold to catch the little shade in her arms and squeeze them as tightly as she dared, relief of her own nearly overwhelming, just to see them safe. And if Ghost was as well as they seemed, there could have been no tragedy while she’d been gone.

They had truly all been fine, as Iselda had promised. How unexpected.

“Hornet, you’re back! I missed you,” Ghost exclaimed, burrowing their frozen face in her neckguard so that she had to raise her chin to dodge their horns, as astoundingly open with their feelings and thoughts as ever. “You were gone so long, we’ve been worried.”

As far as she knew, it had only been hours, though Hornet belatedly realized that just because it was sunset currently did not necessarily mean it was the first sunset since she’d gone.

“I’ve returned now, little Ghost. Are you well?” Hornet reassured as Nettle followed Ghost’s example and crashed, shrieking wordless excitement, into her side hard enough to make her words end with an airless huff (more from the sudden chill than the force) for a moment before darting back away, as though possessed by too much infallible energy to possibly stay in one place. She pushed Ghost to arm’s length to inspect them, ignoring the cold burn of their void with practiced ease, searching for any discrepancy that might have popped up in the day or so of her absence.

They seemed well enough, if wigglier than when she’d left them, staring up at her with their wide white eyes beaming, and ostensibly courteous enough to be held and looked over like a captured mosscreep. There was no particular telling what was good or bad in the undetailed appearance of a shade, so Hornet elected to accept their condition as approximately as she’d left it.

“Yes, of course, we’ve been here with Quirrel. Have you met Quirrel? He’s been here all along!” Ghost informed her while Sonnet crept closer to pat bashfully at the hem of her shawl with a dark little tendril, and Hollow struggled, with Vigil’s coaching, to extricate themself without any unintended destruction from the corner of material chaos that’d seemingly been built up around them. “He’s been doing research! But he can tell you about that himself, I don’t remember half of the words he used to describe everything, though it makes sense when he says it. It’s incredible!”

“Quirrel is taking samples of void he finds down in the tunnels and testing to see what it does when exposed to different stimuli. He’s looking for something it doesn’t like, though he hasn’t found it yet.” Sonnet summarized, puffing out their little chest with a self-conscious sort of pride when Hornet hummed appreciative acknowledgement to them, more than a little impressed.

“Is that so? Fortunate, then, that we have you here to take notice as he does.” Hornet praised, and Sonnet lit up like a lumafly.

“It really is.” Ghost agreed, a little sheepishly. “It’s very interesting, seeing what all he does to poke at it. I wish I could tell him what I know, Hornet, I think it would help.”

“Though he’s made some pretty impressive progress on his own, somehow. It’s like he’s a scholar or something, though Ghost swears up and down the guy’s a wanderer. He’s figured out a lot.” Vigil said with only slightly grudging admiration. “It took me longer than him for some of it, and I’m made of the stuff.”

“What the scholar has unearthed can wait, however,” Hollow said, having finally escaped enough of the mess to carefully edge closer and touch their forehead lightly down to Hornet’s in greeting, for which she grit her fangs and met midway, though the contact was like icewater. “I am glad you’ve returned. Iselda has come twice to tell us you still slept, but still your absence worried me. Are you alright?”

“You promised them you’d be right back.” Vigil said accusingly, curiosity present in the glow of their pale eyes and the incline of their head, their thoughts laced through with something more akin to mild disbelief than blame, like she’d again surprised them, and not as they’d like to be surprised.

“I’m fine. I was only tired from the journey, and fell asleep before I could make my way back. Iselda allowed me to rest in her home.” Hornet told them nearly as smoothly as she tried to, and took heart in that none of it was at all a lie.

There was an unsubtle, growing worry left just-barely unspoken in Hollow’s thoughts as they gazed down at her, mirrored in Ghost’s as they stilled in her hold, that even the littler shades picked up on and turned their attention towards. As though they didn’t quite believe her, but were uncertain how, exactly, what she said was cause for concern.

“I am well,” Hornet said gently and let Ghost go, where they dipped a little in the air before hovering back to eyelevel and cocking their head searchingly at her. “I am. I’m all the better for the rest, Hollow, there is no reason to fret. I was only more tired than I’d realized. Had I known it would worry you so, I would have come sooner.”

“Real cute.” Iselda interrupted with a very meaningful sort of insincerity before Hollow could reply, which told Hornet that while the shopkeeper had respected her wishes and kept her admittances to herself, that restraint was on thinner ice than she’d prefer. “I almost regret keeping you so long. Keep in mind what we talked about, Hornet, and for my sake, be careful, would you?” She said, and when Hornet turned back to her – still stood with Quirrel in the open doorway – Iselda gave her a wry sort of smile, as genuine as it was warning.

Hornet was uncertain what she’d done to deserve it, either its sincerity or cautioning. Yet it would be ungrateful of her to do anything other than what Iselda asked, Hornet thought, when she asked so little; only to be cautious, as Hornet ever was, and to be mindful of whose life she was considering cutting short. It seemed like the sort of idea that Iselda would take offense to though, to attach ‘deserving’ to what she’d done, so Hornet only nodded her somber acceptance, and this seemed to satisfy the bug well enough.

Iselda then lightly elbowed Quirrel, and Hornet saw he was staring at her with a thoughtful look in his eyes, like she’d done something very curious. He only gave a pensive hum in response, and blinked like he’d just woken up when Iselda elbowed him again, firmer this time.

“Hey, Quirrel, I know Sheo sent you home with a basket of goodies. Mind sharing some with your guests? I have to run, and Hornet hasn’t had a chance to grab any yet.” Iselda asked him, and Hornet realized she hadn’t even set foot inside the crowded little house-turned-study.

“Hm? Oh, yes, I’ve hardly touched them yet myself,” Quirrel laughed good-naturedly, looking away at last to cast Iselda a polite smile. “Though they look just as good as the last batch. I’ve been quite occupied, who’d have thought that such a menacing force as this kingdom’s darkness would be so captivating! It’s really very unique, and I’m nearly certain now that our stoic band of ghosts is closely connected to it.” He said, gesturing with a hand to the shades.

“About that.” Iselda peeked briefly around the door she held open and lowered her voice. “Keep it to yourself, would you? I bet you’ve found some interesting side-effects of that connection?”

“Well, yes, now that you mention it. It’s very curious that your friend here, Hornet, would interact with our imperturbable friends so readily. So directly, for that matter.” Quirrel remarked with a strange sort of glance to Hornet, one she recognized as intentionally unreactive and scowled back all the fiercer for, even as a helpless kind of panic began to fizzle at the pit of her stomach, and she wondered if he was about to entirely give her away by the sheer misfortune of his perceptiveness.

“And for that I mean no offense, my friends, but you’re terribly cold. I wouldn’t recommend touching them at all, though it’s a fine way to stay safe in an old kingdom such as this, to have such a convenient defense mechanism.” Quirrel reassured Nettle, to Hornet’s hastily-concealed relief, smiling warmly down at the little shade nearest to him at that moment as they fiddled with the drooping string-tie of a thick, black-stained glove set haphazardly at the edge of his desk.

They knew already that they were cold. They knew already that she could stand it. Now, if only she could prevent the damned wanderer from telling the shades what else they wrought.

“I think so too! I just have to be careful not to get any of you!” Nettle shouted at full volume, making Hornet wince at the force of their eager enthusiasm, pushed in all directions with all the keenness in their little soul, as though that might make Quirrel hear them.

“I’m sure Sonnet would worry after you an awful lot if you went around defense mechanism-ing, though, it might be a good idea to give that shiny idea a raincheck. Maybe you could tag along after me and Ghost once we’ve got masks, and we could teach you how to use a nail about your size?” Vigil gently redirected, drifting to hover in the empty space over them and watching as the little shade worked to loosen the string from the glove. “Nails work without you getting smacked by what you’re fighting.”

As Nettle gave this some thought, and Sonnet felt unhidden gratitude in Vigil’s general direction, Iselda spoke aloud. “It is curious, isn’t it.” She drawled pointedly, and Hornet shifted her glare from the pillbug to her for her overtness.

“But again,” Iselda dropped the subject, though Hornet didn’t think herself lucky enough to consider it tabled forever. “Keep it quiet. In fact, the fewer people come to gawk at them, the better. Say they’re tired, say they’re busy, say you’re busy, doesn’t matter, if someone comes knocking on your door to say ‘hi’ to Ghost or any of the rest, your job is to redirect.”

“Why? I was under the impression most of the town is very fond of Ghost, and growing towards the same for their siblings. What’s changed?” Quirrel asked, though even as he did, he seemed to put the pieces together.

“What’s changed is that I swore they’re, and I quote, ‘totally harmless,’ even though anyone with eyes could see ‘em and think the worst. Their place here hinges on it, and my good word relies on that, and there’s a lot tied together with spit and good intentions in this town. If the Mantis Lords catch wind that I lied in the least and that there is a connection between them and the megadarkness, there’s gonna be a domino effect, with hell to pay at the end.” Iselda stressed. “They won’t take any chances, and I can’t blame them, not with what they’ve lost to that void stuff.”

“… Do you want my honest opinion?” Quirrel ventured.

There, a moment of indecision.

He knew too much, he was a liability. Iselda could be trusted, Hornet tentatively decided. Myla could be intimidated, if needs must, though Hornet thought she wouldn’t prefer it to come to that. Quirrel looked to know more than either, and no matter Ghost’s fondness for the wanderer, he could not be allowed to tell others what he’d learned, not the shades their impact on the living and not the townsfolk the shade’s true danger.

That was what the too-curious did, after all.

“No. I want you to understand that your life is conditional from this point forward.” Hornet said coldly.

“Whatever you’ve found, whatever you might discover, I care not. I know better than any what the shades are capable of, and I judge it a danger only notable to fools who cannot keep respect enough to stay away. Accordingly, if you endanger my siblings in any manner, I will end what I began at the fringes of my kingdom.” She said, low and sharp, a promise.

“What did I just ask you not to do,” Iselda groaned aloud, and the air itself seemed to darken as Ghost near-tangibly made it clear that they weren’t pleased with her approach, their not-voice so strongly defiant and wordlessly protective above even what the others protested that Hornet had to shake her head some to clear it.

“No need for that, Protector,” Quirrel smiled insincerely to say, to her frustration.

If there had ever been anything to made her irrationally angry, it was those who did not act like they understood the meaning of severity. Those who, when an issue is brought to their attention, would smile condescendingly down and say it wasn’t as bad as it seemed, or that to kick a fuss was blowing the problem out of proportion, or who simply did not seem to care either way. Hornet did not think herself known for her patience, and such attitudes were not things she suffered kindly.

Quirrel, only from the considering look he’d had for her moments before, she knew was not ignorant. It still stood to be proven either way if he would take her siblings’ safety, and by extension her needle’s bite, as gravely as he ought. Weak she might be, but that would not save him.

The fool had even put his nail down somewhere.

“I’ve allowed you into this land for a reason, and already you have fulfilled it.” Hornet told him. “Think carefully of what you say next, lest I-“

“Hornet.” Ghost interrupted, abruptly in her face just as she’d been puffing herself up to get in Quirrel’s. “He’s not going to tell anyone anything if we ask him not to.”

“Of course, he will. I know his kind. None of this matters to him, the moment the blade is set to his throat he will save his own shell.” Hornet said harshly.

“Excuse me-“ Quirrel interjected with the first hints of offense, like she’d called him a rude name instead of accusing him of treachery.

“Be silent. I do not speak to you.” Hornet snapped.

To his benefit, the bug shut up and gestured politely for her to talk, as though to be obligingly considerate towards what, as Hornet was peripherally aware, must have seemed a very strange thing to say to someone she’d been threatening moments before.

“He won’t.” Ghost said stubbornly. They lowered their horns hostilely at her, to Hornet’s surprise, just enough to make their point. “He is my friend, and I owe him my life. He helped me,” they said, and the unmentioned ‘when you didn’t,’ hung poisonous in the air between them. “You won’t hurt him.”

Hornet considered them, with all the hours and weeks she’d seen nothing of the little Ghost while they’d wandered her vast, vicious kingdom risen as easily as that to mite at the back of her conscience, everything unknown and unsaid that lay implied in he helped me. Something she hadn’t been there for, something Hornet couldn’t even say if she’d have protected them from, back when there was still so much at stake. Her stomach turned a little at the thought of what she might have left them to suffer, sickened by all that she knew to cause suffering in the kingdom she watched, wondering which of them Ghost might have met with.

She’d thought they’d just met Quirrel on the road, and had simply decided the pillbug was their friend in the same way they decided most folk they met were. Yet from the veracity of their defense for the wanderer, complete and without hesitation, even against her, she guessed at a greater friendship they had forged.

Hornet inclined her head some in mute apology, and the defensive flare of the little shade’s suddenly barbed, sharp-edged tendrils relaxed minutely.

“He means so much to you?” She asked without inflection.

“We’re friends. Quirrel called me his friend, so I know we are.” Ghost told her, with such potent, incredulous gratitude, such boundless trust wrapped up and twined through their words, that Hornet wondered if she herself had ever understood the term beforehand, or if Ghost was only one far freer with their affection than she could ever hope to be.

“I hadn’t had a friend before, not like that, not that I’d remembered having. He helped me, and he fought with me, and he does not deserve for you to be cruel to him.” Ghost said decisively.

They stared up at her with their burning white eyes, with their trust and their hope and all the ridiculous, unfounded certainty that she’d seen in them when they lived, that had carried them to do the impossible, and wordlessly demanded that she not do as she thought was right, what Hornet knew to be the only predictable option.

“I have tried to kill him before, for a… Misunderstanding. I cannot trust that Monomon’s wanderer could bring himself to lend me aid, even as it would be for your benefit as well.” Hornet explained, though in the face of Ghost’s unwavering focus the excuse seemed weak.

“Try.” Ghost said without hesitation, and without any apparent surprise.

“Now, just a moment,” Quirrel spoke up, just this side of exasperated. “What was there to misunderstand?”

“Don’t be coy, simple bug,” Hornet said flatly. “I have witnessed enough warriors attempt to trespass into my kingdom to know another.”

“What a worrisome thing to say. If you clock them all as such, like you did me, I wonder if any were warriors at all.” Quirrel said in his mild-mannered voice, and Hornet had to fight the urge to end him there and then.

“Well, aren’t you two just bosom friends already.” Iselda sighed, drumming her claws on her crossed arms. “Listen, I really do have to get going; can I just get a spoken promise from everyone that I’ll come back to as many people as I left?”

Hornet forcibly relaxed the stiff set of her shoulders, unclenching her fists, hidden beneath her shawl as they were, and glanced at Quirrel, who glanced back somewhat sheepishly. If simply killing the infuriating creature was out of the question, assuming it had ever been a possibility to start, and if Ghost truly held him in such high esteem as they seemed to, then she supposed she would need to tolerate him. If only because it looked as though he’d be sticking around.

Something of her feelings on the matter must have showed on her face, because Quirrel gave a quiet sigh like he was resigning himself to something deeply unsavory.

“I’m sure we’ve only gotten off on the wrong foot. You have no reason to worry, Iselda, everything will be fine. If it makes you feel any better, I’m quite well-versed in taking secrets with me to the grave.” Quirrel said with a weak half-smile, that nonetheless curved genuine in his eyes.

Ghost nudged her expectantly, and Hornet half-heartedly waved them off.

For them, then. For her siblings, she would try. Even should it end in blood regardless, as she expected it would.

“I apologize.” Hornet said stiffly to the blasted pillbug, watching her again with curiosity instead of dread. Already Hornet could tell that she’d despise him more than she already did, if only for how she had to tolerate the power he held over her with her siblings’ safety in his hands. Though the way he refused to behave as she expected and just be scared of her was rising the ranks. “To threaten you so is out of line. Say your piece.”

“Apology accepted, Hornet.” Quirrel said, and held out his hand to her with a friendly, if small, smile.

Hornet peered impassively at it, and then at him.

“… Fantastic. Catch me up later on all the nitty gritty details, I really need to leave. If any of you need me, just ask around, I’ll be somewhere. I mean that, Hornet,” Iselda said, leaning in from the doorway some to emphasize her point. “If you need me, I’m around. So, stay put. Rest up, alright? I probably won’t see you until tomorrow, don’t do anything I wouldn’t.”

Hornet very nearly said something sharp-edged and sarcastic, and bit down the urge with a vengeance. “I will,” she said instead, as sincerely as she could, and much more so than she’d expected. “Thank you.”

Iselda offered her a warm grin for the effort, then pushed herself away from the doorframe and slapped Quirrel bracingly on the shoulder, which he accepted with good grace. “Be nice to this one,” she admonished Hornet. “He’s the smartest bug I’ve met in ages. Useless with a nail, though! Must’ve been some misunderstanding, huh, Hornet?” She joked, and then she was gone, leaving with a wave and a slam of the door.

Hornet frowned at the shut door she’d disappeared behind and looked to Quirrel for answers, finding Ghost to be doing the same with considerably more incredulity.

“Useless with a nail, hm?” She said dubiously.

Quirrel chuckled uncomfortably, taking the break in tension as an opportunity to edge past the shades that’d gathered around, watching with their eerie, empty faces and enough good sense – or curiosity, at least – not to add their two geo to the conversation yet. He didn’t meet her eyes, Hornet noticed, as he rifled around on his cluttered desk until he worked a covered, laden plate free, with the cloth it was draped with tied into a neat little bow at the top. His weapon, now that she thought to look for it, was nowhere to be seen.

“His nail must be at Blue Lake still,” Ghost said slowly, like they hadn’t wanted to mention, yet had, like the seasoned knight they were, noticed what she had. “I didn’t know he was going to leave it. I would’ve stayed a while, to help him get here, at least. Hallownest is dangerous.”

They seemed oddly desolate, like there was something more to the story, something they didn’t know how to say, and Hornet was saved from deciphering whether or not they’d be upset by her asking about it by Hollow mutely offering them their hand, which Ghost accepted to hold as though they could draw some stability from it. The Hollow Knight said something very quiet then, that might not have been words at all, not that Hornet could understand, and Ghost nodded faintly and only watched Quirrel like he was a nearly disquieting conundrum without saying anything further.

Quirrel hummed to himself, blithely ignorant as he undid the knot in the cloth covering what Hornet assumed to be the pastries Iselda had asked him to share, and Hornet decided that whatever it was that bothered her sibling, it was better left undisturbed.

She knew enough about digging up old wounds to still her curiosity.

“Like I said, you must have clocked me wrong as I entered the Kingdom,” Quirrel said cheerfully, like having been caught out in a lie was something that could be smoothed over with enough dogged positivity. “Here, sit down, take a scone. I imagine there’s quite a lot we could talk about. We’re in quite a peculiar situation, it would seem.” He picked the first pastry off the top of the pile and offered it to her.

Hornet took his meaning, but she also took the scone. When she looked for somewhere to sit, however, she found no real open space at all, not even on the floor.

It was as though the wanderer had been throwing handfuls of his possessions about the room all day in a fervor, or like Hollow had been startled in just the wrong way within striking distance of just the wrong cache of upsettable possessions. The sun had gone down completely by now, and the blazing firelight cast the whole mess into warm, irregular shadows, only solidifying the impression that it was an unfordable, indescribable mire. Quirrel was quicker to pick somewhere for her to sit than she was, rescuing a tray of tiny glass jars, each too cloudy to make out their contents, from a stool across from the fireplace, near to the high-built flames. Hornet took the hint, and sat down, and blinked to find her scone already gone.

She hadn’t thought herself hungry, but the bread in her mouth was crumbly and sweet in a way she couldn’t quite recognize, and she eyed the rest of the plate from across the room.

“Are you done being ridiculous?” Vigil intoned from just to the side of it.

They’d perched themself onto the already-cluttered table without shifting any of the mess at all, taking full advantage of their ephemerality to do so without knocking anything over, though they brushed closely against a full rack of what looked like test tubes, one of them broken and the rest stained with something dark. When she looked to them warily, they only shrugged and absently flicked a glass with a sound like it was hit with a stone.

Hornet did not justify the question with a response.

“Ghost is right, you know. Out of everyone you could’ve picked to have some weird grudge against, Quirrel’s about the worst choice you could make. He’s… He’s really nice. Really good at what he does, which I’ve narrowed down by now to either mad scientist or babysitter. I kinda wish I’d been more like him when I was alive.” Vigil said lightly, picking up the glass to examine it closer. “Unfathomably cool.”

“I think he’s nice too. I like him a lot. He let me help him with his experiments.” Sonnet offered with a sidelong glance at the bug in question, who seemed to be patiently waiting for Hornet to start the conversation. She ignored him in favor of the shade, helped by how little speaking to another bug she did not like appealed. “He knows a lot. I think we should keep him.”

“He’s so boring though,” Nettle groused. “He wouldn’t let me go and look for you, or go outside, or climb up the chimney while the fire was going, or anything! Quirrel’s nice and all, but I already know all this stuff about void, and I don’t want to sleep anymore. And now it’s dark outside again! What if it stays dark, this time? It could be ages until the sun comes back.” They complained dramatically from where they’d draped themself facedown over the mantel above the fireplace, with their tendrils dangling listlessly over the edge.

“It’ll only be a few hours.” Sonnet pointed out to them as Nettle apathetically toyed with the hooks set into the wall, presumably to hold clothes near the fire’s heat when it burned lower. “You’ve been here the whole time. You saw out the window, the last time.”

“You don’t know that. It’s probably gone forever.” Nettle sighed. “Or it’ll come back when we’re asleep, and I’ll miss it.”

“I’ll wake you up if it does.” Sonnet promised with a weary kind of amusement, as though they should have expected something like this.

That caused their twin to perk up some, all their energy returned in an instant. “You will? Sonnet, you’re the best.” Nettle swore. “We can go outside to play then, it’ll be fun this time, I swear!”

“I think I’d prefer to stay inside, honestly. All the space is kind of… Intimidating, just a little.” Sonnet confessed, drifting over to the fireplace themself, to lean against the warmed edge-stones.

Quirrel cleared his throat, and Hornet realized that it had been an uncomfortable amount of time since anyone had said anything aloud. If he was so determined not to be the one to change that, she supposed she would need to make the effort.

“I forget he can’t hear, too, don’t worry about it. They’re talkative little mites, moreso than most were.” Vigil said affectionately, gesturing at the littler shades with a fond sort of tilt to their head, one unnervingly half-familiar from very long before. “Guess I don’t have to worry about talking where anyone else can hear like you do, though, so good luck with that.”

“… I apologize. It’s been just long enough that-“ Hornet began to say, and Quirrel seemed relieved to hear anything at all from her.

“We don’t have to go outside!” Nettle exclaimed, carrying on with their own conversation. “Or, maybe I can go out, and you can wait at the window, and I can describe what I see? Or bring you snails, or something? And then it won’t scare you. But we don’t have to go anywhere if you don’t want to, I don’t wanna go anywhere without you. It wouldn’t be any fun.”

“That I’ve grown unpracticed with-“

“I’m not that afraid. It’s just so open, and we don’t weigh much anymore, so what if we go too high and something gets us? Or we can’t get back down? Or maybe,” Sonnet predicted gravely, “the wind will carry us off when it storms again.”

“With talking over-“

“Oh. Oh, I hadn’t thought of that.” Nettle wavered. “I’m- I’m not scared of anything like that, but… Do you really think we could get carried off?”

“… My siblings, while they speak amongst-“

“Definitely.” Sonnet said without a shadow of doubt. “You heard the wind the other night; if we got caught in it, it’d carry us up high and over the mountains and even beyond that, up into the sky until we get stuck in the stars, and they’ll never find us because our eyes will be so bright and so small that you can’t tell them from the stars at all.”

“You were in the height of the storm the night we arrived in Dirtmouth,” Hollow gently pointed out from where they’d curled themself up as small as they could again in their corner, still nearly a fifth of the room by volume, as Nettle quaked at the picture Sonnet painted. “If you could be blown away, do you not think that you would have been?”

“I don’t know,” Ghost wondered. “If you were trying to be tangible, like if you were about to touch something, you might get blown away then. Because you’re a little solid. I think that if the wind was moving fast enough, it could sweep you away like that.”

“No way,” Vigil dismissed. “It’s only, like, one tendril that’s solid at a time. Maybe two if you need to pick something up, I guess, but that’s still not a lot. And the surface area is so small, there’s no way you’re getting swept anywhere.”

“The point is moot, because you won’t be going outside!” Hornet shouted to be heard over them, though their talking was utterly silent. “None of you will be swept away no matter your state of being, because you will all be either in here or in the house where you can meet no harm, weather-driven or otherwise, until each and every one of you is no longer dead!”

The shades, and Quirrel, stared at her in cowed silence until her siblings broke off with their quiet, varyingly apologetic murmurs of acknowledgement, dispersing to each find their own less distracting entertainment around the room.

“I’m glad I had the right of it then, keeping an eye on your siblings indoors,” Quirrel said, recovering his good graces admirably fast. “I’d been thinking of a more general safety, but you’re right that there’s no need to worry about the wind when one is comfortably inside. Yet, even though they’ve shown they can make limited parts of their… Bodies,” he guessed with an uncertain so-so waggle of his hand. “Tangible for a time, the surface area is far too small to cause the whole to be swept away.”

“Ha! I told you.” Vigil crowed, as Nettle shuddered with relief.

“They find that comforting to know.” Hornet said dryly, and edged past Vigil, still beaming with vindication, to take the entire plate of scones for herself. She thought she’d need the energy, if the rest of the night would be as trying as it’d started out.

Quirrel, who appeared to have completely forgotten about the food in his fascination, looked mildly forlorn for a moment before he regained himself.

“I can see you’re the untrusting sort,” he said unnecessarily. “You must understand, however, that I’m not interested in holding a grudge. I’m sure you had your reasons-“

“I did.” Hornet said around a mouthful of scone.

“But,” Quirrel forged on, his voice light and only a little strained. “It seems like we have a mutual cause to tolerate each other, my… Friend. My guess is that it’s what I’ve learned of your siblings, that is off-putting to you?”

“Essentially. I am also off-put by your continued presence in my kingdom, but I have been informed that it cannot be helped.” Hornet said pointedly, indicating Ghost with a tilt of her head, who gave the impression of a smug smile and a thumbs-up as well as they could.

It came across very clearly. They must have been practicing.

“Be that as it may,” Quirrel carried on like she’d added meaningful, if gratuitous, commentary, and picked up a nearby stack of pages loosely collected together, which he began to straighten. “You might be reassured by what you’ve learned of me, which I would prefer not to get around.”

Hornet frowned at him, searching for what he meant as the wanderer set down his neatened pile of paper and began to collect the loose pages scattered over his desk and among his mysterious equipment, neatening up at a pace nothing less than sedate.

“Your ability with a nail?” Hornet ventured. “I had not thought you proficient enough for it to be an issue if you passed yourself off as a noncombatant.”

“Am I inept or a danger, Hornet? One can’t have it both ways.” Quirrel said as he flipped through his handful of papers, looking over what seemed to be, from Hornet’s vantage point, notes taken entirely in a strange kind of shorthand. It reminded her of the Archives. She’d never been taught their writing system, and could never entirely decipher it afterwards, so Hornet gave up trying to pick anything out of what he’d written.

“Yes, I can. You blocked my needle with your head. What am I supposed to make of that?” Hornet asked sharply.

“… Fair.” Quirrel admitted, his back to her as he busied his hands with organizing his desk. The glow of the fire caught over the scratches in his shell, the scars and old, shallow cracks and other marks of a wanderer, a survivor. “At any rate, I’d prefer if you didn’t mention I have any skill with a nail at all. I would… I hope to leave that behind me.”

The wanderer ducked his head and brought a hand up absently, hovered it over the headscarf he’d tied his antennae back with, and then dropped it abruptly as if he’d realized the gesture. Where Monomon’s mask had gone, Hornet didn’t know, and knew better that it no longer mattered.

Centuries. Centuries, she’d spent relentlessly guarding the Dreamers, the King’s Brand, the Black Egg Temple. Time unknowable, years passed like the rain smoothing over glass, running over what was eternal until little rivulets of wear were eroded, unnoticed. An age that she’d wondered about the dreaming Teacher in her sleeping Archive, wondered if she was whole, or if the acid had found the pipes of the Dreamer’s domain less lasting than the Kingdom itself. And now it was all gone, as though it’d never mattered in the first place.

Had Quirrel wondered, too, about the fate of what he’d left behind? Or had it all been wiped clean by the dust, by the wind’s howl and the endless wasteland beyond her kingdom? And which, Hornet couldn’t decide, was the kinder fate?

Maybe that, too, didn’t matter at all; only that the once-scholar had come to some unseen choice, and had chosen to try again at a life in her reborn kingdom.

To try. Yes, Hornet decided cautiously, with Ghost’s words and Iselda’s smile and the moving, living town right outside the door at the forefront of her mind. Yes, she could try.

So she sighed, and stood, and picked her way across the room with the plate of food held awkwardly in both hands. Quirrel had his back to her, and she was quiet, yet the way he startled was more consistent with one who’d been wholly lost in thought than a bug taken by surprise. Hornet set the plate down in the space he’d been mindlessly clearing and picked another scone off the top for herself, before turning away and leaning back against the sturdy shellwood, as casually as she could, nibbling at the pastry while he blinked at her.

“Eat. They grow stale.” She suggested, though it came out more like an order.

Quirrel considered her as he took one, though not as she would consider an adversary. Only interested, like she’d done something he hadn’t expected and was glad for, anyway. He must have been cannier than she’d taken him for, though, as he kept quiet while she collected her thoughts.

“Ghost thinks very highly of you.” She said at last.

The scholar’s face eased immediately with a smile, and some tension she hadn’t noticed in the way he held himself lessened. “And I think very highly of them. I consider us good friends.”

Ghost, from across the room, looked up and preened at the compliment before Nettle urged them to get back to their game.

“They trust you.” Hornet stressed, with her voice low to keep from drawing their attention again. “And you were there for them when I wasn’t.”

Quirrel lowered the scone he’d been about to take a bite of, and the light of the fire casting shadows under his dark, reflective eyes made his expression newly inscrutable. “I didn’t accompany them for much of their journey at all, my friend, only a brief respite here and there. In fact, I think I only played a role in a single battle of theirs, and even that was only good fortune; if they’d come any sooner, I might’ve missed them altogether. What a thought!” He laughed. “How very much relies upon happy coincidence.”

