Chapter Text
The Knight, like a wooden mold filled with molten gold, collapsed in on itself with the voracity of a star that had been dying for thousands of years.
Sight erupts into polyps like a swarm of charged lumaflys going off inches in front of her. Inversion starbursts detonate across the world until everything is static, a sear distributed across the length of her thorax. The sensation is all-consuming. So vast and sudden it’s simply numbing. She sensed rather than felt the displacing crack of her chitin crunching under strain, of her mask slamming the stone.
There is a scream that transcends sound. One she thought, at first, she’d finally choked out. Piercing across a full spectrum of noise and light, raw-throated, wailed without consideration for damage to the esophagus. A noise torn from something's spirit instead of its mouth.
She feels the presence then, entering the room like a water seeping through the walls, attracted to such vast anguish. She sees, around the bloodspots soaking her sight, liquid light flashing like tongues of flame, trying to burn away the dark, each another crack of lightning inside her skull. In response the shadows at the chamber’s edge grow longer. Eyes open. Dozens. Hundreds. White and watchful and so very hungry.
The wail becomes louder, like bone crisply broken. As if in reply the darkness envelopes the screamer and the one who’s nail still pierces their mask. The result is like a popping cyst. All the sickness gushing forth at once in a monstrous exorcism, more than could’ve been contained within a single body, boiling god-light against darkest night. And it is swallowed whole.
From there, everything happened at once.
It blinds her. The centrifuge casts her out to the edge of the chamber. She curls inward, clawing away from that terrible light, that endless dark, wanting anything but it. Heat brushes her face. She smells the fabric of her cloak singing, knows that soon it will be replaced by bare shell and skin. She tries to stand, to do something. But her body will not move.
And then the shadows reach for her. They resemble hands, clawtips lance-sharp, tenderly ravenous in how they envelop her cast-off shell. She calls out for someone, but she isn’t sure who.
They enfold her, cradle her, as she sinks away.
Ooze heaves out of her lungs in long cords. There is no taste. No burn of bile against sensitive tissue. Just a numbing cold, like a pound of brute lead sitting in her stomach. It clears and air is sucked in blazing over tender flesh, inching back into starved muscles, every third breath having the desired effect. A ironshod fist squeezed her ribs whenever she breathed, lungs slapping against their cage of meat.
Copper blooms in her lungs. She judders upward, a dying animal, primal adrenaline conspiring against rational. But her body does not respond. Her throat refuses to exercise.
Breathe!
Hornet breathes—deep, rasping, awful and relieving all at once.
She blinks back into sluggish awareness. In her hindbrain, a simple notion intones, haptic in its sincere simplicity.
I am injured. She thinks. Were I mortal, I’d be dead.
Weakly, she pushes herself up. First onto the flats of her chest plates, then her knees, each stage a conspiracy of her own body against itself. She could barely move. She could barely breathe. But she claws back to awareness, forces herself to survey the scene.
The anteumbra reveals starkly little. A slit of light, barely a pinprick from the Temple entrance baptizes the dark with a long tunnel of cobalt. Stenographic engravings, glowing with soul, swirled across the dome above like constellations. The space seemed to gather itself, shuddering, as if disgusted at the invasion that had taken place within.
Then: a scent. Sour-sweet, fecund. Familiar.
She tightens her hand around her needle, claws finding the thread that bound it to her. The hivesteel is wet with her blood. So is the floor from where she’d scratched furrows into the flagstone, where her side had ripped open against cracked stone. But she’d never released it.
She was in foreign territory, exposed and bleeding. She needed to get up. Now.
That proved to be an absurd ambition. The weight of her own horns nearly severed her head from her thorax. Blood pooled behind her eyes, pounded against her shell as if eager to be free of it, to split and burst between the spiked crest of her mask. Grit scratched in her mouthparts. Her throat was dry, carapace burned from the intensity of the light where she had not been covered by cloak or void. The former was bleached almost white, the rags a darker heartsblood on the side facing the floor, pink in the transitory like swathes of sutured skin, and darkest where the satchel of tools and thread she wore had been smashed into her side. That is where she bled from, she realized, indigo leeching into purple within the hem of her cloak.
Hornet stands, swaying. Tried to wet her throat. Snapped her fangs, mandibles rubbing together to coax saliva, not feeling as they should. She found out why when she spotted one on the floor, lying where it had been torn off her jaw.
