Tallah

“We should warn Tallah somehow. What if she stumbles across that?” Vergil tried and failed to keep pace with Sil.

She went around the small room at something less than a run, knuckles pressed against her teeth, eyes focused somewhere beyond the stone walls. She mumbled things he couldn’t make out.

Vergil tried again, “What do you think it was?”

She didn’t answer. Seemed to want to ask something of the Oldest, looked at the spider, reconsidered, kept on pacing. All the spiders had crammed into the same small space, crowding them, and Sil didn’t notice a single one. She nearly trod on several too slow in getting out of her way while she made a concerned effort to wear a trench in the floor.

“Sil?”

“What?”

“What do we do?”

She threw up her hands, grimaced at him, and started pacing again. He didn’t think she wanted to think on what they’d seen anymore than he did.

That thing couldn’t have been real. Maybe it was the distance playing a trick?

Unlikely.

“Argia, how’s my eyesight? Something strange going on with me?”

Vital signs: normal.

Visual acuity: normal.

Body temperature: 37.1 C

Blood chemistry: normal.

Lovely. Nothing wrong. The world was simply home to that… creature.

“That wasn’t a Vitalis-made thing,” Sil grumbled as she walked past him. “Couldn’t have been a chimera. They don’t grow that big. Always break apart. Dread chimera? No. Too rare. Would need corpses to grow. What then?”

Vergil found a corner that spiders vacated to make way for the healer’s circuit, and sat down with his back against the wall. She’d wind herself down eventually. Panic didn’t suit her.

The spider limped over to regard him, large black eyes darting between him and Sil.

“May this one sit with you?”

“Sure. Hop on.” He tapped his shoulder and the spider, after a moment’s hesitation, climbed next to his face.

“Is your… friend unwell?”

“No. She’s thinking. She’ll figure this out and then tell us what to do.”

Or, at least, he hoped she would. Because for his part, the situation was insane enough that he could openly question, maybe for the hundredth time, if he wasn’t actually in the cage, gone utterly insane. If it weren’t for Sil trying to reason the situation, he’d be hollering right about then.

But if Sil was… fine, then he could be too. As long as Sil and Tallah kept their heads, he was beginning to be certain things would work out. Somehow. They’d gone through blizzard. Survived the fall. Crossed the maze. Survived the ambush. By the skin of their teeth, yes, but here they were and he’d yet to see Sil lose her calm in any critical way.

“Maybe some form of grinner? No, that’s stupid. A grave horror? Still needs corpses. Where to get that many corpses of the girl? Or…”

Sil stopped in front of the Oldest who’d been spinning in place to keep its eyes on her.

“How do you get the water?”

“From the spring.”

“Not that water. The healing one? The one that tiny spider brought to us.”

“From Mother’s flowers. They are grown in the Birthing Hollow. We do not go there anymore.”

“Why?”

“The false mother guards it. It is lost to us.”

“And what’s in there?”

Now the Oldest hesitated. Its palps moved as if it were thinking. “The false mother’s old self.”

Sil’s eyebrows shot up and she exchanged a look with Vergil. He shrugged. What could he possibly contribute?

“What does that even mean? Her human body? Her mind? What?”

“It is her old shape, before she was taken into Mother and became—”

“Erisa’s human body, then. Bloody fantastic. You’ve…” She puffed up her cheeks and pressed thumbs to her temples, rubbing. “You’ve excised her out of a living body, shattered, and—”

Whatever she meant to say got lost on the way as she bent over and was violently sick all over the floor. Her grunts echoed in the deep silence of the library. Vergil got to his feet to go help, but she waved him off.

“Water.” The word whipped some spiders into motion. By the time she straightened and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, one of the black spiders had returned from somewhere with a sloshing jug.

“I don’t have time for this.” She breathed heavy. Swilled some water. Went back to her pacing. “I need to understand. Where was I?”

Her mouth worked soundlessly and, for a time, her face was pale as spider silk while she ruminated. Walked. Drank. Spat. Heaved again.

“Why can’t I bloody focus?”

She paced, carrying the jug with her. Didn’t even react when stepping in her own sick.

Vergil got up and moved next to her, matching his steps to hers.

“How can I help?”

“You can’t. I need to think. My head’s pounding.”

“Maybe… stop pacing?”

She ignored him. Before he said more, she started talking, “The spiders are aethervores, or something close to it. They can extract and redistribute their… souls. Let’s call them souls. Their essence. This is something that I could spend several lifetime studying. That’s the crux of everything going on here. Do you understand?”

“No. Not one bit.”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that they broke Erisa. They broke her at a fundamental level, and then rebuilt her when they took parts of her into themselves. It’s… wonderful.” She waved the jug around and nearly cracked it over his head. “It’s bloody terrifying. If any word of this got out into the wider empire, this place would be burned to the stone. If the aelir ever heard of it, they would wage a species-wide holy war against the spiders here. They would kill a million of themselves to make sure not a single spider survives the purge. Do you understand?”

The prospect stopped Vergil but not her. She kept walking and talking.

“I need to talk to Tallah because she’s the one that knows more about this stuff. I’m only… marginally competent. But it’s clear that they broke the girl. They drained the soul out of her and put it… in their Mother. And Erisa is taking vengeance.”

“I don’t understand, Sil. Stop and explain please. Maybe I can help you figure something out.”

She did and looked at him wide-eyed. “Do you remember the chalice? Your shape in it?”

“Not that I want to, but yes. That’s what happened to her?”