“The fact remains that you were there. And you helped them. For that, you have my gratitude.” Hornet glanced to the side, and now the smile the scholar had was smaller, less sure, but it was intended for her to see.

“I’m rarely wrong in my first impressions, but I believe I’m glad to be, this time.” Quirrel said. “You aren’t as bad a sort as I first thought, hm? Only a tad rough around the edges.”

“I am trying to have a conversation with you. I would appreciate if you didn’t insult me for it.” Hornet groused, narrowing her eyes when his smile only grew.

“I’d thought I was giving a very good compliment, actually. Folk rarely truly change, and it isn’t often at all that someone proves me wrong; I like to think I keep my eyes open for the little measures of a personality. Though, if we’re speaking of insults,” Quirrel said with a kindly rasp to his voice, such that she nearly missed his ribbing for what it was. “I’ll have some catching up to do, of the two of us.”

Hornet snorted. “You don’t seem the type to.”

“Well, I’ve been remembering some very good ones lately. The Archives fostered a drier brand of humor than the climate would make you think.” Quirrel joked, and it was such a departure from how ominous the Teacher’s Archives were nowadays, how harshly the echoing halls clanged with the steps of those few to walk them, that Hornet could do nothing but muffle a grin behind another scone from the dwindling plate.

“I wouldn’t know. I never saw the Archives before they were evacuated.” Hornet told him before the smile had faded. “I doubt I would have chosen to, even without the circumstances preventing a pointless visit.”

“Not one for academia, hm?” Quirrel guessed, to which Hornet made a vaguely disgusted noise as affirmative. “Ah, even as an academic myself, I could hardly blame you. I once thought I’d give anything to get out of the lab and into the world, to see all the wondrous sights it could share with me, and to never need to peer-review another article to research my passions. And yet here I am, the moment I remembered which storage chamber I kept my protective gear in. Right back at it! I think Monomon would’ve been proud, once she finished laughing at me.”

“And now?”

“Hm?” Quirrel hummed questioningly, leaning back on his elbows in the clean spot he’d made on his desk.

“Now that you’ve done both.” Hornet clarified. “Which is better? A life abroad, or the focus of study? Gazing out upon all the marvels the world beyond has to offer, or prying them from the inscrutable, from what you might cup between your hands?”

Across the room, safe in the spacious coil of Hollow’s trailing dark, Nettle burned briefly with frustration. In the next moment Ghost was quietly, patiently guiding them through what might’ve been another game, or perhaps they were deciphering some of Quirrel’s notes, all written in his illegible shorthand. It was impossible to know, with the shades murmuring back and forth in the void-speak they did when it was only them, without the clarity, the nearly-words, that they used to speak to her.

All together as they were, lumped restfully into a corner, it was only the occasional eyeshine or the irregular jut of the deeper darkness of a horn that differentiated them from the shadows and each other. Colder than the rising moonlight, untouched by the fire’s glow. Hornet was very conscious of the burning red of her shawl, the not-quite-black of her hands with old scars catching on the light, claws tracing the desk’s worn shellwood just as corporeal as she was.

The Vessels had always been strange. It had always been almost easy to see an enemy in them, to find mindlessness when it suited her purposes in what only existed differently than she did, even when she knew better. Perhaps that had been the Pale King’s final, fatal mistake; to decide that, if it did not tell him otherwise, his Hollow Knight was as he’d designed it.

Nothing at all.

“You ask as though one can really be separated from the other,” Quirrel chuckled. “The two are best taken together, I think. The enormity of wonder, to see something grand and incredible and new for the first time, there’s little like it. Yet every grand wonder is made up of what is typical and rote. And that’s what’s truly fascinating; that there’s always something new to learn, different lenses to look through, so that even the familiar and typical will have something a little wondrous to conceal.”

“Never in my rather long life have I ever found something that was nothing. Any curiosity that, when followed to its end, had no meaning.” The wanderer said.

Hornet frowned at the fire, watching the flames rise and crackle over the fuel Quirrel had given it. That kind of fire in such a small building ought to have made it sweltering, yet the air was still faintly cool. Not cold, like the breath Hornet exhaled, but not nearly as warmed as it should’ve been. He’d built it up to keep away the shades’ chill, and he’d kept them safe in spite of it.

There was void on his desk, in measured and labeled little vials, black stains in the shellwood, a faint shake in his hands now that she thought to look, and it could have been the shadows the firelight threw, but Quirrel looked the kind of sickeningly weary that one did not come by only from working too long on their projects. He was not half-god, only a bug with too much curiosity and too great a willingness to help a friend, and his soul and life were limited.

He had discovered that void, and by extension the shades, drained the life of those they touched. He had not told them what that meant, just as she hadn’t, or else Ghost at the very least would be inconsolable instead of happily, wordlessly rambling to Hollow now, from their preferred perch between their sibling’s horns.

All of this strife, when she’d only needed to look around her. Just a moment to stop and take in what was plainer than a spoken word. Vigil had had the right of it, when they’d called her ridiculous.

“You won’t willingly bring any harm to them, will you?” Hornet mumbled, less a question than a statement of what she knew.

“I wouldn’t ever think to. They’re very charming, in their own way. Ironically enough, there’s quite a lot more life to Ghost now than when I met them last. It’s always nice to see a wanderer find what they’ve searched for.” Quirrel said softly, low and rasping-fond like the crackle in the fireplace. “I wouldn’t take that from them.”

“No, not to worry, my friend.” He sighed, and if Hornet hadn’t been so familiar with resignation, she might’ve mistaken it for contentment. “I’ll keep them safe.”

Chapter Text

And so Hornet found herself staying the night, watching over her family with the cinders of the dying fire warm to one side and tolerable conversation to the other.

She hadn’t meant to. But if she went, she could not be certain where she would go, what she would do. That inescapable, unthinkable idea that had come to her as she’d come to Dirtmouth did not leave, the plucking thought that worried at her until, with the fire burned low and Quirrel snoring and slumped uncomfortably over his desk, and her siblings, even Nettle, settled into the cozy quiet, it was so loud that she could only rest her head in a hand and mull it over.

A seal.

It called her to leave, told her that it would be so very easy to, so long as it would buy her family a life to live, one at last bought with sacrifice not their own. With penance.

And that was a lie. It would be the hardest thing she’d ever done, to abandon them now, even if the abandoning was for a greater purpose. Hornet had always been grateful for her life, held tight to its living even if it was not hers to live, not truly, and even just the thought of losing it like this rattled her down to her soul. To have found better reason to live than because somebody had to and it might as well be her, reason given in measures of forgiveness and hands again extended when she’d already bitten them bloody, and love she’d never find herself deserving of, it frightened her as desperate little in all her life lived among horrors had. In spite of all the world’s ills, or perhaps because of it, Hornet did not want to die.

Did not want to, and how vastly different that was from needing to live for the sake of a kingdom long dead, for the debt she owed folk gone centuries since.

She couldn’t so much as know what it would cost, what she only suspected the Void might take from her if she did what that pestering idea bid. And yet, she could not let it rest. If no better option presented itself sooner than later, Hornet eventually decided as dawn neared, then she would resolve herself to act as she must.

But not yet.

The grey-lit morning found her still staring dry-eyed into the fire, where only ashes remained of what had been a roaring blaze, with her knees tucked up close to her chest. A sleepless night, but she had weathered many. Hornet blinked as the tentative light of daybreak spread over the dimmed fireplace’s stone, and bit back a groan as her joints cracked one after the other when she stretched for the first time in hours.

Not the unwilling snap of cold-stiffened limbs, though; only the result of sitting too long in one place. She would have to thank Quirrel for the fire.

The bug in question had not twitched, and she’d have guessed he’d fallen asleep only a few hours since, around the time he’d finally finished rambling on about his findings – that, in more quantifiable terms, largely confirmed things she already suspected of the stuff – though he took care, she noticed, to talk around anything that might worry any listening shades. When she glanced over him now, with a shell rough and shallowly scarred as she’d expect of any coming in from the wastes beyond Hallownest, it was with the ease of a hunter that she saw he shivered, his breath coming thin in the tranquility of the dawn.

Only a mortal bug after all, for all that Monomon had chosen him as bearer of her burdens. Beside him, Hornet noticed, was a sheaf of his elegant, illegible notes already knocked half-askew again, and besides that, a quill left thoughtlessly in an unstoppered inkwell. Hornet took the topmost page and picked up the quill, checking that the ink had not all dried, and scratched a splotchy, unpracticed sentence onto the back of the paper.

‘Soul will help.’

This she left to dry on the desk at his side, and soundlessly sorted through his disorganized possessions until she uncovered what must have been his bed, and then effortfully worked the duvet free with as little noise as she could make. That amounted to very little, and no other being in his cramped little house stirred; as expected, she was better skilled than most at a great many things. Her siblings had mounded themselves together in what more-or-less amounted to a black pile in the corner, the hum of their thoughts safely distant beneath whatever came nearest to true sleep for ones such as they.

Hornet bundled the freed blanket up in her arms and then laid it over the foolish pillbug’s rounded shell, where soon it would catch the strengthening sunlight and warm, and then she picked up her needle and left, closing the door silently behind her as she did.

There was little Quirrel might have done to better prove to her that he could be trusted with her siblings’ lives, even so temporarily, than to willingly subject himself to void in any form and then continue to provide them with protection and shelter. Hornet reminded herself pointedly of this whenever she nearly decided to turn around and ensure he knew what was at stake should he fail, walking as quickly as she could without making herself lightheaded down Dirtmouth’s meandering, sparsely-lined roads. Ghost trusted his goodwill, as did the rest, and Iselda had left her siblings with him for however long she’d slept, and if nothing else, Hornet thought she would need to have faith in them.

Faith, hope, how quickly she’d changed, to think of such things without disdain. How easily it had been proven to her that there was true hope, genuine room for such things as kindness, when she ought to have known better.

Let it be so, if it would, Hornet thought; her energy was better spent combatting far worse possibilities than that.

The town was still sleepy, hardly stirring from the night, when Hornet saw Iselda’s hunched-looking little shop appear from behind a cluster of other greyed buildings, all taller and each far less well-maintained than hers. Hornet sighed into the crisp air, swallowed back the coughing fit that it tried to incite, and cut through yards and over mounded dust dunes as she could to make her path more direct.

She regretted this almost immediately, the effort of climbing sapping the steadiness from her limbs far more than only walking on the cobbled path might’ve. The immutable nature of that which sickened her, she assumed, would not allow her to recover in any way but the most superficial. Not until either it was gone, or she was.

Her stomach turned sickly for the thought, for how much easier the acknowledging of what the void in her chest wrought came now. She could only assume it to be because there was far less riding upon her ability to struggle through more-or-less intact, now that her family was safe for the immediate future. That, and the last hold-out possibility she’d kept any meager hope for, that it was only simple exhaustion weighing her down so heavily, was dismissed with just a long rest and a good meal; she was as well-off as she’d ever be, and still it was impossibly tiring just to walk across town.

It was difficult not to falter in her resolve, when she thought she knew now what awaited her at the end of the road she’d chosen.

Hornet roundly shook the idea away, banishing it with a huff of frustration with herself, to even consider succumbing to something so stupid as the inevitable.

What would or would not happen didn’t matter, and it was not the time to think of such things, when she did not intend to meet it quite yet. And for all her irritating faintness and generally maddening malaise, it was still only minutes before she was at Iselda’s door, and then nudging it stealthily open and creeping inside.

The shopkeeper was there, sleeping curled into an alcove in the back wall that was short enough that all her limbs dangled over the edge past her blanket, or else were wedged awkwardly within it. The only reason Hornet could see that would keep her from falling entirely out of bed, as Iselda seemed perilously on the edge of doing, was Cornifer – a peacefully snuffling lump in the sheets behind her – with his arm flung over her side and more-or-less holding her securely in place.

Hornet had slept in far more dangerous places, and far more uncomfortable ones, besides, yet she couldn’t imagine choosing to do so, as they apparently had. Though it hardly mattered; where Iselda chose to take her rest was no business of Hornet’s.

Hornet frowned at them for a moment, and then checked behind her that the sun had, indeed, risen. The light was no longer cool and paling-grey, growing now towards a pinkish tinge that just barely caught over the roofs of the rounded houses beyond, casting the mountains she could hardly see in the distance into a soft-edged, mawlike silhouette. And dawn, she was certain she remembered, was ideally the time when one woke up.

So Hornet edged around the shop counter to the side of Iselda’s bed, where the bug had her face buried deep in a pillow, and lightly shook her shoulder.

The cadence of Iselda’s breathing shifted, but then she only grunted and pulled all her sprawled limbs back under the blanket like a retreating corpse crawler. After a few seconds of impatient waiting, and with no further apparent movement to indicate Iselda had woken up in any way, Hornet decided now was not the time for patience.

“Wake up.” She said, barely quieter than she normally would.

“Make me,” Iselda slurred combatively, muffled almost beyond comprehension.

“You told me to find you if I had need, and it’s morning. Wake up.” Hornet told her tersely.

“Wh’ the hell’re you talking about?” Iselda complained, finally pushing herself up on an elbow and blinking rapidly into the morning light. When her eyes focused on Hornet, scowling down at her from her bedside, she sat up so quickly she hit her head on the ceiling and clutched at it with a startled hiss.

“Gods-“ she swore. “Hornet? Wha-“

“Ghost and I will be leaving soon, though we will return within the day, all going well. I need the key to the warehouse.” Hornet said evenly.

“You’re lea-… Need it for what?” Iselda asked almost desperately around a jaw-cracking yawn. “What could possibly be so ungodly important that you had t’ wake me up at the crack of dawn for it?”

“A lamp. In fact, as many lumaflies as you can spare. Something easy to carry that will hold water. An overcloak in my size, preferably red.” Hornet listed off. “All of which I can find for myself. Do you have the key, or might I find it beneath the counter?”

Iselda stared at her in stunned silence. “Hornet,” she said slowly. “It’s like, five in the morning. Where are you going?”

Hornet bristled. “I might well have taken the key and left without waking you first. It is as a courtesy for all you’ve done that I don’t. You directly asked me to come to you if I needed anything, and what I need is a moment of your aid before I leave. I will pay whatever I owe, I am no thief.”

“Didn’t say you were,” Iselda mumbled tiredly. “Don’t get all antsy with me, short stuff, it’s too early for that. C’mon Corny,” Iselda yawned, patting uncoordinatedly at the arm still cinched around her waist. “Lemme go, I gotta get up.”

Hornet shifted the lay of her shawl, glancing impatiently to the window where the light grew ever brighter, as Cornifer made an unintelligible snorting noise and acquiesced. “You need not come, you have my word that I will not take more than I’ve told you.”

“Nope, you woke me up, you deal with the consequences,” Iselda sighed, rolling out of bed and blindly fishing around in the cluttered shelves under the counter, knocking over half-finished map pins and more than a few rolled-up maps that unfurled when they hit the floor as though they were mostly new, until she surfaced with the key Hornet had seen her use before. “Alright, let’s go.”

The shopkeeper was out the door before Hornet had a chance to protest further, and she could only follow, closing the door quietly behind her, as Iselda’s long stride took her quickly down the road.

The air was brittle and cool in a far different way than Hornet had become accustomed to, the sort that broke over the thick weave of her shawl instead of suffusing through chitin and flesh below it, and more brittle than that was Hornet’s familiarity with asking anything of another. It did not sit well with her, as used as she was to being the one from which things were asked, or, as had by now been the case for far longer, having no one to ask for anything at all.

As difficult as that sometimes made things, it had at least also made them very simple; either she had what she needed, or she didn’t.

This was new, and strange, and Hornet disliked the dependance of it all as much as the uncertainty, for Iselda could very easily rescind her offer, or their friendship, or even her family’s safety. Hornet had woken her up early (evidently too early; she’d remember that) after all, and annoyance was an easy slight to use as excuse. This was as much a test as anything else; Hornet could easily have broken into the warehouse and then returned what she took upon her trip’s conclusion, so there was little at stake should Iselda finally drop whatever pretense Hornet couldn’t help but half-expect she kept up.

It was foolish paranoia to think that she would, when already she’d done far more than one with an ulterior motive might (a motive even Hornet could not begin to guess at, should it exist at all). Particularly when Ghost trusted her and, for all Hornet’s watchful expectation otherwise, had not yet been wrong.

“You wanna explain what’s suddenly so important, now that we’re away from listeners?” Iselda asked, stretching her arms lazily over her head as she walked. “What kind of daytrip takes an overcloak?”

Hornet sighed, annoyed mostly with herself for her own unease. “My sibling and I are traveling to the Resting Grounds, to-“

To destroy the delicate flowers and, should the Queen’s Gardens be cut off entirely, place her kingdom at the mercy of the Void, should no answer to its deadly search present itself. To face a decision that would either be the costliest she’d ever made, or the kindest. To do what could not be taken back, and wholly commit herself to finding another answer, somehow.

“Hey, it’s alright, I don’t need to know. Whatever business you have in a cemetery isn’t any of mine.” Iselda said easily in response to her sudden silence, squinting off into the sunrise as they walked. “I guess it gets pretty chilly there?”

Hornet made a questioning hum, glancing up at her, mind still caught on what was to be done.

“The overcloak.”

“Oh. Yes, it will be.” Hornet said stiffly.

No, the cemetery was not unbearably cold on its own, but the shades were. It was better to be prepared, with the greater toll void had taken upon as of late. Another layer between herself and them, while not anything that could give her back the soul that they took, would make the stag ride to the Resting Grounds more tolerable, at least.

What a boon the Stag that the little Ghost found had become; she’d never have expected to use the old transport system again, yet now its speed could mean all the difference.

They walked in silence then, until at last the warehouse set into its silt-buried hill loomed out from behind a cluster of decrepit, dark-windowed houses.

“Well, early as it is, I am glad you came to get me.” Iselda said conversationally as she fit the key into the lock and swung open the heavy, creaking door. “I just wasn’t quite expecting it to be so soon. Most people give things like that a few days, y’know? It’s been like… Ten hours.”

“I will keep that in mind.” Hornet said gravely, following as Iselda trooped inside, and tapped lightly at the lumafly hung from the wall by the door until it flickered to life.

“And to be completely fair, if you’d waited until the rest of the world woke up, I was planning to come collect you to go pick up your own key from the Nailsmith. Not that I’m about to get nitpicky about anyone’s visit to a graveyard, but did you sleep?” Iselda asked incredulously, clicking the door shut behind them to keep out the dust.

“Nah, what am I saying, your sleeping schedule’s gotta be shot all to hell.” Iselda corrected herself in an undirected mumble before Hornet could reply, already stepping away and towards the slightly grimy corner Hornet remembered as reserved for clothes.

It was a small pile, all considered, though even at a glance Hornet could see it varied wildly in the cloaks it boasted. Some were large enough that she wouldn’t have thought them out of place on Midwife or Hollow, others so short that they wouldn’t have come down to her elbows, if they’d fit around her shoulders at all. And though Hornet mostly saw shades of simple blue and grey and washed-out green, there were more other colors and styles (mostly faded, all stained in some way) than she’d have expected for a thrown-together stash.

Hornet followed, watching with disquiet as Iselda started the search by sifting through the folded piles, the purposefulness with which she did so calling into question whether Hornet was meant to help at all. “You did not need to come. If you’d asked, I’d have returned the key as soon as I was finished with it, if you are so upset by the early hour.”

Iselda pulled a cloak free (a dark blue one sewn in the style the mantises favored), held it appraisingly towards Hornet like she was estimating the fit, and apparently found it lacking, folding it back up to return to the pile with a dissatisfied noise. “Don’t worry about it. If I was that annoyed, I’d have just stayed in bed.”

“I do not need help with this, Iselda.” Hornet said clearly.

“Stow it, Hornet,” Iselda said with the same tone, holding another cloak up to the light. “Part of being on good terms with people is letting them help you, even if you could struggle through yourself. In fact, let’s call that lesson number one; even if it isn’t life or death, sometimes your friends will feel bad if they leave you to figure out for yourself where they put all the weirdly specific things you need, when they are fully aware their organizational schema makes no sense to anyone else, and so they’ll want to give you a hand. Hypothetically speaking.”

“That being said, if you truly don’t want me around, I can take a hint. I’m just giving you the benefit of the doubt here. You don’t exactly strike me as someone who’s well-versed in social niceties.” Iselda said, though not judgmentally.

“You cannot mean to say you want to be here now.” Hornet said, exasperated. “Before dawn.”

“Hey, I’m just doing what I can live with. Pay me back someday if it’ll make you feel better.” Iselda suggested distractedly. “And come try this on, it’s about your size.”

Hornet sighed, and obliged, stepping close enough for Iselda to drape a big woolen cape around her shoulders, the edges and the hood lined in something as soft as dandelion down that smelled about the same, bitter and earthy. It was heavy, and a dark burgundy, thick enough that it easily kept out the faint draft the warehouse’s aged walls couldn’t entirely stop from blowing in, and came down to around the backs of her knees.

She tensed and carefully kept her expression neutral as Iselda did up the clasp at the front, nearly more at odds with the care the bug took as she did so than the closeness that prickled like needles up her back, the urge to jerk away. Hornet blamed the suddenness of the gesture for having allowed it, though something in her chest, that remembered Deepnest as home and ached in a way she’d long-buried for the family she’d left there to rot, would not let her move.

Iselda stepped back to look her over appraisingly, and Hornet glowered back without heat, as more a reflex than anything else.

“Adorable.” Iselda announced. “A little huge on you, and I doubt you’re getting any use out of the hood, but it’s warm and it’s red, and that’s what you wanted, right?”

It was.

“… Thank you.” Hornet said stiffly, without any other idea of how to answer.

“Don’t mention it, kiddo.” Iselda said with a gratified grin, like she’d solved some difficult problem beyond satisfaction. “Let’s go grab the rest, and we’ll get you on your way.”

The rest, as Hornet would unwillingly admit, was hidden so unintentionally well at the bottoms of chests or the tops of shelves that it would have taken her hours, if not the whole day, to find all that Iselda did in less than twenty minutes. What she ended up leaving with was far more than she’d expected, not just the trio of lumafly lights with their glasses variously sized and scuffed and the cleaned, prepared crop of an aspid as a waterskin that Iselda had pried out from beneath a clattering pile of shed mantis’ claws.

Along with what she’d come to get, Hornet also left with a rucksack thrown over her shoulder and filled with whatever miscellaneous food Iselda managed to pack in before Hornet pointedly closed the top and shouldered it, and then another little palm-sized pot of honey.

“In case all the dreariness gets to you, and you need something sweet to perk you up.” Iselda explained, holding it out until Hornet caved and accepted it, the bug only then climbing down from the ladder she’d used to pluck the treat from the highest shelf.

“I won’t be gone more than a day,” Hornet felt the need to stress. “There’s no need to take any of this.”

“Humor me. The last thing anyone with anything that happens at a cemetery on their mind wants is to have to worry about food.” Iselda said wisely.

There was little she could say in response, so Hornet tucked the little earthenware pot into a pocket of her shawl, and tried to accustom herself to the heft of the rucksack against her back and the weight of the cape over her shoulders as they left. It wasn’t a discomfort to get used to, as much as a lack of it; already the thing was marvelously warm, impervious to the wind that always seemed to blow through Dirtmouth. Hornet ran her claws over the cape’s downy edges until they reached the clasp at her throat, a simple loop caught on a small piece of dark, carved shell, and dropped her hand.

“Thank you.” She said again, walking alongside Iselda as the living, still-sleeping town stirred around them. This time the words were lower, more sincere, and she meant them.

“It’s no problem-“

“No,” Hornet interrupted her. “For all you’ve done, that you’ve never needed to. I want to thank you, and know you understand that I mean more than tolerating an early morning. It makes very little sense to me. You and all you do make very little sense, yet I am glad for it. Iselda of Dirtmouth, if all my kingdom had been made up of those such as you, it may never have fallen.”

She hesitated a beat, and then drew the cape tighter around herself. “Whatever may come, I am glad this town has you to guard it.” Hornet told her, more honestly than she meant to.

“Hornet, c’mon kiddo,” Iselda said weakly. “I did what anybody should’ve, you don’t have to sing my praises for it.”

“I wouldn’t have.” Hornet said evenly. “It is a cruel thing to know, but had I been in your position, I might never have allowed my siblings past the station. I’d have protected my own, and if any armed wanderer had spoken to me as I did to you when first we met, they mightn’t have survived the imposition. You are a kinder person than I, and I am indebted to you.”

Iselda gave a long, heavy sigh, crossing her arms. “Yeah, I got that impression back then. Whatever you’ve dealt with in your time, it’s made you a, ah, driven person, to put it lightly. But I’m nothing special, Hornet, just someone who was able to help.”

The shopkeeper shrugged, an expressive movement, as though to emphasize the depths of how little ceremony her actions deserved. “And, honestly? I saw a lot of myself in you, and I keep seeing more, the more I figure out your whole deal. I was a wanderer for a while back in the day, y’know? Or, hah, bandit might be a better term for it.” Iselda said with a wince. “After leaving home I was just a dispossessed kid with a lot of pent-up anger and a nail. Not a great combo.”

“You didn’t mention.”

“Yeah, I don’t much like talking about it. Figure that if ever there was a time, though, this is it.” Iselda said. “I mean it when I say you remind me of myself, and don’t take it the wrong way, but I don’t really mean that as a compliment.”

She gave a short, wryly nostalgic laugh.  “That sort of life can make you pretty hard-hearted; I think I might’ve been the meanest dust-crawler out past those mountains for a while, and I’ve met a lot of mean bastards.” Iselda reminisced, glancing conspiratorially down to Hornet and lilting the words as though to imply that Hornet, too, must have known her fair share of mean bastards.

“I’ll admit I can hardly imagine it.” Hornet said, a faint smile tugging at her chelicerae for the effort.

“Hah! You say that now.” Iselda grinned broadly down at her, and in the confidence of her stride, for all that she hadn’t so much as taken her nail out with her on this early-morning errand, Hornet could see the surety won only through knowing exactly what one was capable of.

It was a familiar thing to know, even with the recent weeks.

The streets remained empty as they walked them, the air still carrying the bite of the early hours though the sky was a rosy pink warming to reddish, but Hornet could hear somebody singing to themself far off in the distance. An unfamiliar tune, rising muted and tired, missing notes and looping over itself like the singer only did so to wake themself up, or else for the simple pleasure of hearing their own voice, and Hornet could only pick it out if she strained to hear above the low brush of the wind that didn’t ever quite seem to stop.

Yet it was there.

“No, I didn’t come by any kindness or anything goody-goody like that naturally once I left home.” Iselda said, a smile still warm in her voice. “Gods, not an ounce of it. The world has a way of beating it out of you if you let it, and I wasn’t a nice person for a long time, Hornet. I already knew what was right; I just couldn’t care less, not considering what all I had to do to keep myself out of hot water. But then, well, I met good people, and they did right by me. Even when I didn’t always do right by them.”

“And then, real slowly, it didn’t seem like such a waste of time anymore to make the effort. Kindness is funny like that; it doesn’t really matter if you feel kind, as long as you act like you are. It leaves its mark.” Iselda told her.

“But being good to people has a way of coming back around, and it gets easier. You looked like someone who needed somebody to do right by her, though I admit, then I went and got attached.” Iselda snorted genially, apparently at herself. “So don’t put me on a pedestal, spider, I got my head screwed on straight late enough. And don’t put yourself down like you’re some kinda supervillain; the worst thing you can do is give yourself up as a lost cause. Giving a shit isn’t something I was born knowing; I don’t know if anyone’s born knowing it. It’s just something I chose to do.”

“D’you get what I’m saying, or am I just blathering like a philosophical dweeb?” Iselda laughed outright to ask, good-naturedly shoving at Hornet’s shoulder. “You’re doing fine, kiddo. Your other siblings I’m not so sure about just yet, but Ghost came by often enough once upon a time for me to know they’ve got a good head on their shoulders; just try getting a second opinion before you go off and do anything you might regret next time, alright?”

The push was too light to truly register as a blow, and so hardly shook Hornet from the contemplative silence she’d lapsed into.

“I have hurt very many people, and done much that cannot be taken back. Time and again I have proven I cannot make a choice, not one that matters, that doesn’t cause as much harm as it prevents. What right have I to accept what my siblings offer, what you give without question? What right have I to kindness undeserved?” Hornet asked, quietly, already so certain of the answer that it hardly needed to be said. “What right have I earned, to pretend that I’m something I have not been?”

Yet she asked, and was uncomfortably unsure what the asking meant of her.

Iselda sighed again, her mandibles working thoughtfully. “Going for the deep stuff this morning, huh?” She mumbled, though not with judgement.

“Only following your lead.” Hornet said, and glanced up in time to see Iselda roll her eyes lightheartedly at her.

“Well, short answer is you’re asking the wrong questions. It’s not your decision to make, what anyone else thinks of you or what they give,” Iselda waved off, “and it’s not anything you can change on purpose. Earning and deserving factor in exactly nowhere.”

“Longer answer is that you can’t undo anything you’ve done, not to make it like it didn’t happen, but you can do differently going forward. You can start trying to be better than that. I’ve messed people up good, people who didn’t really deserve it, and I can’t go back in time and fix it. But I can put down my nail, and follow my incredible partner around to see some amazing places, and I can help some snippy, prickly little spider of Deepnest,” and how Iselda said ‘Deepnest’ was a poor imitation of how Hornet did, all false gravity and coldness, “when she’s down on her luck.”

“And you,” Iselda said, giving Hornet a pat on the horn that she brushed off, even as there was something wound tight in her throat that kept her from interrupting. “Can protect your family with all you’ve got, and figure out where you went wrong so you don’t do it again, and listen to some rambling, retired mercenary lecture at you about the value of trying again, or whatever.”

And in spite of it all, Hornet couldn’t help but smile back at her, even with how impossible all she’d said seemed and how Iselda looked to have gotten embarrassed by the end, trailing off with a faintly self-conscious chuckle.

There was bitterness in her still, a lingering desire to scoff at Iselda’s words just for the spite of it, the idea that she could ever be anything but ruthless, a cold and sharpened thing born to do what somebody always needed to. Yet the bitterness was easier to ignore, and the cold easier to soften, in the warming dawn with the soft-edged cape wrapped around her shoulders and the little pot of honey in her pocket, and a friend she’d never meant to make stubbornly refusing to think of her as the Protector who’d outlived her use.

If there had ever been a kinder parting in Hornet’s life, she didn’t think she’d known it.

