Drained of Light (Into the Welcoming Darkness)
(header commissioned from slimeel)
Characters: The Knight, Hornet, The Hollow Knight, Quirrel, Lost Kin, Nailmaster Oro, too many others to list here.
Warning overview: it’s a Hollow Knight fic. Gore, body horror, aftermath of possession, mentioned abuse, assorted canon-typical awfulness but now addressed in detail! Check the full tags and mind individual chapter warnings.
Rating: M for gore, aftermath of violence, and implied (consensual) sexual content.
Summary: Ghost, aided by a gradually assembled adventuring party, manages to get Hollow out of the Black Egg Temple alive. Having freed their sibling from a mad god’s clutches is one thing; freeing them from their own self-imposed chains is entirely another. Particularly once Hollow manages to arrive at the idea that Ghost, beginning to come into their own as god-king of Hallownest, would like to be the one holding those chains. An idea Ghost wants no part of.
Hornet, having spent the past few centuries desperately believing that all her siblings died in their shells, has learned the truth just in time to struggle with how to help a sibling who firmly believes that their own existence as a living creature is the most heinous of crimes.
Oro has been pulled from his entirely satisfactory and not at all lonely hut in the middle of nowhere to help, and is absolutely not notably invested in this particular patient, thank you. No attachment whatsoever to someone whose response, after everything, is still to put themself between their family and potential harm. Nope.
(He’s also a bad liar.)
Friends and allies can only get you so far when someone’s greatest battle is against their own mind, and, for better or for worse, many things in this crumbling ruin of a kingdom are inclined to interfere in the matter. Not all that is dead in this realm is willing to stay dead, and the past is not content to remain in the past.
These are not the only Void-kin still alive.
(Author’s notes: rougher first chapters have now been fixed! Come read my 400k and counting hurt/comfort post-Temple recovery fic. It’s made multiple people yell at me in generally positive ways, and is wandering in the approximate direction of eventually being one heck of a rarepair.)
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