Hollow Knight: After the Silence Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at https://archiveofourown.org/works/84912326. Rating: Explicit Archive Warning: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Category: Gen Fandom: Hollow Knight (Video Games) Language: English Stats: Published: 2026-05-15 Words: 21,353 Chapters: 1/1 Hollow Knight: After the Silence by MrSecret Leave the world known, face the unknown beyond. ... "HEEEELP!" "HEEEEEEEEEELP!!!" A bug crawled on what remained of his strength. The room was dark and the only light was a dim scarlet glow bleeding from somewhere above, a light that did not illuminate so much as stain the air. Around him, shapes that had stopped being shapes hours ago—broken open, leaking a greyish fluid that pooled on the floor and shivered when his voice passed over it. "SOMEBODY—" The word tore out of him and then he vomited, a thin rope of silk and bile that hung from his mandibles. He could not wipe it away, for he had no hands. "Please— anyone—" A [[silhouette]] stood at the far end of the room. It did not move or speak. It occupied the dark and the dark seemed to bend around it, and the only thing visible in the place where its face should have been were two grey eyes, still and ancient, way above him. Eyes that had seen enough. Eyes that had seen this before and would see this again. The wounds bled again now, reopened by the dragging. He had lost a leg. He pulled himself on the stumps and the one leg that still answered him, and his voice kept spilling out of him. "I— I have a d-d-daughter— sh-she's four c-cycles—" The [[silhouette]] did not move. "Her sh-shell— hasn't hardened— she d-doesn't know where I go when I leave— her m- mother t-tells her I'm out f-finding w-work and she b-believes it because she's f-four— she ch-checks the door every— every m-morning—" He dragged himself another inch. The grey liquid rippled and stilled. "Her n-name— her name is L-Lumen— she w-won't wake up t-tomorrow if I d-don't come back— she'll check the door and I w-won't be there and she'll th-think I l-left her— please—" *[[thud]] * A step. It travelled up through the floor and into the stumps of his missing limbs before it reached his ears. *[[thud]] * Another. Closer. The liquid shook. The shapes that had been people did not move. "I kn-know— what we d-did— I'm not asking to be f-forgiven—" *[[thud]] * He saw them now. The grey eyes. Way above him. Still. They held nothing and they held everything. The size of the shape beneath them was impossible. He fumbled for the shard launcher at his belt. A crude length of hollowed chitin. One shot. A sharpened piece of shell. He pressed it between the stumps of his arms, where his hands had been, and the effort sent a fresh pulse of blood down what remained of his limbs. He craned his neck, reaching with his mouth for the trigger, and his whole body shook with the strain of it. He bit down. *[[Click.]] * Nothing. The mechanism was spent. Or jammed. Or it had never been loaded. It didn't matter. The sound was the same. Small. Final. The [[silhouette]] did not stop. The bug watched it come, and the last defiance he could gather rose in his throat. "GO FU—" [[An arm lifted.]] -- "Hornet?" She did not answer. The Citadel shimmered below them, it was clean, there was light on its spires and carried color of old gold. The bells had been silenced. The land was breathing. "...Hornet??" She turned her head. "Yes?" Lace stood at her side on the cliff's edge, one hand on her hip, the other gesturing at the view and then at Hornet and then back at the view. Her voice carried the particular brightness of someone who has been waiting for the right moment to speak and has decided, after patient calculation, that the right moment was now. "Are you alright? You just zoomed out all of the sudden. I wanted to share the view with you up here. One last time." Hornet looked back at the gleaming city. "I was thinking. We have supported the lands and their citizens for long enough. They may stand on their own legs now." She paused. "Memories have been made, that much of it was unpleasant. And yet...we have come far." Lace tilted her head. "Don't tell me you tried to monologue." Hornet's answer came a fraction too fast. "...No." It was not convincing. She knew it and Lace knew it. The silence that followed was the silence of two people agreeing not to acknowledge what had just occurred. "Ah, very good then." Lace turned her back and strode forward with the confidence of someone who had already won an argument that had not yet started. She raised her arms wide, waving them with slow theatrical grandeur. "—great wisdom— the knowledge of the great, undisputed hunter— who knew no equal—" She dropped the pose and looked back over her shoulder. "Hip-hop. No time to waste, spider." Hornet followed. "There is no need to dramatise this much. You have already established your statement and there is no need for repetition." Lace gave her a long, sidelong look. "Sure, dear. Sure." Hornet gave one last glance at the shimmering Citadel from above the cliff. Free from silk and song. The