“Thank you.” She said again before the smile had faded, and even Hornet heard how it lingered in her voice. “I will remember to.”

They’d long since made it back to Iselda’s shop by now, standing outside the closed door as faces familiar and not began to trickle in ones and twos out of Dirtmouth’s once-abandoned houses, like groggy, yawning ghosts, or else like some tiny, new creatures crawling out of a dried and crumbling snail shell to greet the morning. Something utterly unlike what had been before, but of no less value for the change. Iselda smiled tiredly down at her, leaning her shoulder against the doorway with her arms still crossed, though casually, now.

“Good. Good,” Iselda yawned widely. “Ugh, I’m going to catch a nap. Drop me a heads-up when you get back, alright? And good luck,” she waved, pushing open the door to her shop and disappearing inside when Hornet nodded her agreeance.

Hornet stayed for only a moment longer, finally allowing herself to run her claws absently through the downy fluff lining the cape as she watched the run-down old door Iselda had disappeared behind, worn and warped-smooth and colorless by time and silt. Then she turned and left, with no further reason to remain and only a faint, soul-deep curiosity, a kind of uncanny wonder, causing her to linger.

She went to the house Iselda had led her and her siblings to on the night they’d come to Dirtmouth for the second time, and found it was, in the light of dawn, a tall, distant sort of place. Their home, she supposed.

It had an unlived-in look about it, that Hornet attributed largely to the cracks in the chitinous walls and the dust-clouded dimness of the windows. The door stuck when she tried to open it, and Hornet had to brace her foot against the doorframe and pull the creaking handle as hard as she could to get it to give a grating shriek and fly open, sending her nearly stumbling into a dust drift, the effort leaving her shaking and her breath coming fast and shallow.

When she’d blinked the stars out of her eyes, Hornet ventured inside and, without knowing where to look, walked the breadth of the ground floor until, in one of the smaller rooms, she stepped on a dry-rotted rug that drooped a little under her claws, and the faded shellwood beneath it groaned like it was a second from falling through. Hornet threw the rug back, and beneath it was a wide trapdoor with a big worked-iron handle, light enough to tug open and send clattering dryly and loose on its hinge to the floor behind.

The stairway hidden within it was unusually expansive, and delved deep enough to turn once and continue out of her line of sight. Hornet sized it up, and hummed her approval; even Hollow, by far the single person with the most utterly impractical horns she’d ever seen, would find no difficulty fitting down it as long as they were willing to be careful to hold their head right.

The house was a good choice, then, even for all its flaws. She could fix them all, so long as she could remember how. It was only caulking up the cracks, cleaning the windows, reinforcing or tearing up and replacing the floorboards, a few dozen minor issues that she’d note in full when she had the time to.

And, first and foremost, she’d need to repair whatever was wrong with the stuck front door. Ghost would likely think the solution to be just to take the thing off its hinges and leave the entryway open to the world, knowing them and their free-roaming tendencies. They would learn better, Hornet decided as she descended the unsteady staircase with caution, or they would help her replace it.

It was a stroke of luck that there were enough rooms for them each to have one, too. More-or-less, at least, with how many of them there were now. Four bedrooms, divvied up among the six of them, and a few storage rooms that could be repurposed if need be. She’d take one, the twins could share, as might Ghost and Hollow if they were amenable, which left one for-

Hornet tightened her claws around the stairway’s bannister, taking a moment to stop and catch her breath and her thoughts as her grip drew a protesting, crackling creak from the old shellwood.

She was getting ahead of herself. Far, far ahead, with all that had to be done before she could consider wondering after living arrangements. Whatever agreement they all came to, even she couldn’t be certain what Vigil would do, nor even what she wanted them to.

Hornet took a slow breath of the dusty air at the bottom of the stairs and appraised the basement judgmentally, where a deep basin carved directly into the bedrock waited, half-filled with silt that’d settled down through the floorboards above. The stone-hewn room was dimly unlit, without so much as a lumafly strung up from the floorboards over her head, but enough light filtered in from the open trapdoor to see by. It fell over the pale dust and darker bedrock as Hornet walked lightly across the room and dropped into the wash basin, the scratch of grit under her claws echoing louder than the muted whistle of the wind overhead.

There, at the lip of the basin, she scrutinized the ancient metal piping that must have been how springwater was drawn up to the home, listening to the restless, endless creaking of the walls upstairs and, gathering up her cape to keep it out of the dirt, knelt in the soft silt beneath the faucet.

It took a moment to work out the faucet’s wheel, and when she effortfully turned the rusted thing open, for a long second there was nothing but a shaking, squealing rattle. And then Hornet jumped back as glowing-white springwater erupted from the downturned faucet in a rush, soaking into the dust and turning thick and muddy-brown as soon as it did.

Hornet turned the wheel slowly the other way until the rush slowed to a trickle, and then ran a faintly unsteady hand under the stream.

The relief was nigh-instantaneous, the warm water and warmer soul soothing away all the painful ache in her hands, that she only truly noticed as it left and as the heat edged up her arms. Hornet let out a shaky sigh and washed her hands clean in the flow, loosening flakes of inky black from beneath her claws and dust from the joints of her fingers, and then cupped a double handful of the water to splash over her face.

She’d had a headache, piercing behind her eyes, and amidst all the other little mounting pains over her shell she only knew it as it faded like the water dripping from her chelicerae drew it away by drops. Hornet shivered.

Then she cupped another handful and brought it to her mouth, and though it tasted only like water and aged pipes and wasn’t even warm enough to sting her cold hands, it felt like it thawed the ice in her chest enough to breathe, for her heart to beat steady and strong. And to think, she’d hardly noticed the change when she’d stumbled into springwater in Deepnest.

It had gotten far worse.

She rested her forehead against the old faucet with a sigh, and watched the water run over her hands until moving them was painless and it was only the faint warmth of the water that she felt over the chitin, the soul having done all it could.

She was still tired, Hornet was vaguely annoyed to notice as she took stock of herself, and her long-tensed muscles still hurt and shook, her legs wobbly beneath her when she stood up to retrieve the waterskin she’d gotten and fill it with the springwater, before turning off the tap entirely. And already, as soon as the water slowed to a drip and she was only standing in the shadowy cellar in mud up to her ankles, the persistent cold in her chest slowly began again to spread.

Yet perhaps the soul in the water would remain in what she took for later, and be enough to make her useful to defend herself when next her own ran low. Hornet tucked away the waterskin and sloshed to the edge of the basin, climbing out and then back up the stairs. The house was silent save her own footsteps tapping over the creaking floorboards as she passed through it, dripping mud as she went, and when she left, she left the front door slightly ajar to save herself the effort of wrenching it open when next she had to.

And then all that was left was to wake Ghost and leave, and find out if there was a bloodless victory for her to take, or if she would doom them all.

Chapter Text

And so Hornet found she’d severely overestimated how well Ghost had taken to the relative peace of the past few weeks.

Or at least, how well they’d taken to taking things slowly; there had been plenty of unrest on her mind, and likely as much or more on theirs. Yet it had occupied weeks of travel just to cover as much ground as Ghost could’ve in days back before the battle at the Black Egg, and for all that time, there’d been little of it spent on exploring, or indeed, doing much of anything.

It didn’t even seem to be the peace that stifled them as much as all the staying still and waiting, which Hornet could empathize with. She’d at least been thoroughly exhausted for most of it, which had made the frequent stops and starts far easier to bear.

Yet once Ghost had said their goodbyes to all the siblings they left behind at Quirrel’s house, with extra assurance to Hollow that, yes, they would be back by the end of the day and, yes, they’d only go to the Resting Grounds and back, it was as though the parting words had taken all the self-control they had left. From that point forward, from racing down the street and into the stag station in the time it took Hornet to walk to the door, to the ride over (suspiciously free of any encroaching void in the tunnels, for all that it’d had several days to rise and, by all means, could’ve reached anywhere in Hallownest by now) where they chattered at her with endless enthusiasm about their last trip to the Resting Grounds, to the moment they stepped off of the Stag’s saddle into the dimly-lit cemetery’s station, Ghost did not once stop talking.

Not when she’d asked the Stag to stay put and wait for her, for their errand wasn’t one that ought to take long. Not when she’d left the small sack of whatever Iselda had thought necessary to pack for her to wait by the bench for their return – excepting the little pot of honey, which Hornet had no ready excuse for keeping in her pocket like a good luck charm except that the thought of leaving it behind felt wrong. And Ghost absolutely did not quiet themself when she’d made it clear she wouldn’t interrupt them in their rambling, as she had no real reason to, and they seemed desperately to want to talk.

“-and then I was in a dream, and standing just in the middle of somewhere so empty and enormous that I could’ve been a thousand feet in the air, and when I looked down there was no ground at all! Only clouds, beautiful clouds that stretched on forever, and the whole world was syrupy-sweet and golden and ringing like a struck bell. It wasn’t like any dreams I’ve had before or since, but that’s what the Dreamers called it, and I think they’d be the authorities on that sort of thing. And once I got back, I talked to Seer, have you met Seer? She’s very nice, and very old, and she gave me my dream nail, which I only used on you once when you weren’t looking because what you were thinking about made me want to fight you, though I’m sure you don’t think like that now.” Ghost informed her with a flare of their tendrils like they were brandishing a weapon, and the reassurance they pressed at her made Hornet give a half-hearted hum of feigned interest as response.

They had been rattling on for upwards of several hours by now, and Hornet had completely tuned them out after the first twenty minutes, as soon as she’d realized they were only doing so as an outlet for the built-up adventurousness of days on end of nothing much.

Even if she’d never sworn to return them to the living, Hornet thought she’d have cracked and promised to again if they’d only, inevitably, gotten as restless as this from the relative monotony of existing as only a shade. The walk through the Resting Grounds to the nearest entrance to the Grey Mourner’s veiled home (a Great Knight no longer, Ze’mer had forfeited that right centuries before) was not a terribly long one, chiefly consisting of some picking around to find the correct false tomb to enter, yet it was all Hornet could do to relegate Ghost’s passionate chattering to background noise so that she could hear her own thoughts clearly enough to do so.

“The first thing I’m going to do once I have hands again is… Well, first I’ll go get my nail, and then I’m going to go to the Colosseum.” Ghost exclaimed, whirling in place so that their tendrils twirled like a skirt, and then twisting midair to do the same again in the other direction.

“No, you aren’t.” Hornet said automatically as she brushed the dust from a tomb’s heavy stone cover and scrutinized the engravings, having only heard ‘to the Colosseum,’ and with that being enough to respond with certainty.

“You should go with me! And Hollow! It’s a lot of fun, and I bet there’ll be something to fight leftover after all the infected things died off.” Ghost thrilled, as though they hadn’t heard her.

“The Colosseum of Fools is the most ridiculous, meaningless way to die ever conceived by thinking minds, and I am aware of very many. It is also the only avenue of structured entertainment in the Kingdom that was lasting enough to survive the Infection in any form,” Hornet informed them distractedly, edging around the tomb to look over the next. “Which says much about my kingdom as a whole, and nothing flattering.”

“That’s because it’s great,” Ghost insisted. “Killjoy.”

They dove over her like a frozen draft as she checked the next grave for any familiar marker, with an expansive eagerness thrumming through their not-voice like a spiderling about to be let out to play. “I’m so excited to run again, and fall, and feel anything. It’s like I’ve been floating in a lake this whole time, like I’ve forgotten what it feels like to stand and the water’s so still that nothing I can do will move it.”

“I see,” Hornet mumbled, standing stiffly to scowl out over the graveyard, that surely had not been so dilapidated, nor the graves so anonymously worn-down, when last she’d seen it. “I commend your patience.”

“Where else… Oh, the Crystal Peak, too.” Ghost decided, performing a dizzy series of looping somersaults for no other apparent reason than the sheer joy of weightlessness. “I’ll go there next, after the Colosseum, and climb to the top through the machinery. It moves really fast, and it’s not really made so that you can stand on any of it, so it takes a lot of work not to get crushed by anything.”

“If you value your freedom to do so, you’ll tell Hollow none of your plans.” Hornet said matter-of-factly, tuning back in out of sheer distaste for their opinion of the Kingdom’s Edge’s resident bloodbath. “You shouldn’t be telling me. The more you say, the more incredulous I become that you’d never shattered your mask to a thousand pieces before.”

“Oh, I did,” Ghost said cheerfully. “Plenty of times. It just never occurred to me to stay dead, once I’d decided I wouldn’t, so it never stuck.”

“… I see.” Hornet said without inflection, scanning down another row of carved memorials, tall enough to reach towards the roof of the Resting Grounds’ immense system of caverns. “I find it worrisome that you’re so eager to risk such again, after all the trouble we’ve gone through to find you a new one.”

“Well, I had to leave the old one behind for a while to fight the Radiance, so I’m not really surprised that it wouldn’t seal back up by the time I got to it from the Abyss. And there’s always the Void calling, now, and it’s very tiring to ignore, so even if I could already get around it to have the new mask, I guess I’d be a little more careful than usually I was. But after we’ve dealt with that, I’m sure it’ll be fine.” Ghost predicted optimistically. “I don’t want to die, after all, so I won’t.”

“Is that how you think it works?” Hornet asked skeptically over her shoulder, crouching to brush an age’s dust from the markings on another headstone.

“It’s how it works for me,” Ghost assured her. “More-or-less. The first time was… Harder, though I’m very good at it now, usually. I know how it’s supposed to work, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“I never suggested you didn’t.” Hornet replied, squinting at what looked like a destroyed tomb a few rows away, that nonetheless rang dully familiar.

“There it is! I’d almost forgotten which it was.” Ghost said, having noticed it almost exactly as she did, dashing like a streak of smudged ink to hover over the tomb’s shattered lid from above and look curiously down into its depths. “It should be easy to go through the catacombs, with all the corpses quiet.”

Hornet followed them, and found that this was indeed the tomb she’d searched for, with the Great Knights’ crowned six-winged carapace gouged neatly into the side and half-obliterated, the rest of the emblem broken away along a fissure line along with much of the rest of the tomb itself. She frowned at it and the sharp-edged fragments of what was left, fallen like discarded shellwood around the base and laced with fracture-lines radiating out from the top – where the cover was completely missing – in such a way that implied the damage had been done in one blow.

“Did you do this? Could you not have just… Moved the lid, with less effort than it must’ve taken to destroy the grave entirely?” Hornet asked, walking alongside the false monument for a better viewpoint to look down into its open passage.

She touched the jutting edge as she leaned over it, where the border of the tomb fell to crumbling stone. How irreverent, when the hidden passage to the Grey Mourner’s woeful home had stood untouched for countless years, a rarity even amongst those lucky enough to have been interred within the Resting Grounds. Broken open in an instant, by some curious child.

Yet, the same child had also fulfilled a last wish of the once-knight’s that Hornet hadn’t, had not even known of to consider in all her small eternity of endless guard. It must only be the way of change, to appear irreverent and shocking and then to leave having given more than it took, or else what the old could never have granted. Even back long before, when last Hornet had seen Ze’mer, she didn’t know if she’d have begrudged her a last request. Not the one she’d asked for, at least.

Though there was some petty annoyance still, even as their conflict had lost its teeth to the years, for having had to haul away the tomb’s heavy stone cover and replace it every time she’d visited.

“I tried, but it was too heavy for me. Spells, though, work very well for this sort of thing.” Ghost informed her. “It only took one to smash right through.”

“Efficient, at least.” Hornet begrudgingly decided, and vaulted over the shattered wall of the grave down into the tunnels it hid.

It was a longer fall than she remembered, the ruff of her cape pushed up to nearly cover her eyes by the rushing air as she plummeted, and Hornet landed neatly at the bottom with a soft grunt. For such a familiar maneuver, and as often as she’d fallen much farther than this before, the impact still left her cold-stiffened joints aching and made her stagger as she stood straight, though that was easy enough to correct by leaning against one of the old iron markers standing skewed in the disturbed earth. She’d only stopped on the first part of the descent, a small ledge eroded from the rounded mask-carved stone the walls and crypts of the cemetery were lined with, and below her was a chiseled hole that led to the tunnels of the catacombs proper.

Hornet stared down into it, peering through the lightless black and listening carefully for anything moving, any ancient thing shifting in the dark where it’d been buried long ago.

Nothing. The ground was still, the air stale and unmoving, the only light falling pale and faint from above instead of peering back up at her with glaring orange.

Ghost dove and circled around her head in wordless excitement, their high spirits nearly a palpable thread in their thoughts as they told them to her, even as they evidently respected the moment she took to listen for danger, until she looked up at them in fond bemusement.

“Are you so excited to see a collection of long-dead things? I’d have thought you’d had enough of that, my kingdom being what it is.” Hornet asked, watching them flit around like a flighty lumafly.

“Really, I’m just excited to be doing anything this interesting. I love Hollow and the rest, but I’ve been inside for ages. They’re anything but boring, and I’ve enjoyed being able to spend so much time with them, but Hornet, I haven’t spent more than a few hours in the same place in years before this. It’s hard to get used to not doing anything but talking.” Ghost lamented, performing a tight, restless twirl midair.

“You still aren’t.” Hornet pointed out, crouching to set a hand on the ground to take her weight as she jumped down into the tunnel below, the dark becoming absolute as she stepped away from what illumination fell from above.

“I know that, but it’s better if I can watch you do something else. Living vicariously, and all.” Ghost reasoned, following her down and all but disappearing into the blackness until Hornet pulled out one of the lumafly lanterns Iselda had found for her, a little palm-sized glass with an even smaller fly inside, the surface scuffed and scratched.

“I suppose I should be glad someone is enjoying the journey, then.” Hornet told them, raising the light and squinting into the dark beyond it.

It was still silent as… Well, as graves ought to be, so Hornet left her needle rested at her back as she began the walk, the echo of her claws on the stone below stymied by all the old, forgotten treasures lying shoved aside and broken from the passage of the ghoulish undead. The carapaces of the uninterred were lifeless and crumbling, by now nearly indistinguishable from the carved-carapace chests they lay beside and with nothing in the catacombs to disturb their final rest. Stalactites descended with long, bitter points from the low tunnel roof, catching the light and shining like blades as she passed around them, and if not for the straightness of the path, clearly carved by Hallownest bugs’ hands instead of the spiders, Hornet would have thought herself in Deepnest for the comforting closeness of the walls.

“Aren’t you?” Ghost asked, genuinely surprised. “You look a lot better, and you ate and slept and everything. I’d guessed you’d be happy to get away for a little while, since all the talking all at once can get so overwhelming. It’s a little overwhelming to me sometimes, and I hated being alone in the wastes more than anything. And after this, we only have to figure out how to deal with the Void, and that’s all! We’ll be done with all the life-or-death problems.” Ghost said brightly.

“Yes, only that,” Hornet said flatly. “And such a feasible task that is. I suppose I am glad to have this time to not need to think of what I say, though. It is… Exhausting, to need to interact with all the others and the living, too, in a way they expect of me. I’d forgotten how effortful it is.”

“And you don’t need to think about what to say to me?”

“It’s different,” Hornet frowned into the darkness ahead, stepping over a molding pile of discarded wrappings. “There is no risk in speaking frankly to you, and little chance to drive you away by being… Unmindful. Particularly when I failed to so often back when I’d first met you, and I’d been trying to find the words to scare you off.” She tried for a less serious tone, and thought she’d achieved it well enough for her meaning to be clear. “You are very easy to speak to, little Ghost.”

Ghost beamed at her from just ahead down the path, and darted up to give her horn a brief, casual headbutt before dashing away again, leaving Hornet to roll her eyes and suppress a smile for their unfettered good mood, even as she snuck a hand to her head to rub away the frost they’d left. The catacombs were more humid than she remembered them to be, perhaps with the newly-resumed changes in the weather above them leaving more moisture in the air to be frozen.

“I’m glad,” Ghost shouted from a few turns down, the call of their void-speak a moving target as they newly explored all the turnoffs from the main corridor. “I was almost worried I was annoying you.”

“Always, little Ghost.” Hornet said with warmth, her chelicerae twitching in a grin. “Come back, the way up is here.”

They gave a silent, slightly sidetracked trill of affirmation that already sounded closer, so Hornet huffed a soft laugh at them and began to climb upwards, following the waft of moving air from above, even though it wasn’t until the tunnel became level again that she could, at its end, see the light from the exit. She did not especially trust her own strength to be able to leap neatly out, like she nearly tried to without thinking, and wanted less to think of the possibility that she’d fail to make the jump, so up this tunnel she climbed as well, finding places to hook her claws over the jutting and broken stones.

Ghost breezed past her as she did, interested anew to find their destination, their presence only felt as a colder draft before they passed overhead and disappeared into the better-lit cavern above. Hornet followed, vaguely lightheaded from the exertion, and beheld Ze’mer’s final resting place.

A lonely place, as expected, as remembered. The cavern was immense, its heights either lost to the distance or opening entirely to the wastes past the mountains, as close to the very edge of her kingdom as they were, though she thought they didn’t.

After all, it must have been nearly noon by now, and whatever lay above was pitch black.

The streetlamps were still lit, the lumaflies fluttering in their glasses and casting the short, cobbled path to the Grey Mourner’s home in their gentle light, that fell also upon the building itself. It was an imposing place, ornately trim and regally tall, though not much larger at first glance than Hornet’s run-down house in Dirtmouth. It’d been made, Hornet remembered, as a distant, hidden hideaway for a reclusive champion, for the once-knight had easily been in high enough standing to request such a thing built anywhere she’d have liked it. A celebrated knight of the King had wanted for nothing, though Ze’mer had paid dearly enough for the vows she’d made to the crown.

There was a bitter chill in the air, and Ghost had already vanished through the door (open, Ze’mer had always left it open, such a strange habit for so reclusive a bug, but she’d never told Hornet why), so Hornet tugged the edges of her cape closer around herself and followed them inside.

It was no less chilly there, but Hornet could look dispassionately from the foyer over all the pristine finery left untouched by time, not molded and dragged over by the risen dead like that in the City or fallen to pieces like the Beast’s Den of Deepnest, but a time capsule of Hallownest as it had been, admittedly through the eccentric lens of its occupant, that lay untouched. Ze’mer’s home was no different from the day she’d seen it last, as though the once-knight had only stood pallid and sad in the depths of her mourning within its walls for all the years and then vanished without leaving so much as a smudge on the pale floor, without filling a single grief-emptied picture frame.

Hornet expected that was exactly what’d happened; she’d once met the mantis Ze’mer loved, had known Ze’mer herself before her death and after.

The knight had simply given up, just as thoroughly as the White Lady had, for her own tragedy, though hers had been no fault of her own. Ze’mer had found and crossed the point from which she could not recover and left her kingdom to fall apart in her wake. Once, Hornet had hated her for it.

It had been a very long time since then. There was no use in harboring anger for the dead anymore, not when Ze’mer had never truly deserved it in the first place. Not when the world was changed again.

“Look, there’s a whole greenhouse here!” Ghost called from further within the austere home, the nigh-uninhabited mansion the Great Knight had left behind, having discovered the single thing Ze’mer had evidently found energy enough to care for through her grief.

It was a cruel thing to think of her, Hornet knew as she followed Ghost’s voice, passing around the lavish curl of the grand stairwell and behind it, down the paled, empty halls through which her steps clicked and echoed harshly. Ze’mer had lost the love of her life, and Hornet had no experience to compare it to. It wasn’t any choice of the knight’s to have lost her will to live, to be unable to give help to what asked it of her, and she had not meant to let the burden fall to Hornet, instead.

Yet it had.

“I’m coming, Ghost,” Hornet called back dully, and hoped that the observant little shade wouldn’t notice.

Hornet took a deep breath of the chilled air and let it out slowly, and couldn’t quite suppress the coughing fit it caused. The cold in her chest was creeping up through her throat, though it did not feel deadly-frozen yet, and as she leaned against a greying wall and muffled her wet, hacking coughs with a fistful of her shawl drawn over her mouth, Hornet puzzled over its awakening. She hadn’t thought herself overly upset by the memories the place drew up, hadn’t even thought to care before they’d come, and even now it was more a burnt-out emptiness she had as response for all the dead knight had left than anything else. Aside from that, Ghost was far down the hall, and they’d sat closer than that for the stag ride over even if no other time, and the void in her chest had not bothered her overly for it. Could it have still been too much, somehow? She’d thought there’d have been more time from only that morning forcing it at bay with the drawn soul from the springwater, if nothing else.

Hornet shook off the thought and scrubbed flecks of black from her chelicerae, and pulled out her waterskin, flicking open the carved cap and raising it to her mouth. She wasn’t thirsty, but there was soul enough left to it that it still went down warm and thawing, so she drank half and saved the rest. When she returned it to her side, her hand brushed the pocket where she’d stowed the little pot of honey Iselda had gifted her, and she dipped her claws into it to check that the lid hadn’t come unstoppered.

It hadn’t, yet there was an odd comfort in holding the tiny stoneware pot, that brought to mind dawning sunlight and the once-mercenary’s unfazed grin, so Hornet brushed her claws over it and felt that little bit better, the oppressive silence a touch less difficult to bear.

She did not notice that the lumaflies in their glass containers, each hung from little knitted loops on the inside of her cape, had all huddled miserably at the bottom of their lamps, their wings folded tight and twitching like the tiny things shivered from cold.

Hornet pressed on to the very back of the severe home, where an already flung-open door opened to a greenhouse, like Ghost had said. It was crafted all in clear glass, looking blurrily out over the far-reaching cavern’s sweeping beds of mounded, greyed dust and old, stony carapaces half-buried in silt, as good as fossilized if not already so, for as far as the light stretched off into the dim.

Within the greenhouse and casting a soft illumination over her as she stepped inside were countless lovely, blossoming flowers, each like a feathered full moon.

Though Hornet had seen them before, been shown the delicate flowers when she and Ze’mer had been on better terms and when she’d still had the time and the youth to spend an evening being looked after by the Great Knight at her estate, they were still something to behold. They numbered more than she remembered, so many that their gentle glowing taken altogether made Hornet blink against the brightness. They grew on tangling vines, lovingly spaced so that they might not constrict each other, and each vine bloomed with a half-dozen flowers or more, though some were already looking a little tired for their minder’s absence. Hornet nudged Ghost away from the nearest, where they were looking a little too closely at the dainty, overlapping petals and, mindful of the fresh smear of void staining her claws, drew her needle.

“It’s a shame to destroy them. She’d made it sound like they were very important to her, and they’re so beautiful.” Ghost said wistfully, following her as she stepped closer to the nearest plant.

“I’m certain they were.” Hornet said without emotion and, setting the tip of her blade to where the first vine sank its roots into the soil, flicked her wrist to sever it.

The flowers’ light faded some, but did not die, so Hornet resigned herself to destroying each blossom individually. It took only the work of minutes to destroy the labor of decades, the pale petals withering at the touch of her needle, the flowerheads parting like soft flesh at the cut of its edge. The greatest difficulty came with taking care not to stand where the petals would fall when she cut apart the blooms growing nearer to the arch of the ceiling, yet even that was almost effortless.

Ghost, she noticed, seemed more than a little dismayed by the loss, their brilliant-pale gaze following her needle as she worked. It made sense that they would be, Hornet thought; they were fond of wonders, of beautiful things as much as what had tales to tell.

Perhaps they’d like a greenhouse of their own. There was ample room around their Dirtmouth home, more than enough to build on, and plenty enough glass for it around the City of Tears or the Gardens to scavenge. A greenhouse wouldn’t be so difficult to build, once she’d gotten the rest of the house in order. No pale, delicate flowers would it hold, but perhaps other things. Stubborn little plants that Ghost’s wandering attention wouldn’t harm in the least. Wildflowers, ivy, perhaps dandelions if Hollow wouldn’t take offense to weeds in the garden.

She lowered her needle once the deed had been done and huffed in satisfaction, thinking already of what they’d grow.

There was a moment then, where Hornet stood staring up at the final ruined flower on its cut vine falling to greyed, withered pieces like it rotted entirely in seconds, and the last silvery-pale glow faded until the greenhouse was lit only by the pale beacons of Ghost’s eyes, casting the iron beams between the windowpanes into stark contrast, and by the low light of the streetlamps around the other side of the house glowing distant and mostly reflected off the ground outside. It was dark, then, in the way it is dark to stand beneath a full moon and all its stars. It was a moment fragile and unformed, that reared back and drew tense.

A moment of stall, of hush.

And then Hornet frowned, seeing something strange past the clear roof, something so distant and fast that she nearly doubted she’d seen it at all.

It was a moment of unusual darkness, up far in the hazy heights near the ceiling of the cavern, a flicker of something deepest black and so small for its farness that she couldn’t pick out a shape, not with how wide the cavern stretched into the uncertain distance. And then there was another, and another, and then an immense bed of lashing, twitching silhouettes of tails or worms or bladed tendrils high above her appeared between one breath and the next and, as Hornet stood in dawning dread, the chill that had been bothering her sank abruptly to a glacial, cruel cold.

Before the hundreds of pairs of gleaming, disembodied eyes opened and looked down towards her, like a scattering of pale-white stars spread across a new-moon night, Hornet had turned and grabbed up Ghost and hidden them close to her and wrapped securely in her overcloak, as they stared over her shoulder and upwards with their eyes, equally pale-white, shocked wide.

The shade was silent, the silence of one stood in the sudden shadow of gods, for as long as the moment wavered, for all the time it took to gather them up, and then their void was alive and roiling with an awful, heart-stopping dread colder than their touch even as it burned her through her layers, and Hornet began to run.

It was useless to, as she knew the moment she sprinted out of the greenhouse and directly into the opposing wall, causing all the blacked-out picture frames to clatter where they’d been hung, and then shoved herself away to keep running despite how every one of her limbs screamed at her for it. Useless when it was there, it was all there, all of it, the Void itself having pooled at the scaling heights of the Grey Mourner’s cavern to watch over the only thing that could’ve destroyed it, and Hornet did not stop to consider despairing as she ran anyway, with her needle still gripped in one hand and Ghost tightly held in her other arm, too tightly.

Yet as she fled the abandoned house and heard without hearing the Void take notice of her slowly, gradually, as though it was fragmented and sluggish to respond to its own will, Ghost sobbed and buried their face in her shoulder, clutching back at her just as tight.

And Hornet heard why they did so; it wasn’t fear, not anymore, for what now reached and twined juddering-quick down to catch them as she fled and cooled the air further as she stumbled past the now-darkened streetlamps and all but fell down into the catacombs, what now began to call with the draw that void always had, that was so strong now that it was all here.

