Chapter Text
Every morning for the last two decades, the Pale King woke to the vessel awaiting the day.
It waited outside his room, stock still and silent and resting without dreams.
Every morning for years and years, he grew used to the same white shell and the circles of darkness that stared from beyond it.
That shell grew as those years passed. The long horns extended with new curvature, until they were nearly as tall as he was standing. Their triple prongs grew more pronounced in a way that reminded him of the Root God who’d also created it.
The dark eyes remained the size they had started at, though the shell around them grew to slant as it molted larger. They were very small amidst that massive crown.
The eyes remained the same.
The king may have had to lean his head back to look at them where they were inlaid in bony shell, but what he stared into didn’t change.
Every morning for the last two decades, the Pale King would leave his room to stare either down or across or above into those void-dark eyes and the pale shell around them.
Grief was a funny thing.
It rarely hit immediately.
A being’s first experience with loss often came early. It could be the loss of another sentient or it could be the loss of a pet. The loss of a worshiper could be seen as a similar thing, for a higher being.
Their first experience with death came even earlier than that, in most cases.
No land was perfectly safe.
A larva could stumble across dead beasts when playing in their own nest. There would be no tie to that rigid corpse, but it was the shock of finding something that would never reanimate that let grubs know life did not always exist.
The death of someone who mattered allowed mortality to hit different.
Grief was something learned.
Always.
Because no life could start and finish without discovering loss.
First came the discovery of death, then loss, then grief, then mourning.
And between many of these steps was shock, was a state of incomprehension that felt little, numb, nothing, and then snapped in time.
This was what brought such a challenge to beginning the mourning process. It required grief to arrive first. It required a mind to comprehend it had lost something it would never get back. And that often took time to arrive. Even for a god, it would.
The being who called himself the Pale King had first seen death on the day of his birth. Many of the eggs around him were stillborn. Their cracks admitted only rigid bodies devoid of light. Many of the surviving eggs released larva weakened from their struggle to break free. Too weak. They were the brood that would be thrown out of the den to begin with, left to die in the windy wastelands above, to dry out and become hollow, brittle husks. Had it been much worse, then, for the brighter larva to realize these weak wyrms would sate their hunger just as well as the stillborn corpses they’d already fallen on?
There was no proper grief for any of the clutch he’d been born with, not then or after. It was a rapid discovery of death that did not even sink in. Not for a newborn’s mind.
He had plenty more opportunities to see mortality again.
When he was not even halfway grown, he found an odd beast weak in the sand. Hunger was not so driving a force then. Unlike that first discovery, there was no screaming, painful need to fall upon it. He’d played with it and left it and come back a few days later to play again. But it did not roll upon the ground and run from him, nor push the fur of its mouth against his shell. It had none of its activity from before. It did not regain that activity when he left it and came back. It only began to rot.
This was the first understanding of how some changes might be permanent.
And that was the basis of all loss. A change that could not be reversed. Positive or not, it was still something that was there, that had all of its opportunities and was ingrained as it was in routine, that now was not there. That was gone. That could not be touched again.
There were many other introductions to death after this. More siblings fell ill, were trampled, or were injured. Injuries were death sentences. The sire of the brood was killed soon after they’d hatched. He died from something avoidable, alone, unable to send another for help. He was found long after he had already begun to rot. Dead in the hot sands. Fried by dawn’s daylight. Alone.
Alone.
Wyrms always died alone.
Except those who founded their own territory.
Not wanderers and nesting wyrms, but gods to what kingdom grew around them. The light of a wyrm was a powerful thing. To draw in a thrall was not so difficult.
But what was better than not dying alone? Simply not dying at all. To live eternal would be a preferable thing. Wouldn't it?
Ah, but there was still a problem though:
To be immortal meant to be surrounded by mortality.
An eternal being experienced infinitely more loss than one whose lifespan was set short.
A higher being ought to be used to accepting and moving on past changes irreversible.
The Pale King had shed his wyrm life in metamorphosis into a transcended god. When he looked upon his kingdom, he called it as eternal as he.
It had been good, until one who had been dead and given life again decided to contest that eternal nature.
Hallownest’s population shrunk dreadfully before he was even driven to the vessel plan. Many more died as the time it took for the vessel to reach its final molt passed.
As a newborn, it had not hurt to look back into a nest of broken shells and slime and realize there had been more larva alive there only moments before.
But to have worshipers whose names he knew die…
To die or to leave. Die or leave. She offered no options. It meant the same fate. Those that left could return, yes, but they would not return with all the same memories as they left. So was that truly returning? That was still a loss.
Many things could be a loss.
The silly young infatuation shared between two gods, before they both committed acts so dark they could not rightfully look each other in the eye…this was a distance that could not be closed as it had been. This was a loss.