land was free once again, as it once had been. Images flooded behind her eyes. Little Ghost, Hollow, the red memory, the training she had been put through. Everything had been in use. Everything had led here. Then they departed for good, leaving Pharloom to its own future. The last line in leaving that place was only fog. So they crossed the fog, into the lands between. Not for glory, nor a mission. Simply as an end in itself. --- At the beginning of the journey, Lace walked several steps ahead. She had been walking several steps ahead since they left the cliff, as if forward momentum was not a choice but a condition. She pointed at things. A rock formation that resembled a claw. A carving in a hillside shaped by wind. The way the fog behind them caught the light and turned gold for a single moment before it greyed again. She named what she saw, and Hornet looked where she pointed, and the road passed beneath them without complaint. Then Lace did not point at the next thing. It was a small absence. Hornet noticed it before she understood what she was noticing. The space where Lace's voice should have been had grown quiet. Her steps, which had been light and full of direction, had slowed. She was no longer ahead. She was beside, then she was a little behind. Hornet stopped, waited and Lace stopped shortly after. The wind moved between them and Lace's voice, when it came, was not the voice of someone who had run out of things to point at. It was the voice of someone who had been holding something up for a long time and had finally been forced to set it down. "I've never been outside Pharloom." A pause. "Maybe not even outside the Citadel. I don't know if Mother kept me in or if I kept myself there. She told me the world would pick me apart, thread by thread, and I believed her. I stopped asking to see it. I stopped wanting to. And now—" Her voice broke and Hornet turned. "I don't know how to be outside," she said. "I never learned how. And I'm afraid that I'll spend the rest of my life being afraid of the thing I wanted most." She looked at Hornet. "Does that make sense? Is that anything at all?" Hornet crossed the distance between them and placed one claw on Lace's shoulder and held it there. She did not rush, for rushing would have been for her own comfort. "Too long have you suffered alone." The words came out formal. She had rehearsed protection but never quite learned tenderness. "Too long were you withheld from the opportunity to experience life. This is no more. Now you can live not as a puppet under a hand, but as a being who can breathe and use this new chance of destiny for something new." She stopped. Meaning every word that has been said, and the meaning had come out wrapped in something that sounded like a proclamation. Hornet was aware of this, and did not know how to fix it. Lace blinked. The tears were still on her face, but something behind them shifted. She let out a small, wet sound. "Oh, you silly spider." She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. "You always know what to say. It's like you have a book somewhere, where you write all your speeches and practise them in front of a mirror." Hornet gave her an unassuming look and resumed walking. She did not confirm the existence of the book, nor did she deny it. Lace steped beside her. Not ahead or behind. Besides. "I'm sorry. That was a lot. Probably not what you signed up for." "At times it is true." Hornet did not look at her. "But even that holds a teaching." Lace was quiet for a moment. Then she laughed, a short bright sound, and the wind took it and carried it off toward the Citadel they had left behind. Then she was talking again. She was talking about the shape of a cloud, the color of a patch of scrub grass, the way the gravel here was paler than the gravel they had seen that morning. She was pointing again, Hornet looked where she pointed, and the road stretched without end across the waist of a silent dune. They walked through caves where Lace tapped on the walls with her pin to hear the ring of different stones. They fought beasts whose names they did not know. They made camps, Lace slept, and Hornet wrote in her journal by the light of a low fire. Four days passed. The dune gave way to smooth gravel, pale and fine, and the sky above it seemed wider than it had been the day before. The land opened. Hills rolled into valleys, valleys into shallow rivers, rivers into meadows that stretched so far that the only boundary, was light. On the seventh day, the sun came out from behind the clouds for the first time since they had left the fog, and it stayed. Lace sat on a flat stone overlooking a waterfall and hummed something soft and tuneless. Hornet sat beside her and played her needle like strings on an instrument. Neither of them spoke. The water fell, the insects flew, and the sun held. They continued. Day twelve, day fifteen, day twenty-two. The world grew stranger and more beautiful and more quiet. Lace's smile grew brighter even as her words grew fewer. She was learning how to be outside, Hornet watched her learn. They were both, in their