She was conscious enough to know that she shouldn’t be. That if she really wished to continue standing she needed to let herself fall back into that blackness. Attempting to bind her wounds may unravel her.
Counting each inhalation, memorizing the strangeness that came with manually breathing, each beat of her heart bringing to attention something formerly ignored and highly unpleasant. The air, already stale, stinking of warm pus and burning metal, had grown acid. She purges herself of the nausea, finding focus in the haft of her needle. The tectonic upheaval in her head fades, subtle, precise consciousness supplanting it. Battle-focus and instinct indexing with decades of training. Her setae were prickly with awareness, her plates rigid and interlocked. Her tongue was heavy, muscles tense in the same way air was before lightning strikes.
She crouched on her spurs at the heart of a crater. Void swirled questingly in cracks within the stonework, as if seeking escape now she was awake. Some remained, mixing with flecks of ambient soul. Mingling and dancing, finding strange harmony in the adherence to one another, bouncing off remnants of essence like oil off water
Of the Knight, there was no sign. Immolated perhaps in that same flash that had bleached the corners of the chamber. Nothing but a faint smoldering stirred the air above where it had laid bound by her thread. Not the fever of an infection, but of flint and steel still hot from their schism. Pieces of pale metal—what remained of its longnail—lay in a heap on the sinkhole edge, forlorn fragments still glowing white-hot along the bands where it’d shattered.
And beside those—
Memory flares open, like a stomach sliced down the center, butterflied apart. She spikes upward, attention scissoring between remnants. She doesn't know what sound she makes. Barely hears her own voice as she stumbles over the lip, the stream of oaths, the tiniest of whining gasps, the diminuendo of denial metered by her own weak pulse.
“No.”
The plea is an embarrassment. She cringes at the infantism, at how maudlin it sounds, less at its abraded cadence that surely told of some deeper injury. She ignores herself, not ready to confront that. Every sinew protests as she starts, limps, crawls, and finally drags herself from the pit, cloak soaking in the pus and carbon, to collapse at the edge of where the wildfire had burned itself to dust.
All to stare into two sockets. Windows that once held a sea’s worth of writhing, churning ink, that were now the pale white of empty bone.
A spell of binding came out of her bleeding mouth as a string of curses, saliva-soaked. Every cut, scraper, skewer and gouge was pulled wider. The singing song of magic under her skin nearly made her scream. Ice and witchfire bound and leapt through her veins, taking form in a coil-storm of delicate steel. Moonlight strands lash from her joints like reels of barbed wire, frayed and viscous, constricting her body. Loose until the moment they encircle her, then pull taut with a whipcrack to plunge back into her shell like a fan of nails.
That’s when she actually screamed.
Of the following two days, Hornet had no recollection.
The flight from Temple to well, then the mad dash from there up the chain to the center of the dismal little down hunkering against the windswept pass, was a smear of watercolor, more sensation than memory. A flare of pain from her cracked mask. A jag of something solid in the smoke. The half-crest of two stocky horns, smited in twain. Each a moment taken out of context, deceptive on its own.
Instead she was told later how she had threatened to kill anyone who touched the mask she held. That it had taken three of their strongest to restrain her long enough to extract the pieces from her grip before they could be crushed into bone meal. That she had nearly sunk her fangs into someone’s throat before the village elder had promised to handle the remains with the utmost care, and she, for some reason in her delirium, had trusted him enough to let go.
That almost immediately after she fell into a sleep she didn’t wake from, she was informed by the local cartographer whose home she’d been moved into—for they didn’t know where else to put her—for two days and three nights as her body knit its broken pieces back into something resembling herself. Later she would look back and have no idea how she had survived the climb up that chain, much less having done so with one hand full of the vessel’s shattered remains. Pale blood or not, the injuries she sustained should have killed her at most, or rendered her comatose at least. The knowledge that she’d come within a nail’s edge of discovering the true tolerances of her demi-godhood didn’t bother her as much as it should’ve.
She had hardly been in a better state when she had all of this explained to her. Most of her focus was on the round seed bug before her. He is circumspect in conduct. His glasses were cracked, and dipped down his proboscis as he spoke, rarely looking right at her. The expression he’d assumed when he’d walked in to see her awake bordered on comical: a mix of relief and abject fear. The other bug in the room—the same species, so slender and tall the princess had to crane her head to look her in the eyes—was significantly less shy, openly glaring at Hornet. The latter she ignored.
