Archive of Our Own ^beta

The first one said:

This world once aslumber, now stirred anew.
Once blinded, now comforted in shadow.
Once hollow, now brimming with life.

The second one said:

These voices once silent, now ringing like bells.
These faces once husks, now aglow with hope.
These hearts once stone, now surging in joy.

The third one said:

Can we get going? You can wax your poetries in the rain all you want when we get there. I'm starting to remember how it felt to be hungry, and frankly I’d quite like to forget.

Three travellers came to Hallownest.

It was not an unusual occurrence, per se. Many a bug showed up in the City of Tears these days, having braved the winding pathways of the Pilgrim’s Path just to reach the capital’s gates open once more. Dozens daily, sometimes. At first Hornet had attempted to meet with every one of them, but she quickly lost count, and frankly, at this rate she would’ve needed to spend the entire day standing at the gate just to greet all the newcomers—and it wasn’t like she had an excess of free time at her disposal. There was so much to do.

The City was waking up, slowly, from its age-long slumber. Still, most of the awakening had to be done by hammer and broom, and it seemed to Hornet that all the little things she’d been disregarding for the decades she’d spent guarding its halls—dust and rubble, dampness and mould, vengefly eggs behind peeling wallpaper—had somehow multiplied and were now sticking out like a sore thumb in the progressively cleaner, progressively livelier spaces. They’d cleared out all the corpses (and there were so many corpses) and scrubbed ancient rust off the gate bars and lift mechanisms, cracked open the storerooms and removed the spoiled food, chased out whole colonies of aspids and made most of the houses around the Watcher's Spire somewhat liveable.

The Spire itself was enough to cause a headache, with the entire week it took them just to find and secure all the structural hazards. Though once they swept all the floors and washed most of the windows (Hollow helped), the place looked much more friendly than Hornet remembered. She’d not set foot inside it since the fall of Hallownest—there had been far too many ghosts lingering in its empty rooms, and too much angry grief for her to brave it—but returning there now alongside her siblings had felt… right. As right as it could given the circumstances, anyway.

Ghost wasted no time making itself at home, and the chamber it chose for itself was soon cluttered with scrolls of paper, writing utensils, bags of Geo, and piles of bits and bobs it had collected throughout its journeys. It employed the Hollow Knight to help it hang garlands of flowers in the empty corridors and over the ceiling-high windows, and as Hornet watched it hop around with such earnest joy, turning the place that had once rejected it into its personal playground, she couldn’t help the tight feeling that rose up her throat.

For herself, she chose a chamber on one of the upper floors, small, but with a lovely view of the rain-drenched capital. Settling in the royal guesthouse next to King’s Station might’ve been the more obvious choice, but Hornet couldn’t bear the thought of entering it yet, not when she didn’t know if any of her mother’s things would still be there. The whole city was a minefield of memory, really; though while she’d previously dreaded the inevitable confrontation with the past once she’d have returned, now she found the experience overwhelmingly cathartic. She only cried once, in the gardens, when she saw Hollow nipping insistently at the overgrown hedgerow with a pair of rusted shears like it was the most normal thing in the world for them to do. She failed to explain it when they jumped up to her with great alarm, their single spidery hand patting her form to check if she was hurt.

She still couldn’t believe it, most nights. Lying awake with her eyes wandering across the room—the ancient floorboards and stained wallpaper, timeworn furniture cluttered with old books and the ever-growing piles of Ghost’s trinkets, her own cloak hanging on the dusty rack—she couldn’t shake the pervading, surreal feeling of being caught in some sort of elaborate and incredibly detailed dream. Was any of this real? Or would she wake up, eventually, on the cold ground outside the temple, small and alone again in this world after the end of the world? There was always that moment of dread, on the threshold of sleep and awakening, of where she would find herself when she opened her eyes. But every time it turned out to be that same old ceiling which would greet her, faded and stained where she’d peeled off aspid cocoons from; that same room, awash in blue-silver light spilling through the windows. That same new, surreal, wondrous life.

Still: the travellers. Hornet found out about them from Haki, a young bug from Dirtmouth who’d followed them into the capital. He now worked as a secretary slash courier, his duties extending from managing Hornet's growing paperwork cabinet to delivering missives from all across the city back to the Spire. It’d been weeks since the gates had been opened, and Hornet was way past the point of paying attention to every single bug that passed through them—but there was something eerie about these three, Haki said. They carried themselves as if they knew things. And they specifically asked after her.

This was noteworthy in and of itself. Despite the decades Hornet had spent guarding it, most of the bugs of Hallownest who were now seeking refuge in the City of Tears had never even seen her, not to mention any sort of recognition through their Infection-driven haze. A handful of them remembered glimpsing Ghost or some other vessel, but even those hardly ever hailed from beyond Greenpath. The strangers’ particular interest in her piqued Hornet’s curiosity, but also unease. From a certain point of view, she supposed she was the acting leader of the resurgent kingdom (which in and of itself was a frightening thought she took great care not to focus too extensively on), but her actual leadership duties had so far been limited to directing clean-up works, sending out rescue teams, and making sure the ever-growing population of the city had something to eat and somewhere to sleep. More political matters, like diplomacy and border safety, lay far beyond the scope of her concerns for now. So why would anyone seek to confer with her in particular?

Were they just another group of refugees finding their way back home after years of displacement? Lost bugs shaken awake from Infection and now wandering the kingdom in confusion? Or maybe foreign ambassadors from Deepnest or the Mantis Tribe, seeking to negotiate the balance of power in this new post-armageddon world? Hornet was suddenly starkly reminded that as of now, the army of Hallownest consisted of a whole of two royal knights.

She asked Haki, “Are they here already?”

“I told them to wait in the eastern guest room.”

The eastern guest room—one of the prettiest chambers in the Spire, with its plush fauteuils and a roofed balcony overlooking the city. Hornet had stayed there once with her mother, on the first visit to the City of Tears that she remembered, before they’d been assigned a room all of their own in the royal guesthouse.

She shook out of her reminiscence and stood up. “Then let’s go.”

The three travellers were out on the balcony, turned away from the door and towards the City. They each wore a nondescript cloak that spilled loosely towards the ground, obscuring their exact shapes, but even still Hornet could tell two of them were roughly the same height and the third was taller and larger, with a pair of horns visible under the hood. The first two conversed among each other in hushed tones, while the third only stared out at the sprawling city below.

“Princess Hornet,” Haki announced.

The travellers all turned around to face them, and Hornet froze.

“Really,” the third one said in a deep, rough voice. “I thought by now they’d be addressing you as ‘queen’.”

Hornet’s mandibles moved wordlessly.

She drew in a shaky breath. She dug her claws into the meat of her palms. Then, she tried again, her voice coming out small and hoarse and quiet enough to nearly be drowned out by the sound of the rain.

“…Mother?”