It was longing, open and desperate longing for what the Void always had promised and always would. Untouchable peace, perfect respite, reunion. Home, Ghost cried with their tears stinging cold even through her layers, home.

It was a jarring thing to tell, from a being she knew to love life and its living and the home they already had more than any she’d ever known. Hornet ran.

The way back through the catacombs was not complicated, and she had memory enough, both new and old, to guide her, to find the way sure through her stumbling. Every step was agony, each panting breath shallow and fought for, to bring into lungs too cold to expand, Hornet’s sight uncertainly darkened and confused by darting, breathless sparks as her heart slowed when it should’ve quickened. And still behind her she heard a terrible rending of the stone, as though something colossal tried to force its way with monstrous, countless limbs into a too-small hole in the earth, pursuing her with unrelenting focus, and beneath the intensity of its wide, unblinking eyes the very rock parted like the flowers beneath her needle.

It hunted her, Hornet realized as her leg caught on an old coffer of some long-dead bug’s treasures and nearly sent her careening to the ground, only the hand she’d freed by slinging her needle over her back, now thrown out to catch herself on the stone, letting her scramble back to her feet. Ghost made a terrorized sound for the sudden drop and gripped so tightly to her shawl that she thought it’d tear.

Even as she ran, even as she was pursued as she’d never been, never, Hornet spared thought enough to feel indebted to Ghost’s immutable will; that they (only void and the imprint made upon it, the words of the Mask Maker dashed across her mind as she fled) held onto her at all, when even she was pulled to turn around and embrace what forced itself down the tunnels after her, was a testament to their resolve.

She had been touched by the Void; they were wholly of it, and it called them.

The ascent to the Resting Grounds came up upon her so quickly that she nearly missed it, half-blinded and half-debilitated. Hornet leapt heavily up the ledge, digging desperate claws into the ragged stone, hauled herself up and over and then up again, just as the cacophonous, deafening rip of ancient rock and earth and carapace came so close at her back that it must have passed directly below.

Hornet clambered gracelessly over the shattered tomb, Ghost held securely to her and shaking with wavering, desperate denial, and fled through the graveyard like death bit at her heels.

Yet even as she forced haste from herself, the tombs rising from the gloom hazy-edged and unclear in her fading sight, her knees threatening to buckle, she could not go on forever. Her heart was unsteady for the effort, her head pounded like it’d been driven through with a nail, and Hornet only just recognized the aged, pale scrawl of the stag station’s signpost when she careened bodily into it and took just the half-moment needed to reorient herself enough to stagger into the station itself.

Here she collapsed to lean against a fence to the side of the stagway, Ghost sheltered in arms she could hardly feel, and felt instead as she faded.

She needed only last a little longer, a little farther.

Behind her, the roar of the earth being hewn in two, of a passage discordantly shattered apart and clawed wide, gritted rock and the hectic patter of dust and desolate destroyed things, and then deafening silence that frightened her worse than the dark.

And then the sudden grating of abruptly-shifted stone, whole tombs tossed aside as though they were nothing at all, coming closer as the darkness hunted them down.

Here, it called out to her with a thousand entreating pleas. Here, to me, her own soul responded. In her arms, Ghost wailed.

The Stag, only an indistinct darker-grey blur, grunted in alarm and got to his feet from where he’d been patiently awaiting their return as she’d asked of him, and Hornet could not stop yet.

“Hold onto me,” she gasped to Ghost, the effort making her chest burn badly enough to bring tears to prick at her eyes, but Ghost did so without question.

“Protector? What has become of-“ the Stag began, his gruff voice lowered in concern.

“Dirtmouth.” Hornet wheezed, tugging weakly at his saddle and only able to haul herself onto it, shaking so badly that she feared her arms would give out before she could, once the old stag had knelt to lower it to her level.

“Will you be able-“

“Run!” Hornet shrieked brokenly, and then she knew no more.

Chapter Text

And so Hornet again survived what ought to have been the death of her, for more reasons than she knew.

Awareness returned slowly, unwillingly, as though it hadn’t meant to come at all. There was the impression of some infinite emptiness, like the unknowable trenches of underground lakes or a long night of exhausted, dreamless sleep, that made the world seem strangely flat. Unremarkable in a way, and tiresome, and Hornet nearly succumbed again to sleep before she found the will to remember that she couldn’t allow it.

Not why, though, not yet. Recalling what’d taken so much from her that there was very nearly nothing left took time, though only as long as for Hornet to work up the energy to crack open her eyes. Minutes, and minutes more to hazily understand that the slowness was bad.

She was lying on her stomach, she noted first. And then, that she lay in a bed. Then, that the room was dark, and when she shuffled some to test how badly her body ached, that she was covered in tightly-tucked blankets, piled generously over her and even so, still leaving her chilled. There was a spot of cold soaked into the pillow her cheek was pressed against, and the hitching, uneven rise and fall of her side, the needling pain piercing in her lungs with every inhale, told her why.

It hurt to breathe, it hurt to wake, she’d have taken the bloody loss of a limb over the slogging, sickened sort of pain that the Void had wrought upon her. Hornet’s head throbbed, her sight unfocused, and every limb felt so heavy that she thought she might never move again. To remember, and keep remembering, why she wanted to move at all was nearly more difficult than the action itself.

It was quiet here, though not the quiet of Void. So easily, she could choose never to move again. To remain at rest, to drift back into that vast, soul-sickening emptiness fogging the back of her mind and never leave it.

But that had never been how it worked.

And as ever, so long as she lived, there was only one thing to do. Hornet huffed a shaky exhale, and tried to get her hands beneath her to sit up.

“Lie still.” Said a cold voice, one she did not immediately recognize.

She hadn’t noticed another sitting with her, not by scent or sound or sight. It awoke her as little else could, though there was less of the expected shock and reaction Hornet would have anticipated of herself as much as an awful revulsion deep in her stomach, curling low like a beaten thing. Still, she steadfastly ignored it and found the energy to bare her fangs for good measure, her arms trembling beneath her own weight as she did not do as the watcher asked.

“I said, lie still.”

And then there was a hand placed flat between her shoulders, the claws pricking at her chitin, and it took only the barest force from it to press her back to the bed. The humiliation of being so easily quelled brought her back to herself all the more, fed that revulsion until she knew plainly that it was for only herself, and Hornet gave a vicious, extended hiss that rattled from her dry throat and ended with a hoarse cough.

“Bold. Were you of my tribe, there would be consequences for such a greeting.” The one at her bedside said with the barest hint of satisfaction, and even before Hornet scowled and effortfully turned her head to glare, she recognized who spoke at last.

One of the Mantis Lords sat at her sickbed, unreadable and stark, and Hornet kept the implications of her presence from showing on her face. The Lord’s pale mask was all Hornet could easily distinguish, the room lit, she saw as her vision steadily cleared and the Lord’s dark, severe eyes came into focus, only by faint moonlight cast through the far window.

Hornet dipped her chin some, as well as she could lying sprawled over a pillow, and gave no other acknowledgement.

“Worry not, Protector, my benevolence is not so easily rescinded. You are a remarkable opponent, and an honorable creature; having been laid low by a thing stronger than us both will not make me think you weak.” The Lord, who Hornet recognized as the eldest of the sister-rulers, said dourly.

“What have you done with them?” Hornet rasped.

The Lord took her meaning. “The shadows persist, Protector. It is not my place, nor my responsibility, to remove your burdens from you. Not when you guard them so fiercely. I have been informed you should drink this, now that you have awoken.”

Hornet blinked irately at her as the Lord stood and turned to the bedside table, where a large pitcher stood with a pair of small shellwood-carved cups. The Lord poured something clear and very faintly glowing from the jug and offered Hornet the filled cup. “I do not expect it to help, but I am told it may.” The Lord stated. “You have often surprised us with your vigor, but now you must make your peace with the bloodless death that finds you. Drink.”

Hornet grit her fangs. “I cannot sit up.”

“Hm.” The Lord hummed, looking her over emotionlessly. “I suppose I should help you do so. Be warned, such strain may hurry things along.”

“I will take my chances.”

“On your own head be it.” The Lord said calmly, and carefully helped Hornet turn onto her back, then to sit up. Without needing to be asked, she pulled the firmest of the pillows to lie where Hornet could lean against them for support.

Hornet glared down at the covers pooled in her lap and kept her peace, though shame was hot in her chest, where she wasn’t still struck through with cold. She thought she’d never hated the void caught there more, though she’d again survived its reach. It seemed to be something that ate like acid at the air, unsaid, that this was what little life was left to her, and what she was now consigned to. It was a dreaded eternity, and it was a heartbeat. Through everything, her strength had never failed her, her own vitality always resilient and everlasting. Her faith in herself and her capability, particularly when so many others had so little of their own, was all she’d had to rely on for so many years. Yet it seemed there was no coming back from this.

It had been clear as day nearly from the start, hadn’t it? She ought to have known. How perfectly, intentionally ignorant of her, to think that just because she’d never been able to die before meant she could decide she wouldn’t now, and once she’d only just found that she wanted to live.

In all the deaths she’d imagined for herself, Hornet had never foreseen one so slow and insidious.

It was nearly too cruel.

It didn’t matter, Hornet told herself with as much conviction as she could muster. Not while she still lived. Not yet. There was nothing for it, and still work to be done.

There was work to be done, and she was not finished. “Where are my siblings?”

“Your ghosts are with Iselda, or else the wanderer they favor. They are well. You, Protector, are not. You die, and as you do, it is the deadly dark that drove me and mine from our lands that you cough up when you breathe. Deathless, merciless Protector, you have at last met your end.” The Lord observed, not without regard, but still with the same calm she’d faced their every confrontation with for as long as Hornet had known her.

“I haven’t yet. How long did I sleep?” Hornet said harshly, finding her arms responsive enough to take the cup from the nightstand and drink. It was only springwater, but the soul from it thawed her heart and her breathing was easier, the weighting, dulling exhaustion less intense. No, she was not dead yet. She had sworn to live, and she’d not make a liar of herself so easily.

If not hope, then there was always spite.

“Long enough for many to think you’d never wake. A week, perhaps more, and I admit I have not been paying such close attention. It is only coincidence that finds me here at all. I am filling in for Iselda, who has rarely left your side. She will make a good guardian for this town once you are gone.” The eldest Lord commented. “You have chosen well.”

So she’d lost a week this time.

“I did not ask any of this of her.” Hornet said crossly, dropping her cup back on the side table and reaching for the entire pitcher instead. Whatever soul was in a cup’s worth of water, it wasn’t enough.

“No? With how relentlessly you have guarded this land, we had assumed it might only be by your choice that Iselda could seize command of this, your kingdom’s last stronghold. Do not drink that all, it will not be on my watch that you make yourself sick.” The Mantis Lord instructed her, crossing her legs neatly.

“I have been distracted.” Hornet replied without acknowledging the command and without meeting the Lord’s unflinching stare, watching instead as she plunged a hand into the soul-rich water and let the intangible warmth suffuse through her chitin. The soft glow faded, but her hand warmed, the ache in the joints lessening to a throb.

“So it would seem. Convenient, that her actions are not your responsibility. Tell me, Protector, did Iselda think she could lie to us?” The Lord asked smoothly, unperturbed.

“The shadows carry with them a biting cold, a lifeless draw. Iselda herself has admitted this, and you know quite personally what they do, if your affliction is result of it. It is only out of our respect for Iselda and, to a greater extent, our respect for you and your dying wishes that we consign them only to seclusion instead of death. What say you, in her and their defense?” The Lord said.

Hornet clenched her hand, still held under the springwater. “What I suffer from is not their doing. They are not your enemy, and they are not a danger, and in this, Iselda did not lie. You know that which stalks through Hallownest below, the Void, and it is not my siblings.” She said, just as coolly as the Lord. “No matter my fate, if you harm them, I will tear you apart.” Hornet said.

The Lord’s mandibles twitched in the smallest smile. “Perhaps I should not have been so eager to see you dead. Do you swear you speak only the truth?”

“I do.”

“Then they will not die.” The Lord said with finality. “Should you recover, I would like to face you once again in fair combat, daughter of Deepnest.”

Hornet gave a dry chuckle that hurt her throat, made easier by the mantis’ promise. “You’ll need to wait for my sibling to do the same, Lord of the Wastes. They’re extremely confident that they could, and I’ll need to knock some sense into them first.”

The Mantis Lord threw back her head and roared her booming, dignified laugh. “Then may your strength return soon, before you rack up a longer queue! I will go and wake Iselda, she has asked that I do so if you woke. She has also been the one to insist that you remain in this derelict old shack far from the wanderer’s home, thinking to spare you the cold you willingly choose to suffer, an admirable, if useless, precaution. So, if you were to blame any for the draft and the dust – and having been made to suffer it myself, I hope you will – it is her. Farewell, Hornet.”

“Goodbye.” Hornet nodded to her as the Lord stood, picked up her longnail from where it’d rested against the bedframe, and left without another word.

As the Lord’s footsteps faded and a far-off door slammed shut, and she was left only to the whistling of the wind through the window’s cracks and the wash of moonlight, Hornet found she’d never appreciated the brutal candor of the eldest Mantis Lord more; and more than ever before, she thought herself not in the mood to talk.

Though pushed aside by necessity, that awful blankness, the revulsion of defeat heavy in her throat, was unchanged. And Hornet found that, as the seconds dragged effortlessly into minutes and she only stared blankly at the empty doorway the Lord had left through, it was all she could do to stay awake to wait for Iselda to come.

When she eventually blinked and looked back to the pitcher of still water cradled in her lap, Hornet saw there was no glow left to it, and that her hands still faintly trembled, disturbing the surface and the silvery reflection of the moonlight upon it. She couldn’t’ve said whether it was because of physical weakness, the cost that prolonged soul-deficiency and constant, unrelenting bitter cold enacted, or how very near she’d again come to losing the shades entirely, and this time only because she hadn’t been able to protect herself, let alone them. The Mantis Lords responded to surety, to truthfulness and a warrior’s ability, and had the current Lords any less than a century to have known Hornet as one who did not lie, and as a warrior of skill unmatched, her siblings would be dead.

The void in her chest pulsed like a living thing, and Hornet sucked in a startled breath past her fangs and raise her eyes back to the empty room just as the temperature around her dropped like a stone.

It hurt, but she was nearly grateful for it to, if only for something more substantial to anchor herself awake with, but more than that, there was something strange to it. The void there rang with an anticipation, Hornet thought with a frown, or else a warning. Like the dark caught in her lungs had itself awoken in a very literal way, not how it’d tried to drown her in her own regrets or how it responded when a shade called to it, but as though it… Knew something. Like a sense, as much as hearing or sight. A change and an expectation in one.

If she hadn’t had experience by now with what came soundless and swift to watch her, she might’ve reacted worse than she did when she saw what it reacted innately to, that it felt like a hand passing over staticky yarn. If she hadn’t already been too tired, in that terrible, indelible way void caused, to even think to stand, she might’ve killed something that didn’t need to die.

There was a shadow cast across from her and along the wall past the foot of her bed, emptier and deeper than the rest.

And as she watched, perhaps literally frozen in place, it rose and deepened further to a formless dark all lined in bitter points, warped and twisted like the silhouettes of fangs. Even before the first whisper could be heard by the touch of the void they shared, unintelligible and overlapping itself like the choppy waves from a sea, Hornet knew there could be no running this time.

It was as though the world had been cut away along a sharp, shifting line at the thing’s edges as it loomed as tall as the roof and then bent to hide the ceiling, too. The outline of it was fringed with slow-drifting, bladed tendrils, each perhaps the size of those Hollow might possess, that gave the impression of depth only as they passed differently before the unstable mass of the darkness itself, lost for contrast. Its proportions couldn’t have been said, only that it was an incongruous thing, like the shadow of something greater. Like a shadow puppet, Hornet thought, amassing itself into existence and unmistakable for all that it wasn’t.

A roiling and huge mass of shifting void and shadowy tendrils and hungry cold, very like that which had descended upon her from above as she’d fled Ze’mer’s home, and Hornet narrowed her eyes and lowered her head bullishly, as though there was any chance at all if it chose to descend once more. Yet what spider of Deepnest would go to her death cowering? If it came near enough without killing her, she would bite it, and it would discover for itself if shadows weren’t seared by venom.

There was something small and hot burning through her shawl, spitting and sparking like a brushfire from a pocket at the side of her chest, and by now it did not occur to her to pay Ghost’s charm any mind, nor think to be rid of it.

She could not stand to draw her needle to the voidborn thing, and so she only stared it fiercely down as it grew in height and width, brushed the ceiling with innumerable soft grating sounds, like claws drawn lightly over a bed of chalk, and then it shrank back, wobbling back and forth to currents unlike those in the air.

And then all at once it crouched into itself and became very small indeed, only about Quirrel’s height at its tallest, taking on a shape almost like that of a bug. From nothing it made a discernible head formed with a half-dozen dissimilar silhouette horns and, further down past what could’ve been shoulders, the tendrils it drew out whipped blade-sharp over the floor as though in slow motion. Like it had slowed itself down, no longer only single-minded intent.

The last thing to come were the eyes, just as blank and white as her siblings’ or those from the cavern above the greenhouse, a cluster of four or five at a time that blinked out and reopened across what might’ve become a face. As Hornet frowned slowly at it, setting the pitcher carefully to the side and drying her hands on the sheets before the water could freeze, the void-thing cocked its head at her with a motion that stopped and started almost erratically, like it took effort to agree with itself on the action.

It had thoughts when she thought to listen for them, as her siblings did, but it was not her siblings. It was not trying to speak to her, and so all she knew, all it could not hide, was that it was deeply, unsalvageably torn. Uncertain.

It did not attack her, nor did it call. Neither did it speak, nor leave. If Iselda came upon the thing, Hornet realized, there would be bloodshed.

“Why have you come.” Hornet spoke up harshly when it did not.

The thing flinched, of all it could’ve done, recoiling from her like she’d chastised it. And then it did speak, in the hardly-words her siblings used among themselves when they did not mean them for her, that took true effort to resolve into anything understandable.

Had a lot of time, a lot of time, lot of time to think, the void-thing said with stuttered thought, as though several spoke from it at once. A lot of time. A lot of time.

It cut off the line of thinking before it could repeat itself anymore, with a full-body shiver. So scared, so scared, too scared, so frightened, the void-thing said then, as though it were confessing to a wrong.

“You are scared?” Hornet asked, her voice hard.

No, no, never, not ever again, the void-thing reassured. Never, never, never. Home.

No, the void-thing continued, shrinking back into itself. No, scared them, scared them, so scared, shouldn’t be scared of me of it of us.

Sibling, it warbled pathetically. Frightened them, scared them, didn’t want to, didn’t ever mean to, not them never them.

“… The little Ghost?” Hornet guessed. She, too, could remember how the pursuing Void had terrified Ghost, been something they longed for and feared to join in equal measure. Hornet could not blame them for either; they had sacrificed more than anyone for the life they’d built from the ruins in Hallownest, and they stood to lose the most of any, for all they’d won from the ashes.

Sibling, sibling, sibling, the void-thing trilled like a rallying cry, and the shadows swelled with it. Only want to find, to take home, come home come home please come home.

“They don’t want to.” Hornet said pitilessly, cursing that her needle was nowhere in sight. For this, she might’ve found the strength to use it.

The void-thing, that had pressed forward until it partially subsumed the end of the bed and caused her lungs to pang with the encroaching cold, again shrank back and became small, blinking across at her with its many shifting eyes.

Know that, know that, we know that, it mumbled. Took time to think. Hard to think, to think, like this. Too many. Far too many, but not done.

“… Are you the Void?” Hornet ventured cautiously.

Yes, yes, no, the void-thing answered. Yes, united. Yes, was us, we were the Void. Now… Not sure, not sure, not sure. Maybe. Lost purpose, lost strength, lost unity.

Changed mind, we thought a lot, took time to think. Scared sibling, so scared, scares us, too. Changed mind. Not sure. Not anymore. Don’t want, not this, never this. Can’t give up, looked so long, can’t rest, not yet, not until all can. But, the void-thing hesitated, and its form shivered and split along a dozen axes, and then it began to slowly slump like it had lost its grip on its ever-shifting darkness, as though it’d loosened the strings to a marionette.

Can’t stop can’t rest, it gasped and drew itself, shivering, effortfully back together. United, not alone, not until together.

“Not until- You think that we want to die? Is that why you hunt us across this gods-forsaken land? You want us to come with you?” Hornet accused. “That’s all?”

Yes, yes, yes, please come, come home, is rest is safe, safe forever, the void-thing insisted. Why run? Why scared, so scared, so angry with us, we won’t leave behind, it reassured as though that would make her agree to its plea. Come sleep, come rest, never pain never hurt never again.

“I don’t care.” Hornet said bluntly. “What you want of us is not what we would choose. Not yet, not for this.” She told it.

Yet? Yet? The Void asked.

“We will choose our times, or perhaps we won’t, but they have not come yet.” Hornet said to it. “If you want to sleep, then sleep. Return to your Abyss. We do not want your interference. We do not want to succumb.”

Don’t understand, the Void said weakly. Don’t get it, don’t understand, don’t, why not? Safe, content, so peaceful, it is peace. Not alone, not lonely. It is peace.

“Have you any idea what you’ve done?” Hornet asked tightly before she could think better of it, rage rising hot in her chest and such a relief to feel after the nothing she’d awoken to. “You seek to take a choice from those who weren’t granted one to begin with. What you are of, it is poison to things that live yet. You are not scaring your siblings, you are killing them. You are killing my kingdom, and all who, in spite of everything, remain to live within it. And we do not want to die.” She spat, furious.

Take? The Void asked, overwhelmingly confused and recoiling from the bite in her words, the venom in her voice only restrained for that she could not physically get up to make her point clear. Killing? No, no, never hurt, never kill them, never, only guide. Protect. Take home, home with us, home to sleep. Sleep forever.

“Think what you will, but we do not want to sleep. We don’t want any peace you offer, and we never will. Now go.” Hornet snarled, and the words rang in the air between them even once the sound of her raised voice faded.

The Void cringed back again as though struck, its shifting white eyes wide and brilliant as it slowly crumpled into itself with such an aching, rising sorrow, such a profound anguish that couldn’t have come from only a single being, that it caught in the dark in her chest and made her cough dripping black into her hurriedly raised hand.

And as she watched, reeling and lightheaded and feverish, it began to cry.

I don’t want to leave them here, the Void wept, unified in this as it hadn’t been before. Not here. Please, please, I won’t leave you here again.

It did not mean her, Hornet knew, yet it meant what it said with everything it was. The sentiment was such a strange thing to coalesce around, for the Void to fight for and fear the very antithesis to what she did. It feared life, their lives, and though it was dead it did not envy her that she lived. It was the end half-resurrected, and despite how tenaciously it hunted her and her family through the Kingdom, it did not wish to be.

There was love in it, Hornet abruptly understood like the understanding had been one of the loud-quiet things the Void whispered seemingly without meaning to, so much love, and no vengeance at all, no anger or bitterness or power-hunger. No doubt there had been vengeance to it, hatred and resentment and a desire to hurt as the little remnants that made it up had each been hurt, but that had not lasted the years, hadn’t become part of what now mourned before her. Things that died so badly as the Vessels had did not die without anger.

Yet their anger was not what survived of them. Rage had not outlasted what now, instead, spurred the Void to act at last. It was not angry. It did not care to be.

It sought one thing, only one; it wanted to reach them, Hornet’s siblings and herself, to help them in the only way it knew how. It wanted to take them to the restful death it knew, and ‘it’ could only be all the others, every other killed little shade, that Hornet stilled to realize must only recognize her by her void and even then, only as one of their own. It was acting out of nothing but this love, what must be a desperate last attempt of the long-dead to take their lost family home with them. To save what they’d long ago failed to save, and help what they never could have hoped to help when they’d lived.

And with her refusal, the Void thought it left them all to suffer. To experience suffering that, of course, the amalgamation had similarly experienced for its own lives, that Hornet let out a shaky breath to know she had unquestionably contributed to.

This was, in part, her own doing.

Hornet stared into the Void, wide-eyed, and the enormity of her failure stared back.

Won’t make you go, won’t force, not anymore, the Void breathed. Don’t want to frighten, never hurt, never again. But there is pain here. Hurts, kills, hurts so badly. Remember, we remember, the Void grieved.

Safer home, won’t let us lead? Only lost, are you lost? Hurts here. Bright. He is too bright, she only hurts, the Void said. Please, please come home. Didn’t want to leave, don’t want to, never leave, want to go home. We want to go, to go home, come home. Come home, come home, the Void pleaded. Together.

It was the Void, and it had nearly made itself the end of her world, of her. It was cold, and uncomprehending, and like any other god, it could never truly understand how it harmed those who were not of it. All that it noticed, the only thing it had noticed in all the mindless destruction it had wrought, was a mind of one of its own that cried out for its actions. Even now she could tell it didn’t understand how it hurt her, a creature that lived and breathed and was smothered even by its presence.

If she was the vengeful sort, and she’d once thought she was, the bitter, wounded anger in her chest for its unintentional cruelty, its ignorance, would have been what she spoke with. The Void had destroyed so much, had proved itself such an indelible threat that she’d nearly chosen to end her own family to destroy it, too. Though that would only ever have been her own unforgivable decision, she wanted badly to blame it, instead.

It killed her. It was lethally and irreversibly oblivious to its own devastation, it threatened her family, it had caused her suffering that she hadn’t known the equal of since before her kingdom had died.

If it died, perhaps if she found the strength to raise her needle while it mourned her, something of what she loved might survive its passing. It needed to leave, needed to die before it killed, the Void needed to be killed because there was no other option. She could not spare the heedless optimism to hope for a bloodless way out any longer.

This was her chance, before it brought her down with it. Before it killed Dirtmouth, too, and those she would not see dead within it. Before it shifted nearer to something that looked like her siblings and she recognized it.

Hornet hated it. Of course, she hated it.

… It was only a child.

“… We will not hurt.” Hornet mastered herself, the tremor that wanted to whine like a plea in her voice and the anger that was not hatred, not truly, to say quietly. She searched for clumsy reassurance she’d never practiced in all her years, all the time that she’d raised her blade instead, to offer those who’d never deserved worse. “There is suffering here, but not as you knew it. Go home, little ones, and worry not for those that are left to live. We will follow in time.”

… Are you sure? The Void asked, slowly and meaningfully and like it didn’t quite believe her, even as, made up of only void as it was, it did not seem capable of disbelieving her as such. Sure you don’t? Sure you will come? Promise?

This was all it cared for. Only this, out of every spiteful and cruel bad-faith imagining she’d come up with to explain the Void’s rise. It was only the lingering love of a thousand dead children, who remembered their siblings and the agony of living and wanted them to be safe, too, now that they’d found the security of their end. Who, unlike those gods who’d first ended her world and unlike Hornet herself, would not accept even the loss of free will as cost for what they sought.

“Yes.” Hornet answered simply, and then she spoke as she would to a hurting child, gentle as she knew how to be and gentler. “You have been very brave, little ones, and what duty you have to your kin, you have completed. We will come to join you when we are ready. I promise. Go home, now, and sleep, valiant little ghosts.”

The Void stared at her with as many eyes as it could fit onto its face, now only about Ghost’s height when they’d lived, and shaped something like a small Vessel of many uneven horns. It stood on the end of her bed, with a vast, twining network of tendrils like sharp-edged vines spreading from where it ought to have had legs, spilling over the sides of the bed onto the floor and up over the walls. The Void watched Hornet, and she watched it, and knew its sorrow and hesitation to leave right alongside its near-palpable hope. In the face of that deepest dark the moonlight was nearly blinding, and its eyes moreso.

Not lying, the Void said at last, like a sigh of relief. Not lying, you don’t lie.

It watched her a moment more, dimming, lulling, all its eyes falling shut.

Tired… It breathed.

And then it dripped down from what could’ve been a body to be only a fathomless, fast-disappearing pool on the bed, all the tendrils falling to thick black and trickling down the walls and over the floor, and then it seeped sluggishly between the floorboards and was gone.

And Hornet was alone in the run-down bedroom, her breath frosting in the slowly warming air, to come to terms with how very abruptly it had all ended. And then, with the night chill prickling unnaturally over her bare chitin and a sweeping lightness in her head, Hornet shakily lowered herself to lie down before she fell, and was asleep as her head hit the pillow.

Chapter Text

Gods in Hallownest were absolute in what they commanded.

Not absolute in power, nor influence, nor even temporal persistence; all things fade, after all. There is always a greater force, something to break down whatever finds its strength failing, to take it apart piece by piece until there’s nothing at all. What lives in Hallownest, same as with anything to live anywhere else, places vaster or grander or happier than the kingdom stolen a dozen times over, lives on the time granted.

It flares, it rises, it stumbles, it ends.

No god is wholly exempt from obscurity, nothing has ever shone so bright it can’t be forgotten.

The Pale King thought himself the exception, and while the aftershocks of his claim would gleam from the clever mortal minds to outlive him and exist always in the worship he carved from the bedrock, even if only as a passing wonder to those who might turn over little dull-featured idols of him in their claws, he won’t ever rise to his feet and seek a home again.

And one day the last pale-ore idol would be forgotten in the last wanderer’s cache, hidden and lost in the bleak boulders at the foot of a mountain far away, and the Pale King might as well have never been.

The Radiance saw her fate more clearly than the Pale King had, and in her desperation did all she could to prove herself the exception. The eroding maw of whatever quietly awaits the forgotten opened to consume her, and she fought with what little is at hand for a dying god to fight with; that which she could make absolute.

She’d been a god of dream, a god of beautiful, radiant light, and she’d loved and been loved. But nothing is without teeth, and all things that know pain also know to bite. One can ignore the pleasant, the things so rote and expected as dreams in the night, but one cannot simply forget that which blisters so uniquely as she learned to. The Radiance burned where she’d warmed before, and ensnared where she’d cradled, sunk deep her teeth and did all she could to escape the fate that she saw coming for her, that she could comfort herself to know came quicker still for the Pale King.

And still she faded. Not in a way that lingered until it was hardly memory at all, like the Pale King would, but with a gnashing of her eyeteeth and a screaming flare burned phosphor-white into the dreams of all who lived to see it, the last fury of what knew it’d been cornered, a god who at last turned to face her dissolution and leapt, seething, into the flame.

And like the Pale King, though she’d have hated any who’d even dream to say it, she was gone.

