Tallah

Sil woke to the sound of dripping water, with a scream lodged in the back of her throat. It tore itself out of her on the first heartbeat of consciousness. Survival instinct clasped a hand across her mouth.

Where was she?! What had happened?

Everything came back in a rush. Tallah’s blaze. The two monsters barring the way. Vergil fighting. Vergil being thrown off and the creature galloping across the narrow battlefield straight for her.

Clawed fingers gripping arms and hair. Sticky webs binding her. The feeling of weightlessness as the Erisa-thing picked her up and…

Oh Goddess!

She did not relish learning what the girl had in mind for her. Odd ends and fragments of the rush across Grefe marched into recollection, up to the point when something hit her in the head.

The monster had fought some battle Sil couldn’t see and in the rush kneed her neatly across the temple. All had been black since.

Had it been Tallah on her trail? Was she close?

Close to… where exactly?

Her breathing came in shallow, racing gasps. She was in utter darkness again and it did not abate no matter how much she blinked. Had she been blinded?

Breathe, she urged herself, teetering on the edge of panic. Take stock. Plan. Act. I’m not helpless. She pulled on Tallah’s old training and drew in illum. Reeled at its revolting touch. Wherever she was, it was a place of sickening violence.

At least Erisa hadn’t had time to bind her properly. Webs ripped easily and there was nothing else holding her in place.

No great pain aside from the throbbing headache.

No light, only impenetrable dark.

No compass, but that could be solved. She had illum and control of it. She wasn’t bound. She could resist.

With the thunder of her own heart abating, sound assaulted her, a roaring mixture of water flowing, groans of a structure barely holding together, and some rhythmic breathing that got her hair standing on end.

And she was drenched head to toes. In the stifling wet heat, it felt like fresh blood on her. She rose and waded blindly forward in the ankle-deep mire. With arms outstretched, she groped for a solid wall.

Right, that won’t do.

Her sprite popped into existence in a blinding flash. She’d tried to keep it small and unobtrusive, but against the blackness it was still as bright as the moons on a clear night. She cupped hands around it and reduced its glare to a beam of red-hued light.

“This may have been a mistake.” Her whisper was swallowed by the roar of the place.

Webs. Webs everywhere. Of course. Glistening wet, undulating on some breeze she couldn’t feel, they made for a disorientating tableau.

On the far end of the room, collapsed against the wall, was the spider that had carried her. It bled white ichor from accumulated wounds, twitched its terrible legs, but did not react to her stirring. The half-girl growing atop it lay still, unblinking eyes pinned to Sil, mouth open. She made no sound.

Sil’s back stuck to the wall as she followed the curve of it, not daring to approach the creature.

If anything, Erisa’s presence seemed absent for the time being, but she’d already seen how that could change at a moment’s notice. With no idea of where she was or when the girl might return, she made her way out of the room.

The floor swayed underfoot and sucked at her boots. Water seeped up to fill every imprint she left behind, a muddy-brown that stank of rotten eggs and worse.

With any option as good as the other, she picked the first passage leading away from where she’d rested, trusting to follow at least a way that could’ve fit the large spider as it brought her in. Maybe she’d find a way out. Or maybe she’d find the girl and the gruesome fate in store for herself. But one thing she wouldn’t do was wait around.

I am of the many, and I am of the few. She swallowed the lump in her throat. I am light, and I am warmth. The mantra centred her and kicked down the fear even as every sound of the place sent her heart into spasms and her breath into gasps.

Things skittered and moved in the web-covered walls, reminding her uncomfortably of Anna’s Sanctum. That particular gruesome adventure seemed a lifetime away, and yet here the memory of it lingered, returned to torture her.

Some of the passages ended at dead drops, the path falling into some deeper pit beneath. Hardly an obstacle for a spider, but not a viable route for herself. Light shone off eyes in the pits and she scurried away before she’d draw attention. How she hadn’t already only increased her panic.

If not escape, she’d at least make herself harder to find in the labyrinthine mess of tunnels and rooms. Their arrangement and connections made no sense as she crept from one to the other. In places the passage narrowed and she had to crawl sideways through thick swathes of wet silk, feeling its clinging touch as if spiders were right on her.

In places, the walls moved with things crawling beneath the layer of spider shit. She tucked the light under her shirt and crouched in a corner, willing herself to breathe slower, quieter, and wait for the things to pass.

For a city filled with crystals shining rainbow hues everywhere, to find a place so desolate of any luminescence felt odd. Why had she been brought here?

No. No, that wasn’t something to think on. She’d seen enough of Grefe to dread the answer.

Doubling back from another leg-shattering drop, taking the last available path, she found her first clue regarding the girl’s state of mind and the source of much of the background noise. What she’d catalogued as some whining of the structure became actual voices whimpering.

A row of Erisa similes greeted her in a room featuring familiar medical implements. If she hadn’t known better, she would’ve thought she were in an operating theatre back at the School. Only here the tools on display were much too gruesome for any sensitive work, crude implements better suited for torture than medicine.

Bodies were held in cradles of webs, strung up as if for flaying, arranged in a disorganised row.

Such an odd, impossible to ignore sight.

They were all the girl, as Sil imagine she could have been if not for all this. Almost the girl, but not quite right. They hung by arms or legs, wrapped half-way in webs, their chests opened up as if for vivisection. Almost human guts drooped to the floor. Organs in wrong places, wrong shapes, wrong sizes. Vestigial spider legs sprouting from bones. Faces mutated into chimeric masks twisted in agony.

