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In Hallownest, there were no seasons. In Hallownest, there was no morning, no night, no cold or hot- unless you sought a drafty hall.
There were only the cycles of emotion. Perpetuity, the dead king’s dream made manifest.
When she was little, Hornet had looked to the cliffs that surrounded Hallownest as a cradle, nurturing as a mother and vigilant as the strongest wall. Those walls raised the weavers, and within their bosom the Sacred Realm cuddled, suckling.
She climbed them, every day or thereabouts. Even without light, she still slept, and whether she desired it or not, she still woke.
Today, she looked from their summit upon Hallownest, that little cropping of abandoned shacks surrounding a pit no larger than she was tall. Almost humble…
She could feel the changing of the seasons in her bones.
First came the spring, the time of change. Hallownest was a corpse, pecked over by gnats and fungus upon the murder of the pretender. The juices of the corpse had run dry, the nutritious viscera wasted by an era of neglect- half her fault and half that of the greater world, abandoning the Sacred realm. But the bones were strong, would be strong until the day the blue lake collapsed onto the heart of it all below. Hallownest was a stock, rich bones that she could sup upon.
Hornet had seen the world beyond the cliffs. She knew the price of pacts with gods, the whims of the winds that gouged seeping wounds in the sandy hills. She bore her share of scars and had inflicted more, and gained nothing during her sabbatical from these cliffs that nurtured her into the woman she was.
Summer settled hot, though Hallownest bore its brunt no longer than an arctic tundra. It was hard to rage, to scream and cry, when there were none to listen. No consolidation, no reprimands, no acknowledgement. So summer fell shorter and shorter each year, turning its fury inwards until each month was hotter than last year’s, a one man global warming.
Hornet had seen the world beyond the cliffs. She had seen ignorance and heresy and turned her back upon each in equal measure. Bug like beast would worship anything if it offered so much as a chance at the erasure of suffering, even if it was only within your own mind that your troubles eased. The atheists she could respect, the brute she could love, but those who claimed to know? To understand?
So often the only thing that burned in their hearts was care. For themselves, those they loved, those they told themselves they didn’t hate- It sickened her how much their care poisoned her soul.
Summer burned itself away each year in the only tally mark she inflicted upon the old walls of the kingdom- another hall of a castle destroyed in a fit of infantile rage. No one would care, none would miss the paintings, the masonry, the labor it took to erect such a wonder.
Autumn feasted upon what remained, growing fat on what was left after she had purged herself.
In Autumn she read the tablets, deciphered was was left of the scrolls.
He had known from the beginning. She couldn’t blame any of them for not putting it together, she alone had long enough to piece it all into one framework. Through some way or another, the King had known that he would kill them all.
He was a traitor. To his morals, his people, the order of the universe. A rebellion of light, despite the knowledge that every single one he took with him, would leave in much the same way.
And they screamed for him. But he had told them all along. It was so easy to ignore the truth, when its audacity makes it anathema.
Hornet was cradled now by the world beyond the cliffs. Calling to her, ‘stay away, there is warmth here, there is fuel for that fire that dies with you’.
The wastes lapped at the walls of Hallownest, eroding them. Pulling their mighty arms up the walls in sandstorms that flirted against her eye-lids. They pulled her back. Too the not quite empty world of heretics and hoplesses that remained beyond.
Purpose, they wailed. Something besides corpses, and… Winter.
Winter rested. Silent.
Another dead thing, surrounded by dead things.
She visited a pale corpse, twice her height. Another, half hers.
She sat atop a cliff, and counted the false stars glimmering high above.
Hornet saw the world beyond the cliffs. Empty.
Someday she would grind her mother’s bones into ash, and throw them out of the cliffs, and they would drift slowly until swept along by a current. And then there would be no mother.
Was that her fate?
Someday she would walk into the wastes again to learn their final lesson.
Before long, in a fit of self destructive ennui, she would ready herself before mother. Then she would enter the den again, and remember her family who did not remember her. The weavers, across the wastes.
Snapped out of her mortified stupor, she would wander half awake through the kingdom until she stood before the sealed gates of the city, crying from acrid air or something else. The spider would collapse to her knees, and look up at the only thing that had ever seemed larger than her, and larger than the wastes.
How had father done it.