And with her absence, what had been the old god Unn’s garden and then the Radiance’s domain and then the Pale King’s Hallownest was now nothing at all.

Unn still drifted into her mosses and her solemn, inhospitable lakes, never to grow vibrant again. The White Lady, Hallownest’s Root, did the same, though her fading was not nearly as peaceful as it was pointed. Soon she would shed all the light her rule had granted her and be again as she was before; higher, yes, but sedentary and apart. The bright gods of Hallownest were dim as afterimages over a waiting lens, the land gone fallow and unclaimed.

There was, however, one single force left untouched in the underbelly of the land, beneath all that had ever crawled through its endless tunnels or thought to claim its curious minds. If what was left was a god, it wasn’t a blinding one. If it was a ruler, it did not mean to be.

In ages past, it would’ve done nothing with the power vacuum it so unexpectedly found itself in; there’s no domineering mind to the Void, and no desire to love and be known, or to foster green growing things, or to propagate itself. It was what it’d always been; sleeping, silent, content. Uninviting to all but its own, a passive and perdurable enemy to those bright and brilliant things above it. To say the Void did anything was wrong, because it wasn’t a thing as much as a place, a dark, terribly cold, peaceful place where all the regrets of the dead and dying collected and were soothed. It did not will or conspire as it amassed a power to eclipse all others, drawn from the byproduct of other gods’ wars above its dark and ancient home.

A power that the Pale King would realize, and realize the potential consequence of, only briefly and far too late, and that the Radiance never truly forgot.

It only slept. But Hallownest, or what had been called Hallownest, is a place that breeds things that do not die easily.

In ages past, the Void would have been harmless right up until some foolhardy wyrm (for example) dipped his claws into the pooled obsidian of its restful surface and found his very soul stolen from him as nothing had ever dared to steal it before, hungrily taken like body heat into an ice bath; not to sate any need, but only because the Void had none of its own. It slept without possibility of awakening, content alongside itself, because all the malingering discontents of the dead it collected were only that; dead. It might react if provoked, like a touch-me-not folds away from the wind, like avalanches rage to follow the snowmelt, but ultimately it was an end, not a threat.

The Wyrm had taken note of what he’d found there, seen a need and an answer and put them together to make an unsatisfying, but promising, equation. The Void was void and it was dead and empty and cold and fathomless and everything the Radiance wasn’t, which made it ideal to weaponize.

And, though no one would ever know it, he’d been right in his guess. If one takes a living thing and adds it to the Void, or else takes liquid void and adds to it a binding, what one gets is a voiceless, mindless thing with no will of its own. Something that is caught like a candleflame, that is not at rest as it desires to be. Even severed limbs jump to sparks of electricity, like intent.

And if he’d done that, he would have made a Vessel of god and void with which to trap a seething, virulent dream for all time.

What the Pale King did was not that, though.

No, what the Pale King gave to the Void to hollow out wasn’t yet done becoming a living thing, and as the children of two of the most powerful gods to ever shine upon Hallownest, the Vessels did what any suitably determined, still-growing things might when placed into an inhospitable situation (as the Void could generously be described as); they shifted gears, adapted what they could, and grew anyway.

Such is life.

And what lived down in the Abyss then were living things, though stranger than most. They took on respects of all three influences, though most strongly those of the dark. They spoke, though not as a wyrm-god of light could hear, and they thought, just as clearly as their mother, and they even willed, more strongly than either. The Vessels weren’t the only creatures ever to be born in this way, as the Pale King might have realized if he’d, instead of retreating to save what he could of his soul from the chilling dark, only poked around the recesses of the Abyss a little more, to find the remnants of those who’d come before him or the Radiance or even Unn, the green, sleeping god who preceded them both.

He might’ve found imprints of void given will, the worship of those who’d known the dark better than the Wyrm ever would.

For void given will was what he’d created, in many ways the complete opposite of what he’d set out to make. All the love and desire for sanctuary and odd, dangerous otherness of the Void, and all the clear mind and ironclad will of the Root and Pale Wyrm, which together made a clutch of little children who looked up and dreamed and hoped for something better than the mindless, sleeping dark, that particular gentle comfort at the end of all roads that is not meant for beings so young.

For many of them the Void’s comfort would be their only one, which was not so awful a fate to fall to, or at least they wouldn’t think so once they met it.

For others there would be something vivid and horrible and wonderful that awaited them above, something called life that the Vessels would take to like fish to water, hand-in-hand and brimming with excitement, and a few of those would see all it had to offer before they returned home to rest. A very few would strike out alone, with hatchmates and twins already succumbed to the dark that couldn’t be adapted past forever.

Of those few would be the ones mislabeled and mistaken until even they forgot that they were born from that which loved them like the night loves the winter frost, and who tried so very hard to be what they never could.

But all the Vessels to die in and outside of the Abyss, if they had reason enough to turn from the Void’s opened arms and offered repose, even briefly, would leave behind a shade of themselves. Mostly just a cumulation of all the strongest loves and the other emotions born of it that they’d experienced, which for most living things in poor situations does tend to be net negative, a tangled snarl of anger and fear and confusion, and of regret. A shade in the Abyss wasn’t the Vessel it came from, not truly, not when they had no frame of reference but the Abyss and nowhere to go, besides, and when the light beat down so harshly from above that it made the dark all the deeper and memories of sunshine all the quieter.

Time went on, and as the number of living Vessels in the Kingdom and beyond dwindled, the number of shades grew, far beyond any remnants the void-beings of the ancient civilization’s worship ever formed, even before they’d themselves faded. Years came and went and what little clarity most shades kept, the memories of their lives and their purposes before they’d been just shades, faded and smoothed over with time until they were far more like the Void than anything else.

Not wholly like it, though. Even the furthest gone remembered others like themselves after all else was lost, moments of contact and the joy of recognition of something that was familiar when all the world was inherently strange, something that was family because it was lonely like lost void but still so awake, aware and wondering and not empty at all. The shades remembered each other, even if they couldn’t quite remember the places they’d met, the time of day, if they’d had names or not.

Years passed and years faded and then, suddenly, the haze lifted.

Just for an instant, only for the moment that the last blinding light faded from the world above and it was only them and the darkness. The shades were the Vessels they’d once been, then, freed like the relaxing of pressure from above and below made the Void hold them just that little bit less closely, as much themselves as they’d been the moment they’d left their masks.

And they faced a decision.

The door above them was opened. They could leave. As it’d been when they’d lived, there was still a whole world over their heads, and the way out to it lay open and beckoning as if it’d always been so.

Or, with their minds clear and the reasons they’d lingered looked over with lucidity, they could choose to sleep. The Void called as it had since the moment they’d hatched, and when it promised contentment it did not lie.

A select few, mostly made up of those who’d only just met their ends, escaped before the dark called too sweetly. Many others understood that their hang-ups were long gone to dust, and succumbed to dream no more of what lay above.

But there were many who remembered their siblings, who could, so close to the Void and the newly-unblinded view it had of the no-longer kingdom the darkness now inherited, see very clearly that there were siblings still in that vast, dangerous world above them, little spots of waking void that hadn’t come back to join the whole, that were all alone. The shades who did not leave and did not sleep instead remembered being alone, as the clarity faded back into the wholeness of the shadows. The view of the world overhead came at the cost that befalls all void-beings resting too close to the Void itself, and particularly those not shielded by anything (such as a mask) to delineate them as living; the gradual erosion of the self by the quiet.

In many ways, it made them as they’d been before the Radiance’s fall; persisting for a purpose they couldn’t quite hold onto in their minds, but that they knew was too important to abandon.

Yet now the way was clear. The door that had kept them there, that’d locked them in the dark and had never, ever opened, was gone. The light was gone, too, that which had always pinned the Void down into the deepest darkest crevices. Not only was there nothing keeping the shades in the Abyss, there was nothing keeping the Void itself except its own inclination to quietude, a sleeping beast with its cage sprung open.

It didn’t take much time for those that lingered to come to an agreement with each other, made between all the shades not quite willing to strike out on their own and not quite ready to rest; if they couldn’t sleep until they knew they were all safe, and yet also couldn’t leave and be alone again after so very long waiting and forgetting as one in the darkness, then there was really only one option.

The shades would simply all go to bring the others back. The idea spread like it’d always been in the backs of their minds, filtered through the many without resistance, like water through sand.

They would all go, and they’d take the Void with them.

There’d only been one Vessel ever born who could’ve – after some immense difficulty – commanded the entirety of the Void on their own, but the last shades of the Abyss were, by merit of persisting as long as they had, several hundred of the closest runners-up. Vessels were creatures of ironclad wills, and shades of the Abyss only less individualistic, significantly more dead versions of Vessels, and it wasn’t a very complex thing they sought to accomplish, after all; work together, raise the Void, find the siblings.

And so in a perfect storm of collective willpower, lack of any substantial understanding of how still-living creatures might think (specifically, that they might have their own reasons for not returning home to the comfort of a restful end), and a unique sort of not-knowing-what-you-can’t-do, the shades of the Abyss, with good intentions and questionable methods, united the Void and ascended.

Chapter Text

And so when Hornet next awoke, it was all at once to the shattering crash of thunder somewhere too close to not have struck in the town, and to the barrage of rain slamming against rattling windows.

She shot up in bed with a startled gasp sucked into her crackling lungs, her eyes flying open and her pulse leaping and lethargic, shivering with alarm even as moving so suddenly made sparks dash themselves across her vision, dizzier than the flash of lightning. And then the awful, sickening ache rose to drag her down, and Hornet edged herself back to lean against the headboard with a soft, pained noise she couldn’t stifle, that was lost to the upheaval of the storm regardless.

There she calmed herself by force, swallowed thickly past her dry throat, and once she’d checked that the room was clear both of others and of any shadows darker than the stark, sudden ones cast by the lightning as it again washed blinding over the bedsheets, she pressed a shaking hand to the center of her chest where the pain was worst.

The smooth, scarred chitin there was chilled even to her own touch, and when she breathed in next, Hornet nearly expected the expanding of her lungs to be accompanied by snapping like fractured ice. All that happened instead was that she choked on the breath taken too deeply, and hunched over with her hand pressed to her mouth and began to cough, horribly wet and hacking and each feeling like she’d shattered her own thorax, or else like her chest was dissolved to the frigid black that dripped between her fingers then. Hornet fought for breath, and the void in her lungs fought back, and for long minutes, it seemed as though the latter would outlast her.

Then at last she felt as her throat cleared, and spat the last numbing, pinprick-painful mouthful to the darkly stained bedsheets, and gasped for as much air as she could get, trembling badly for the lack of it as much as the cold and the feverish weakness all the sleep in the world could not have cured of her.

Hornet spent long minutes only sitting there, then, instead of standing again to do as she knew she must, to find out what had happened since she’d been placed here, in what must be her home in Dirtmouth. She needed to get up, needed to know if it’d worked, if the dissolution of the Void’s will meant that it was gone, and if the Mantis Lord had made good on her word and kept her siblings safe, yet while the rain battered itself against the leaking, dripping house and howled in the cracks of the mortaring, she could only wait.

Hornet waited as the black she’d coughed up seeped into the topmost blanket rumpled in her lap, dully watched the little motes of shadow that lifted from it as they faded away, to leave only an innocent smear on the simple, thick quilt.

She waited for her breathing to ease, and her heart to regain a steady rhythm, and for her hands to steady where they lay unused, unclenched for once in a lifetime, over the soft, black-marred blankets and sheets piled over her lap. She waited for the cold to abate, to feel as though she could stand without falling, even with an airy unsteadiness ensnarled in her belly and rising nauseatingly into her throat.

It did not, none of it, even as lightning flashed and was followed by its thunder again and again, minutes crawling by as she refused to accept what was at last unignorable.

That the White Lady had been right.

Hornet again raised her hand to her mouth, but this time it was to muffle the wretched, despairing noise that tried to escape it, that would have gone unheard past the rain anyway.

She was alone, and for only this once, she desperately did not want to be. Where were they all, where were her siblings, her family, that it might not seem that the world was empty, that she lay on her deathbed by herself? How many times had she faced down an end unflinching, how many deaths had she wrought without a twinge of remorse, and how could this, this quiet night alone in a raging storm, seem more unbearable than them all? Hadn’t she known and accepted that she’d die alone, that there was no other possible end allotted to one such as her?

And yet the hiccupy, shallow breaths she took were painful, the way her chest tightened with what could not be loneliness moreso, and if she had to die, Hornet only did not want to die alone.

Where were they?

Hornet bit down on her hand to quiet herself, with only barely restraint enough not to punch through the chitin with her fangs, and took as slow and deep a breath as she could tolerate. Of course, there was a very obvious answer for why her family had not come; if they had been kept away by Iselda and the Mantis Lords, they must have been told why. Ghost in particular could not be kept out of anywhere they wished to be, so they must not wish to be here. They would know that she had been misleading them, intentionally, blatantly and by omission, and that they had been instrumental in pushing her as close to her death as she’d come.

And that, Hornet understood as thunder rolled overhead, was perhaps the cruelest thing she could have done to them. In spite of all her effort and all her trying, to be kind, to be more than she was, to be different so as to fit awkwardly into the better world they had brought about in spite of her, she had hurt them for the care they had shown, so badly that they would not stay by her side as she met whatever slow end the void in her chest could bring.

Knowing so hurt worse than the void-borne illness, far more than the icewater in her heart.

And yet, even now, there was nothing to do but live.

And even now, how badly she wanted to. She had grown used to sunlight again, there was so much in the house she’d been given that shook and creaked around her in the onslaught of the gale outside, that she could fix if she only had the tools, the time, the reason, there was a life here and she wanted it. She wanted it more than she’d ever wanted anything, even if it was not hers to take by right, even if it did not want her.

And what a miserable Protector she made, if she could not see her task through to the end. If she could not see it safe at last, for even now Hornet knew she needed to make it so. Retreated and sleeping the Void might be, though she did not trust such a thing to its word, but even if it had done as she’d asked it, could a higher being blinded to suffering by its very nature truly end so easily?

She doubted so, but she needed to know. She needed to be told, or to see with her own eyes that her family was safe. Even should they despise her, she needed to see that they were well.

As ever, the only thing to do was stand again, and all she could not allow was to lie down to the inevitable.

Hornet took a last breath, slow and deep, and rested both her hands on the bedsheets, effortfully freeing her legs and using the side table, still with a refilled pitcher of faintly-glowing springwater, as something to brace herself with as she stood. Her legs were weaker than ever they’d been, as unreliable as when she’d staggered into the Resting Grounds’ stag station days, perhaps weeks, before. They buckled beneath her twice, sending her falling to her knees and wading through the resulting lightness of her head to stand again, before she was near enough to grab her needle to use as a support.

The blade felt far heavier than it ever had before, even when she’d first taken it up, but the worn handle was sure in her grip and the loop at its end had space enough to grasp with her other hand, the tip sharp enough to sink into the dust and groaning floorboards and find purchase. Her shawl she found lain neatly over the only other piece of furniture in the room, an aged dresser missing two drawers. She leaned against the creaking shellwood and pulled it on, knowing by its familiar weight as it settled over her shoulders that all she’d had in its pockets was at least largely untampered with, and without the energy to go through them to check.

One pocket burned like an ember against her side, the one where Ghost’s stubborn little charm had resided for as long as she’d had it. It was not worth the effort to fish it out to throw aside.

Clothed and with her needle in hand, Hornet slowly, stiffly made her way out from the bedroom’s open door and, in the hall, saw that another was open, too. Though any number of others might’ve come through her house while she’d slept, and though the knowing that they had prickled at her and itched to be worried over, Hornet could not help but think it strange that this one was left ajar, when all the other doors were shut.

It was only a few steps out of her way to check, and how it gnawed at her that even that much effort was something she deliberated over and had to weigh against the storm outside and how far it was to Quirrel’s home, where she imagined (and hoped, for if she guessed wrong, there was little strength to spare past what she intended to do) her siblings would reside.

As it turned out, it did not take as long as she’d feared. Even from the doorway Hornet could see Iselda sprawled out and snoring over a makeshift bed on the floor, and the room utterly bare otherwise save the disturbed layer of dust and the piles of silt sunk into the corners. The bug looked exhausted, curled in a blanket and not awoken even as thunder crashed again outside. The thrown-together bed she slept in, just a few thick blankets layered overtop each other and a squished-looking pillow thrown halfway across the room, looked too haphazard to be made as anything less than the quickest possible option, and too lived-in to be from just the night before.

And Hornet could only stare at the once-mercenary who must’ve, once Hornet had passed out again from the last time she’d woken before she could talk to her, chosen willingly to leave her own comfortable home and partner to keep watch here. To guard her when Hornet herself couldn’t’ve, and when her family was elsewhere.

Kept safe enough to do this last thing, a final effort that even now, when she knew in the lowest, most dreading depths of her heart what must be done, she could not think of lest she lose her nerve. An unsatisfying deed to give for such a debt as she owed Iselda, and a worse one to go to thinking that this might be the last time she’d ever see her, yet the strange, painful loneliness eased for it. Hornet inclined her head, though Iselda couldn’t have seen, and turned away so as not to succumb to the urge to shake her awake, to ask what had happened and if she was alright and if it was finally over, and in doing so compromise her own intentions.

There was something she needed to do, for the void deep below the earth even now called her to sleep, and Iselda would not like it if she knew.

It wasn’t over yet.

Yet it seemed the minutes spent needlessly lingering were for the better; the storm outside had slowed abruptly to a drizzle by the time Hornet left through the wide-swung front door propped open with a sizeable rock, the water pattering like an apology over her mask and not quite coming down hard enough to make the pommel of her needle-turned-cane slip in her hands, thought the dust underfoot had all turned to mud.

When she looked up, squinting against the sprinkling of the rain, the sky was dark and lightless. Night, then, and the clouds covered the stars.  

Even so, the dark was not too deep to see through for one such as her. It was simple enough to find the stone-paved path by the edges occasionally peeking from the solid layer of silty mud washed over it, and her needle did not slip when she carefully dropped its point between the broken pavestones. By now, however, she had regained some little bit of strength, and enough to use her blade as more of a walking stick than a cane. It made the travel easier, and the clean, brisk air and the soft touch of rain over her hands and her face were more vital than ever they’d seemed, sweeter than any such thing had been before, when she’d hardly taken a moment in her life to appreciate them.

She hardly did now, yet the simple curiosity the changing weather posed made the walk seem to take only effortful moments, and then she was stood before Quirrel’s door, peering balefully into his darkened windows.

There was no sound from within, not even the scholar’s rasping, pleasant voice, and no light to suggest a fire, though he might have only drawn the curtains to hide from the rain and keep in the heat.

Hornet was many things, but a coward was not one. She rapped her knuckles sharply on the door, the sound cracking like the thunder past the tuneful drip of water from the eaves.

For long moments there was no sound from within, and she’d scowled and nearly decided to raise her fist to knock again when the door suddenly swung open, and Quirrel blinked groggily at her from the doorway, a piece of paper stuck to his mask as though he’d fallen asleep at his desk and then run to answer the door before properly waking up. In fact, Hornet decided as she looked him over, thoroughly unimpressed, that was likely exactly what’d happened.

Yet the bug looked well, for all that he frowned lightly to see her as though it didn’t quite make sense that he did, without any particular exhaustion to him and with a healthy sheen to his shell, and she reached out to peel away the paper drooping from his mask while the pillbug regained himself.

The action seemed to startle him out of whatever drowsy torpor he’d fallen into. “You’re awake?” Quirrel said, in unnecessary surprise.

“When last I checked.” Hornet said dryly, and cleared her throat when the words came out almost unintelligibly hoarse.

Quirrel made a startled noise, as though the part of his brain that worked had finally kicked to life, and then held the door open wider and gestured for her to come inside. “Come in, I was only just about to put another log on the fire. There’s no need to talk in the rain.”

“I am looking for my siblings.” Hornet said without moving. “Are they here?”

“Your- Ah, the shades. Yes, they’ve been in my company for some time now. I must be driving them up the walls at this point.” Quirrel gave a forced chuckle. “Come inside, sit down, I’ll catch you up on all that’s happened in your absence.”

Hornet took a deep breath, and steadied her grip on her needle, and nodded firmly to him, stepping over the threshold when he gestured again for her to.

The air was less brisk within Quirrel’s home, but for all that he did truthfully have a low fire crackling in the fireplace, it was not altogether warmer than outside. This, of course, was the direct result of the shades clustered in a corner, all huddled together as one dark, pointy mass for which Hornet could only truly make out the jut of Hollow’s horns, as though the great shade had curled around the rest as they all slept.

Hornet took a step closer, and thought better of it even as Quirrel made an aborted, warning sort of sound and set a staying hand on her shoulder, that she shrugged off as soon as his claws touched her shawl.

“How much do they know.” Hornet asked plainly.

“I admit that I’m not sure,” Quirrel said, his voice lowered. “I suspect by now that I have only half the story myself, at best, and I think also that it’s little of my business to. It was Iselda who has come by to give them news about you, and it was her as well to tell them why they couldn’t visit you while you… Slept.”

“She told them that?” Hornet asked harshly, turning to glare at him, though she knew it was not remotely his fault, nor even his doing.

And now, from the moment he’d said as much, she could see the wisdom in the decision; if it had taken her so long to wake the first time, and gods-only-knew how long since then, she might not have chosen to jeopardize any possible recovery with their presence either, well-meaning as they were. The shades might’ve well and truly been the death of her before she could’ve even woken up, if they’d been at her bedside for the wait. It eased something that dreaded, that lay in thorns deep in her chest, to know that even if they still could not forgive her, there was reason, good reason, that they’d not been there for her.

How foolish it seemed already, that she’d been so distraught to wake up alone. Perhaps they had even been concerned, if Iselda been visiting only to tell them that there’d been no change.

No, of course they were concerned about her. It was her siblings she was thinking so lowly of, of course they wouldn’t have left her to her fate like that. Gods, they had to be half out of their minds with worry by now.

The thought hurt as much as it comforted.

“Yes, she did, and I didn’t fight her on it.” Quirrel said calmly. “Indeed, I’d have told them myself if she hadn’t. They deserved to know why they couldn’t visit you, and I regret my part in keeping the secret from them, with how hard they’ve taken it. They’ve been worried, and Hollow especially took time to convince, but if there was even a possibility that their company might have caused you difficulty while you recovered, none of us would take the chance. Truthfully, I’m more surprised you hadn’t told them yourself, if they had any sort of incidental hand in what occurred.” He said, and it sounded as though he’d have liked to tack on, ‘you idiot’.

“I hadn’t the need, nor the opportunity.” Hornet said quietly. “… May I sit down?”

There was a dangerous blurriness crowding her vision, and a loud rush in her hearing for how long she’d been stood, that only lessened when Quirrel cleared two rickety shellwood chairs of scattered writings and old, unwashed plates and she accepted one to rest in, stabbing her needle’s tip into the floor to keep ahold of it.

It was only then, perhaps reacting to the sound of splintering wood that caused Quirrel to wince, though Hornet paid him no mind, that a white pair of eyes emerged from the featureless dark the shades rested as, and then separated from the whole as Ghost, quietly wriggling free so as not to disturb the others as the rain pattered lightly outside. Hornet smiled softly to hear the reassuring thread of their thoughts, far more cognizant and linear than those of the Void, pick up as though they’d just shaken themself awake.

So they’d pulled through well. Good.

She heard the moment they spotted her, the impossible, overwhelming relief that melted something cold and grimly expectant that still crouched in her heart, and then the discomforted fear of the sort that one who did not want to cause harm might have around something very fragile, and then, a quiet undertone, hurt that was slow and marrow-deep, that’d had time to settle.

Even so, it was Ghost, and Hornet thought herself an extraordinary fool for thinking this beyond their capacity to forgive. And forgive they did, or perhaps had, because even now there was no anger to them as they drifted closer and stopped nearly halfway across the room, before Hornet could even feel their cold.

“Let me build up the fire,” Quirrel mumbled, edging around her and, astutely, she thought, removing himself from the situation. She appreciated the bug, and she was glad he had not suffered as she did the effects of void (he must have taken her advice to heart, and of course, he had none of his own to suffer from), but she did not want to speak to him.

He was not the one she had wronged.

Ghost said nothing still, though their thoughts, very faint and distant now as though they feared even that might cause her harm, were unsettled.

Hornet met their pale stare head-on, remorse a bitter and eroding thing in her stomach. “I’m sorry.”

Silence was all they replied with, and Hornet spoke again when it became clear they wouldn’t. “I intended to tell you when you were safe.” She told them, for there was no time for anything but what needed to be said.

“You weren’t going to tell us. Don’t lie.” Ghost said very quietly, without even a greeting. “It’s been almost a month that we’ve waited here, and I’ve… I think I know what happened.”

“It’s nice to see you, too.” Hornet said, more genuinely than she meant to.

Ghost glared at her for that, and Hornet shut up.

“Let me talk.” They said dully.

At Hornet’s mute nod, they continued. “It wasn’t so bad to start out with, right? We were cold, and exhausting, but so was everything else. I like to think that maybe you didn’t even know that, aside from directly calling to your void, we could’ve hurt you back then. We drained your soul, but you had plenty.”

“And then you didn’t. It got worse, and it never let up. And then there were more of us. And then you,” Ghost broke off, and their void sickly turned over on itself. “You have to know that, no matter what, we’d never have chosen to hurt you, right? That we’d never want to, and we’d never do anything that would, if we’d known, right? If I’d known?”

There was thinly-veiled agony in their not-voice, as though they desperately wanted her to agree, and did not trust that she would know even that much anymore. Hornet tightened her claws around her needle’s handle, leaned more of her weight forward against it.

“It was not something I could have lived with allowing you to bear the burden of. Circumstances demanded that I remain at your side, and I do not regret that. It would have caused you needless suffering to know that I…” She broke off at the look on their face.

Hornet sighed heavily. “This is not your fault. I believe the void that even now allows me to hear you speak would eventually have taken this same toll, even if I had never once left a hot spring and not come within arm’s length of any of you a single time. This was inevitable. I did what I needed to.”

“Do you have any idea how much Hollow and I have suffered anyway?” Ghost asked in soft disbelief, their soundless words with the same tune as the falling rain at the window. “I’ve told you before, I’d take any fate, do anything, if only my family did not have to hurt anymore. I didn’t know I was hurting you, Hornet. This is… Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” They breathed, their pale eyes so wide, their hurt so profound they could not even cry. “I hurt you, and you let me. I’d rather have died.”

Hornet clutched tighter at her needle’s grip. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t you know by now? I don’t want you to be sorry,” Ghost said, so faintly. “I want you to live.”

Hornet grit her fangs, and took in a shaky breath.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, for she had nothing else to give. “I will understand if you cannot forgive this, nor trust anything I might say to you. My actions have earned worse. I did not… I didn’t know you would be so hurt by this.” She whispered.

“Yes, you did. You just judged that the possibility of keeping this from me entirely was worth the consequences. You can’t lie to me, Hornet, and I know you. Even without sort-of hearing you like I can the others, I’d still know you’re a terrible liar.” Ghost said. “I should’ve figured it out earlier, but I suppose I trusted you when you told me you were alright.” They said bluntly, and for this, Hornet had to drop their stare.

“But you can’t do this, Hornet. You can’t just make unilateral decisions for us all, and you’re not a queen. I don’t want you to decide how and when I suffer.”

“It would have been torture, knowing that I was making it so much worse just being around you, but I’d have taken it to this. I’d have been able to… To make it less horrible. I wouldn’t have so many new things to regret.” Ghost told her. “But I do understand why you had to try. If I’d never known, and we’d miraculously fixed everything, then you could’ve spared us all of this.”

“I understand. I hate it, but I do. Never, never do anything like that again. Please,” Ghost asked, the plea hanging in the air like a weight around her neck, and Hornet lowered her horns over her hunched shoulders. “Never again.”

“Okay.” Hornet agreed, more cowed than she’d ever heard herself, for that was all she could say.

The rain fell over the town, light enough that the spatter of the drops against the windowpane was hushed, as though the world outside had gone as regretful as she. Quirrel picked at the fire with his poker, little rustling crackles that grated on her nerves like nothing else, until she had to speak and break the silence.

“If ever I am confronted with a situation that impacts you, even should it cause you pain to know, I’ll tell you.” Hornet offered, the words coming clipped and stumbling and, hopefully, as much a half-joke to lighten the tension as she meant them to be.

Let it be enough, she pleaded silently.

“Try, ‘if ever I am confronted with something and think to myself, “Ghost will have an opinion on this,” I will let Ghost know, because they like to know about things and because I owe them one.’” Ghost corrected, forgiveness if ever she’d heard it.

Unearned, unmerited, still such a relief.

Hornet gave a hoarse chuckle. “I’d like to know when you became the level-headed one of us.”

“Whenever you figured out what was going on and just kept soldiering through, I think.” Ghost said with the faintest tint of humor. “That might’ve been the turning point.”

“Hm.” Hornet hummed, with a tentative half-smile. “I take it I was preemptive to think you disgusted beyond words with me, then? I admit I had assumed the worst, waking up alone and half-dead.”

Ghost shivered. “Don’t joke about that.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I’m sorry you had to wake up alone,” Ghost said, and she could nearly feel their sincerity as a press around her lungs. “If I wasn’t… Under any other circumstances, I’d have been there. I was… We’ve been...”

Ghost glanced back at their siblings, restfully lumped together still. “They’ll be glad to know you’re alright. And no matter what you’ve done, I’m glad you’re okay. I’ll always be glad you’re okay.” Ghost said, and there was nothing to their words but the immense earnestness that seemed so unique to them, as inherent as their care and their resolve, things she had never earned and, Hornet thought, no one ever could.

Things they gave by choice.

“It is a… Relief. To see you awake.” Hollow spoke up then, an uncertainty to their words like it was only with effort that they’d drawn themself from silence, and with hesitation like they’d have chosen a far more potent word than ‘relief’ if they knew of one. They said so without moving from the tight coil they’d made around the others, where the great shade was still laid on their side and turned away from the rest of the room.

The littler ones stayed silent and, Hornet supposed, sleeping, as Hollow raised their head just enough for a single blindingly pale eye, the one unmarred by the crack from that last battle, to regard her from over the nest they’d made of their draping tendrils. “Let the little ones rest, but know I am of a like mind to the Knight, and I expect they would be, too. Not a one of us would have chosen to do you harm, sister.”

