Fanfic / A Song of Silk and Saplings

A Song of Silk and Saplings is a Bug Fables and Hollow Knight crossover fanfiction by Zennistrad, who has also written My Little Planeswalker. The story begins when Hornet, in the aftermath of the Vessel's defeat of the Radiance and Infection, is kidnapped by a mysterious cult of bugs who wish to marry her to their leader. She escapes, only to find herself injured and unconscious in the Forsaken Lands outside of Bugaria, where Mothivia and Zasp (mostly the latter really), rescue her. Now Hornet must navigate a strange new world while figuring out what to do about the cult, who have dark designs for both Bugaria and Hallownest...

See also She Might Be Giant, another Bug Fables-centric fanfic by the same author.

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This Work Contains Examples Of:

• Amazon Chaser: After their duel, Maki develops an attraction to Hornet specifically because she's capable of fighting on his level. Kina teases him over being "an old-school mantis" — since, in traditional mantis culture, men pair up with women who can tear their heads off. Literally, in the past.
  "No, it's pretty obvious you do," Kina sing-songed. "And you must be a real old-school mantis, too. 'Cause you're totally into women who'll actually just kill you!"
  "I-I don't know what you're talking about!" Maki sputtered. "And besides! No one does... that anymore."
  "Hey, calm down, Maki," Kina teased. "Don't lose your head."
  "That's not funny!"
• The Archmage: When Team Snakemouth sees what Quirrel can do magically in a spar with Hornet, Kabbu suggests that he might be the greatest mage in the entire history of Bugaria.
• The Atoner: When the Radiance was destroyed, a small fragment of her lodged itself in Hornet's mind. Having regained her lucidity, she is fully aware of how awful her actions have been, and seeks to at least help Hornet in her plight.
• Awful Truth: Hornet is horrified to learn from the Radiance that her father ordered the Final Solution on Hallownest's moths as revenge for the Radiance's actions, but eventually admits that she isn't surprised he'd stoop so low.
• Canon Welding:
  • Bugaria's ants were originally native to Deepnest, and migrated to the surface to escape the Infection. This serves to explain both why the ants' past before Elizant I founded the kingdom is so mysterious and why the ant queens' masks look so much like Hallownest masks — because they are.
  • Similarly, Bugaria's moths descend from the survivors of Hallownest's Moth tribe, who fled to the surface in earlier times to escape from persecution under the Pale King's reign.
• Commonality Connection: Elizant II and Hornet end up forming a bond over both being expected to step into the shoes of extremely accomplished, beloved and successful monarchs despite not feeling even slightly up to the task, and over being from groups originally native to Deepnest.
• Crossover Cameo:
  • In Chapter 10, Hornet briefly comes across a fire ant and a mud dauber wasp who are very clearly Chandra Nalaar and Jace Beleren from Magic: The Gathering who have been transformed into setting-appropriate forms when planeswalking into the story's world, potentially as a reference to one of the author's other stories.
  • Later, the protagonists briefly encounter a rosy maple moth and blue dasher dragonfly that are very clearly based on Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash.
• Dance Battler: Rosha adapted the waggling dance used by bees to communicate into a martial art similar to capoeira, which she uses to her movements fluid, precise and unpredictable.
• Dream Weaver: In the absence of Radiance, the Knight/Ghost has taken over this role within the minds of bugs, as seen when it leads Leif into a dream where he meets the original Leif and his wife Muse.
• Driven to Suicide: Very closely avoided. In Chapter 27, when she recognizes the presence of the Radiance in her mind, Hornet concludes that she has succumbed to the Infection and tries to take her own life to prevent herself from spreading it further, and is only stopped at the last moment.
• Eyes Do Not Belong There: Omega, the monster in the Giant's Lair, is revealed to have an eye in each "armpit" and another in its mouth.
• Fantastic Diet Requirement:
  • Hornet, being part spider, is an obligate carnivore and liquivore. She cannot digest plant-based food at all, and can only digest animal-derived matter if it has been liquefied and partly pre-digested. Normally, she eats by simply hunting of her own accord in the way that spiders do — that is, webbing up her prey, injecting it with digestive enzymes, and then drinking up the remains — but in Bugaria, where carnivorous bugs are feared and hated, this causes her problems.
  • Carnus the carrion beetle has a similar issue. He's a scavenger, which means that he can only digest decomposing meat. Unlike Hornet, who can at least hunt for herself, he's often reduced to robbing graves in order to eat the corpses.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Hornet, as a result of what she was told about the moths of Hallownest being responsible for the return of the Radiance and the coming of the Infection, has a deeply ingrained distrust and fear of moths. She knows that it's an irrational fear, and she tries to be civil with the Bugarian moths, but it still occasionally slips out.
  • Hornet is a spider, which in Bugaria are nearly all non-sapient predators, and thus more that one person who learns her species distrusts her. It doesn't help Vi's reaction that she found out by seeing Hornet drain a non-sapient bug for lunch.
  • In general, carnivorous bugs were only accepted into Bugarian society relatively recently, and there aren't any dining establishments that openly serve meat due to an unspoken agreement that carnivores can stay only if they aren't seen eating meat in public. The Wasp Kingdom, given that Wasps can eat meat, is the exception to this.
