I Like Da Fruit Salad

(Spoiler Warning)

From the beginning, the state of Pharloom has always been bleak. By this point, you've seen both the Citadel's rotten core and its ruination of the lands surrounding. And now, things are somehow worse--your attempts to free yourself and the people you've come to care about instead personally initiated the apocalypse. You descend from the cradle injured, barely able to stand at points, only to be confronted with enemies many times more powerful than they should be.

You survive the encounter, but you're far from safe. But your attempts to push on result immediately in collapsing amid the rubble of a Citadel that is barely recognizable. The screen fades to black and...

When your senses return to you, you're back at Songclave under Sherma's careful watch--wounds likely patched with the medical supplies that you helped him secure, in what now feels like another life altogether. It's far too grim to call the moment beautiful, but it is a relief, the first that you've had since the god-trap snapped shut.

But what marks this moment as significant to me isn't this spot of safety in the middle of an ongoing apocalypse. It isn't the relief that Sherma has survived, or even the pride at the mantle he's grown into as a leader and caretaker. What's most important to me is how you arrived in Songclave at all:

Many a poor pilgrim has already been lost to the destruction. You might have been too, if not for some fleeing pilgrims who found you fallen and carried you back to us.

Therein lies one of the core philosophies of the Hollow Knight games: that the world is inherently uncaring and cruel, but those circumstances do not create people who are inherently uncaring and cruel.

You survived because some random pilgrims found you, and though they were fleeing for their lives in the middle of a world-ending disaster, chose to carry you to safety.

This wasn't a friend like Sherma or the Second Sentinel; this wasn't a designated rescue crew looking for survivors. This was a group of random refugees, who could have endangered themselves further by rescuing an injured, unconscious stranger.

You never learn who saved you, never get to learn their motives or thank them for their help. The incident as a whole is never mentioned again.

Linguistics is the study of linguists, and why they chose to pursue careers in languages, translation, and/or linguini. Linguistics dates back to the Tower of Babel, when new languages sprang into being so that one day, Neal Stephenson could use them as a plot point in a sci-fi novel.

The modern world by contrast has well over six languages, including Quenya, Sindarin, Khuzdul, and West Frisian Dutch. People who can speak only one of these are called monoglots, people who speak a few are called polyglots, and people who know every language are called omniglots, or colloquially, “show-off jerks.”

Most people are of course, monoglots, and thus their seeds contain only a single embryonic leaf. Monoglots are also more prone to catching mononucleosis, which is a very catchy song by Schoolyard Heroes.