Hollow Knight

There is a famous saying about Rome. It teaches us, simply, how it was built. This is inherently optimistic, and I’ve long wondered what its antithesis would be. Yet I no longer have to wonder. I’ve played Hollow Knight. I know the way of rulers and their empires.

There will be remnants, for instance. Husbands and wives clinging to normalcy, perhaps even salvaging survival from some scraps left behind. A bit of passion, a bit of feigned contentment. There will be scavengers and prophets - and enjoyment. Whistles and moans. Public servants who wander and wonder, often at once, always at that which is gone - and won’t be back. The gravedigger is overworked. The Emperor is gone to memories; he may have never existed at all.

There will be decay. The statues linger and have become immediate, a sort of foreground you cannot avoid; they distract and infuriate those left behind. Yet the breadth of them, the mass, will fade, monumentally - alongside the intentions which bore them. Burrowing, mere escape, becomes commendable. The loft of ambitions, the metaphorical towering of it all, so sleek and gilded, is gone to dust, and what’s left is rubble. To burrow, I think, has become admirable. A tower’s precipe remains, as do the tools of laborers and the lavish comforts of wealth, but, again, intentionality has been left out in the rain.

There will be sorrow. An infestation of it. A crawling up and down your spine as you sift and hack and batter the past and present and battle the wondrences, those hulking and apart, webs long untangled, hallways long emptied, riches long abandoned. It has a tune - the same one, though, endlessly repeated. A reminder of loss, of totalities and totals, given the smallest tinge of self and, therefore, of being. In thickets and caves, from valleys to peaks, the tune is there, a downcast companion for any occasion - and nowhere in particular to be.

Much of Hollow Knight is work, and, I assume, so too is empire building. You press forth, pillaging, taking for yourself, and, thus, for all the others, yet there is always the the prospect of your forgetfulness. A city left untouched. A population unmolested, untamed, by your brutal grace. A person unconvinced of your blatant, prodding generosity. So you search. Adhere to prophecy. Begin to dig, and fill; there will always be more skulls. More souls. It’s all laid out at your feet. Your colosseum is filled with fools; ignore the danger in pity. Draw those close closer. Slaughter the rest. Dig, and fill.

You already knew this: There would be death. Inevitably. This is the way of rises - and falls. You will pay, tirelessly depraved by the singular notion of conquering. It led you this far. Why stop now? Why admire a villager’s humility, or a defender’s loyalty, or a knight’s radiance?

An empire becomes this accumulation, of peoples and habits and hopes and ignorance, and then of death. Its rank lingers, no matter who stays, across the peoples and the ages gifted another day. Put aside, lifeless and hollow, an empire, once emptied, can never die.