own ways, learning. The days grew longer in feeling. Time had begun to pass in a different rhythm, as if it did not want to rush toward anything ahead. They were watching the native insects thrive in a patch of sun when the horizon yielded something new. A single mountain, standing alone in a land that was otherwise flat. Tall, prideful and entirely without company. Lace put a hand under her chin, fingers spread just so, her gaze fixed on the mountain with an intensity usually reserved for the covers of philosophy books or the pose of a scholar who had just asked the one question that would topple an empire. She held the pose a beat too long. On purpose. "I don't think I've ever seen a mountain that wasn't surrounded by others." Hornet studied it. A lone mountain in a flat land was a tactical anomaly. It would make a strong fortress, if someone were inclined to build one. Armies had probably fought over it. "There will be many more sights," she said, "each more unusual than the last." Lace looked downcast for a moment, and then her expression shifted, the way it always did just before a joke was made. "What a lonely mountain. Maybe it was—" she turned to Hornet with perfect timing— "too rocky for others." Hornet's lips twitched. She tried to pass it off as a cough. Lace's eyes went wide with theatrical delight. She put an open hand to her ear. "Did I just hear something? A laugh, perhaps?" "There was a frog in my throat." "A what?" "Yes." Hornet had no idea what a 'frog' was. She pointed toward a nearby cave and began walking that way a little faster than usual. Lace did not follow immediately. She took a moment to celebrate. Lifting a knee, pulling down an elbow from the same side, in the same arm, a fist was clenched. A proud, private face of victory. The joke had landed rock solid. They entered the cave. Its appearance was unusual from the first step. The walls curved in ways that did not seem natural. "A bit round, don't you think?" Lace turned in a slow circle as she walked, her silking feet, crunching on loose crystal. "These caves are not naturally generated." Hornet said, as she ran a claw along the wall. Smooth, too smooth. "There are no preserved settlements near this site, and a system of this size would have required dozens of miners." They continued through the passageways, which were lined with minerals and pale crystals. Hornet stopped often to compare samples and write notes in her journal. Lace tapped on the different formations with the tip of her pin, listening to the ring of each. She seemed to be waiting for one of them to explode. It was unclear whether she would be disappointed or delighted if it did. A smaller tunnel branched off from the main path. It was just taller than their heads, lined with lanterns that were still burning. The air carried a smell that did not belong in a cave of rich resources. Lace stopped shortly. "Phewww— what is that? Are we back at Bilewater?" Hornet did not step closer. Her senses were sharper than Lace's, and the smell reached her as a physical sting at the back of her throat. "Beer". At the end of the tunnel stood a simple table with four mugs, carved from rock and stone. The lanterns were still flickered. "No one's here," Lace said. "No one was here for a while." "And yet the lanterns burn." They left the way they had come. The smell followed them out and hung in the air like a phantom, long after the cave mouth had vanished behind them. The world beyond the cave was pale and strange. The ground was a flat grit of crushed stone and shell fragments, white as gauze, stretching toward a lightless haze of a sky. Spiralling stone towers rose at irregular intervals. It was also smooth, but now twisted like drills. A low hum vibrated constantly, a baseline that never left their heads. And between the spindles lay the husks. Thier gigantic, hollow, brittle and empty. The insects that had left them behind were unknown, and would remain so. They had been ancient before Pharloom was built, before Hallownest was dreamed. Lace grew more carefull and held her pin in a steady, close distance, before Hornet ran a claw over one of the shells and it crackled under the light pressure. Creak. Crack. Krrr. It made Lace flinch and Hornet pulled back. The vessel had survived this long without turning to dust, but it would not survive much longer. They walked in silence and the hum pressed on. The pale grit crunched underfoot. It was a graveyard, a very large and very old graveyard. It did not care that they were walking through it. Lace spoke first, her voice softer than usual. "You weren't wrong about unusual things." Hornet pulled out her journal, which reminded Lace to ask what day it was, as she had lost the touch of time. "Day twenty-two." "Strange, I thought it was day fourteen." Lace shook her head. "Didn't notice it went this fast." There was some truth in the speaking of this line and Hornet answered back. "I noticed that too, how semesly it flowed." Hours passed, or what felt like hours. Food, water and silk ran low. The hum was a constant now, and the husks gave way to a settlement that