The hovel is small, hunched from a broken spine improperly sey. The ribs of the roof expand up towards a steeple. Its stanchions hung with nooses of dry herbs to chase out the musk of dry-rotting timber. The homesteadings are ascetic, as are the signs that these were just the most recent in a long succession of inhabitants.
“We tended to your wounds as best we could. Nothing has become infected—thank goodness. I could scarcely believe to see you up and about so soon.”
Hornet nodded. She’d already guessed so. She did not smell a sorcerer among them. Just simple bugs.
They had set her on a bed of sweet-smelling straw and bandaged her, a large wrap around her thorax, the linen soaked into copper where her blood had oxidized. It was glasspaper on her split chitin, raking the skin beneath. That skin is sore, inflamed, but not rheumy with disease. She checked that fact twice. If vessels could become infected, it was best to be sure they hadn’t brought a husk-to-be into their hearth. Afterward, ignoring the pain with mixed success, she re-covered herself in her cloak, which rested by the bedside, warming by the fire. Someone had washed it.
He waits a moment more, perhaps expecting a reply. When Hornet says nothing he glances at his associate, absently adjusts the satchel he wears, running the leather stirrup across his right side carapace. It is inconspicuous, but she sees what he tries to conceal: the crooked furrows where her claws had scored him in her exhausted savagery.
Perhaps there should have been sympathy. But she had not been in her right mind, nor did she see the point in apologizing when harm was already done. What use was the basest courtesy now? If there was shame she felt, it was for allowing herself to be lowered into such a state as to require their hospitality in the first place.
She swung her lower body, having to hop off the elevated bedside. Her legs were as steady as disintegrating leaves. One knee corkscrews out before she gets it straight again, half-sitting back down. Her eyes pinched shut, breathing to calm herself before her exoskeleton could shiver and unlatch, separating into psalms of hurt.
Not in front of strangers.
This was exactly why she travelled alone.
The map-maker extends his arms, as if to steady her, but his feet seem to know better. He remains rooted to the spot. “Easy, please! You’re still injured. We had to pick fragments out of the wound in your side. There…might still be some in there.”
“I am aware of this.” Hornet says. It is a proxy for the stuttering hiss bubbling up with it, the instinct to unfold her ruined chelicerae from beneath her mask and flash her fangs in a threat display. They flinch back.
Perhaps like those first retainers who had received her off the stag’s back when she’d been inducted into the Pale Court, because of her silence they wondered if she even could speak. They would’ve heard her half-mad ravings, but perhaps had wondered if she was capable of intelligent speech. They didn’t seem all too pleased knowing the answer.
He wrings his hands together. His claws are surprisingly slender, putting her in the mind of the palace scholars. Fragile-looking, most suitable around a quill, and seemed aimless without one to grasp. “R-Right. Yes.”
A bead of blue formed at the corner of her mouth. The taste of where the scab had broken open, raw against the dusty air of the surface, told her that they had not removed her mask. She lifts up one hip in an attempt to alleviate the pain in her side. Metal grinds together through her skin, each a needle in her mind. She feels silk webbing between her claws. There were strands of it flickering around her, trying to flash into being.
“Where are my belongings?” She demands. Her own voice rings churlish, bordering on petulant.
The two transmit a look among themselves. It’s the barest motion, one that tells her they are acquainted beyond merely associates. A tenderness, an alertness, a protectiveness: something more profound than camaraderie. Hornet realizes, bleakly amused, that even injured they were more wary of her than she was of them.
Royalty was supposed to have a way with persuasion. Oftentimes simply projecting one’s voice correctly was sufficient to persuade lesser mortals to follow one’s will. Obedience and herd-instinct was strongly ingrained in most of their hindbrains. She paused. Adjusted her intonation for formality. Her accent is somewhat antiquated, which made this harder than the simple act already was. She had not had much reason to speak, nowadays, for want of anything to say and anyone to say it too.
Now, how did this go again?
“My thanks for watching over me.” She starts. And when they seem to ease into her words: “But I will not be staying longer than I must.”
“Surely you do not intend to—”
A hand on his shoulder stops him. He turns his head and something flits between him and his mate, unsaid but understood. Hornet couldn’t stop her hackles from raising. The woman had no trouble at all maintaining her glare.
