the abyss (from which you came) is packed so densely with the bodies of your siblings (canon name) that there is nowhere to walk but on them, while their unquiet shades flit about you. each represents an attempt to create an instrument the king (your father)’s will.
the point of you, any of you, but you most of all - eldest son - is that there is a void in you. to your father this means you are empty, and so a perfect vessel. it is more complicated than that. but, into this vessel he will place the god he has supplanted. this god threatens civilisation itself because she refuses to be forgotten, after your father claimed her domain for his own. you are to take this corrupting god of light into your body and house her in perpetuity. your sacrifice, your exile, your containment, compr(om)ising civilisation itself. they remember you in the capital of the empire. on the fountain the dedication reads:
MEMORIAL TO THE HOLLOW KNIGHT
In the Black Vault far above.
Through its sacrifice Hallownest lasts eternal.
this is how they have to remember you.
when your sibling finds you, the little ghost of hallownest, as the middle child calls it, your vaunted perfection is already giving way. you could not stop the rot. the sickness of empire cannot be contained within you, the weight of your father’s worship has angered the god that lives inside you and she spills out and everything that is here is echoes and parody. automatic, a reduction of empire to the brutest regime of the body. animated by a bright and penetrating light whose rape of you you could not keep to yourself. you have failed. here are the bodies of your father’s subjects:
your sibling finds you and you are loosed in order to be killed. come what may, you must be purged. you are animated by the furious light inside you and it is macabre. she marionettes your body in ugly, lazy swipes, or sometimes launches you, bodily into the ground at your sibling - or just explodes out of you. it looks like this:
as your sibling lays into you, moments of lucidity emerge. you want to help your kin. you cannot even yet defy your father, even what you do next contained in the paradigm of opposition to her. a gesture against the femininity nested in you. your sibling hacks at you, and you do what you can to protect it. and i love you, and im very very sorry. i was the eldest son once. it was bad. it looks like this:
in reality your father is a corpse even in the dreams of his enforcers. you cannot transcend him, though. but you oppose her, you help your kin, not so helplessly entangled as you. the truth is that even she is a supplanting of something older still. in the way back when, those who lived here worshipped the abyss itself. apeiron, the unlimited, the void. you were full to the brim already for any with eyes dark enough to see it. that you were made to be anything else was for empire’s sake only. the purview of gods with shapes and faces. living gods. oppositional gods. i have something to say about your sibling, about the “lord” of shades, too. but not right now. this one’s for you. you were a good kid. fate worse than death.
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