“Worse. A soul, Vergil, is the essence deep within us. It is a reflection of who we are in the meat, and also a mirror for the meat suit to reflect in. Do you understand.”

Not one bit. He nodded along.

“When you shatter a mirror, you can never set it right again. It will never be the same. Whatever it reflects will never be the same again. A soul is not a river or a lake or a pool of energy or whatever else poetic nonsense gets attributed to it. It is brittle. It can shatter. Build it up wrong and it will reflect a monster back. Erisa was taken apart, piece by piece, and spread out, filed down, and brought back together.” She shivered and heaved again, as if the words made her sick. “Goddess’s mercy, she is probably in so much pain for it. And it never ends. She will never be the same again, and she will never be whole again.”

“We can’t take her back? If we find her, can’t we do anything to help?”

A nod and a distant, pained look. “We can kill her. But she’s in many bodies now, if all they told me is true. She’s spread out like a plague. It’s impossible to save her. But I can’t simply leave her be like this, especially if that thing we saw is what she’s turned into. Or part of her…”

And now she was walking again, rubbing her temples and groaning, face gone white and lined with tension.

“Why can’t I focus? I know this. I know I know this,” she whimpered and nearly slipped on the vomit.

Vergil gave the spider a side glance, “Did you all mean for this to happen?”

“We did not know. We do not know what a soul is. We only know the Knowing.”

“Different name, same thing. Maybe.”

It was plainly clear he wouldn’t be helping Sil while she was like this, and going out to find Tallah meant they would need to also face that creature prowling the city. He was certain it had seen them and had its reasons not to come up there.

Wonderful. How lucky he, to be faced with such wonderful experiences.

“What’s your name?” he asked the spider, both stepping aside from Sil’s path.

“What is a name?” it answered back, genuinely confused.

“What others call you.”

The spider seemed to consider this for a time. “This one is not called upon. This one just does. We do not have names.”

“That one has a name.”

“That one has a description. It is only Oldest for your understanding, not for the kin.”

Lovely. Sil was speaking in crazy-talk, and the spider in riddles.

“What are you then?”

“…A spider? Kin.”

“Male or female?”

Again the confused silence and the careful answer. “This body serves no function for reproduction. This body only serves to acquire Knowings.”

He groaned and reached for the spider. It fit, rather neatly, in one hand. Regarding it as it had defaulted to some strange rock-like colour, an idea struck him.

“I’m going to call you Luna.”

“…Why?”

“Because I can and want to.” And because Sil’s pacing was getting on his nerves and he felt the need to impose his will on something. Naming the spider felt right and he wanted to be able to talk to it as something more than the whole of Grefe spiderdom. “Luna was the name of my original world’s—Earth’s—moon. Add that to your Knowing.”

If a spider could frown, Luna made a good attempt at it.

“Luna,” it repeated. “Of earth. What is earth? What is moon?”

“Why are you holding it like a puppy you want to take home?” Sil asked as she noticed the scene. “Put it down before you annoy it.”

“Am I annoying you, Luna?”

More confusion instead of answers. Vergil sighed and set it back on his shoulder.

“Did you decide what we need to do?” he asked. “Are we going out there to find Tallah.”

“Tallah’s a big girl and she can take care of herself. I still can’t channel. And I don’t know what that thing out there is or what it can do. I’m open to ideas.”

They looked at one another and then at the gathered spiders staring expectantly at them. Well, no pressure. In the far background, among the shelves, activity continued as if they weren’t there, spiders moving across the infinite webs. What alien dreams would their alien mind conjure up? For a moment he wanted to go and reach out, maybe even accept Luna’s Knowing to understand the creatures better.

“We can’t stay in here forever. And we’ll need a plan for when we head back.”

“Yes. We regroup with Tallah.”

“And after that?”

“Run like the daemon armies of the Twins chased us.”

He wasn’t convinced she was serious. By how she worried on a knuckle, she might have been.

“Just like that? Leave everything as it is and turn tail to run? Like young cowards?”

Her answer was a cutting glare and more silence for some heartbeats.

“Of course not. I want to help them,” she said, a sullen note in her voice.

“Them or Erisa?”

“Erisa is beyond our help.”

A general murmur went around the spiders. Not in words, but in skittering feet tapping the floors and walls, palps rubbing together, claws scratching. Sil’s words struck an invisible cord and sent a shock wave of vibrations through even the spiders on the web.

“Is your judgement in favour of us? Can we be?” The Oldest and Luna asked together, both raised up on their hind legs like excited dogs.

No. Vergil cursed himself for the unkind thought. Not like animals at all. Like people given a stay on their execution. Like prisoners meeting another sunrise.

Sil blanched, the paleness spreading at the question, huffed, and tried to look anywhere but at a spider. In the overcrowded room it was hard.

“I’ve said already, yes. I believe you deserve a chance to survive your first mistake. I believe that you are not evil, nor set on conducting evil. My conscience is on your side, yes.”

If there was excitement before, now it was a veritable hum of joy. There wasn’t a single still body anymore. All skittered and moved as if in dance, raising a noise that Vergil was certain could be heard through all of Grefe.

Why was this so important to them?

“Because Erisa is telling them to disappear. She’s not going to forgive what they did to her. I expect she can’t. Peace is not something we can broker here.” He hadn’t realised he’d asked out loud and Sil was keeping her voice low, as if speaking only for him. “Be told enough times you’re worthless, and you might start believing it.”

That was all fine and wonderful, but failed in answering the final question: “What now?”