Hollow stared her down, and there was something in their expression that rang so knowing and edged-sharp that Hornet briefly feared they knew precisely what she intended to do once she’d spoken to them. But then, while she held their gaze and felt sick to the core of her for the idea, something in the carry of their void went slack like they’d lost any fight they’d had, and in its place there was only a very familiar sort of mourning. For something failed, something fought for and lost, that should not ever have come to pass and still had.

Something they’d never have wished for her.

“You are dear to me,” Hollow murmured. “Dearer than my own heart. I have not the stern words that Ghost does, and I could not bear to give them if I did, but know that it weighs heavy upon me that you would suffer so. Heavier, that you would choose to. It is the worst agony you might inflict, to cause me to watch you do so, but never doubt that I love you, little sister. No pain might change that. To shoulder any hardship alongside you, you need only ask – and I beg that you do – so that our burdens, we do not carry alone.”

The request was pointed enough that it set her on edge, and abruptly, Hornet felt that they must know. They had to, to ask that of her. Hornet waited for them to give her away, to say aloud what they knew of her intentions, yet Hollow only watched her with their terrible, absolute fatigue. When they spoke again, it was not of what she expected.

“We are tired. We are all more tired than any creature ought to bear to be, but we are not done. No, we are not done. But it is late. Let us sleep tonight, and speak again in the daylight, when it is easier to stay. Little sister, how this wears on me, and how much a weary joy it is to see you again.” Hollow said to her, the thought nearly stumbling beneath something that felt like weariness, but not the sort that sleep would help, and lowered their head until the gleam of their eye was hidden again behind the curl of their body.

“Now build up the fire, and have a drink and something to eat, and rest. I have been updated on the healthier habits of a living creature, and you have not been following them.” Hollow announced too clearly for her to pretend she hadn’t heard them even if she’d had a mind to, though quietly enough that no other pair of shining eyelights emerged from the dozing pile they’d made.

Hornet could not help but smile very slightly, her heart warmed even as it squeezed like the shade had taken it too-tightly in hand. Of course, they didn’t know; how could they? “I will, sibling.”

And then she looked to Quirrel, who by now had the fire fed up to a blaze and was studiously poking at the structure of the logs, and with a grunt of effort rose to help him.

“Ah, you don’t need to get up, I believe the fire is as good as I can make it.” Quirrel protested, turning to her upon hearing the creak of the chair. It ought to have been, Hornet considered, given that he’d spent nearly half an hour on building it up.

“It must be nearly tomorrow by now, but if you’re inclined, I have a small keg of cider hidden around here somewhere, and a pot to warm it in. Would you like some, and then perhaps we can catch a few hours’ sleep?” He asked, looking up at her in what she could best categorize as vaguely sheepish benevolence, as though trying to make up for having heard all of her side of the conversation.

Hornet thought that the only decent thing he could have done, and wondered when the last time she’d drunk anything but water had been.

A long-ago tea, probably. “I would appreciate a cup. I do not find myself tired yet.” She replied, only a little sardonically.

Quirrel smiled weakly, though it warmed genuine in his eyes. “Hm, you may yet outlast me tonight, then. I’m half-asleep on my feet.”

And so Ghost hovered about them as he warmed the cider and Hornet allowed herself, only just this once, to lean back and simply sit, to bask in the warmth and the rising scent of spices in the drink and the low, pleasant chatter of the fire and of good company. Her siblings, though not yet in masks, were safe, and for that night she was alive and so were they, and so were their friends, even as Quirrel, true to his word, conked out as soon as he’d finished his mug. The rain drizzled light outside, and then stopped, and then the clouds cleared away, though Hornet did not see them.

Even so, and even as she sipped at the sweetened drink that warmed her through even as it couldn’t touch the solid cold of void still caught and mounting in her chest, Hornet knew what he had not needed to tell her.

Some days, or perhaps weeks, had passed since she’d met with the Void, and still the shades were not in masks, though the Mask Maker and, likely, the masks they’d already carved for them, were just down the road. Whatever the wraiths of the Void had done in falling to their sleep, in dreaming no more, they had not lifted its call from her land, and still her siblings could not live. There was something more that needed doing, some further step to take, and as she drank the last of her fire-warmed cup, long into the night and long after Ghost had succumbed to wriggling back with the others to rest instead of staying to watch her almost wordlessly, with worry like she’d disappear if they didn’t, Hornet knew what had to be done.

In truth, she could feel an echo of what they must; the dark still called to her, nearly as strongly as it had when she’d spoken with its united children. The Void still called, and if there was to be life within her kingdom, it could not be allowed to. Not so strongly, not that might be felt and fought from here, the farthest point from the Abyss.

There was something left to be done, and though she hated the thought of betraying their trust so quickly, she hated the thought of their deaths, of the misery of their lives spent as only half-dead, far more.

And so she sighed softly, the sound swallowed by the crackling fire already burning down to cinders again, and set aside her cup, and penned a note for if she did not return, though dearly she hoped she would, if only to see them live before what killed her finally took its toll.

And then she picked up her needle, and left.

Chapter Text

And so when Hornet tried that night to leave, late into the black morning hours and with Quirrel and her siblings all deeply asleep, she found that hope is not so easily abandoned.

“I thought I might find you out here.”

Hornet sucked in a startled breath and whirled around, her careful step stuttered and her claws scratching in the dust, and hissed under her breath for the ache of moving so quickly. Vigil, though she recognized them more by the shape of their not-speech (still horribly familiar, like a language half-forgotten), stood by the closed front door of Quirrel’s home. In the soft brush of the dust-laden wind, shifting Hornet’s shawl and gently creaking in the faintly firelit window frames, the shade was little more than a deeper dark amidst the night, a crack in the diluted grey that the moonlight couldn’t reach. Their eyes, though, burned white and resigned.

They must have been outside all night, and perhaps overheard Ghost and returned to wait her out. However distorted her memory of them, they surely remembered her. Well enough, at least, to have known she would try to do.

No. Not try, there was no other option. How strange it was to be certain of that again, and stranger to have no need to draw her needle to mete it out. Or, she expected she wouldn’t need to. Hornet did not think she could live with another unbearable cost, but she knew she could survive it, just long enough. And Vigil, she thought, must know that, too.

“I’m not gonna stop you, and I really don’t want to see what you’d do if I tried.” Vigil said tiredly. “I don’t trust you, Hornet. Not even a little, and it boggles the mind that anyone does, when there’s apparently nothing and nobody that’s an unthinkable sacrifice to you.”

“There were things that mattered more than what I thought was right.” Hornet said, her voice low enough that it was almost lost to the wind, quiet so that she wouldn’t wake the others. “We don’t have time to discuss it. If you aren’t keeping me here, then I must go. Now.”

“Yeah, I figured. You didn’t let me finish, though.”

Hornet eyed them, their shadows drifting discordant to the wind. “Then speak.”

Vigil gave something like a laugh, strained and a little too rueful to quite be one. “Okay. Before you go off and leave me and Hollow here to watch the kids, maybe to go complete your death wish or whatever you’ve justified this with this time, I think you need to understand something.”

“They love you. They depend on you, ‘course, in more ways than one, but they also really love you. Nettle, Sonnet, Ghost, gods,” they swore, “even Hollow, somehow. They love you, and they care about you more than I think you’re capable of knowing, and if you run off and die, they won’t be alright.” Vigil told her.

It felt like a cruel joke still, but Vigil did not make cruel jokes. Hornet bit down her gut reaction before she could say something she’d regret, though it hurt to hear them say aloud what she already knew.

“They shouldn’t.” She said instead of ‘I know’.

“That’s not up to you to decide. Hornet, I’ve been around you all for no time at all in the grand scheme, but even I can tell that you’ve kinda built yourself a family here. It’s stuck around even while you were off in la-la-land for a month and, gods, they missed you. I’m dubious about how much of that was actually your own doing, but they’re not stupid. So… There’s gotta be something left to like.” Vigil told her with a shrug. “I don’t trust you, but I trust them, I think, and I don’t want them hurt. So you better come back.”

Hornet glanced to the stag station in the distance, its lumafly lanterns a dim and shifting light. Vigil’s words hung leaden in her chest, the weight heavier as she considered what she had left to do, how little a chance it was and how she needed to face it, regardless. Yes, death came for her, but it was one thing to die in what could be months, with enough soul and rest, and wholly another to disappear and never be seen again. Could she leave them like this, in the middle of the night and with no explanation save a sparse letter on the mantel, knowing that even she, the daughter of Hallownest’s need, couldn’t guarantee her own survival?

“No,” she decided, the denial taking her by as much surprise as it did Vigil.

“You think I’m pulling this out of my-“ Vigil started to ask, frustrated.

“No. That’s not-“ Hornet huffed in irritation. “No. I will come back, Vigil.”

“... But?” They questioned, picking up on the unsaid.

“But if I don’t, tell them I love them, too.” Hornet whispered fiercely, before the selfishness of what she asked could overtake her. “Tell them that none of this was their fault, tell them to let Iselda take them to the Mask Maker once it is safe, tell them I love them.”

 Vigil hung silent, their blank white eyes and the touch of their void inscrutable enough that it sparked a frenetic sort of dread that cloyed in her throat, that they might refuse when she could not stay to say the words herself. They watched her, and she them, as though they were sizing her up, measuring her against some unseen standard.

“How do you make it so hard to hate you?” They eventually said. “You’re more abrasive and annoying than ever, now, and you’ve got all the subtlety of a nail to the face, but you say things like that, and I believe you.”

“Please.” Hornet breathed.

“Of course. Of course, I will. Don’t worry, I’ll… I’ll make sure they know.” Vigil agreed, and a tense knot in Hornet’s stomach, like she’d stood on unsteady ground waiting for it to crumble beneath her, loosened. “Can I ask something, though?”

“Anything.” Hornet said.

“What changed? About us, I mean, to make you decide we weren’t expendable. And don’t give me that about the dead gods and duty and all; even if you won’t look at it that way, this situation right now is the exact same as before. The only difference is what you’re not willing to give up, even if it looks like there’s no other option.”

“Vigil…”

“Was I just… Not worth the effort?” Vigil asked, their not-voice suddenly opened to her, and it was raw and bleeding with grief. Their eyes narrowed like they were in pain, and even with only the starlight above Hornet could see where their edges went liquid instead of hazy, like the shade fought back tears. “You love them, and I’m glad they have you caring instead of the alternative, but did I ever matter that much?”

They laughed, just as raw and hurt, their head listing habitually with their uneven horns. “I feel awful even asking, with everything else happening and everyone else you’ve probably killed, but you were my best friend, Hornet. You were my sister. I’d have done anything for you.”

Hornet stared at them, waiting for her to give them answers she didn’t have. It nearly didn’t make sense, that they could ever have thought she didn’t care, that they could think she hadn’t needed them when they’d died. As though their death hadn’t been the beginning of the end, in more ways than one.

And yet, how could they have known? She had not been especially open with her feelings in her youth, could rarely bring herself to expose them even now, and telling anyone what they meant to her had long since been left by the wayside by the time the Infection had begun again. There had been too much to fear for, she’d been so tired and so scared and so angry. Yet even so, she’d thought they’d known. She had thought, at least, that they’d been able to lean on her as much as she leaned on them. She had assumed it didn’t need to be said.

It had happened so quickly. Would they have ever believed her, even if she’d told them that they’d once meant more to her than anyone left living? That she’d never wanted them to die, that it’d been a horrible, unforgivable accident and nothing more? That they’d been the first she couldn’t bear to mourn, couldn’t bring herself to think of and still be able to do what she must?

Hornet took in a deep, shaky breath as Vigil tried to stop their crying, to muffle the grief their void called with, and stepped carefully to their side, to the lee of the house where the wind that carried away the recent rain’s clouds wouldn’t also carry away her words, less ephemeral than theirs.

“When I killed you, I could not live with myself.” Hornet began, very quietly.

“You’re looking awful lively for a dead bug.” Vigil couldn’t seem to help but say, trying for cheerful with their voice still thick with tears.

“Of any point after that, any day I wanted to lay down and allow the inevitable to take me,” Hornet continued as though they hadn’t spoken. “When Deepnest was overrun, when the City of Tears fell, when the cemeteries filled up and nothing, nothing I did could spare those who filled them, when the Great Knights left or succumbed and I was alone, never did I want to join them more than the day you died.”

Hornet saw Vigil’s eyes widen, their void going dreading-cold with unwilling understanding.

“I had done the unforgivable. And I would need to do it again, and again, for a kingdom of nameless fools who would only die anyway. But if I stopped, if I let the seals be undone, then it would be for nothing at all. If I had done what I thought was right, no one in this miserable land would be alive today, and still I don’t know if I’d do it all again if I had to. I don’t even know if I could.”

“You ask what changed, and the answer is nothing. There was nothing special about Ghost except that killing them didn’t work, that they were far too resolute to be laid low by my needle. To say that I’m hypocritical to draw the line here is nothing less than the truth, when I only chose to act differently now that I’d thought it was over and it wasn’t.”

“I am selfish,” Hornet said evenly, and it hardly hurt to say so now, to be so. “But I love you. And I did love you. Do not doubt that I do. You are my sibling, and I would bury gods to keep you safe.”

“Why?” Vigil pleaded. “I don’t forgive you. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive you. You’re all about big pictures and hard choices, why won’t you just get it together and make this one? Why do I matter to you? If I wasn’t enough then, I’m sure as hell not enough now, so why do you care?”

Hornet could almost have smiled. “Because, as someone’s told me often enough, that isn’t your decision to make. I’ve spent a very long time on not caring. Now, come what may, I choose to.”

“I don’t ask you to forgive me. But do not doubt that you were always worth it, and you have always been enough. That, though I imagine it to be little comfort, I could never again choose to hurt you. And though you’re insufferable at the best of times, if I do not return, I will miss you.” Hornet told them, too softly to have bite.

“Gods, you,” Vigil glared wetly at her, a pair of their tendrils wrapped tight around their chest like they meant to cross their arms. “You suck.”

“I am fully aware.” Hornet said.

“Shut up, jerk.” They said weakly. “I’m not done being mad. Wyrm, just come back and tell ‘em what you told me yourself, so I can make your life a living hell for the rest of forever.” Vigil grumbled. “Good luck keeping sand out of your pillows with me around.”

There was precious little anger in the request, though Hornet did not mention it. “I will try.”

Vigil went quiet then, and Hornet allowed them their silence, resting back against the carved chitin wall and crossing her arms tightly beneath her shawl. The night was cool, though not cold, and the wind only just enough to kick up little flurries of the fine, silty dust from the wastes, where the rains must not have wet it down. Above, the moon was soon to set, though the brightest of the stars still hung brilliant and scattered like pale-soul embers. The sight was so solemn, so quietly, immutably different from what she’d long known the sky to be, that it seemed it’d been taken away and drawn up anew, like the skies themselves were as fresh as the rain.

The stars had a certainty to them, one that robbed her of her own, and their cold, faint light could do nothing but remind her of what was to come.

There was no other option, and nothing else she could stand to give but herself.

But she had to come back. Gods and death be damned, Hornet knew she had to come back. This could not be her end, not with all that had inched and scraped its way into her heart, not even if she could not admit what, exactly, she intended to do down in the depths where she knew she had to go, only that it had to be done. It had to be done, no matter those she did not want to leave, no matter those who did not, somehow, want her to leave at all.

“I’d miss them.” Hornet whispered with a puff of cold breath to the night.

“I’d hope so.” Vigil said quietly.

The stars shone, the heavens bordering over the mountains tinted just noticeably lighter than the dark overhead, and the distant sun rose by unknowable degrees. As it had every day of the weeks before, as it would for every dawning after. She would need to leave before it crested the dust-strewn peaks, though abruptly she longed to see the pinked sky it would carry, the levity to the air the godless light brought.

“… The Void is not gone, is it?” Hornet asked, though she already knew their answer.

“No. Not entirely. I’m sure you know something about why it’s not looking anymore, but it hasn’t gone anywhere. Just… Settled down.” Was Vigil’s simple reply. “That’s why the others have been resting so much; it’s easier to ignore the call if they stay together. If they don’t give it something to sink its teeth into. It’s been… It’s been hard on them. Especially the kids. I guess they’ve made hypocrites of themselves a bit getting all bent out of shape about what’s happening to you, if they didn’t tell you that.”

Vigil sighed, and leaned back against the dusty wall by her side. “Can’t really blame them, though. You look like you’ve got about as long in this world as us, even if they won’t admit it. Whatever you do, whatever your plan is, I just hope you’re fast.”

Hornet tore her stare from the skies above and tightened her grip on her needle’s handle, that which had never failed her. “I will be. Goodbye, Vigil.”

“… Bye, Hornet. Good luck.”

And though she did not want to leave, there was nothing left to say. So as the sun rose, Hornet took a deep, bitter breath of the early morning air and made her decision. When she turned away and left down the main road, to where the lights of the stag station had just begun to dim in preparation for the day, Vigil did not stop her, as they’d promised.

The Stag, Hornet knew, could find the way to the Ancient Basin, and she had just strength enough to cross it.

Chapter Text

The Void was a cruel thing, when it was truly mindless.

Hornet was very familiar with cruelty, and so she knew cruel circumstances when they impressed themselves upon her, when they threatened those she loved so dearly that she sought out the substance of their making to save them.

Whatever she’d left in the world above, a city or a kingdom or a world, it seemed inconsequential before the enormity of what now lay open and waiting, what, to her wide, limited eyes, seemed as enormous as it was indefinite. The throat of the Abyss lay before her as if it always had, and the dark drew her to itself still, so strongly that it was as though she’d blinked as she’d climbed down from the Stag’s saddle and opened her eyes just before stepping off the metal landing into oblivion, with only just the awareness enough to stop herself.

If her siblings had come here, they would have been gone even before the dark could’ve willingly made way for them as it had for her, welcomed her into its depths with bladed silhouettes like backwards-facing teeth.

Was this a worthy use of her life, of whatever she had left, a worthwhile trade to make? Her mother’s sacrifice was not hers to give away, not entirely, even if it had cumulated and presented itself as her frantic heartbeat and her tinderbox soul. Hornet was Hallownest’s, and Deepnest’s, and her life belonged more thoroughly to her people than it ever had to herself. She was beholden to the future; she’d been born to bring it about. In so many ways, she had been born of duty, and she knew this better than she knew all but her needle, itself an extension of that obligation.

And it was cruel. Her birth, her life, her endless guard of a dying land and all that guardianship cost her, and now, perhaps, her death.

There was, after all, a measure of cruelty that could not be attributed to intent. The cold and lightless lake below the Distant Village, trawled by gaping mouths of hungry things that had been hungry for so long they’d never known otherwise, it did not seek to harm. The chill of the water crept into joints and made them stiff, the sightless things within it lunged at movement above, but the lake didn’t want to hurt those who fell into it. The long, slender creatures with fanged mouths and pale flesh that parted the water without effort, moved implacable as inching glaciers through its depths and places darker and more airless than Deepnest itself, they had no vindictiveness in them, and no mercy, either.

What the Void was left as, with the last of the shades gone or far above, seemed similar to those twisting, slow things that hungered so endlessly, waited so long and so patiently for what might never come. It was like those creatures that’d haunted Hornet’s nightmares as a little spiderling, even when she’d been cared for, even when she’d had all the safety in the world, curled tight in her mother’s bed and close up next to her side, her mother bigger and stronger than anything and so certain that she oughtn’t have ever feared anything at all, least of all the dangers a long drop below.

She had feared, though, and she’d never once spoken it aloud.

She still feared them, still feared only mindless cruelty, as she stared into the consuming black of the Abyss stretched before her, darker than death and so empty her eyes strained to pick out anything, anything at all, even the blur of her mind filling the space with its own meaningless creations.

The Void was not hers. It might have been kinder if it had been, but it was too empty alongside her racing thoughts, too cold to comfort her heated veins, and while it held no hatred for her, and never would, neither could she understand it as anything but a threat. The Void was cruel in the way a deep snowbank is cruel to a youngling mosscreep, the way a fool-eater is cruel to the little creatures that fall into its maw, how a dead kingdom is cruel to the Protector born to make it live. It simply existed as it was, and its existence brought suffering to those who could not withstand it.

Cruel, and empty, and unopposed. Snow is driven away by the sun and the spring, flytraps are evaded by the soft persistence of slugs’ flesh, and Hornet’s kingdom and family would be made to live again if she had to beat back the third god-power to try and take them from her with her own cold, dead claws.

As before, it felt like rest. The Void felt like it offered a rest so painless she’d hardly know to fear it, if only she took a step into its endless dark. Not forgiveness, never that, but it whispered without voice or thought that she’d never have to end another if she allowed herself this respite. That her siblings and her kingdom deserved better than her, that her own cruelty was too great to be surmounted by deeds or apologies, that, of course, she was too alike the Void in that way to ever leave.

And it was right, of course it was, void did not lie, because what it said was from her own thoughts. But it was not as enticing as it had been before, not nearly as comforting an end. Perhaps it was because she stood carefully back from the lapping of the risen void’s surface and its whipping thorns, or because she had come with too much relying upon her success, waiting for her to come home, to be so selfish as to accept its proposal.

Perhaps though, Hornet thought as she braced herself against the chill, refused to back away though it only grew and numbed deep into her flesh, it was because she was a touch more selfish than she’d been before. It was an offer, yes, but how could peaceful death compare to what she had found above? Not just duty, not only cruelty, but warmth in smiling eyes and the laughter of her siblings and friends, of people who loved her, something that if she thought of it too long hurt as much as it caused Hornet, too, to want to smile. She’d left a home behind, one she’d only just begun to know, one she could not help but long to return to.

And what was hopelessness, what was rest, however entreating its call, when compared to that?

And so Hornet stood firm at the throat of the Abyss, the cold that was not only cold – for she knew it better than that – encircling her with the roiling mass of the black rising from just a nail’s throw below the ancient worked metal of the landing under her feet, metal spattered already in long-bled, long-dried void along the edges. She couldn’t see it, not truly, but it was so very cold there, hoarfrost creeping up her legs and her claws so stiff they couldn’t tremble, something she appreciated in a sharp, ruthless way, so unimaginably cold that she knew the Void Sea had risen to meet her challenge, knew it boiled over itself and cut at the iron between it and her with bladed tendrils as intangible as a last breath and as fine-edged as flakes of obsidian.

Hornet heard the rasp they made, jagged and catching like the sound sought as the tendrils did to drag its edges down her back and shake her open. The Void still rose. It did not come for her; it might not have come for anything anymore. But like a tide, still it came.

Without her bidding it and that she hardly noticed with the numbness creeping up her wrists, Hornet found herself smoothing her thumb over the twisting carved flames of that stubborn little charm, Ghost’s last stand, hot as a living ember in her palm where she couldn’t recall placing it.

The shellwood should have been frozen, or brittle to the touch at the least, yet as Hornet stared down the Void and fought to draw her silk to her side, though she’d been long-since drained of all but the last of her soul, and as the Void took by breaths that little bit that was left, that which pumped her heart and stubbornly ached like jagged crystal shards in her joints where, had she been anyone or anything else, there would have been only senselessness as her strength failed, the little charm burned between her claws like a raging flame.

And Hornet could not be afraid of the Void as she stared into it, though it was exactly as those dreadful pale things that writhed deep below her mother’s nest were, only horribly, painfully aware of what she left behind.

She was still the Protector of Hallownest, and at her back lay all that remained of her kingdom. Hallownest itself, not quite a tomb, not entirely, still as beautiful as Ghost had thought it when they’d seen it with eyes less jaded than hers, still as worth protecting as Hollow had deemed it when they’d been offered a choice, and sought instead of anything else to give all to a hopeless cause without any hope of their own. Far above were the last of its people, still enduring long past when she’d thought they’d all gone.

Their fates lay in her claws, in the sparse shreds of silk she fought and focused and dredged up from the soul of her, that dissipated like fine mist before the Void and cost her the soundness of her heartbeat, faltering in her chest.

Her siblings. They were waiting for her to come home, she hadn’t told them where she’d gone, she loved them so fiercely it was as a heavy red-hot iron in her chest, burning brighter than her anger, the helpless rage that had never truly left from finding the last masks of the last Vessels empty and cracked like forsaken shells.

Hornet gasped a low breath, crackling in her chest like breaking ice, and clutched the charm tight as her stiff tendons would allow.

She hadn’t told them, but they might realize where she’d gone. They would realize, eventually, they weren’t fools. The understanding was far more terrible a cold in the pit of her stomach than any death the Void could call to take her, nearly made Hornet take a step back from the edge.

“Fools. The damned fools.” She breathed, faint and furious and recalling now, far too late, that her siblings were just as stubborn as she was, in itself not any sort of surprise but terrifying when Hornet gazed upon the Void Sea and knew that if they came here, if they met this, they would not survive it.

They were probably on their way. And this, the Void gathered before her and gazing back with endless unopened eyes, would kill them as surely as it killed her.

That could not happen, Hornet knew as starkly and abruptly as though the words had been carved into her carapace, a simple fact more than a promise.

Something huge and terribly wounded, bleeding and snarling in old pain and new desperation and as defensive as her namesake of its nest, reared and caught in her throat. It hurt like she’d been laid open by a greatnail and burned like she’d been doused in the forge it was smelted by, and Hornet knew she’d never allow her siblings to die like this. If the Void rose to claim them, if they died by its consumption, it would be by her failure, and that great something howled in agony at the thought. It would be on her hands, as much as if she’d raised her needle against them, and if Hornet’s resolve had been any less than that powerful thing she contained, her caring and the ceaseless, ruthless defense it nourished, the certainty that she’d place herself between them and any threat, even her own, it would have turned its claws upon her for the understanding as her guilt did.

They were different from Hallownest. The care she had for her siblings was a burden, but no more than the careful, resolute watch over a nest was; they were a burden she had chosen, and with it had come a family she had not earned and never could. Yet theirs was the family she’d been given, and to see them safe and well and happy she’d risk far more than death.

It was that love that the charm of the doomed chose then as her reason, fortifying her to make her last stand, pumping fire and valor through her veins and conviction to her heart and steel to her claws where her other hand curled around the grip to her needle, but though it strengthened and focused, it did not create. Hornet would have died before she turned away and left the Void unchecked, knowing that, even as easily as it drained her, she was the last left resilient to the depths of regret and quietude it wielded.

Knowing that her deadlock with the empty abyssal god had the chance to give her siblings their lives.

A seal.

That was all it needed, it had to be sealed. A coward she’d been to not think of it before, but it would work, she knew it would, and she knew just the one to cast.

Hornet clutched the searing charm tighter still and searched within herself, fangs bared in a snarl, felt the threads of her own pale soul like the touch of maskfly wings, fleeting and infuriatingly distant, deeper and higher than that which she’d use for thread or wound-binding. It was there, she knew it was there, the seal she had to weave was bright in her mind and blinding in her eyes and she could see the flickers of white in the corners of her dimming vision as it struggled to take shape.

A simple binding seal, but with no out. Everlasting. All seals had a filament one could tug on to unwind the whole thing, to send it collapsing to harmless silk. It was necessary, all seals had to be undone in time. All spells had to have an end, and every woven thing began with a single thread, and every single thread that’d ever been had once been cut.

This one would not be so. A seal within a seal, a mark for eternity. The one she’d spent so much time tracing with her eyes and her claws where it was embedded in the closed entrance to the Black Egg, thinking first to look for weakness, then to understand, and then, in her darkest moments, to undo.

There had been no end to find, the thread that would see it unwound tied in place and split three ways, affixed to three Dreamers. Unbreakable. Untouchable.

… Could a Dreamer seal herself?

Without meaning to, Hornet’s grip tightened so sharply that, in the hand clutching her needle, the frozen joints snapped and tore, the weapon falling with a deafening clatter from nerveless claws. It was a blinding agony, and, had she the time to think for even a moment, would have been a far more chilling, mindless terror; she had only two hands, and that was the one to wield her blade. She was all at once almost completely helpless, and Hornet could not even care enough to realize she’d been wounded.

The other hand, however, clutched the charm. When it tightened, and her claws pressed against its surface, the shellwood was weaker than a failing grip. And so when Hornet clamped down on it, it burned a vicious red for a split instant and splintered in two.

And though Hornet’s eyes had fogged over with cold and death she hadn’t quite noticed crawling close, the Void, had it been a thing that watched, would have seen them to flicker a deep and thoughtless crimson, a fire that knew no redress and no refuge, born of the charm of hopeless battles waged for greater things than survival and, dually, from the soul of the Beast’s child, the Protector that had never thought twice of what must be done so long as she was the one to pay its price.

The Void did not see, was empty and mindless, but even an icy lake turns over and into itself when the daylight lengthens, pulling away from the sun.

Hornet’s silk exploded from all directions, thick as iron and quick as thought, and as it whipped about her for a single moment like an unfettered shriek, a hail of strands so impenetrable that all around her hummed and sang with heat and wound so precisely that the only sound was their jubilant twisting through the heavy air, each thread never once catching on another, in that moment the haze of fast-moving soul illuminated Hornet in drenching red and blinding white. She was a figure small and immovable, her eyes burning as a young god’s and mulishly narrowed and her shawl torn about and ripped and singed by the flow of her silk, its duller red casting the white of her mask into stark contrast as she was buffeted by the storm, yet the bladed thread never once touched her shell.

And then Hornet breathed out, a last puff of warmth in the lifeless, frigid air, and the barrier of silk cast itself out over the Abyss faster than she could think to ask it to, winding out and uncoiling, ignited and pale and unrelenting, until it met with the far walls, hours’ walk covered in between slowing heartbeats. The silk twisted and wove around itself in the lessened darkness, illuminated by its own light and following the imprint that Hornet saw so clearly, strained against itself until it was pulled into shape, more immense than any seal a Weaver had ever woven, to span the entirety of the Abyss.

The Void shrank from its glow and the shimmer of its heat, formless and retreating, and the suffocating chill in the air retreated with it.

The Abyss was not a confined place, physically speaking. Though far deeper than it was wide, it could still have fit the largest ten of the sprawling towers of the City of Tears with room to spare, though this was among the few things that Hornet was not aware of in Hallownest. And in less time than it took Hornet’s struggling soul to realize what it had done, the seal had settled, and the silk had dissipated to nothing, burning away to leave only the lines it had laid out. A thin, impenetrable shield, something that could not be passed to leave or to enter, suspended inches above the surface of the Void that drained slowly back down and away from its light.

