Comment on carrying you

  1. tragic_unpaired_electron Tue 23 Mar 2021 12:17AM UTC

    This is so heartbreakingly beautiful. Your writing is gorgeous and the style is really appropriate for how a Vessel might think. There's something about it that feels kind of detached and dreamy, but still carrying that undercurrent of bitterness that the Knight must feel. It's really effective, and very poetic as well. I particularly liked: "The abandoned child, the failed vessel (one of hundreds, one of thousands), remembers nothing of Hallownest’s beauty or glory in its rising days. They remember broken, tear-stained masks, dead and lonely siblings, an infection that is a wound on the world." It really puts you in the shoes (metaphorically speaking) of one of these children who were buried and forgotten in the Abyss while Hallownest thrived.
    I loved the section about the White Lady. I can't stand it when she soliloquizes about how she can't perceive the Knight's thoughts so therefore they must not be thinking. I like your version, where the Knight is boiling with emotions that it can't possibly share, so it just walks away.
    And the idea of the Knight clawing off the Brand???? Ah, painful, but it makes perfect sense. The Brand is not only the symbol of the King but the very thing PK used to seal the failed Vessels in the first place, so of course the Knight would despise it. I had never thought of it like that before.
    Oh, and THIS: "Some days it is worse than others and they think they understand the sheer, suffocating hostility of the shade they leave behind. Even though it hurts, they let it attempt to break off that stifling prison, though the need to absorb it into themselves and become whole again always wins out before anything else.They strike back, pull it into them; they feel the memory of the death sink into the dark, they feel its anger soothed. They feel more complete than they did." What a fantastic (and by that I mean hurtful) explanation of why the shade Hates You So Much. I've never understood why it's hostile, but this makes sense. It's sort of an avatar for the impotent anger of the Knight.
    In short, I just love your characterization. You've written the Knight as not just a being capable of feeling emotions, but one that feels them much more acutely than anyone else and is cursed by the inability to express them. It's beautiful, and wow, painful.

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