“As Corny here was going to say, your…nail, is behind the counter.” The tall one gestured with a flick of her claw.
Hornet nodded, standing. “I will be on my way, then.”
She pushed among her belongings. There was scant little she travelled with: her toolpouch, mangled by the setting off of the traps kept within, the Hallowest seal used as its buckle scratched over. The fragments of the knight’s sword remained within, still somehow warm. A set of spare bobbins. Double-edges knives. Her needle, set on its side atop a shelf meant for hanging a large scroll from. She puts what she can into what was left of the pouch, winds a new length of silk through her needle’s eye. She misses it the first try.
She turned, bristling at the sensation of eyes on her back. The Wyrm’s blood did much to alleviate the injury, but the discomfort that came with being vulnerable before strangers had no balm. They glanced at her needle, both wary and curious. Not many were familiar with the Weaver’s weapon of choice.
“Where is the rest?” Her voice is tight but not frayed. Nothing to betray the irritation she’d masked so well thus far.
She knew she need not be more specific. Again, the cartographer looks like he wishes to answer, claws twisting in on themselves. Plead with her to rest out of his goodwill, but was smart enough to want her out of his home as soon as possible. His wife has no such inclination. Cold as snow: “The chapel. On the edge of town. You’ll see the overlook past the graves. Follow the lanterns.”
“Why—” The question catched, hooked on her broken chelicerae. A hissed intake of air sets their antennae straight. “Why were they taken there?”
The cartographer looked to the side, rubbing one elbow with a set of twofold pincers. His wife stared at the floor, hands that formerly rested on her waist finding purchase on a nearby countertop. “Everyone in town knew them.” She murmured, staring into the cracks in the shellwood. “They brought supplies from our store. Brought everything, actually. Gods, brought Cornifer home once when he got lost. If they hadn’t…”
She trails off, eyes squeezing shut behind her mask.
Her husband moved up beside her. A fractious movement, claws fumbling for each other before intertwining. Now it is him who levels his attention at Hornet, and she finds it unexpectedly difficult not to reel away.
“You brought them back. Were they a friend?”
Hornet pushed past the counter, needle clutched tightly against her palm, heedless of her overstretched sinews, throwing open the hut door and stepping out into the dust.
Hornet was semi-familiar with the town. A hub for those coming in or leaving Hallownest and staging ground for the earliest excavation of the caverns below. One of the first of its kind. Dirtmouth is what its current inhabitants called it, in a fashion she guessed was supposed to be derogatory. It had a previous name once, though she’d long since forgotten it. She intimately knew the bitter, winding roads where the borders of the kingdom weft and wound, for that was the route her patrols had carried her across ten thousand times. Knew the turn of every stone, the names carved into every cairn for a fallen warrior, the watchposts and landmarks. But this one had slipped through the cracks, and she couldn’t say when. That bothered her for some reason she couldn’t manage to articulate.
Dust blows heavy from the desert beyond King’s Pass. The stones of the road she walks are pale and smooth from it, as are the shell houses. It is little more than a collection of dilapidated structures: the cartography shop she’d just left, door still swinging on creaking hinges, what advertises itself as a general goods store, a stag station, and several more homes, each little more than hovels leaning parasitically against one another. Everything was dull. Sand collected around the walls and windows, scratching the glass, piles in doorways to be swept back out every time they were opened. Her needle tip sinks into it as she moves.
Her knees felt like they were being cushioned with flint chips, but only when moving could she ignore the worst of the aches. Motion dulled the pain—disturbed it unevenly across sections of her body. She had always found it easier to compose herself while walking, to the point it had become compulsion. Though now there is nothing spry or elegant about the way she stalks to the town square, the spiked ridges of her back pushing up against her cloak, spine-bristles on end. Both her father and tutors had spent many hours teaching her to stand up straight, physically pushing the hunch out of her back. But in moments like this it returned with a vengeance.
It is only when she has sighted someone else under the glare of a lanternpost—hunched like herself, clothes so tattered she mistakes them for something artificed to frighten whatever vermin might skulk around this dismal collective—does a realization articulate itself, like dust catching on cobwebs. She had not offered the use of their names.
It was strange to suddenly be burdened by a relic as mundane as niceties. She sloughs it off like a remnant from a molt, quick to return to her previous line of thought. This stranger. Directions.