appeared slowly, mirage-like, out of the white. It was determined that it was a standard villager, a place to buy supplies and rest, but also a place to find out more about this barren region. Spindle Field, named after the towers that resided and at the far end of the settlement was a cemetery with an eclectic array of graves. As they approached, Lace in a curious tone commented: "That's quite a collection of graves." There was one stone slab for example with the word CLEM carved in blocky letters. A small lotus beneath it, and two crossed twin-barreled weapons. The carving was precise, someone had cared for it. Then a modest grave with a small statue of a four-legged insect hound with a worn leather collar. The name read Bug Meat, in simple, uneven letter, it felt like a loyal companion's resting place. And a large, weathered gravestone. Most of the name was gone—only an R and an M remained, with a faded helmet rested on a stick besidet it. Next to the stone lay a worn photograph of nine figures, one wore large gloves, one held a shovel and one carried an instrument. The rest were too faded to make out. The grave was oddly vibrant and well-kept. As both kept looking at the uniqueness of many others, a villager passed by and Hornet used the opportunity to ask, "Sir, could inform me, why does this cemetery hold such an extendric accumulattion of graves?" "Nope." Was said with straight face. "I beg your pardon?" A quick laugh. "Oh, it never stops bein' funny. I do that to every traveller. You ain't gonna be the last, let me tell ya." Lace squinted. "Riiiiight." Being a little annoyed that someone else was making fun of Hornet instead of her. "So yeah. People come extra to this place 'cause of the field, y'know? They think the hum here gives resolution or makes a good final restin' ground." Hornet bowed slightly. "You have my thanks." He snapped his fingers like a weapon. "No problem, pardners." They left the village and continued into the plain. Hornet wrote in her journal as day twenty- three arrived and some days were longer than others. The next place they entered was a swamp that looked alive. It was not. Almost nothing moved. The noise that should have been there—the croaking, the chittering, the splash of unseen things—was absent. The wind was quieter than it had been in the region before. Lace did not like it at all, and Hornet was more still than she had been. Lace tried to stand more confidently. She adjusted her expression, cleared her throat. "Say," she said, "wasn't there an entry in your journal about wanting to learn how to skate on water? Water you thinking?" She smirked, wide and absurd. Hornet gave a flat stare. "Hm." The joke sank into the silence and drowned there. The emptiness was too thick. Lace let the smirk fall and went quiet herself. She still tried to talk, but the words came less often now. The only topics were about the environment or something more tactical. She disliked this place. They moved quickly, scanning every direction, with no attackers in sight or sound. Whether that was, good or bad, was becoming harder to answer. It did not take long to leave the swamp. And it took less time to enter something worse. They were met with tall grass, almost their height, dark green and dense. The sky above was a dim sheet of greyish cloud. The wind had stopped completely. Even a few paces out, there was no sounds of any bugs, not of the grasses brushing against one another. The environment was bewaring of something. Nightfall came. They built a makeshift camp and sat at the fire, doing nothing, waiting. Hornet broke the silence. "Have you noticed?" Lace did not look up. She had been waiting for this. "You mean how everything was fine at the beginning, and then everything slowly got quieter, emptier, like something was being drained out of the world, and now we're sitting here and the quiet is so thick I can feel it pressing on my skin? The feeling that the more we move, the more wrong everything becomes, and we're only talking about it now because it finally got strong enough that we can't pretend anymore - that thing?" She pointed it out pretty good. "Correct. It is suspicious. We must keep watch, I will stay awake." "Silly little spider." Lace's voice was softer than the words. "Did you forget? I don't need to sleep. I'll take the watch. Please." Hornet considered. "...Alright. I will plan the next steps and recover." "Thanks." The fire was put out. Lace sat in the dark with her pin across her legs, waiting patiently—for once. A little further off, beyond the camp's edge and beyond their sight, a single lumefly drifted. Its glow was faint, too weak to notice unless already looking. It flew low over the ground, tracing the contour of the grass. Then the grass cut off, and the earth became, in one motion, too deep. The lumefly drifted over the depression. Its light caught an edge. Then another. The shape below was too large to see all at once—an odd formation of lines and forms, uneven, where the ground had been deformed by a single weight. The lumefly moved on. It did not know what it had illuminated. Dawn