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Hornet the Sentinel waited. The pitch-dark water muted all sounds outside the submarine, and the space within the submarine was hardly better. It was claustrophobic, only steel and glass keeping the water from snuffing her out, the dimly lit lights above her blinking and sparking from some malfunction somewhere and doing wonders for her confidence in this deathtrap.
A glimmer of movement redirected her nervous attention back outside. A lantern fly with WAY too many teeth, mutated by the unnatural blue substance that flowed freely from somewhere deeper down. It watched curiously, before swimming away, judging the submarine too large to devour. There were monsters in the sea. Mutated wildlife that had come into contact with the plasmium pools below, reanimated husks of drowned sailors doomed to forever wander the ocean floor, and abyssal demons that had emerged from even deeper down. This far down, there was nothing good.
There were also monsters in the ship. She couldn’t see them, but she knew they were lurking, just out of sight. She’d suspected some had snuck on board, but if she could be honest, she had expected something like this to happen for years. She had attempted to send out warnings about the explosion of lifeblood following the void incident, but it was not treated with the urgency it ought to be, and now, it was too late. Far too late for now, anyway.
Hornet was a warrior. She had spent two hundred and fourteen years defending a tomb, and seven more helping Hallownest back onto its shaky feet. And she had freed Pharloom from its own curse. After that, her travels had reawakened a wanderlust within her she had never quite managed to quell, that she now indulged in at full force. As a child, she’d seen small fishing boats on the various lakes of Hallownest, and had heard tales of bigger ones on bigger bodies of water that stretched out as far as the wastes did. Ships, they were called. The idea of seeing an ocean herself had intrigued her. And so, out of curiosity one day, it came up while she was trying to get Father’s attention.
“Father?” She asked. “You know everything, right?”
“…Yes?”
“Then tell me! What’s out at sea!”
“…Why do you ask?”
“Auntie Belle said she came from an island surrounded by a MASSIVE sea! Like, bigger than countless worlds! Is that true?”
“…Your concept of the size of a world is regrettably small,” Pale King sighed. “It is my hope that one day, we can reopen our borders, and you will be able to travel across the lands one day if you so wish.”
“Yay! When I grow up, I’m going to travel the world and” she wisely decided not to bring up Hollow. “And see what’s beyond the wastes! I wanna go on a ship into the sea!”
“…Ah. If you wish to travel, you must never go to that island. I’m sure you’ve already been told the story of your people. The Pale Beast whose siren song calls the desperate and the naive.” (In hindsight, Pale King’s exhausted tone suggested that he knew there was no point.)
“I won’t! I’ll go to the rest of the sea! I’ll even go UNDER the sea!”
“Under the sea? That place is even more forbidden. At Pharloom’s peak lies a beast. In the abyssal trenches off the coast -there lies only monsters. Abyssal beasts that would swallow you up whole, and unnatural forces not of this world. The unnatural things at the bottom of this world would surely kill even you. You must never, ever go there, understand?”
Pale King had sighed, as perhaps he realized he was only making the ocean sound more tempting to the tiny little goblin. But still, there was a fleeting time in her youth when Hornet believed his words, and clung to the hope that one day, she would escape her pale prison and see the world. But, then the world fell apart, and Hornet resigned herself to her fate of haunting her own tomb for all of eternity.
And now, on the ship she called the S.S. Tomorrow, she knew there were monsters. Above her, below her, all around her… even on the ship with her. Whispering and lurking just out of sight.
She was startled by harsh feedback from the communication device in her pocket. “This is Lace. Where the hell are you?!”
Hornet speaking. "The ship has… regrettably been overrun with monsters.”
“What?! Then kill them or so help me I will end you!”
Is what she imagined Lace would say, at least. In truth, Hornet had no idea; her end of the ancient Weaver trinket seemed to be malfunctioning beyond comprehensibility. Hornet was interrupted by a slithering beast appearing from the shadows. She stabbed through it with her needle before it had a chance to attack.
Something in her… broke, upon finally fighting the monsters she’d been so fearful of. There really were monsters on the ship. If she didn’t do anything, they would surely drown her and everyone she loved.