She wanted to seek the chapel herself. But another, that part entwined by Greenpath’s twisting briars, demanded she scout her surroundings before committing to any path.
She stands up straight against her own body’s protests. Her cloak had been cleaned, but not repaired. Particulate finds the tears and weds itself to the crack in her shell, grinding down the shattered plate and rubbing at the soft flesh beneath. Nevertheless she set her own shoulders, forced herself to walk tall—though she was of the mind everyone in town could hear the way her exoskeleton creaked and cracked.
He was old indeed, for his species. His shell thin and brittle as the turn of the waning moon, his breath a wheeze. His mask seemed to protrude up from the waxy membrane of his cloak, out of what she thinks had once been wings since gone soft with age.
Hornet had always been disconcerted with the elderly. Despite her status as an immortal, she’d never had to look far for the reminder not all shared her agelessness. The Pale Court had been full of wizened retainers. Entertainers and thieves, husk-voiced sycophants beckoning her closer into that fold of diplomacy and subversion. Even the Beast had seemed to age unnaturally quickly within the last years her daughter had known her. Hornet had not realized it then, still so small. But Herrah was no longer as tall or broad, no longer all parts the warrior-queen of the Weavers, though whether that was stress from wondering if she’d prepared her heir well enough to survive the coming years without her, or because of the magics the King had worked in preparation for interring her into the Dream, Hornet could only speculate.
Uncertainty and the span to agonize over it. Those were the gifts of her birth—and a few of the lifetimes of debt it incurred.
The pale light from the lantern flickers, the lumaflies within nearly spent. The elder turns to her as she approaches from outside its reach. Even injured she moved quietly, and paused, surprised, when he’d noticed her approach. Doubly so when he gestured to the ironwork bench nearby.
“I promise it is more comfortable than it looks.” He says, his voice surprisingly strong, like she had dug a spade into loam only to hit rock.
Hornet took one look at it and found she doubted that. “I will stand. Thank you.” She added that last part hastily, some remnant of basic manners compelling her to throw it in last second. It felt suddenly like she was trying to shovel herself into an old shell after molting, familiar and all the stranger for it.
He couldn’t have noticed her slip up. But a smile, or something like a smile, invents itself upon his face and leaves her guessing. “I am glad to see you up so soon. You gave us quite the scare, young lady.”
“I am—” she cut herself off. No use explaining the pretense of her blood to mortal bugs. Especially one as withered in their shell as him. “looking for your burial grounds.”
She felt like a scroll left alone for centuries, crinking as it was unfolded, the way his sunken eyes seemed to be reading her.
“Follow the path back the other way, then keep going past the well. The confessor should be finishing their rites soon. The rest of us will be attending momentarily. You are welcome to join us, Miss….?”
“Hornet.” She offers, and her own name rolls strangely, the acoustics teetering on the foreign.
“Miss Hornet. Will you be staying? There’s plenty of vacancies. I’ll warn you, our town’s not as quiet as it once was. But perhaps that isn’t so bad a thing.”
“I will not. I just need to see—”
See what? She has no idea, though the elder before her presses no charges. He only nods and says, “Very well. Will you be able to make your way there, on your own?”
“Yes.” Her hand goes to her side before she could stop herself. She shifts her cloak to hide it better. Begins to walk away, far less gracefully than she’d have preferred.
“Thank you for bringing them back to us.” Hornet half-turns to see him playing with something she only notices now. A flower—a beautiful flower—worn proudly like a brooch fixed to his wing-cloak. His clawtips, dulled over the years since his final molt, ran rivers across the pale petals. “Too many get lost down there, their shells never put to rest. Vengeful things only ever come of that.”
Hornet didn’t voice that she didn’t believe in souls. In life after death. There were only echoes of past lives, formed by the wakes in the world of dreams cast by the stone-throw into the lake of lives. Those could linger after one departs. But they weren’t really who they had been. If not, where was her mother now that her shrine was empty? Where was her father, to offer some explanation for why he had left, tell her everything kept hidden now that there was no reason to hide it anymore?