arrived. The sun did not smile. It had not smiled once. They walked. They discussed. "-ecosystem or terrain deformation could be a variant to the answer. I tested the soil and the inhabitant plants in this territory. There are major shifts to internal flows, becoming more active for a reason." Lace closed her eyes, made a proud face, and posed. "That was one long explanation. I think I understood half of the words you said. I, however—" she opened her eyes, "—discovered something." Hornet leaned in. Lace went detective mode. "Unfortunately for you, there are footprints I found." She moves more dramatic now. "Hidden from the eyes of the Beholder." She was mimicking Hornet, goofy and theatrical. Hornet did not mind. "Everyone—high, low, whatever—left marks. Far away. Different directions." Lace paused, letting the reveal breathe. "EXCEPT the one we're going. My observation: they RAN AWAY." She celebrated quietly, as if confetti was about to fall. Hornet looked at her. "You have keen eyes, Detective Lace. It is a shame I have not wandered far enough to observe this missing detail." Lace stopped. Did Hornet just play along? Was she going crazy? She was speechless. She had not felt a sincerity like this in a long time. The only one who could replicate that feeling was Phantom, and they were long gone now. They stopped. A forest lies ahead. They did not notice until they were already too close. It cut in without greeting—no transition, no thinning of the grass, no warning. The grass simply ended. Clean. Like a wound. Beyond it, the earth was dark and bare. The trees were pillars without end. Identical bark. Identical columns of dark, cold wood. The fog did not move. It did not leave the forest. It breathed, and the air was thick as guilt. They looked left. No end. They looked right. No end. They looked up. No end. Breathing became deliberate. The silence stretched. Hornet continued forward. She reached for her needle. Lace grabbed her arm. "Oh no, no, no, no, no. We are NOT going any further." Hornet looked at her. Certainty in the eyes. Lace's grip was desperate, her face a plea. Hornet sheated the needle back, braced her other claw against Lace's hand and, carefully, let herself go. She walked on. thud... thud... thud... "THIS IS YOUR ANSWER?! YOU'LL JUST LEAVE AND NEVER COME BACK?!" Hornet stopped at the threshold. One step from the dark earth. She did not turn around. "You are no puppet. You are free to choose your destiny, your experience. Return to the past if you want." A pause. "However. There will be no one waiting." Another pause. Longer. "Thank you, Lace, for your companionship. Your jokes were amusing." She gave a single bow and stepped into the unknown. Lace stared. Seconds passed. The space where Hornet had been did not fill. She burst. "ARE YOU KIDDING ME RIGHT NOW!?!?" She kicked a rock. It was a boulder. Pain shot up her leg and she hopped on the other, clutching her foot. "Ow, ow, ow, ow—you stupid thing." She drew back to kick it again. Stopped. Let out a deep, shaking breath and sat down on the boulder instead. "What am I doing?" Minutes passed. Her foot tapped up and down. The forest watched her without watching her. The constant ominous feeling pressed in from all sides. "GIVE IT A BREAK." She threw a pebble at a tree. It struck the bark. No sound came back. The forest had swallowed it. She did not stop tapping. Her hands went to her face. She was thinking. She was trying not to think. Then she stopped. Her hands left her face. She looked sideways at the trees. She stood. "THIS IS YOUR FAULT, YOU IDIOT WEAVER! YOU DRAGGED ME INTO THIS STUPID ADVENTURE! WE COULD'VE JUST STAYED IN PHARLOOM LIKE WE DID! I WAS HAPPY! YOU, HOWEVER, DECIDED DIFFERENTLY, AND I'M THE STUPID ONE WHO AGREED TO IT! AGREED TO YOU!" She was shouting at the trees. Nothing cared. "Stupid, stupid spider." The words sank into a mumble, muffled by her own hand. "When I get my hands on you, I'm going to get serious this time." As if. She did not sound convinced even to herself. She stood at the cut, where the grass ended and the dark earth began. The forest whispered its dread into her. She leaned forward. She leaned back. She made small, useless movements. Not wanting to go in. "It's just a little foggy. A few branches. Nothing more." She seemed smaller than before. Gulp... "When I get my hands on you..." She closed her eyes and stepped into the beyond, pin weaving, her other hand covering her face. She walked blind, trusting the ground to be there. Then she stopped. Opened her eyes. Carefully. She was standing on the dark soil, among the pillars. "I did it..." "I DID IT!" She jumped. The celebration erupted out of her—she broke a twig in half, then slashed it into a thousand pieces in seconds, the wood splintering into the fog. "Hff—hff—hff—" She grabbed her pin with both hands. She looked in every direction. Checking. Scanning. Making sure there was no something. The trees stood. The fog breathed. The forest waited. She hated every second in this place. The ground rose in soft, small mounds that were cold as stone in shade. The trees stood too