Chapter Text
1: scrosciare - the action of rain pouring down or waves hitting rocks and cliffs
The rain never ends. Its pattering fills this place; it runs down the dark, grand spires crowed with nail-sharp spines, cascades down aqueducts in shimmering rows alongside the paved roadways, impressively intact despite the years and years of neglect.
… This city was beautiful before.
Quirrel does not know how he can picture it as it must have been so clearly, but from his lookout high above, he looks down and can almost see it: the roads, milling with bugs of all sizes and dress—the visitors with their umbrellas, none of the native bugs would use them—filling a bustling marketplace lit bright with strings of lumaflies, little hatchlings scampering in the plazas with their pets, guards watching fondly beneath all their pomp and armor. It was a city bursting with life. His eyes find a low wall, half-repaired, and he can imagine the menderbug who would have worked there, their buckets of plaster and piles of smooth-carved stone beneath a little tarp to keep the rainwater out of their work.
He does not know how he can picture it, but he does not question it. The images are pleasant and come to him freely, unlike those he has seen before, in other, less-ordered reaches of the kingdom.
He lets himself sit and watch, claws on the glass that shimmers with sheets of water.
He can almost ignore the husks, here.
Part of him marvels at how proud they must have been, how devoted to protecting their charge for their bodies to continue their duty after their passing.
The other part of him spies a long-dead sentry’s corpse stir, sees the orange leak from between the plates of their shell, sees the flash of their orange eyes in the half-dark of the city, sees the way their body clumsily moves as they heft themself into the air on tattered wings and he shudders.
It is his pity for them, the bugs they once were, that looses his nail when he must, but the sentry is not aware of him. Down there, far below in the fountain plaza, something small and white shines, a pale glow that makes him sit forward on his bench and peer downwards.
The little wanderer is there.
He wonders at their story, watches them flit with expert grace around the husk sentry’s clumsy nail swings until it falls into the dark water below, dispatched with ease. Their nail glints as they wipe it off and stow it, pittering up to the fountain.
It is a curious thing.
He stares down at it himself, at the ‘Hollow Knight’ cast in marble, at the plaque before it. At the wanderer who looks up at the stone, a moment of rain soaking their shell in silence.
Quirrel squints. There is… something. The Knight and the Wanderer, his brain struggles to recall, but seeing them side-by-side, part of him knows…
The Wanderer bows to the statue. They fiddle with their cloak, and depart, silent as they came, side-stepping a still-twitching limb of the sentry as they vanish back into the shadows, back into the depths of this ruined kingdom, but something still glows on the edge of the fountain where they lingered.
It is a flower.
Pale and white and luminous, placed before the Knight’s stone cloak, its petals bruised by the city’s tears.
… Voiceless, but not unthinking.
His eyes widen, memories whispering back to his mind as he understands.
The flower. An offering to their kin.