She slips between the huts and into a place alcoved by graves and padded by more smooth cobblestones. Walking through the mist in her tattered shroud, she has half the mind to think she looked something crawled out of one of the graves. The heat had begun to drain for her cloak, and it felt heavier with every step. Sand chimes against the iron lychgate. She avoids looking up, disliking the openness above her, the feeling like gravity would invert—not assisted by her aching skull— and she'd fall up into it if she stared long enough. But she can't help a glance. In the minutes before she arrives, skulking amid the gravestones, the indigo horizon begins to bleed. And just barely—without stopping to really look—she thinks she sees the sun begin to crest the cliffs, a red-gold seeping between faults in the mountain line.
He had noticed her injuries, but did not press. Wryness constricts itself through her core. When had she become thankful for such things? To be left alone in her brooding? Was it a penance of some kind, another way she thought to lessen her burden?
She knew better by now. The weight could never be diminished. Only rearranged, redistributed in a fashion slightly more bearable.
Beneath the peak of the mountain, the sky tinged to an aurora from the refracted light of the crystals jutting from its peak, an archway of gray stone leads into the mountainside, doubtless the most ancient structure here, likely pre-dating the settlement itself. But whatever scrimshaw engraved into the stone to denote its original purpose may well have been writ in smoke. The text has long since worn away, barely even impressions. Hornet thinks she can make out a claw there, a row of barbs here, tendrils swirling through a black sky. Her gaze does not linger enough to tell.
The barrow door is already cracked. A slant of candlelight limns the entry from within, traces the steel spine of her needle as she pushes it wider on groaning iron hinges. The steps within lead down. The stone beneath her hindclaws is rougher, flattened by lifetimes of uneven tread rather than gently abraded by the wind. She holds her weapon half-ready at the fore, though knows she has precious little reason to use it for once. If they’d wanted her dead, she’d never have woken. But old habits were harder to kill than dream-gods.
Within, she smelled death. Not fresh death. Decay so long ago it was now little more than a musky suggestion of spice and marrow in the heavy air, but buried deep beneath, something rancid, not unlike infection. Alcoves lined the wall, petrified mimics of the cells within the Hive, each the resting place of a corpse long gone to ossification. Some held personal effects. A beetle with claws resting on the hilt of a tarnished nail, blade pointed towards their hindclaws. A willowy creature she didn’t recognize with a tome across their thorax, an amulet of dirty crystal resting atop. A moth dressed only in their tattered drape of wings, eyeless sockets turned to her.
Hornet moved without stopping to examine any of them, to read the stories nicked into chitin or squint at the epitaphs written on faded plaques. She heard movement ahead, a flicker from dim candlelight, like a suggestion of a silhouette through fog. Her eyes were made for dark like this, and she was quick to navigate to where she needed to be.
Down, down, deeper into the crypt. On the next floor the scene altered. The rot here was fresher. The work of decades, not centuries. Chitin that still kept a shimmer of iridescence, scraps of sensory hair and muscle that still clung to joints. Incense burned sweetly among dry bundles of flowers, wilted from lack of water at the time of picking, further desiccated by the dry air. Under it was that same sulfuric reek, stronger than before.
This chamber served a different purpose: the preparation of the dead for interment on the higher levels, where the grisly acts of the mortician could be concealed behind the dignity of the stone above. Nothing was more telling than what she found at its heart.
Hornet came to a stop. In the center of the chamber, ringed by a tribunal of candles and more herbs, was something offered like a sacrifice. A pyre formed of its own cloak and dry reeds, a wreath of vibrants flowers the color of lifeblood, five and ten-piece geo pieces, quills stained with colorful ink, set atop a cairn formed from river stones.
It takes a few beats of her heart longer than it should’ve for Hornet to realize she was not alone.
It stood at the furthest reach of the candle’s aura, obscured in a haze of incense. It was a corpse against the other corpses, silent, moving so slowly Hornet hadn’t registered their presence at first. That was disquieting even before they began to move, and Hornet realized how much of them had been hidden within the dark-bruised corner.
As if noticing it were a signal, it began to move toward Hornet. The bug was larger than any other of the townsfolks she’d met. Unless they were thinner under those robes than they appeared they could not have left through where she’d come from, meaning either the barrow had alternative exits, or the stones had been carved around them. Whoever they were, they were truly ancient. There was a novelty in that, one Hornet didn’t appreciate. It was rare to find a being older than she was.
Finally, Hornet found her voice. “Stop. No closer.”