• Fish out of Water: Hornet has never been outside Hallownest's tunnels, so natural sunlight and greenery freak her out when she first sees them, as does the idea that there is in fact a definite surface to the world instead of the earth continuing infinitely in all directions. Combining this with her antagonism towards moths, Maki assigns Team Snakemouth to escort her around the Ant Kingdom so Hornet doesn't cause a scene.
• Foreign Cuss Word: Rosha, an Africanized honey bee originally from what used to be Brazil, swears liberally in Portuguese.
• Fusion Fic: The story combines the settings of Bug Fables and Hollow Knight, with Hallownest being deep below the Forsaken Lands.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Implied when the Radiance shows Hornet where she ended after she got forgotten: a featureless void with no sound, no sight, nothing, not even black. Hornet finds just a few minutes there unbearable. The Radiance doesn't know exactly how long she was stuck there, but knows that it had to have been centuries.
• I Have Many Names: The main antagonist, Father Veritas, introduces himself to Maki by several different titles and names. It's made clear that "Father Veritas" is itself just another chosen title of his.
  "Do not presume that you know who I am, Sir Maki, for I wear many names. The Father of Leaves. The Masked One. The Eternal Ash. The Gallows of Níu Heimar.^note Old Norse for "Nine Realms" The Everlasting King. Here I wear the name of Veritas, and you stand before me in my domain."
• My God, What Have I Done?: The portion of the Radiance's consciousness that survived her death is going through a tremendous crisis of conscience over what she did during her madness, and in particular over her betrayal of the moths.
• Non-Human Humanoid Hybrid: Hornet's mother was a spider, and her father was a Wyrm deity in a more bug-like form.
• No, You: In one scene, Kabbu compares Vi's excitement to a kid who just saw an exciting play. Vi, who's touchy about her age, protests that she's not a kid, to which Lief responds that it's just a simile. Vi, who doesn't know what that word means, retorts with "You're a simile!"
• Oblivious to Love: A running joke is that Maki develops a colossal crush on Hornet after she kicks his ass in a duel that he's profoundly embarrassed by and does a rather poor job of hiding, and which Hornet is the only person to remain consistently oblivious to as a result of her poorly-developed social skills.
• Oh, My Gods!: Quite common among Bugarian citizens, often in reference to the "Three Goddesses," one of whom is implied to be Venus. Being from Hallownest, Hornet is fond of saying "Void's Embrace" and "Oh My Wyrm," and as well as "father's ghost" and, in one particular example "father dammit."
• Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: The Pale King's given name is Typhon in this story, and the White Lady's is Echidna. The Radiance, meanwhile, is named Io.
• The Psycho Rangers: Hornet's captors are a trio recurring antagonists who are direct counterparts to Team Snakemouth:
  • Brier is a boxelder bug with powerful lightning magic and a former scholar of Hallownest's Soul Sanctum, diametrically opposite to Leif in several key aspects. While Leif was viewed as a "failed experiment" by the roaches of Upper Snakemouth, Brier was seen as the greatest success of Hallownest's Soul Sanctum, as they were the only Sanctum scholar to infuse themselves with Soul Magic with no side effects. Whereas Leif cares very little for his possible biological immortality and seems to have become an Anti-Nihilist in his personal journey, Brier is an obsessive Immortality Seeker who rejects any notion that a mortal life can be meaningful. And while Leif was an unwilling test subject of the roaches of Upper Snakemouth, Brier eagerly dedicates their entire life to the exact same kinds of hideously unethical experiments. Finally, while Leif is a cordyceps fungus who accidentally absorbed the memories and identity of its deceased host, Brier willingly sets up a cordyceps to take host in their body in the event of their demise, so that they can come Back from the Dead.
  • Carnus, an American carrion beetle of exceptional physical strength, is a foil to Kabbu. He suffers a great deal of angst over his species' diet of rotting corpses forcing him to scavenge grave sites, and while he's seemingly quite gentle in personality, his immense guilt complex leads him to side with Light Within solely out of the belief that their promised "Second Reckoning" will absolve him of his "sins." More gruesomely, he's also scavenged the graves of Kabbu's master and friend and eaten their decaying bodies.
  • Rosha is an Africanized honey bee (better known by the common name "killer bee") with a fiercely independent spirit and a strong desire to prove herself, making her directly parallel Vi. Unlike Vi, she's actually a queen bee who purposefully refused to start a new hive and birth a new generation. Also unlike Vi, she is a nasty Social Darwinist who regularly murders other bugs for sport, out of the belief that strength is the only thing that truly matters.
• Shout-Out: When lost in the area beneath the Light Within's headquarters, Hornet finds herself in a maze of twisty little passages that look all alike.
• Spider-Sense: During a duel, Hornet (natch) realizes she has a very limited version of her father's precognitive Foresight, and learns how to sense danger right before it happens.
• Walking Ossuary: Omega, which in-game is seen only as a disembodied eye and two hands, is revealed to consist of the spines of three or four humans wound into a snakelike shape, with a dozen arms serving as legs and a human skull for a head, with a yellow eye in its jaws.
• The Worf Effect: The main antagonist, Father Veritas, obliterates the Deadlander Omega (a human-sized monster that can't even be harmed at all in its original appearance) in a single attack.

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