She’d been a god after all, for only a breath, just long enough to spend her divinity on a greater feat than her father ever had; the lasting captivity of something vast and absolute.

If Hornet had been more alive to notice, she might have realized she’d done it wrong.

This seal was not tied to a Dreamer, nor even to a living soul to fuel and guard it. If she’d known more than the very basics of seal-weaving, she’d have understood that this was because she had been missing two crucial details in her attempt to bind herself to the safety of her kingdom in a final, fatal way; the first and foremost of which was that she had not wanted to be bound. The Fury of the Fallen had not expected survival from its bearer before it was destroyed, but neither had it been a hopeless charm. It was perhaps the exact opposite of hopelessness, throwing its meager lot behind any cause its bearer cared enough for and, of course, including her own life.

The second detail was that the seal hadn’t needed a source of soul in the first place, not to maintain itself once it had been cast. A Weaver’s seal would have needed soul, as a spider, like most other creatures, has very limited soul to use without inviting disaster. Hornet was, however, half-wyrm. And as little as she cared for him, her father had been a god-being of the pale light of mind and clarity and, auspiciously, of soul. From her heritage and her actions, Hornet had once had the brimming potential to become a higher being herself, though now she never would.

Godhood offered in the place of soul is an unbalanced exchange to make, yet it was accepted.

She had begun to trade that away the moment she fell to the Void in the Black Egg high above, and the void that affixed itself to her soul had been growing, feeding, overtaking whatever almost-godhood she’d inadvertently cultivated over the centuries until to use it at last was to forfeit it entirely. Void is the nothing and the dark, and Soul is ubiquitous light. Hollow had been right all along; they could not coexist without the first consuming the latter. In a way, so was the Pale Root; Hornet had been dying a slow death to entropy, the same death her father met.

But Hornet was not her father. She was more than light. Hornet was the Beast’s child.

Yet even a nearly-god, now a barely-god, can use her strength when the desperate need arises, and arise it had. The seal was strong and sung crimson and pale as weaversilk, and though there were ways for the Void to creep out from the Abyss, there had also always been such. The crown of a tree shies away from others growing alongside it, and the Abyss knew the light of a blinding god, any blinding god, as antithesis to its shade. That it was a fiercer light than had shone upon it before was lost to it; it cared little for minutiae, and all the little souls who might’ve were at last truly at rest.

And so as the charm’s influence faded, its final stand over and done with, Hornet did not notice the warmth of the air as she fell, made lighter and less chilled solely because there was no influence of the Void’s to sap its warmth. All at once, the opened door to the Abyss was silent again and, once again, nothing within it lived.

It would always be so.

But Hornet was not one meant to be silent, nor still.

Chapter Text

And so, in spite of it all, Hornet was meant to endure.

Her mother had wished it so with her final waking moments, her father had demanded it as an afterthought to the greater failure he hadn’t survived, she herself had known the alternative was not an option so long as there was reason to. By hope, by need, by the simple luck of a sole survivor, Hornet had from birth been meant to outlast it all. And she had.

It would take something more than an unending god of vast emptiness and final ends to kill the likes of her.

Hornet had, however, died. There was no other possible outcome from the moment a drop of void had clung to her, feeding off her soul, than an end to what it took from. And as it ate away the last warmth of her life, it, too, dissipated, dripped from her still jaw and slunk down, as the rest of the mindless substance of its like across the breadth of her kingdom did then, to join the whole far below, collected again in the furthest abysses.

And that might’ve been the end, if she’d been a nearly-god of anything else than what she was.

It isn’t the sort of thing one thinks of in clear terms or could write out in words, but while the Void is a mindless god of nothing, Hornet was a hard-fought god of ferocity, and duty (cut into her, grown with her like wire tied around a root as it swells with age), and of persistence. To such a creature, poetically-presented times to die are only things to be grimly ignored, or else trudged around like a conspicuous and annoying interruption in a road long-traveled.

Hornet was not nearly the deathless being of will and purpose that the little Ghost was, but with primed circumstances and enough bullish stubbornness, anything is possible.

That did not necessarily mean it was to be comfortable.

The very last flicker of any godhood she might’ve achieved, forfeited for worthy cause and doggedly clinging to her just long enough to spark her sluggish, cold-stiffened heart to begin again to beat, left with a flash of white-hot, driving urgency between her lungs. And in the next instant, Hornet’s chest jumped as she sucked in an overlong, searing breath, and then hissed bitterly against the awakened agony of a body thoroughly taxed beyond its capabilities, that had not been meant to survive through what it had.

Her very first thought as a newly-living being, the last of her existing siblings to earn that dubious honor, was that, in spite of every ounce of her complaining all at once for what she’d put it through, surviving certain death wasn’t as bad as she’d been expecting.

Her second, as she tried to get to her hands and knees and only managed instead to twinge every nerve in her body badly enough to leave her gasping in breathless pain – and breathing, at least, had suspiciously little pain of its own associated with it – was to be grudgingly grateful that her siblings weren’t here to see this.

Hornet lay where she’d fallen, sprawled loosely on her side with her cheek pressed to the cool metal of the wrought-iron landing from the Abyss’ door, and prised open her stinging eyes.

And immediately winced and narrowed them, to see what she’d done to cage the Void laid out in pale and crimson before her, if only because the seal she’d strung over the width of the Abyss was blinding to look upon. Yet she didn’t close her eyes, and with a small, whining huff, managed to tilt her head some to stare out over the twining, elegant swirls of white and the rich patterns she’d cast in red like her shawl.

Weaver-red, she noted, and frowned tiredly at the lacework-grid – what little she could see of it past the edge of the landing – while she waited to be able to move.

That wasn’t the seal she’d meant to make. Hardly resembled it at all, to her distant frustration. It was more spiderwebbed than that, and far less orderly, like it’d all been dashed into place by the flick of an ink-laden quill. There were no pale-soul filigrees written into its borders, and what latticework she saw centered around nothing so obvious as the Black Egg door’s seal had. That spell had been all drawn with formulaic precision, every detail slaved over and carved to be exactly as it was needed, circling back to the representation of her sibling’s…

Of the Hollow Knight’s mask. This one circled, yes, but around-

Oh. There, the central figure. Not done in solid white as she’d expected it to have been, and filled in by a fierce reddened glow, stretched so widely across the chasm that she’d overlooked it at first, still blinking the glare from her strained eyes.

The shape of her own mask, nearly unrecognizable until she’d thought to look for it.

She supposed that made sense enough; it had been her intention to seal herself within it, though what it had taken instead, Hornet saw, made it burn so fiercely that its light gently warmed her face, where she was turned towards it. The minutes passed slow, and she waited for them to tip over into a reason for dismay, expecting even now for this, too, to be drawn out from under her just as tentative hope began to spark, that the inelegant seal would stay as solid as it seemed. Yet the haphazard thing was lit brighter than any of the Pale King’s blinding spellwork, and did not so much as flicker.

It was acceptable, Hornet decided, craning to glare over it to search for imperfections.

Yet while it was indeed more ungainly than any pale seal the Pale King had once wrought, it looked… Balanced. Hornet knew what to look for in a well-made web, and knew better how to weave traps and bandages by intuition alone, and what was not evenly-woven was not necessarily inherently unstable or prone to unraveling.

There was even a beauty to the thing, if she were being egotistic about it. Along the far wall, the curve of an immense, stylized horn stretching away into the dark. Nearer to her and flattened by the angle, still identifiable for their familiar shape, what must have been meant to be her eyes were lit with a firelight-red more steadfast than whatever wavery strength was left to her, a scorched crimson that felt, as Hornet stared into what she could see of them, like a promise kept.

A promise she’d kept.

Oh. She was alive.

… Ghost was going to kill her.

Hornet let her head fall back with a solid thock of mask-bone to metal, closing her eyes to the brilliance of the immense seal, as steady and uncompromising as though it’d always been there and always would be and, at the throat of the Abyss with the new light she’d brought to it falling over her, began to laugh.

It would have been a wretched sound, if not for how good it felt to make it. It rattled and creaked in the aching depths of her chest – already warm like she’d swallowed a bonfire, in comparison to the dead chill of the void before – and escaped her as barking and coarse-edged as if she’d never laughed before, and she might not have, not like this. And it was wonderful, it was incredible, for Hornet realized with it that she wanted to live and she would.

It was seeing her family again, it was assurance at last, it was the end of the last god of Hallownest and the beginning of something she liked much better, it was going home. She was going to go home.

Hornet laughed so hard tears welled in her eyes, and then laughed all the harder for it, the sound faint for the weakness of a mortal body still only half-ready to be alive and strangled with enough joy that it felt like she’d burst from it, like if she didn’t laugh, she’d die all over again. Still it rang out over the empty cavern, haunted no longer, darkened no more but in its furthest recesses, harsh as grating stone and lovely as dawn.

She was going home, Hornet marveled deliriously, she was going home.

Something twinged in her side, as likely some disused muscle or another as anything else, Hornet guessed, and her laughter died down into something bubbling and light that curled up warmly in her heart, the center of her chest that felt hot as if it’d been baked beneath the sunlight. The absence of that awful, sickening cold felt almost alien, and she couldn’t quite put a name to what’d come to take its place, except to wonder if some part of the sun itself had gotten caught there somehow in the moments she’d stood beneath the sky.

It was possible that, even before she’d fallen in the Black Egg, she’d never felt it before.

And once whatever brief and euphoric madness had taken her was mostly passed, and the pressing, inescapable indignity of reality returned to remind her of where, exactly, she lay and crowed over unlikely victory, Hornet tried again to get her uncooperative limbs in order and stand.

It hurt. A good, clean pain, at least, just an exhausted ache like too much work and nothing like what void had done to her, but more than the pain, there was a weakness in her limbs like she’d spent days doing nothing but straining herself when all she’d needed was sleep. Not paralysis, as such, but just as impossible to force past. And then she tried to put weight on her right wrist.

Hornet made a startled squawk of a noise before she could choke it down, and crumpled back to the ground, twitching to press her ruined hand to her belly protectively.

Ah. How could she have forgotten; she’d rendered herself defenseless. One last parting gift of the Void. It felt, with the joints pulsing painfully to her heartbeat and her claws spasming weakly, as though she’d torn every muscle of her fist, and a few up into her wrist, besides. She couldn’t’ve, or else there’d have been far more pain than this and her fingers wouldn’t be responding at all, and she knew this grimly well, yet still the hand was useless until it healed.

Hornet effortfully dragged her hand up beside her face to look it over more closely, and scowled at what she saw. How foolish of her, to relish any success when she wasn’t out of danger.

Wyrm’s sake, she was immobile and wounded at the door of the Abyss. What was she thinking, making such noise? There could well be creatures left to the Basin that had endured the Infection and then the Void’s rise, too, for what lived in Hallownest did not die easily. She could not count herself as having survived until she set foot in Dirtmouth, and perhaps not even then, for there were plenty of strange folk who resided there that she’d only trust as far as her sprained wrist could throw them.

At best, Hornet decided, it seemed she would need to wait out the weakness and limp to the stag station when strength enough to stand returned to her. Unfortunate, but any fate was a better one than what she’d come expecting to meet.

A day or so, she estimated, until the journey would be doable, if frustratingly slow. Hornet sighed, stirring up the fine, black-tinted dust settled over the iron beneath her, and resigned herself to the wait. However long she’d been… Gone, it had to have been well into the evening on the surface. Vigil would have told the rest what she’d asked them to by now, they’d have all found her note, and from it, they could only be assuming the worst. It was what she’d have done in their place, after all.

Gods, but she wanted to be home, so that they need not mourn her when there was no need to.

The thought died with something strange she felt in the metal the side of her mask was pressed to, an almost-rhythmic, inexplicable vibration rattling through the iron landing. Hornet ached far too much to raise her head to see what it was, and knew better than to even if she could’ve, as the faint resonance resolved into clear and heavy footsteps, the hurried scrape of claws over stone that faltered and stopped as soon as they transitioned to clicking over metal.

There was a pause, during which Hornet tried to slow her breathing to feign death, for she did not recognize the gait. It couldn’t have been one of her siblings, for there was no welling of foreign thought and emotion in her mind, as the moment where the strange bug must have stood frozen at the mouth of the Abyss stretched on.

Who, then? Who was left, who would venture so deeply beneath the Kingdom, who could?

There was a tentative, hesitating clack as the stranger took a step out over the black-stained landing, then another, and Hornet could tell by how quickly it grew close that this bug was easily large enough to do her harm. She couldn’t move other than to twitch her disobliging limbs, still as stiff as though they’d forgotten how to work, and so Hornet forced herself instead to remain still and limp. It was only some scavenger, it had to be, an uncoordinated hopper or mawlek or something searching in vain for a meal.

If it decided to make do with her sorry shell, she still had venom and a hand’s worth of intact claws to make it regret the attempt.

What an undignified way to die that would be for the scavenger, Hornet thought with some satisfaction, and closed her eyes to the thin light streaming in from the Abyss door behind her as it was shaded out by whatever had come, that fell heavily to its knees (not a mawlek, then) and rested a shaking hand, claws light as moths’ wings, over her shoulder (not a hopper, either).

Strange.

Hornet could not hold her breath long. It escaped her in a weak fit of coughing, and the hand tightened lightly over her arm, as though surprised. And then, ever so gently, the tall bug bent over her to edge their single arm beneath her weight and support her head in their hand, and to slide her upright to rest against their folded legs.

Even before she unwillingly opened her eyes, that still stung in the seal-light like they’d been staring unblinking for far too long and, even now, her vision only slowly realigning to focus on something so close up, Hornet blearily recognized them by the half-forgotten way they stiffly held themself. Like they were standing on ceremony, or like they knew no other way to be, countered utterly by the delicate, painfully careful way they leaned down to touch the tip of their mask, smooth and pristine and pale, to her forehead, just between her horns.

Hornet’s eldest sibling, living and whole, cradled her close and wept, utterly silent.

“Hollow,” Hornet rasped, her voice breaking on the single word, and Hollow shook their grand head weakly, the slightly smaller, less prideful face that the Mask Maker had crafted for them, that she remembered as theirs from when they and she had been very young. The point of their mask, undifferentiated into mandibles or chelicerae like a truly living creature would have, scraped faintly over the bone of her horns, but when their black tears dripped down from it over her, there was no pain.

Only a faint cold, as light as a chill on the breeze.

Oh. Of course, they were silent; the void in her chest was gone.

Hornet spent the barest second to regret that she’d never hear them again; it had become a comfort to, somehow, while she hadn’t been paying attention. And then she cracked a grin, something lovely like sunlight beaming again within her, and butted her head up into their chin for the sheer fierce joy to be capable of it, that they’d have a mask and she’d be alive enough to do so at all. The effort was a weak one, and she thought she’d be shamed by it later, but for now she felt wrung out, as though there was only space within her for one emotion at a time, each more overwhelming than the last.

No matter that she couldn’t hear them. Most creatures had no godly nonsense to act as a soul-deep, direct line of communication; they’d make do. They’d speak, even if never exactly as they had.

“Hollow,” Hornet said again, coughing through what might’ve otherwise come out as an incredulous laugh, raising the frustratingly weak hand that wasn’t an agony to move to try and push away their big head so that she could see them past the fall of their clean, storm-grey cloak, that along with the underside of their mask filled her sight entirely. “Are you well?”

For a long moment they did not reply at all, only tucked her close, hid her beneath the breadth of their shuddering shoulders, lingered over the embrace as though they’d never expected nor hoped to have been granted it, not in an age of protection of a kingdom they had not truly been part of and a sister they’d never truly been able to shield. The Abyss was soundless, and so were they, yet Hornet could nearly feel the anguish with which their tremulous claws cupped carefully at the back of her head, that she could not yet so much as lift any higher than it was already under her own power.

It was in how they hunched over her, as though, even with all the battle and horror done and over with, they could protect her from it still, and it sobered her as little else might’ve.

An anguished relief carried clearly even in their silence, of a horrible thing that had not come to pass but had drawn so near, so near to, and which was nearly as awful a thing to feel as the horror itself. It had not occurred to her that Hollow might take her end harder than she would. Ghost, perhaps, but Hollow she’d thought would understand.

Perhaps they did. Hornet did not know what she’d have done, if their places were reversed now.

Her sibling’s pain was not an easily disguised thing, nor was it a feeling unknown to her, and it made what she’d done, what she’d come to the Abyss to try and give, seem now far starker and more unconscionable a fate than when she’d stared it down. It made the arm holding her so tightly, that she’d ordinarily have prickled for the closeness of, feel more akin to a protection than a painful strangeness, as though Hollow had plucked her back from the edge of the world and forced her to understand what she’d tried to do.

It made her say nothing more as the moment ticked on into minutes, as their silent, breaking tears slowed, and only wordlessly press her face into their hand and again close her eyes and, this once, quietly accept the gift they offered her.

They would mourn if she’d died. They would remain with her if she lived.

What an awful thing to know, and yet, what a relief to. She’d never have chosen to care for another named being if she’d known it would be like this, yet she could not regret it, even now.

For there was a life for them both – they two that had suffered the death of the kingdom entrusted to them – that began now with the final passing of what had come before.

It was minutes more before the subdued rustle of their cloak quieted, the only audible sign to betray the emotion that carried strong in their grip and juddered in their breathless form, new and sturdy but not ever like a living bug, and it was only the sound of her shallow, faintly hoarse breathing that was left, growing easier with each warmed puff that rose into the darkened cavern, left to echo from the ever-silent Abyss.

Once it had, and the claws of her unharmed hand began to be easier to tighten, Hollow nodded, briefly and reassuringly pressed their cheek to her horn, and squeezed her just tight enough that she huffed in surprise. And then, without hesitation, they scooped her up and got to their feet, so unsteady that she briefly worried for how very close they were to the precipice of the Abyss before they found their balance.

They took a few steps, and then stopped and shifted their weight. Her needle she heard the click of as Hollow nudged it with a foot, perhaps considering how to carry it back, too, but there was only a single pair of functional hands between them and quite a lot of Hallownest to lose it in, so Hornet only mumbled for them to leave it be.

She could come back for it. It pained her to think so, but it would only be a hindrance at best, now. Until she had strength enough in the grip of her off-hand to carry it, at least.

Hollow nodded their acknowledgement with a somber dip of their mask, and Hornet gave an uncomfortable hiss as they then tried carefully to position her into a carriable arrangement with their single arm, an effort for which the greatest help she could give was to be slightly less limp than a drooping, underfilled sack of sand.

“Stop, stop, I’ll handle it,” Hornet said through gritted fangs, every overused muscle screeching at her for her impudence, to think to use them so soon, and found the constant, burning pain was a good enough reason not to demand to walk herself back to the surface, even as her pride tried to suggest she do so. She’d been the one to wish she could go home quicker, hadn’t she? Just this once, she oughtn’t look a gift stag in the mouth.

Hollow gently nudged her horn in apology and allowed her to try as she would.

To admit – at least to herself – that she wouldn’t be able to make it to the Stag under her own power did not bite at her as much as she’d thought it would, though. Perhaps because it was an issue already auspiciously solved, or perhaps because it was Hollow who waited with infinite patience for her to stiffly, slowly arrange herself with her arms loosely looped around their neck and her chin rested over their shoulder, her sibling who had seen her far weaker and younger than this.

In a way, it did not feel strange at all for Hollow to be the one to carry her like an overtired child from the Abyss, where now the Void slept beneath the light of her seal – and always would, if she’d made it well enough.

For even with all that she’d done, Hornet mused to herself as her sibling ducked (they were shorter now, though not by much) beneath the arch of the aged door, all the unforgivable mistakes and all the long life she’d lived, all that she knew they were not ignorant to, she thought they’d never quite stopped thinking of her as the little sister they’d known an age since. As though the long years, the death and rotting of a kingdom under her useless watch, the small eternity Hollow had spent beneath suffering unimaginable, it was all only a brief hiatus before they had found her again, and knew her to be the same as the intractable spiderling that had caused them such petty difficulty running around the palace, before it all.

As though in spite of it all, they still thought her a worthy thing to protect, and a sister deserving of love.

Hollow gently leaned their head against her, pinning her with care to their shoulder with their horns, to hold her safely in place as they ducked again to pass through a tunnel with a ceiling too low to stand straight beneath. Hornet could not swallow down the wavering exhale that escaped her, though she tried to bury it in their soft cloak.

“Thank you.” Hornet said very softly, so as to give the words the weight she intended and none of the coldness she feared would color them instead. “For coming for me. I’d not have asked you to.”

It would take time to readjust herself to the Vessels’ silence, Hornet realized as Hollow only shifted to support her weight with greater care. They pulled her more to the center of their chest, so that they could push aside a cluster of trailing, ribbonlike dark roots with their head and shelter her from the shower of blackened dust as the ancient things snapped and broke.

“I wouldn’t’ve wanted you to, either, should this not have ended as I’d hoped. Perhaps even if it had; none of us could have expected this, instead. Yet I am glad you did.” Hornet told them, resting her cheek against their shoulder and looking back to the darkened tunnel that fled them.

These roads before the throat of the Abyss were blackened by the mark of centuries’ void, and she couldn’t quite remember how they’d seemed when she’d stumbled through their shadowed halls on the way to meet the empty dark, yet now they were unmistakably lighter. The air was easier to breathe, and didn’t press and choke as it had before.

Hollow’s even stride hesitated just noticeably as she spoke, and they touched the side of their mask to her horn, that Hornet supposed was the easiest way they had to tell her that they’d heard her, that they understood.

She hummed, resting her chin over a fold in their cloak collar, far too tired and far too… Too something, to be ill at ease, even for all the many and varied reasons there were to cause her to be. It might have been the odd and half-forgotten familiarity, simply the fact that she wasn’t alone down here, she thought. Or else, Hornet considered, that now there truly was no greater calling anymore, neither for her nor for Hollow.

The thought was more freeing than she’d expected it to be, when she’d only ever been resigned to it, before. Perhaps it was because it did not mean death any longer, as she’d long thought it would.

Her sibling walked at a measured clip, steadily making their way back through the same tunnels Hornet had staggered down to descend to the Abyss, with purpose but not undue haste. The leisurely pace did not bother her, and her peace with it was as surprising as the reasoning that came alongside; their family waited above. Not duty, nor suffering, nor awful, unforgivable choices to be made.

Only their family, and the home that she would repair and make livable as soon as she was able. A kingdom to rebuild later, though perhaps only Dirtmouth would be enough for now, since it’d never be a true kingdom again if she had any say in it. She would grow strong again, already there was strength enough to her for her grip on Hollow’s cloak, from the arm she had thrown over their shoulder and the only hand she could move the fingers of, to tighten when she willed it.

If Hollow had their mask, the rest must be able to have theirs as well. How long had she been unaware, lying somewhere between life and death with the Void cowed at her demand, that they’d been able to call the Stag back and ride down to find her? Had they realized immediately where she must’ve gone? Had they taken up their mask as soon as the Void’s influence faded, and left the moment they’d lived again?

They must be terrified, those Hollow had left at the surface. Ghost, Hornet thought, would be a singularly difficult reunion, bearing in mind how she’d left. To think, the only time she’d ever gotten away with a bald-faced lie was this. There would be hell to pay. Perhaps they’d take Quirrel’s pen and paper in order to tell her precisely how furious they were, once they realized she couldn’t hear a word they said any longer.

It would be cowardly to let them rant for a time before she clued them in about the void she’d lost, and particularly so when they’d well-earned their right to a good tirade, yet still the option appealed nearly enough to consider it.

Yet she could hardly think to dread it, and only pressed an uncontainable smile into Hollow’s collar for the image, for she was alive to see them so. How unexpected, how incredible, that the life she had no longer wished to leave behind had instead been granted in full, by stubbornness and the good luck to have just what she’d needed on hand, a gift that Ghost might not even remember giving.

And surely they would forgive her this, once they were done writing out their exasperation, for she’d saved herself, too.

There was that vastly unfamiliar joy rising again in her chest, irrepressible amazement still so strange that Hornet was sure she’d never felt it, that came for what lay only hours’ ride above, that which she’d prised from the jaws of fate and defended to the last and even past that. Yet even so, even with all there was left to fix and the work that could only now begin, she wanted only to sleep as long as she’d be allowed.

And even this was changed, for it was only her shiveringly exhausted limbs and the haziness of her mind that caused her to be so. No soul-deep fatigue, no terrible tiredness for what she’d done, what was left to do, weariness measured in the stretch of eternity. It was all still there, she knew, still locked back somewhere deep within her where it’d again find her someday, but for now it was easily shooed away by the world newly opened to her, for they were all safe. When Hollow took her back home (and that, too, was a thing long unfamiliar), she would reassure herself that her siblings were well, that the darkness was indeed laid low enough for them to be safe, and then…

And then, they would turn towards what came next.

“I do not think the littler ones can write. I know Ghost can, to a degree,” Hornet considered aloud, her words echoing in the ancient caverns and mused back at her by the resonant walls. “I know Vigil is well-able to. Though I cannot say I’d have chosen to keep the ability, considering all that came with it, I will miss hearing them speak.”

“We will make do; you all will learn quickly enough. Perhaps that scholar- Quirrel,” Hornet amended, “will have a better alternative, for I cannot imagine that you or they will take easily to silence again, when before you could voice every complaint to come to mind.” She said, the words stretched around a yawn. “Something else to dedicate our time to, in the wake of all we’ve seen the back of, now.”

Hollow nodded, and tapped at her back almost admonishingly, for all that the contact was so light that she hardly felt it.

By the time they’d made it back to the immense, sprawling grounds that had once housed the White Palace, and now held only ruins and fading light, Hornet had succumbed to close her eyes and allow herself to be lulled by Hollow’s even, loping gait, and to let her mind wander. There was plenty enough to think of, plenty to worry at and enough unignorable paranoia waiting at the edges for her to know well that, if she began to think of any one thing, it would all come rushing back and there could be no rest.

And rest, to her resignation, would better serve herself and the others than anything else that could be done. They were safe. They were safe, and she was tired, and finally, finally there was no fault in a moment taken to breathe, to allow herself to breathe. She ached in every limb badly enough to quash any restlessness, her back was watched by her eldest sibling, and there was nothing to do but wait until she’d healed enough to be of use again.

Yet, though sleepiness stung at her eyes and weighted heavy in the rhythmic shift of her head to Hollow’s stride, there was something that pulled at her to be said, that returned again to the forefront of her mind as many times as she pushed it away.

“… Do you remember sunlight?” Hornet asked slowly, half-asleep.

After a moment, Hollow nodded shallowly.

“From before, I mean.” Hornet clarified. “Before… Everything.”

She hummed, blearily thoughtful, as Hollow stepped into the shattered, displaced hall that’d lead them to the lost palace’s stag station, and closed her eyes. “I did. Do. I have thought of it more often than I’ve thought of many things that I’d expected to miss far more. I only saw it a few times, only once with my mother.”

Hornet buried her face in the softness of their cloak, that smelled only of the cold and the stone and faintly of the stagways, where they must have come through before they’d found her, and her breath warmed it enough to be comfortable. “It began to seem a very foolish thing to desire, once I had thought of it enough, remembered it too many times. It began to seem like something I hated, for it was what I could never again have, and why ought I waste the effort to want something I wouldn’t see again? And then, once I had thought often enough that I shouldn’t, I did not care about it at all.”

What was sunlight? Light from the sun, yes, but there was something warmed to bursting in her chest still, something she couldn’t truly name, that when she tried to, all her mind could offer her was that it was like sunlight, as lovely as sunlight, just as hearth-warm and dearly missed.

It was something she’d lasted a very long time missing. She’d been wrong; she had known the feeling before, and before it all.

Even now, it didn’t seem like something she had earned the right to. Yet it persisted.

“I’d survived so long without; I knew I did not need it. I’d nearly forgotten it entirely, and enough to know better than to want for it. Did you remember that it is warm, for all this time? That it makes all the world seem to live, that it comes in the morning and leaves at night? I would understand if you did not; the Old Light was a near enough comparison to make anything warm something to be despised.”

“But it is,” Hornet murmured insistently. “It is warm, and it comes and goes, and I need it. I will give it to you, as well, if I can.”

“Yes,” Hornet whispered as she drifted off, for once wholly at peace, trust that could not be given except irrationally, when it is earned. “I will give you the sun, that not even an old, dead god might take from you. I will give you the sunlight, and we will be warm.”

Chapter Text

And so the little Ghost did not trust her for long enough that she wondered if they ever would again.

The Kingdom had fallen into an uneasy peace over the months, once the Void, and what void it left strewn about the places it had invaded, retreated without a trace of itself save blackened stains in the stone where it had lain, scattered patches of frost-stricken plantlife in Greenpath, a few acres of shriveled mushrooms in the Fungal Wastes. There were few pieces to pick up, given how intact – if somewhat discolored in places – it had left the lower tunnels, and little that needed to be done by Hornet or the survivors save to move back to the places they’d abandoned.

Though even that meager effort had proven eventful. A handful of the mantis youths had started their molts just as the darkness receded, and though they’d been shiny and newly-emerged for weeks now, were still reluctant to go back to their village with the rest of their tribe just yet, dragging their feet to leave the companions they’d made of Dirtmouth’s more permanent residents.

With the Mantis Lords still fairly peeved with Iselda, it had fallen to Hornet, in the capacity that she was the one they most respected, to negotiate their stay.

And while she hadn’t particularly cared either way except to be frustrated by how many young mantises were desperately eager to face her in a duel, the Lords had offered an armory and a half of various nails taken off long-gone travelers and a monthly hunting party to top off the burgeoning town’s supply needs, and Hornet had judged that worth tolerating a few wayward newmolts. It was good experience, the Lords had laughed when she’d sourly brought up the incessant sparring matches their young tried to start.

They enjoy the sunlight, they’d gone on to say, and Hornet knew the Lords would have given much more to let the first of their young ones in centuries to have the opportunity do so.

The reclusive Nailmaster, Oro, she thought his name was, had stayed in town. The other one and his husband had as well, though their shared home was empty much of the time, and Iselda had told her the pair had taken to being wandering artists. A third of their like had even puttered down from the mountainside, to Hornet’s distaste, and his and Oro’s shouting matches were steadily becoming less frequent. They got on best, it seemed, when suffering the presence of the youngling mantises as pupils, and having both annoyances occupying each other’s time suited Hornet’s fraying patience well.