They obeyed, but by then they were almost close enough to touch with her needle. The dark had receded then, supplanted by dim candlelight, and she could better perceive their features. Their—her—eyes blink out of sync, as though they were recently woken from a deep, unrestful slumber. Her claws are long and slender, attached to thin twisting arms that disappeared into her dust-slick robes past the second joint, all the smaller in comparison to the thorax which towered over the spider. Thick, interlocked plates stood in the way of any other facial features they might possess, so that between their robes and shell, nothing but her eyes were visible. Each of those alone was the size of Hornet’s fist.
Hornet realized they were studying her, as much as she was studying them. Surely they were undertaker of this somnolent place. She had intruded upon them in the middle of their rites, and would be rightfully chastised. Even she felt a prickle of shame at that.
But what she said encapsulated nothing of the sort
“Your shell is riddled with shame.” She said, in a curiously soft voice.
Her needletip wavered. There was nothing in the bug’s stance to suggest battle-readiness, but that could easily be something concealed. It was too dark for Hornet to determine the quality of intelligence in her dissymmetric gaze. The long-lived were not always the brightest, nor the wisest, or even the most sane. There was a brief period where they maintained the qualities of all, but eventually time eroded away the faculties of most mortals, even those possessed of naturally long lifespans, until by the end they were little more than the husks roaming the Crossroads below her foreclaws, tending to rituals they’d long since forgotten the shapes of.
After another span of considering, Hornet let her needle touch the stone. Her arm was getting tired of holding it up anyway. “You come to a curious conclusion about someone you have just met.”
“It is quite obvious.” The words were hesitant, though whether that was out of genuine apprehension at a perceived slight, or mere respect for the place they stood in, was unclear. “But you did not ask for a confession. I was remiss to speak so.” They bowed. Hornet suspected they were using the gesture to wipe something from their face. “I am Confessor Jiji. Welcome. I am afraid you have caught me at an inopportune time.”
Hornet sniffed the air, fangs working into a grimace. It smelled like one of the Fungal Waste’s acid lakes. All brimstone. “I know of your kind, and your masters—” a vein of satisfaction as Jiji flinches at the word—”grip on this realm.” Her grip on her needle switches, poised to thrust it through mandibles and brain. “There is more being done here than just a burial. Speak carefully of what you truly intend.”
The confessor sighed tiredly, a sound like treading on dead leaves. “I have done nothing of what you expect. Despite my contract with them, I take my duties as caretaker of this tomb sincerely. But you are correct. Before I began my true rites, I attempted an invocation.”
Without meaning to, Hornet almost released her needle. It hung slack in her claw, it’s tip tinking against the stones.
“You have the means to summon a shade?”
Jiji's words were quiet now, as if this was her own confession. “Subverting the eyes of my masters, I have attempted on eight occasions to call upon their missing half.” She exhaled deeply. Hornet realized it was her breath that smelled of brimstone. “I have failed every time.”
“Your methods must be flawed. This is a poor place for channeling arts like yours. The presence of the dead, the soul that lingers, the age of this barrow—it must be interfering. Try again.” Hornet held out her arm, needle poised to cut into a space between plates. “I will channel you what I can."
She knew, given her current state, that wouldn’t make much of a difference. Not when her reservoirs had been shattered and driven into her, and what soul she’d metabolized within herself beforehand having bled out through the wounds. But she couldn’t just sit there and do nothing.
Jiji’s gaze unfolded, replaced by a sympathy Hornet hadn’t seen in a very long time. “I have worked in this field longer than you have been alive, pale one. I have summoned more regrets than I would like to remember, and seen them swallow those who have asked it of me more than I have seen them reconcile. That part of us, broken-backed, dying, it hungers to be whole again. To share its burden, for that is the only way it can hope to be carried.”
“I have carried my burdens well enough.”
“So you have. But you have yet to confront them.”
Before Hornet can protest, Jiji gestures with one multi-jointed arm to the cremains.
“This one had made use of my services several times, and, while their methods were eccentric, not once had they failed to harmonize with the spirit within.” Shedding dust, her claw reached further out from the gate of its robes, gently tapping one half of the vessel’s shattered mask. “The fault is not with my technique, though I wish it were. If their shade still lingers, then it refuses to answer my call.”
Hornet’s mouth was dry. “How is that possible?”
The confessor glances at the assembling of keepsakes, her hand folding back into her body. Two of the plates around her face dragged back on one side, revealing strangely perfect teeth. “Perhaps it simply wishes to rest.”