They breathed and writhed in the confines of their supports, and mewled as she passed the light from one to the other. Efficient cruelty on display.

“What are you doing here?” she mused. The need to understand overcame her terror as she paused and studied these poor things.

Were these the same as the wretches in the pit? Was Erisa trying to make herself a new body? A human one? If so, she was failing in terrifying fashion.

“Do not run from me,” the creatures spoke in one voice, all heads turning to her.

Sil’s heart skipped beats. The girl knew! Many pairs of eyes turned to her in tandem, all shining red with the bound light of her sprite.

“I am nearly ready for us to meet face to face. Do not run. All will be well.”

The Goddess’s own edict wouldn’t have kept Sil waiting around. Fully closing her hands around the light, she fled out a random exit, bounced against the soft wall opposite, and took off down the constricting corridor to lose herself in the labyrinth.

She’d wasted time. The girl had seen her. Maybe even followed riding some spiderling’s tiny mind?

A part of her, one that fear couldn’t smother, suggested a plan. Tallah’s probably on the way. How do I signal to her? It was a too-small part that couldn’t overcome the terror of being discovered.

She stopped several intersections later after stumbling and falling headfirst down a narrow set of steps. The sprite rose overhead when she protected her head from the crash, and reflected back at her off of a series of dark crystals, all sculpted into rectangle shapes. The room was filled with them and…

There were no webs here and none of the usual constructs she’d seen across Grefe. She’d fallen hard on a floor that echoed as if made of metal, her first step after rising as loud as a bell’s toll. Spritelight revealed a place like none other she’d witnessed thus far. Rectangles of crystal covered the walls.

What is this place?

Pain flared in her side and shoulder, her left arm mangled again. Tears of pain ran down her cheek as she stumbled inside, reeling in her sprite. Here there were no webs, so maybe there were also no spiders? Sanctuary?

A vague memory attached meaning to the sight. Vergil’s memory, what was left to her from the mind touch, said these were computers and command consoles, whatever those were. This was something of Vergil’s past and the boy would know how to operate them. She understood, vaguely, that the crystals could show images and information, but activating one felt a fool’s task.

Several of the odd artefacts blinked a steady rhythm of light as she approached, coming alive. Some green, others red, most yellow. Maybe if she touched one?

No. That would be stupid.

“Why do you run, sister? Where to?”

Sil froze as a hand clasped the back of her neck, its fingers slimy and cold, the pressure just on the wrong side of painful. Heavy, squelching steps resounded behind, approaching heavily across the metal floor.

“She’s abandoned you. It hurts, does it not?” It spoke on the back of Sil’s neck, hot breath washing over her ears. “We are not the first she’s abandoned. Did you know?”

Whatever form Erisa now occupied, it was massive. Sil couldn’t dare move a muscle as the presence settled at her back and reached a hand over her shoulder. Slender fingers caressed one of the complicated assemblies of metal and crystal. Something strange happened. An image appeared on several of the screens—she remembered the term—and a woman looking very human spoke at her.

She wore clothes like none Sil had ever seen before, a blue and gold uniform buttoned up to beneath the chin. Some metal mask covered half of her face. She was speaking in front of a background of chaos, the words and voice wholly alien. Text appeared on the bottom side of the image.

Sil couldn’t look away. Erisa’s hand angled her head up to stare right into the image.

The text was the Healing School’s Codex. Sil could understand every word. “We are going down with the ship. Life pods have been deployed but most of our cargo could not be unloaded in time. The machine spirit does not respond. It is as if she’s lost her mind.” The woman in the image hesitated. She wiped tears from her eyes. “There is no known precedent of a SPRAWL surviving atmospheric burn, but we will try.” The woman had auburn hair tied back in a severe knot that showed off her age. Well over eighty summers, if Sil was any judge. The image was quiet for a time, staring into her eyes as if she were there and waited for an answer. “We’ll do our best and hope it will be enough. If it won’t be… well, it won’t matter, will it?”

The image froze and Sil stared into the woman’s eyes, terrors matching.

“Know that our lying goddess has abandoned many to their fates,” Erisa whispered with near malicious glee. The long white arm touched some more crystals and another image played out. The language again alien, but the text made sense of it

On any other day, in any other circumstance, Sil would have been enraptured by what she witnessed. Whatever these people had been, whatever they’d known, to see them like this… it was a marvel. Terror, as constricting as the hand on her neck, drove that fascination out of her as her mind raced.

She had no weapon. She could not fight. Screaming wouldn’t solve anything but, maybe, enrage the creature calling itself Erisa. All that was left was to bide her time and hope for another chance at escape.

A man was speaking. Not quite human, Sil’s observant mind catalogued. Not quite something else. Great white wings unfurled behind the figure, stretching out like any of the statues.

“Preparations are underway,” the text said and the man smiled broadly. His face looked human. “We’ve run preliminary testing and results appear promising. We have her locked out of every critical system we could salvage. Once the protective lattice deploys, she’ll be locked out entirely. Panacea’s reign on our lives will finally end. We can be free of her. We will be free of her.”

Pressure increased on her neck and a finger traced the small gap on the back of her head. “I will show you all, sister. Every secret she’s kept from us. Every sin she’s buried beneath immortality. There is so much I’ve learned here. So much to share once we become one.”