even, their trunks almost polished, the spaces between them measured. No moss. No fungus. No rot. Only the silence—and the silence was not empty. It was full of something without a name. She breathed deep. The air filled her lungs and gave nothing back. Lace heard herself speak. Her voice came out thin. "Think. What would Hornet—" She stopped. "No. What would a hunter do?" The trees did not care. "The environment is unknown." She swallowed. "And it is giving me the creeps. Hmmm." The hmmm hung there. She was talking to herself. Who else was there to talk to? Then it came. "Markings." The word landed like a small, solid thing. "A true hunter marks the path. Start with the exit. Simple." She turned around. There was never an exit. She turned again. Slower. The way she had come from was not blocked. Not hidden. Simply not there anymore. As if the world behind her had been unpinned and lifted away. Her silkheart found a faster rhythm. "Oookayyy. Blind optimism. Worked before I met Hornet. Just—mark this. Marked. And that. Marked." She had walked a long while. She had marked the ground several times. The marks were clear in her mind. She had pressed the pin into the soil herself. She had felt it go in. "There. That was quite something. Good thing there's light everywhere out of nowhere so I can see better. Goodie, let's che—" The marks were gone. She checked further. She checked again. The soil was smooth. Undisturbed. The ground did not remember. Lace stared with a flat face. A long sigh leaked out of her. "...You're in so much trouble." Her pace slowed. Both hands on the pin now. Holding tighter than before. She tried everything a hunter would try. Smell. She inhaled deep. Nothing. The air had no scent. Nothing was the scent. Sound. The soil drank her footsteps. She shouted. The echo vanished instantly. She tried whispers. Whispers came back instead. Her own voice, returned to her, wrong. Sight. The fog was a labyrinth of illusions. Trees looked closer than they were. Shadows moved at the edge of vision. Sometimes, in the distance, shapes of bugs appeared—clear, almost real. She moved toward them. When she reached the spot, there was nothing. The fog had reassembled itself somewhere else. She did not know if minutes or hours had passed. Time was optional here. The only certainty: the longer she stayed, the worse it would become. And it was becoming worse. She walked. And walked. And walked. Running in circles. Maybe for days already. *[[swish]] * A sound. Something swung fast. It did not repeat. Lace spun. She looked everywhere. The sound had come from nowhere. The fog closed around the space where it should have been. She ran. Not a decision. A reflex. Her legs took her before her mind caught up. Branches cut her face. Fog filled her mouth. She did not care. She did not stop. The clearing opened around her. She burst into it and found no one. At the top of her lungs: "HORNET!!!!!" Nothing answered. Not even the whispers. Her knees hit the soil. Cold pressed up from below. The air pressed in from all sides. She was compressed between two silences. A hand touched her shoulder. She turned. "You are loud, Lace." Lace broke. Weeping came first, and then Hornet was kneeling beside her. "There, there. You will no longer be alone. I must apologise. It was cruel of me to leave you at such place. I cannot promise for you to stay by my side..." A pause. "...but I will try to be by yours." Lace wept harder. The words came out mangled. "StUPiD, s-stupid spiderrrr..." She tried to gather herself. She wiped at her eyes. "I don't want to be alone and I don't want to be afraid. One doesn't work with the other, I guess? Heh. Heh-heh..." Hornet looked at her. Full of confidence. "Sure it does not, Lace." A little relief. A little calm. "How much actually passed? I lost the touch of time here. You always write in your neat little journal." "Thirty minutes." "Huh." Lace let out a breath. "Doesn't surprise me anymore. I really thought it had been hours. Days." She was quiet for a moment. "I was so scared. So scared it made me wish I was still Mother's obedient perfect daughter." The words sat between them. "I know this sounds strange, but... maybe... perhaps... could I have a hug?" "Of course." They held each other, two shapes in the fog, as if meeting a very old friend again for the first time in a very long time. Then Hornet leaned close. Her whisper was barely voice at all. "There is everything wrong with this forest." A pause. Lace felt the breath near her ear. "Everything is wrong, because it lives. Pretend that everything is alright. Ignore everything you see." Lace understood. Crystal clear. They stopped hugging. Hornet rose first and helped Lace to her feet. "I tried using your methods. To find where something is. A settlement could be around the corner." "You took my teachings well. You only need to develop your senses further, across more varied regions." They began walking. They began talking. As if nothing unusual had occurred. The things happening around them were being ignored, and they both knew they were being ignored, and they both knew this