Wobbling exhaustedly, she tried to open the door, only to find that it was sealed shut. Fortunately, she had her silkshot on her. Though it was not meant to be used this way, it was… a suitable method of opening holes in things. So she took her silkshot, poured more silk into it than she was supposed to, and BLEW UP THE WALL.
The monsters on the other side paused, not expecting her entrance. They were grotesque horrors, right out of her own nightmares. A grotesque void creature with a vespine stinger-tail that dripped black void and struck instinctive fear into the weaver’s heart. A shapeless, scentless beast with FAR too many legs and an amount of silk that drew out her prey drive. A mass of flesh, silk and rusted metal, barely holding together and pulsing murderous intent.
They were communicating in some wretched void language Hornet could not make out, but some instinct compelled her to try to understand, and even she did not know why she stood there with her weapons out. Her senses seemed unusually scrambled today…
“…She’s going to kill us!” Hornet finally managed to make out somewhat clearly, in that distorted screech that was painful to listen to, and her prey drive couldn’t take it anymore. She was upon the pale Nosk in an instant, trying to devour what she could, before a blow from a metal object knocked her away.
The cogwork monster stood en garde, voice crackling horribly. “I will e-eliminate her,” it said. A swarm of cogflies flew at Hornet, which she expertly dodged. She had used that technique first, after all.
The battle was fierce, as Hornet shot at every living thing in the room and tried to disintegrate them to dust. Did she even have that much ammo? It mattered not; her silk seemed to run so endlessly she was not even thinking about it.
The monster with the tail jumped out of the way, resulting in her silkshot hitting the support beam at just the right angle to collapse the ceiling, trapping all of them under the mess.
Hornet’s leg was outright broken, bent the wrong direction, and the weight of the metal beam on her back made the decision for her; she wouldn’t be going anywhere or fighting anything.
“Nngh… No! This cannot be it… The beasts, they… I have to kill them before they…”
The communication device pulsed again.
“No, spider~” it taunted, not really sounding like anyone Hornet knew in particular. “That’s you. You’ve gone thoroughly mad. If you’re looking for demons, try looking inside.”
“Speak plainly, Lace. I’ve got no time for your dramatics. Are there demons or not?”
“No, Hornet, you are the demons!”
Hornet was abruptly startled by this revelation. She… she was a monster? It was so hard to think of anything but bloodshed… But- she did recognize just enough about the creatures to find them familiar. Why could she not recognize them further, or see them as they really were? Her senses were scrambled to hell and back… Was she even really here? Where even was she? Not on the submarine, she could tell that much. Had there even been? No, there had been a submarine, she was sure, but somewhere she’d wound up… in a building.
It mattered not, now. Hornet was practically a dead bug walking, driven to such madness, and her allies- she tried to kill them.
She had not shaken off the confusion, or paranoia, but she was now aware of her madness, if not of the source.
“One, two- hhh!”
The beam lifted off of her body did nothing for her. She could not understand, her body urging her to run away, allies distorted into such… things in her mind.
She could not ask Lace or Sentinel to use their blade on her. So she did the only thing she could, and answered the void calling her into the sea. Sinking down into the cold water, losing blood at an impressive rate, Hornet finally got her rest.
The rest was nice, the first true peace in ages, and it regrettably did not last.
A body pulled out of a watery grave, dragged off elsewhere, the increasingly strong sense of void surrounding a metal tomb. “You’re going to hate me for this, I know. Hate me all you want. You can yell at me when you’re breathing. Just let me try this.”
Drifting, sinking through a cold, dark ocean, deeper than she had ever been, in pressure that would kill someone who was not already deceased.
Closer to the seafloor, the water grew room temperature -which is to say, comparatively warm. Not from any sort of hydrothermal vents, but from glowing brine pools at the bottom of the sea, so thoroughly contaminated that even a mountain’s height away, a liquid tinged with unnatural blue was able to seep through the water and coil around the body like loving tendrils, life given form promising that the warrior would not be left to sink.
And then Hornet was a zombie.