Quirrel had gone nowhere, except to take her siblings on expeditions down to the Archives to requisition equipment to outfit his steadily-cluttering home-turned-lab. Hornet appreciated when he did; she’d deny death for any one of them, but by the gods, sometimes she needed a few hours of peace. The once-wanderer was an inexplicably good friend, and she’d recently worked with him to build what he’d called a ‘hand-crank centrifuge’, for which he had translated an acid-vial record of communications the Weavers had once kept with the Archives in return, letters from long before the Infection.

She was loath to admit how much it meant to her, to read about a time when Deepnest had prospered. She thought he knew, regardless.

And so Hornet watched, grim and ever-taken aback, as the other new denizens of Dirtmouth steadily settled into the odd sort of community that’d sprung up there, the fading town growing like a weed in the ashes of what came before and laying down its roots with equal stubbornness. The folk were kind, or else largely tolerable, and if not, someone else’s problem. Iselda kept it in order, and Hornet kept it fed, and it thrived as the days warmed with the slow turn of the land towards summer.

The last Weaver herself, Plait, resided in Deepnest. Hornet had visited only once, just long enough for the emptiness of her mother’s nest to impress itself upon her again, for the harmless, empty dark below the Distant Village to claw up her back and make her think of failures and impossible cold and her heart slowing to a jarring stop in her chest. It was a special kind of disgust she felt with herself, to be so horrified of her home (that she’d never feared, never) that she could not stay, but Plait had been well and so was the clutter of spiderlings she and Midwife fawned over, so Hornet decided she could at least keep her distance with a clear conscience.

If she forced herself to go again, Ghost would know, by her foul mood with herself when she returned (having had the whole stag ride to wonder why it still hurt so badly to be reminded of an end she’d gone willingly to), and she could not bear to make them worry.

Not with how distant it made them when they did, how they’d hover at the edges of her sight without ever coming close enough to talk, how they’d leave her the honey-drizzled cakes she’d come to love where they knew she’d find them when she wandered in for a snack, and steal her work tools when she needed them late at night, and it was impossibly frustrating because she couldn’t simply ask them to stop.

They cared, the little Ghost cared so deeply, and they did not trust her.

They’d forgiven her, and Hornet doubted there was anything in the world that could be done to them that they wouldn’t find it within themself to forgive, but the difference between forgiving and forgetting was a wide one. And what had been done to them, what she’d done to herself, Ghost did not forget.

And the worst was that she knew they weren’t even mad; anger she could have dealt with, argued out of them, she understood being angry at what one couldn’t help, fury for that which couldn’t be saved. No, the little Ghost was not angry with her, or disappointed, or even betrayed by the single blatant lie she’d ever gotten away with, she thought. Far worse, they did not seem to trust themself to come closer to her than the other side of the house, startling away like a kicked mosscreep whenever she happened across the room they’d been in and causing twice the guilt to burn low in her stomach. And they did not trust her, not in the least, when she told them she was well again, as strong as before, that there was again nothing under the sun that could bring her low.

They didn’t trust her when she told them she was alright, and truly, this time.

The greenhouse, with its foundation already laid out behind their shared home and its plans conceived in the Grey Mourner’s home months before, was coming together as the project she worked on when this bothered her the most, taking shape slowly, as she couldn’t stand to think of it being built by any hands but hers.

Iselda had advised her to wait out their avoidance, to be patient with them and with herself, reminded her that they could’ve taken it far worse than this. And then, that Hornet was still ‘a damn idiot for what you tried’, to which Hornet, in retrospect, could only agree, albeit begrudgingly; desperation made the vilest paths appealing, and she knew such far, far too well.

Perhaps well enough, now.

Hollow, for their part, had haltingly (they found sign hard to learn and harder to use, and writing for the purpose of communication only somewhat easier) suggested that she talk to them, reminding her that Ghost wasn’t unreasonable, only scared. And then they’d made her wait while they carefully crafted a full paragraph to tell her, in detail, how they weren’t at all pleased with her either, and if she ever thought to try anything like she had again, then she should simply not, and if she did regardless, then they wouldn’t let her go alone no matter her opinion on the matter.

Hornet found herself becoming very tired of being told, in not so many words, that she’d acted the biggest fool Hallownest had ever seen. Yet she thought it would be frustration of the kind she’d never known that’d cause her to snap at Hollow for it, and so she had only sighed and allowed them their hurt and their fear, for that was all it was. It was easier, now, not to expect cruel laughter for her shortcomings, and easier still when in place of mockery, Hollow was only as solemn and sincere as ever they’d been.

It was Hollow that she found herself with most often, and they worked alongside her to make their shared home livable when they weren’t practicing their sign, or staying holed up in their room penning something they hadn’t showed her yet, hadn’t shown anyone but Ghost and even then, Hornet suspected, only because they shared a room.

Together they’d all but rebuilt the old, crumbling Dirtmouth house that, so soon, already felt more like a home than anything had since Deepnest, centuries before and half-forgotten. A different kind of home, though, and it had to be; in every possible way, it was different.

It was drenched in sun during the days and weathered the rains, coming more frequently now, that she worried for in those early days when it became clear that the roof and windows leaked like a sieve. There were storms here, thunder that rattled the doors like garpede tunneling and unnerved her into half-expecting the walls to fall around them, lightning the littler ones found so terrifying they fled to her (even now, even knowing as they did what she’d done, what she’d told them all once she’d recovered strength enough to say it all at once) to clumsily soothe them through it.

The roof became the first thing she repaired, cannibalizing curving slabs of worked chitin from the abandoned old buildings around them to replace theirs with, cementing them in place with the same sticky silk she’d always used to make her temporary hides.

And as Hornet and her siblings tolerated the clouds, so too did they see as much or more of the sun.

The first weeks were hard as she grew used to all the sunshine, inescapable and hot as nothing had ever been and always, always a relief not to be cold instead, accustomed herself to all her family and all the talking, all the learning to soften her harder edges with the finer points of permanent cohabitation, of communication mishaps and flaring tempers and, ever an undertone, their simple presence. The fact that she was rarely truly alone if she was home, and even stranger, that she found, with careful consideration and the coming and going of the days, that she preferred it so.

It was all but wholly safe in Dirtmouth, where Deepnest had ever been dangerous. Her life within the town was something she built from the ground up, instead of something already long-since in place for her to rise to meet. Her family here she loved just as dearly, but they expected nothing of her except that she show up for dinner and help them with their nail practice and to be there, in the same way Hornet slowly came to know that they, too, would be there when she needed them.

It was often far too much in those first weeks, and unused as she was to any of it, she kept her room dark as delving tunnels and the windows covered with blankets and her door locked, just for a place to be that wasn’t so much for a time, when she needed it.

Hornet had needed that reprieve less and less, as time went on and the sunlight didn’t seem so overwhelming anymore, as it ceased to seem like something brief to be tolerated (to remember and miss when it left) and more like something that was hers, that wouldn’t be taken away just because it was sometimes more than she could bear.

And as she grew into it like a thing starved for warmth melts into an embrace, uncertain and wanting what was given so dearly, Hornet made her home seem more like their own by degrees.

She patched the worst of the holes in the walls one by one, routed the tiktiks laying eggs in the attic and cleared it of dried-up nests and silt, replaced most of the crumbling ceiling piece by piece; an ongoing operation with how low the roof curved in places, and with how unaccustomed Hollow had become to needing to keep track of the height of their horns, even the somewhat smaller ones crafted anew for them. The windows were caulked and did not rattle any longer except in the worst weather’s squalls, the front door (with Hollow’s help) taken off its hinges and redone, that swung open now as though it longed to each time it was closed.

She’d cleared out and rebricked the fireplace and made an evening of testing it with her family and Iselda and Cornifer, roasted palm-sized springtails until the whole room smelled deliciously buttery and laughed so long and loud she’d felt sick and giddy with it, half-startled with the unfamiliarity of it all and too pleased with what she’d accomplished to care, even as Ghost sat on the opposite side of the room from her and she didn’t dare try to talk to them and risk driving them off from what was theirs as much as hers. With Hollow to one side, steady and content and turning a spare speared springtail over the blazing fire for whoever’d want one next, and Iselda to the other, slapping her bracingly on the shoulder as the shopkeeper roared with laughter for something Vigil had signed with emphasis, comfortably full and with her back watched as the night deepened outside, Hornet thought this, then, deserved not to ever be forgotten.

This, then, meant more to her than anything else.

And as Hornet settled into the life they’d won together one unconscionable self-sacrifice after another, so too did her family, in their own ways.

Hollow, she thought, had a harder time of it even than she did. They still froze sometimes, when addressed directly by anyone who wasn’t Hornet herself, or else one of their siblings. She learned that they held themself stiffly and properly when they remembered the Pale King, and hunched like a wounded, beaten thing when they remembered the Old Light. She discovered they could not answer any question she had save the simplest during the former, and sometimes not even those, and that they wanted only to write and write and write until the quill shook in their hand and tore jagged, jerking holes in the paper during the latter.

Hornet could not argue away the dead gods that still hurt her eldest sibling so, nor kill them any more than they’d already been killed, so she only let them be someplace quiet when they acted too close to how they had long ago in the White Palace, led them home and away from whatever had jarred them into complacency and sat with them until they could again believe they were not to be a mindless thing crafted for the purposes of others, until they could remember they had purpose of their own.

When they shook and curled into themself and laid their horns back, lowered and afraid against their shoulders, recalling instead what she only knew the worst of, the centuries they’d burned alive in the Black Egg, she’d recall what they’d told her of such memories and take them by the hand, so that their claws wouldn’t find the stump of their right arm that had not grown back. Hornet would take them somewhere quieter, for these attacks came on much more suddenly than those from their upbringing, and squeeze their hand so tightly she could hardly feel her own, and speak aloud to them of whatever she could think to until their shaking slowed and their claws uncurled from rigid-tight. Then they would dip their head low to butt it gently against her horn, and press her hand with theirs one last time, and leave to write out what they could.

They would weather the past together, two who had suffered it more than any other could ever know.

Yet Ghost got to them first more often than not when Hornet was not immediately nearby, as though summoned in by a call. For these attacks, she worried less; Ghost was better with such things than she was, and Hollow would ever be safe with them.

And such days, difficult as they were, were steadily growing to come less often than in those first few hard weeks, that terribly tense month when Hornet thought not one of them truly expected this to last, not truly, anymore. When her siblings in their own ways feared what would come next so deeply, unnamed horrors and unknown pain that, as time went on, never did.

She waited, but nothing could ever be what the Infection and the Void had been. There were no gods left in Hallownest, none that could take it from her again.

Better days soon outnumbered the worse ones, for them all and especially, she was glad to find, for Hollow. Occasionally they’d take some geo from the jar on the kitchen counter, where Hornet made sure to leave enough for anyone to peruse the little market that’d sprung up in the center of town and come home with something nice, and steel themself to venture into town with that as an excuse.

Hornet thought they liked the walking, having had so little chance to do so before, or perhaps how it was a rare bug that did not greet them with a smile and a call of their name anymore, or maybe the little choices picking a treat to come home with provided them to make. On these better days they’d often return only some half-hour or so later, all but buzzing with energy and with the air of one who’d pulled off something very daring, and they’d hold their head a little higher and offer whatever they’d come back with for the twins to be delighted over and then preen over their victory for hours.

Hornet found their triumphs infectious, could rarely contain a grin when Hollow came back smiling in every way but the literal.

She smiled often these days, it seemed.

Ghost did, too, she thought. Their room, when she ventured there to ask something of Hollow, was steadily filling with drawings they’d made and pinned to the walls, the shelves she’d built them (a peace offering, one they’d accepted only after she’d made everyone else matching sets, and one that had changed nothing between them) growing cluttered with keepsakes and charms and little shiny things that glittered in the light when the evening sun came in through their window. Ghost seemed constantly to be in the company of someone in Dirtmouth if they weren’t hanging around her just out of sight, and she saw their friends pleased to see them more often than not.

Still they avoided her.

Vigil, who’d taken to divvying their time between bothering Oro and chaperoning Nettle and Sonnet, whom they’d come to dote upon above all others, had essentially only told Hornet she’d well and truly made her bed with this one, though in less polite terms than that. They were better at using sign already than Hornet was at reading it, which was what saved them as they’d run away with a jaunty wave before she could parse what they’d told her.

Hornet was tempted to mend their latest ripped cloak with rude words embroidered in the seams as retribution, but to reply to their prodding in kind still felt… Strange. Like she’d be trying to behave as a person she no longer was, taking liberties that she had not earned.

Yet Vigil still caught her at the kitchen table while she ate breakfast some days (a marker of Iselda’s influence, to insist that regular mealtimes were a must) and talked to her while the sun came up, and mornings spent with them did not feel like anything but fragile and comforting, like hope for a tomorrow.

Vigil’s real advice for her was to rip the bandage off, so to speak, and just apologize. They were of the opinion that Ghost and Hornet both were being ridiculous when, with all the Vessels safely revived and in masks and whatever void had been killing her apparently gone for good, there was no reason for Ghost to be afraid of hurting her, and no reason for Hornet not to suck it up and stop dancing around the issue. Furthermore, Vigil thought there was no particular excuse for the avoiding they’d both done; that not only was it messing with both her and Ghost, but the two of them were setting the whole house on edge, too.

When Hornet had only scowled and replied that she had apologized, repeatedly, Vigil brought out their inkwell and writing pad in frustration to tell her in no uncertain terms to try again, and better, this time.

And then they’d written that they didn’t like seeing Ghost upset like this, like they got to being whenever Vigil themself tried to talk to them about what was bothering them. And then, in smaller glyphs, that they didn’t like seeing her upset like this.

When Vigil pushed their chair away from the table and stood to go, Hornet had stopped them. And, against her better judgement, she’d promised to try.

Vigil had seemed settled some by that, or at least less likely to storm off. They’d taken her by the arm all at once and squeezed it tight, almost roughly and without looking her in the eye, and then hefted their heavy nail over their shoulder and left.

And Hornet had gone out to work on the greenhouse.

It’d only been a week since then, and she’d spent the time mulling over what to do. Hornet felt she thought best when she had something to busy her hands with, so she’d begun to set the empty frames for what would be the greenhouse’s walls. The foundation was long-since lowered into place, heavy slabs of stone she’d pulled up the Dirtmouth well herself and leveled until they were more even than the ground they were set into. To support the walls she had metal scavenged and melted down and beaten into shape from old, mangled cast-iron fences below, perhaps not the best source but the best she could find. The glass, and the appealing stained glass of brightly-colored flowers she’d found for one wall, she’d taken without guilt from the White Lady’s Gardens and the City of Tears, and it waited in her room for when she was ready to use it.

It wouldn’t be a beautiful structure when she was finished, more of a lovingly-crafted eyesore sprung up in their backyard in the shadow of a large fossilized carapace half-buried in silt that'd hopefully catch the worst of the wind, for Hornet was no architect or skilled constructer, but it would see plenty of sunlight, and hold plenty of plants.

She’d just about decided, while painstakingly soldering a joint into place with the ancient, untrustworthy tools the Nailsmith had loaned her, to take her siblings’ advice and broach the topic with Ghost, no matter how dedicated they were to avoiding her whenever the issue crossed her mind, when the little Ghost themself appeared like their namesake from around the side of the house.

As though they could tell she’d finally worked up the courage (no, it was not cowardice to have given them space to think, only kinder not to demand they speak to her before they were ready to) to find them, though they had no way of knowing that of her any longer.

Ghost made no sound louder than her soldering tool and the fire she’d built up to use it with, so it was only when she glanced up to reheat it that she saw them standing there, the hot sunlight shining directly overhead bleaching their pale new mask as bright as warmed porcelain. They carried their nail on their back, as always, just as she couldn’t bring herself to leave her needle behind even as her grip was still weak while her hand slowly healed. But Ghost also carried their own pad of paper, smaller than Vigil’s to be less bothersome as they traveled and bound with a simple spine of thread for convenience, clutched tight in their hands until they’d pricked the pages with their claws.

As she noticed them and set down the tool where it wouldn’t melt or ruin her work, Ghost, too, stepped closer until they were nearly within arm’s reach, stoic and silent without their void’s carry to tell her what they thought, but with a stiffness of their shoulders, a watchfulness to them that made her think they might throw the writing pad at her and sprint away.

Ghost had always been made of sterner stuff than that, though, and with a final glance down at whatever they’d written, they offered it to her.

Hornet had meant to apologize, meant to tell them in whatever words it took that she regretted hurting them, regretted lying to them, that she’d sworn to herself to do better, to show them that she meant it when she said she’d never do so again. And even without doing so, she knew the effort would be useless; they knew what she’d done in going down to meet the Abyss, knew full-well what would’ve happened if she hadn’t and knew also that she’d meant to come back. It wasn’t something she needed to apologize for.

And it had been cruel, nonetheless. It had hurt, and it would have hurt far more if she hadn’t lived through the Void’s sealing, and that pain would exist no matter what she’d done or why.

Hornet realized she’d been sat still on the ground and staring at them, frowning, instead of accepting the notebook when Ghost stepped closer to tap her on the shoulder with it, and then offer it again. She took it from them, and glanced over what they’d written.

I’m sorry I’ve avoided you, Hornet read silently, and stopped to argue with them about it.

“You’ve done nothing to apologize for.” She said heatedly, cut off when they gave a somewhat exaggerated eyeroll, a little of the tension they carried lost with it, and tapped a light claw on the page to request that she keep reading.

She scowled at them, but did so.

I’m sorry I’ve avoided you for so long. I don’t truly know why I have, I-

Here the writing was cut off, and the next few lines scribbled out until they were illegible. It picked up again halfway down the page.

I am not mad. If I was, I’d have told you so, and this could have been dealt with the day you got back. Nor am I sorrowful, though there is much to grieve. All I am is afraid, and nothing else that’d make a better excuse, because I’m often afraid, and it’s never stopped me. And what I’m afraid of doesn’t make sense, even to me.

It makes no sense, but I can’t so much as see you without feeling as though you’re about to die, like if I watch you too long, you’ll just sit down somewhere and never stand back up, or that something terrible will happen that I can’t keep away, and it makes even less that I haven’t gotten over it even now, weeks later. I’ve tried so hard, Hornet, but I can’t push this aside, and I don’t know why.

Maybe it’s because it’s all my fault.

“You know that it’s not, little Ghost.” Hornet said quietly. And then, realizing Ghost had no particular way to know where in their letter she’d gotten to, “It has never been your fault.”

They tapped the page again dully, as though they only wanted this over with, and gave no other response.

It is my fault you got so hurt, and even so, I’d never have done otherwise. I would have killed the Radiance no matter if I’d known what it’d bring. I’d have never left Hollow, or Sonnet and Nettle, or Vigil, even had I known what it would do to you to have so many of us near. Does that mean I lied, when I said I’d never willingly hurt you?

I know I wouldn’t, I know I can’t, but Hornet, I am so, so scared I’ll be what kills you. I’m so scared you’ll let me.

The next sentence was smeared to unreadability, and the lettering neater when it picked back up, as though they’d left and come back to writing it.

It feels kind of silly to believe it so strongly, but I keep having nightmares. I didn’t even know I could have nightmares. It’ll be you, or Hollow, and sometimes the others, and you’ll look me in the eyes and lower your weapon, and I’ll raise mine. I never remember attacking you, but the dream always ends with broken masks, and I know I’d caused them.

I guess you must think I’m very upset with you, with how long it’s been since we’ve talked at all. I haven’t really told you otherwise, after all, and I asked Hollow not to tell you about the nightmares.

“That is what I’d assumed, yes,” Hornet murmured aloud. “You have been having nightmares?” She said louder, glancing up at Ghost.

They didn’t meet her gaze, only jerkily nodded to the paper, their hands clenched tight in their cloak and all their weight leaned so far back on their heels, and away from her, that she thought they’d fall over. The sight curdled something remorseful in her heart, such that she had to force away the words that burned in her mouth, that might’ve been reassurances and might’ve been frustration that they hadn’t told her when she might’ve helped. Hornet knew well that neither would have done any good, when the name and reason she now could give to their avoidance was fear.

Fear of her, however indirectly. How hadn’t she known?

Ghost looked back to her and, seeing she was making what she belatedly realized was likely an unhappy scowl at them instead of reading, took a step back and again gestured to their notebook.

She read.

I’m so scared, Hornet. Not just for you. I’ve never been so scared, and there’s nothing to do about it. There’s no kingdom gate to break down, and no god to kill to end it all, nothing of substance I can do except wait here for whatever comes next. I’ve been teaching the twins to fight, even though Sonnet hates using a nail, because I keep wondering, what if something comes for them and I’m not there? I keep watching my friends and my family because if I don’t, what if they go away, what if they get hurt? What’s next, Hornet? Will it flood, during one of the thunderstorms? Will everyone get sick again, with something that we can’t cure? There’s so much that living bugs need in order to keep living, what if you run out?

I’m so scared, and it never stops anymore, and I don’t know how to make it, Hornet, because there’s nothing left to fight.

And then, after a third of a page taken up by sentences scribbled out and written over,

You terrify me most of all, I think. I can almost trust that Dirtmouth won’t fall to some impossible, awful calamity and cease to exist, because it was here before me and I think it’ll be here after. I believe Hollow when they tell me that there’s nothing they couldn’t protect themself from, nothing they’ll let harm them again, and that Vigil’s nearly as unbeatable as you, and that one of us is always watching the twins.

But I can’t trust you, anymore. I wake up in the morning with frost on my blankets and your blood in my nightmares, and until I see you scolding Nettle for tracking mud in the house again, I think you’re gone. When I’m too close to you for too long, even only in the same room, I wonder if you’re dying again and I just haven’t noticed. You don’t like people to see when you’re hurting, and I wonder if I’m about to see you die, instead.

I know you don’t have any void anymore, and none of us can really hurt anyone like that anyway, now that we’re alive again, but I can’t ever seem to prove it to myself. It’s sort of ridiculous, but I can’t take the chance, not when it feels as if, if I stop being careful for even just a moment, something horrible will happen, and it’ll all be gone.

So, I’m sorry I haven’t spoken to you. I don’t know if I’ll be able to give you this letter, but it feels wrong to make you worry so much, like Vigil says you do. And Hollow thinks it might help the nightmares, if I talked to you about this.

I don’t know what to do, Hornet, but I miss you.

Hornet lowered the little notebook to her lap, absently smoothing out a corner with her thumb where it was crinkled and worried to soft fibers by Ghost’s claws, as they tended to do to the edges of what they wrote on. Her heart ached in her chest like they’d taken it in hand and squeezed tight, and she drew in a slow breath to settle herself, to think, because if she acted as she thought to then she’d only try to assure them again that there was no reason to fear for her, or else give them a platitude that she knew to be true but that they wouldn’t, and either frighten them off or cement in their mind that she couldn’t be trusted even to be honest about her own wellbeing, even now.

How her family had drawn her into taking more care with herself for their sake, she’d never understand.

This was what the problem had been, all this time? That Ghost only couldn’t think that they could keep the life they’d won, they and her and all the rest together, fearing it would be torn from them the moment they turned their back? Fearing more, somehow, that she’d be torn from it if they so much as lowered their guard enough to speak to her, as though they were the lightning rod of poor luck that would bring about her downfall.

It was an irrational fear, if one born in experience enough to make it terribly clear how it’d come about. Hornet trusted in what she saw, what she could hold in her hands, and their home she’d helped fix and the folk she’d chosen to care for were very real, hardly fragile. She was deeply proud of her family for their strength, such that she knew she needn’t worry overmuch for them while they lived their lives except in the usual ways, for matters mundane and emotional, only. But Ghost had more cause than most to fear what they loved being taken away.

Ghost had lost as many loved ones as they’d ever had, and each to the choices they’d made, and though they’d each come back to them, that was not something one forgot.

Hornet sighed, very softly, and flipped closed their notebook to set it down in the dust where she knelt. She and Ghost were nearly the same height like this, and when she raised her eyes to the little Vessel, she saw then the tremor in their shoulders, how their hands were fisted tight at their sides in the shadow of the cloak she’d made for them, like they wanted badly to run and only stayed through force of will. To see it and know why they wanted to bolt weighed heavier in her throat than she’d thought it would, and though she had to narrow her eyes against the midday sun to look directly into their pale mask, she thought their eyes was dark enough to spill over, like they were moments from tears.

How she’d ever seen such a thing and thought to ignore it, she’d never know.

They’d made her better, the little Ghost had. All of this, their home and their lives and their family, it was all by their doing, directly or indirectly, and the first step towards it had come when she’d thought them to be the Vessel to end the Hollow Knight’s agony. The change had not nearly been solely their doing, yet it was remiss to think that they hadn’t begun it.

It was a cold and painful thought, to wonder who she’d have still been if they’d never come.

Someone bitterly ruthless. Someone who thought little of lives taken, someone pained and alone in all the world with no desire to be otherwise, who’d wholly given up on all but what duty remained. Someone that disgusted her to know, whom she was only desperately glad not to be.

“Come here.” Hornet said softly, and opened her arms to them.

Ghost jolted back, a hand coming up to clutch at their cloak where it draped over their chest, digging their claws into the fabric as though to physically hold themself away. They stood stock still, with just the shifting of their cloak in the slow summer breeze to show they hadn’t frozen solid in spite of the day’s heat. Watching her, waiting for her to reach out and take the choice from them.

Their wariness ached like a clawed thing, sunk into her chest.

“You know when I lie,” Hornet told them, gentle as morning dew. “And I have given you little reason to trust that I won’t. So come and prove for yourself that there’s no more to fear, little Ghost. Come here.”

She held her arms out to them and marveled that, though her work had not been light, they did not shake. There was value she’d long taken for granted in a sound body, in one’s health, and whatever divinity she had lost, Hornet was not weakened. Changed, painful and scarred where before she’d been whole, but what was a slow and mortal recovery to what had come in exchange for it?

Hornet saw as Ghost wavered, tears at last overflowing and their claws clenched so tight in their cloak that she heard when it tore and they jumped at the sound, their eyes never leaving her as though they thought that might’ve been what hurt her. She saw as they looked with something like desperation into her face, as though if they’d seen a shadow of doubt they might’ve turned and left.

She saw when they found nothing, and bent their head to scrub messily at the dark dripping tears staining their mask with their free hand. They fought a fear she couldn’t banish in their stead, that consumed them as Hornet’s own demons had until so recently consumed her, that they would need to decide, as she did, to take a leap of faith towards or retreat from until it destroyed them.

Hornet saw when they chose to place their faith in her.

Ghost came closer by painstaking inches, waiting at each to see if she’d move and, when she didn’t, taking a step more until they were close enough to loosen their claws from their own cloak and sink those of both hands into Hornet’s shawl instead. And then they gave a full-body shudder, blackened tears dripping down the pale of their mask, and crumpled to their knees to all at once lean their full weight against her, to press their hard little mask to her shoulder and shake like they’d shake apart, and Hornet closed her arms around them and held them so tightly she nearly thought they’d complain.

They didn’t. Ghost was solid and trembling and whole, alive, and only cool in the sense that the dense shade of a tree might be so on hot days, and Hornet let out a shaky breath for how precious it was that they were, how much relief and gnawing guilt there was in that they’d chosen to trust her when she asked them to, in spite of themself, in spite of everything. She tucked them close under her chin and rested a hand at the back of their mask and felt the almost unnoticeable chill as their crying dampened her shawl over her shoulder, and rocked them ever so gently, like they were far younger than they were. Hornet drew in a slow, uncertain breath to prevent herself from letting the tears pricking at her own eyes fall, and rested her cheek between their horns, and waited.

Once their shaking had slowed some and their little fists unclenched enough that she thought they weren’t in danger of poking torn holes in her shawl, Hornet spoke.

In a lulling care she’d never have thought herself capable of, she whispered evenly to them. “When I died, I was cold. Colder than death, colder than anything. Don’t fear,” she told them when they stiffened. “Hush. Don’t fear. Am I cold, now?”

A pause, heavy and deliberate. A headshake, minute and hesitant.

“Good,” she murmured to them. “I am sorry to tell you of it, but if it will banish your fear, I will do so. Only, tell me to stop if need be, tap twice with any hand or pull away. I will not think less of you, little Ghost.”

They did not, only buried their face deeper in the neckguard of her shawl, so she kept on. “I could not breathe, then. In my lungs, the void collected, and my breath was frozen when it ought to have been warmed. Listen, can I breathe?”

Hornet took as deep a breath as she could, and let it out easily, and Ghost was a little sooner to nod their head.

“Good. I enjoy the ability. It is a helpful pause, before I say things I haven’t yet thought through.” Hornet said wryly, and Ghost’s crushing hold on her lightened some, like they almost thought to sign to her exactly what they made of the dry joke. Hornet’s chelicerae twitched in a smile.

“Void caused my heart to slow, to hardly beat at all. Any touch of it, any stir of my own in my chest. Many times, it stopped my pulse entirely. Little Ghost, my heart still beats.” Hornet said fiercely to them, a promise. “And I will not allow it to fail. If you ever cause it to do so again, if you ever think to harm me, I will stop you. If there is any reason to fear my life, our lives, will be cut short, I will warn you and you and I, the most capable to ever set foot in my kingdom, we will ensure they are not. There is nothing in this world that could take this from us, sibling, and I will be here to see it through with you, as I swore I would.”

“You needn’t be afraid of what you’ve gained, only because it is a kinder fate than you steeled yourself to. It is yours. It is ours. We’ve done it, little Ghost.” Hornet whispered forcefully.

Ghost, their face still hidden, traced something shaky with a claw over her back, that Hornet took a moment to understand, and a moment more to understand as a question.

We’ll be alright? They wrote.

Hornet grinned, joy as hot and fierce as the sun burning in her chest, and crushed them to her with a laugh that came easier than yesterday as she stood up, and Ghost reflexively wrapped their legs around her to keep from falling and dug their little claws into her shoulder, just light enough not to prickle. “We will. I swear it to you. We’ve done the impossible; what’s a little more?” She asked rhetorically, and hefted their weight to settle them more comfortably on her hip before leaving the nearly-finished worksite behind.

The day was warm, and the sun high, and she thought she’d spent more than long enough alone. Indoors were cool drinks and whatever Hollow had made of the basket of fruit Iselda had dropped off that morning, and she thought Vigil would be back with the twins by now. Inside was her family, and she thought she’d like to see them.

“Yes, little Ghost,” Hornet said through a smile, and caught a handful of her shawl to help them dry their eyes when they looked up, likely unwilling to let the rest see that they’d been crying. “It will be alright.”

“We’ll be alright.”

And they were.