was not sustainable. Their pace quickened. "The compass does not show my standpoint in this place. It is a strange anomaly." "Maybe it is... ehm... aetheric flux interference?" Lace blinked. By her mother, what had she just said. Hornet looked as surprised as Lace felt, but they kept their faces forward. They kept acting. Something unseen took offense. The air changed. Damp fur and old blood. Fear given a scent. Hunger given a taste. They were trying to avoid something that could not be avoided. *[[Skitter-skitter-skitter-skitter.]] * Something else came running, sprinting toward them from a direction that should have been empty. The cover was blown. It came not with dread but with teeth. Battle stances. Silk Skills charged. Watching where the sounds emerged while the fog hung and hid everything. A beast their size broke from the fog in the opposite direction it should have come from. The expectation of sound shattered. They turned. They took it down. "Well, that was easy." *[[Skitter-skitter-skitter-skitter. Skitter-skitter-skitter-skitter.]] * More. Jumping out. Attacking with increasing aggression. Increasing armour. *[[Skitter-skitter-skitter-skitter. Skitter-skitter-skitter-skitter. Skitter-skitter-skitter-skitter.]] * They fought with Silk and Skill. The fog thickened. Their vision blurred. More beasts emerged from the haze, their numbers growing, the ground itself seeming to resist each step. A tactical retreat. Shoulder to shoulder, running, Hornet using Sting Shards to slow the pursuit, Lace using her speed to swirl the dust from the ground. Silkspeed Anklets pushed her faster. Lace matched Hornet's pace. The skittering faded behind them. The cliff edge appeared without warning. They could not stop. They fell. The cliffside opened as they dropped. Less fog here. A more open space. Trees still surrounded them, their crowns blocking the sky, but the ground below was visible and approaching. Nothing to grab. Nothing to hold. Hornet took Lace's hand and threw out her Drifter's Cloak. The fabric caught the air. They were no longer falling. They were floating. Their feet touched the ground with soft thuds. A clearing. Trees in a dense ring, trunks pressed so close they formed walls. Only a few gaps allowed anything through. The fog was thinner here. The beasts were not. Silence before the storm. Nowhere to run. They stood their ground. The creatures that came through the gaps had different shells, different sizes, different anatomy. One thing in common. They shared the texture of the forest—the same dark wood grain, the same cold smoothness—as if the environment itself had shaped them, or they had shaped themselves to the environment. Bodies made by will for a single purpose. Hornet counted the gaps. Five. Only five, where the creatures emerged. The trees forming the walls had no branches, no holes, no points for a needle to hook. The crowns were too high to reach. They attacked. The first one lunged. Hornet sidestepped and drove her needle through its throat in a single motion. The needle sank deep. The sound it made coming out was wet and wrong. A thick fluid followed the blade—brown-grey, viscous as honey—and the shell cracked when it hit the ground. She twisted the needle outward and took another through the neck before the first had finished falling. Lace parried. The impact jarred up her arms, but she answered before the beast could recover —a flurry of counterslashes, pin reversing, blunt end then blade end then blunt end again, each strike finding the gap between shell and shell. She leaped. She dove. She thrust through the chest of one and carried the momentum into the next. They were slain. The breathing was still normal. Lace had taken more. She said nothing. She only looked at the bodies. Hornet knelt beside one. She had seen the wood-grain texture from a distance. Up close, the texture broke down. Beneath the bark-like shell, the body was organized. Blood vessels. Organs. Nerves laid in sheaths of pale tissue. The forest had dressed these things in dead material, but inside they were alive. More alive than the husks in Spindle Field. More alive than anyone wanted to admit. She threw her needle at the nearest trunk to grapple upward. It bounced off. A dull, flat sound. The wood was solid through. New shapes emerged from the depths. These were larger. Slimmer bodies, heavier shells, more limbs. They moved in zigzags. They watched where they aimed. Hornet targeted joints now—the narrow space between plates, the soft articulation where shell gave way to tendon. She worked with precision, not force. One came from behind. She spun. The beast recoiled, covering its neck. She adjusted mid- thrust and opened it from stomach to sternum instead. It used its last strength to claw a tear into her arm before she put the needle through its head. It is just a flesh wound. No time. Three more closing. She wove a loose mesh of silk, sticky, not solid. The beasts hit it and tangled. She ended them with a thread storm before they could pull free. Lace was moving faster than the wind now. She cut through a dozen in half the arena. The