The moment that the Pure Vessel ascended the Abyss, the Pale King knew it would walk into an eternal prison at the end of this. The seals would not be lifted and the vessel inside would never be seen again.
It would be a loss.
The less investment one had in a thing before change arrived correlated to the intensity of the grief that would follow a loss.
On the first day that he stared at the vessel’s empty face, had it been sealed away that hour, he would not have grieved losing it. No more than the grief he already felt- and that was grief for himself and his wife, and the hundreds of children dead before they had ever lived. It was not for the one vessel specifically.
On the first day of the one year mark, had it been sealed on such an anniversary, he would have felt a more personalized grief at never seeing it again. It was not a child, but it was a creation of his. And it had easily become his most advanced one. It felt like a loss just in how its fate would be to be forever chained in one spot, when its potential outmatched anything he had made of void before.
If it could be a weapon rather than a prison-
But the Pure Vessel was pure and the plan proceeded.
By the end of his last day with the vessel, he knew- with the distanced thought of an emotion not yet sunk in- that he would be mourning horribly for years to come. An attachment of this much time would not be processed in a day. The full pain would likely not even settle in for many weeks or even months to come, and mourning lasted much longer than the initial peak of agony. Pain would come and it would stay.
It would come in the change from expectation.
In how there would be no pale shell face waiting blankly for him outside his door.
In how he would not be followed down the halls now. The very sound of nearly silent padding would never be heard again.
It was about sensation.
Touch, sight, sound, all of it.
He would not feel the disconcerting softness of void-touched chitin again. He would not feel the fabric of a cloak that was made crooked during training, of which the vessel had no mind to think to correct and so he would straighten it out instead.
He would not see it waiting for him, watching him always. He would not see it again, no matter how often he might have told himself not to look while the chance to see was still there.
He would not hear its presence, which he’d grown accustomed to the soft noise of. It had a sound, even if it had no voice. And it brought other sounds to the court that would now be gone. The hearty praise of Ogrim, carrying louder than the other four knights. The specific laughter of the heir of Deepnest that came when she ‘played’ with the Pure Vessel on her visits. The cursing of one young sibling taught by the nailsage as the vessel won seamlessly again.
None of those senses would be experienced again.
He knew that.
He just did not know it yet.
Because grief took time to begin in full.
Knowing what would come did not make it possible to brace and actually avoid the pain itself.
The Pale King had known that the more time he spent growing used to those senses, the more vivid the time it would take to adjust to not having them any more.
He also knew he had grown used to seeing the vessel waiting outside his door in the morning.
On the morn after the sealing, he left his room and felt that confusion over why he was staring at a wall instead of black shell and empty eyes. It took a manual reminder that he would be seeing the plain painted surface from then on.
It would take many, many more. For days, for months, for years.
This was going to hurt.
It was going to hurt so dreadfully, when the full comprehension of all those normalities gone forever hit.
But the comprehension had not hit yet.
It had only been a single night.
He was still at the mental place where he forgot the vessel was already sealed away in its purpose, so he had expected, unconsciously, that it would be standing outside his door that morning. Just as he expected to see it standing beside his throne passively later in the day, when he subconsciously thought it was until he would actually glance to see it. Just as he expected to hear its steps padding after him when he walked from his throne to the gates upon being summoned urgently by a retainer.
And so he felt no surprise upon seeing the vessel standing beyond the gate.
Indeed, his only confusion came from the fact he was looking down at it again rather than up. He had not looked down for years.
Something was wrong, then. It was bigger than this.
It was bigger than this and it was gone.
(There came the reminder, too late, too forced, like a thing too distant and disconnected to be felt.)
Gone. Lost to him.
Permanently.
It was sealed just a day before.
After the clinical, disconnected reminder, the surprise finally came.
Only then did alarm shoot through the Pale King until he felt ill. And yet it was still not as much as it should have been.
Because he had not mourned the Pure Vessel yet. He had not even really begun to.
So to see his child there felt natural, normal, expected, routine.
It felt like he had just stepped out of bed a few years prior, when that creation of his was still so very small.
It looked like his child.
It looked like his child.
It burned.
Confusion and enforced alarm ran about sickeningly. But no amount of reminding himself that the Pure Vessel was gone made this vision go away.
It stood there as a tiny specter.
Its small horns too wide apart and thin to really be mistaken for those of the Hollow Knight he’d grown so very used to.
It looked like his, but his was sealed away and lost forever.
So this was a ghost, standing, staring, so fast arrived a haunting for the grief inevitable anyways.
On the morning twenty years and one day after the Pure Vessel’s ascension, the Pale King woke to see a vessel waiting like a wraith straight out of the past and a taunt of what would never be again all at once.
You look like my child, came his first thought and he should have known then, with that thought, how very wrong his plan had gone.