The automatic doors of the convenience store slid shut behind him with a dull hiss. Plastic bag in hand, Natsuki Subaru stepped out into the amber-lit sidewalk, his thoughts quiet and tired. Just another walk home.
But he never made it.
There was no flash. No sound. Just darkness—absolute, suffocating, endless.
The sky, the street, the world… gone. In its place: a cold plane of nothingness. The ground beneath his feet rippled with black fog, soft and yielding like ash-slick water. A chill crept through his shoes, into his bones.
The air was thick. Unnatural. Each breath he took felt wrong, like breathing in grief. His lungs burned. His heart began to pound, loud in his ears, louder with every second—until—
Something moved.
He turned. A figure—shapeless, crawling with darkness, glided silently through the fog. Its body was a walking void, barely a silhouette… except for two glowing amethyst-blue eyes, staring directly into his soul. They pulsed like dying stars, ancient and filled with unspeakable sorrow.
And love(?).
Terror swallowed him whole.
Subaru did the only thing his body could manage—he ran. His legs stumbled through the fog, lungs aching, heart hammering, panic screaming in his blood. Black hands—limbs of inky shadow—sprouted from the floor, reaching, grasping, hungering.
He dodged left—tripped—rolled through the haze, never daring to look back.
He didn't need to. He felt it—like judgment following him with each breath.
Then… the floor gave out.
Subaru's scream never reached the air. The world fell away beneath him, the ground collapsing into a gaping abyss of black nothingness. He plummeted into its hungry maw, shadows licking at his limbs, his mind unraveling as something in the dark cried out—
"Don't leave me..."
The voice wasn't his. It sounded like a memory… a lover's final wail…a piece of himself that didn't want to be forgotten.
Tendrils wrapped around his arms and legs, pulling him deeper. He thrashed, screamed, fought—It didn't matter. He was going to die here, in this abyss, unknown and unloved. Never apologizing to his parents. Never finding out what went wrong. Just another failure.
Tears welled in his eyes as he closed them.
"Do not lament, my beloved."
A soft voice. Feminine. Timeless.
Warm arms wrapped around him—gently, like a lover hugging her husband. He opened his eyes.
She hovered just above him, surrounded in the eternal black.
She wore dark-purple thigh-high socks with golden frills, a one-piece dress adorned with flower motifs, a veil covering her face, and an eight-pointed star pinned to her hair. Only her smile was visible.
It wasn't cruel. It wasn't kind. It was devoted.
"You are mine now. And while I yet breathe… you shall not die."
The Void surged around him—then silence.
A numbness greater than any pain washed over Subaru, and sleep took him like the embrace of a god.
A breeze stirred. The scent of fruit and water drifted by.
Subaru awoke slowly, a dull ache in his limbs, his senses returning one by one.
He sat on a stone bench beside a fountain, sunlight catching on the water's dancing surface. All around him was a market plaza—bustling, alive, real.
Cloaked in black, a long mantle draped over his body, he sat slumped. Beside him, resting against the bench, was a massive silver sword, its hilt adorned with the same eight-pointed star from his dream.
People walked past, speaking a language he didn't recognize. None noticed him.
But he noticed everything.
His heartbeat was slow. Controlled. His body… didn't feel like it belonged to him. And something in the back of his mind whispered:
"Not yet. Not your end. Stay alive."
The fountain gurgles gently. The plaza is warm and filled with life. Subaru is in a foreign medieval-style marketplace. Stalls with fruits, cloth, trinkets line the streets. No one seems alarmed by Subaru's presence—but some give his weapon strange looks. He feels detached from his body. As if someone else is inside his body. His hands are marked with thin black veins—they pulse softly, and fade.
The fountain murmured quietly beside him, splashing crystalline water under the light of an unfamiliar sun. Laughter and chatter drifted faintly through the air, but Subaru heard none of it.
He sat motionless on the stone bench, his cloak draped around him like a second skin, but it was the weight on his lap that grounded him.
A sword—not forged in this world. Long, silver, monolithic. Its surface was clean but cold… and mirrored his face with unnatural clarity.
He looked into it. And the reflection that stared back?
Wasn't entirely his.
His face—covered in a white mask. His eyes… hollow. Void-deep. Familiar, but wrong.
He leaned closer. The air stilled.
Then—
Pain.
Like a spike driven into his skull, something cracked open inside him. Subaru's body tensed as a flood of foreign visions tore through his mind, unstoppable and raw.
Screams, shrieks—some human, others monstrous. A silhouette—small, cloaked in pale shell and black limbs—leaping through ruins, sword in hand.
A thousand battles. Gods with golden masks. Insects with divine strength. Flames. Screams. A world rotting under a Pale Light.
And himself—
—fighting something that looked like him. Taller. Stronger. More broken.
The Hollow Knight.
Another—her—a lithe figure with a long needle, eyes like a sharp knife.
Hornet.
All of it built toward one final image:
A blinding yellow light—pure and furious—crying out in rage, in fear, in despair—And the Void rising up to swallow it whole. Dragging it back into darkness.
"I'm sorry," the light whispered.
"Please remember me…"
Then—
Silence.
Subaru gasped.
His vision cleared, and the fountain returned. The marketplace sounds came rushing back. His breath came in shaky, controlled bursts, but his hands remained still.
The sword now rested heavier in his lap, as if acknowledging something. Not as a tool. But as a reminder.
Those were not his memories…But they were now part of him.
He stared at his hand—calm. A little too still for someone who just saw gods die.
He rose from the bench slowly, the silver blade sliding into a sheathe that he couldn't remember acquiring, yet somehow felt natural slung across his back.
"I don't know where I am… or what I've become," he thought. "But the first thing you do in a place you don't recognize—"
He took a step into the crowd, eyes scanning the roads, stalls, and alleyways.
"—is get familiar."
The people didn't notice him. Or rather—they didn't want to. Some glanced. Flinched. Looked away. As if something ancient brushed their subconscious when he passed.
Something… not supposed to be here.