Chapter Text
No cost to great.
He had repeated this mantra, this sentence, a thousand time already. And it was a sentence, a death sentence for millions of his own children.
Yet the king of Hallownest couldn’t bring himself to accomplish his duty, to save his kingdom. Before him laid his wife, crying, clutching three white orbs against her chest. They were full of a glowing pale liquid, in which he knew floated tiny embryos, that would a horrible fate to save the kingdom.
Their insides would melt, rotten by the corrosive void. The small, tainted creatures that would come out would merely masses of the mysterious fluid, wearing the shells of his children.
In all the timelines he foresaw, only one vessel would ascend, only one would prove pure.
In all the timelines he foresaw, all the other vessels, these little, innocent creatures that never asked to be born, would fall to there death. And the only one saved would be the one without a mind.
No cost to great.
Could he still believe that, watching his unborn children he was about to throw in the abyss? He was the king; he could still call it off. Besides, nobody knew why the entire basin had been pretty much evacuated. Nobody knew the detail of the creation of the vessel, not even Monomon.
He could just say that the way he wanted to create the vessel turned out unusable, and people would believe it. He was the king, after all.
But because he was the king, he needed to place the safety of his people before his own egoist desires of a family, of pleasing his dear root with offspring. No, for his people, he would sacrifice anything.
But his children, even if not born, and the vessel, even if made of void, weren’t they his people too?
No, he had decided, every time he had this thought before. But now that their existence was so much closer to become reality, he wasn’t so sure.
In a moment of weakness, he let his mind wonder to what would happen if he canceled everything right now. It was less than a second, but enough for the curse of his foresight to kick in.
Flashes of happiness, his children growing up, the White Lady playing with them, the influence of the little higher beings helping him to change, become a kinder, more open version of himself. And has they keep growing up, powerful knights and brilliant administrators, helping him expend Hallownest beyond what it already was, into a truly eternal kingdom.
And all of that could never be, because of the Old Light.
He began to cry. His dear Lady did so too.
As a goddess of fertility, she could create millions of eggs in a matter of hours, yet, in the entire morning, she only produced three, each one breaking her heart more than the last.
If he pushed her, he knew she would get over her sorrow, long enough at least to produce the eggs required. He wouldn’t.
“Let’s stop here. The Hollow Knight plan need a complete replanning. We can’t do this.”
The White Lady was still crying. Was it joy or still sadness? He couldn’t tell. Would she ever be free from the trauma of them nearly killing their children? This time, his foresight remained mute.
“But… The kingdom? The infection?”
“I will find a pure vessel by another mean. There has to be another solution. There has to be.”
There had to be, because in the future he foresaw, the kingdom would survive and thrive as much as his children. He needed a moment to remember that as much as it felt like his gift had for only purpose to torture him, that wasn’t the case. If he saw a future, it was possible, which meant there was another solution to the infection problem.
There has to be.