Hornet was about to speak. To threaten, in all probability, though even she wasn’t sure what exactly she meant to say, only that she wanted to see the ritual again. To see it fail, so she could be certain, when the sound of foreclaws over stone stopped her.
The townsfolk were on the level above, making their way down. Jiji glanced at the ceiling, then her gaze fell like a stone back onto Hornet. “The others will be here shortly. The rites are already done, so there’s no further reason to dally. I get the inkling that you will not be joining us, so tell me, before you go. What do you think of this place, daughter of Hallownest?”
The use of one of her titles did not surprise Hornet. Not as much as the question itself. Did she mean the kingdom as it was? As it stood? Dirtmouth? This tomb?
“Clarify.” Her voice comes out flat.
The confessor wiped their antennae with a claw. The plates around her face had receded again; a momentary lapse, then. “Nothing so broad as you’re thinking. Just this place we stand. This level, even.”
“It is a place of sorrow.” Hornet said, feeling it was true, if not as florid or mystic of an answer as she’d have liked. The quixotic prose of poets had never appealed to her, nor was it fitting for where she stood. The cracked flagstones and flyblown air did not match the dignity or tranquility of the Resting Grounds. Those interred here were done so out of convenience, sealed within so their rot could not burden the living.
“And why do you say so?”
Hornet swiped her needle swift and shallow, suggesting the alcoves in the walls: the beetle with the nail, the moth in their tattered drape, the emissary from some far-flung land. “No one still living, aside from you, remembers them. Not the town above. Not the Kingdom below they once served.”
Jiji tilted her head, considering.
Again, Hornet expected scorn, perhaps indignant piety, as her tutors would provide amply when she answered wrongly. There’s been many who attempted to graft civility onto the spiderling—most eventually became exasperated with her ineptitude—and they were almost all the same. Lofty, jaundiced, brittle-shelled. The kind of people she’d have loved to sink her fangs into—nearly had on a few occasions—but settled for daydreaming of them meeting gorey ends at the claws of Deepnest’s dirtcarvers and garpedes. That common bugs had been placed in a position of influence over her had infuriated her as much as their prejudice, and she’d taken her revenge by forgetting them in the years since, though their lessons had regrettably stuck. She wouldn’t have been surprised to learn if she’d cut down several of their husks in the time since, nor would she have wept.
Jiji’s response was given like a suggestion, with a level of hushed reverence that conveyed how truthfully she believed it—or wanted to believe it. “You’re not wrong. But above all else, this is a place of redemption, not regret.”
Hornet had little patience for a lecture. Less than usual, and even less than usual for one of this tone. She does not even know what has pulled her into this place’s thrall. She has seen what she had come to see. The vessel’s remains lie there on the plinth next to a knapsack containing their belongings. The Goddess and Knight were gone. Her memory was correct, just as she knew it would be.
What reason did she have to linger?
Something brushes her, a breath in the quiet. The village elder appears flanking her shoulder. He merely gazes at her, curious, but she tenses regardless, needletip grinding against the ground to a half-raise.
“My apologies.” He says quietly. “Will you be joining us, then?”
“I…” She unclenched her jaws. Her limbs were heavy, sticky, like she was being pushed through a web. Hesitance sinks its fangs in, wraps its maw around her.
Where had this come from?
The elder stands there, ruthlessly patient. The others filter in around him, limned in the light of their lanterns, wrapped in shawls and cloaks to ward off the abrasive sand outside and the chill within. A fly barely waist-height, the map-maker and his slender wife, the latter casting Hornet furtive looks, a leather-shelled beetle whose eyes were red and swollen. An emancipated figure of a species she did not recognize, a musical instrument slung from a cord around his neck. A short bug with a mock nail who took up a corner of the chamber and stared at the remains almost as much as Hornet herself did.
The elder pays them little heed. She remains the sole focus of his query. Finally, on the third attempt, she swallows, wetting her throat enough to answer. “No.”
She shrugs her collar higher, hiding from his scrutiny. He tilts his crooked horns, hideously knowing, before nodding once and taking his place to the side of the shrine beside the confessor. Hornet’s attention isn’t on the crowd, the press of bodies, more than she’d been around in over a century. Her eyes keep finding the vessel’s featureless face. Drawn to it like a hook finding purchase in the plates of her chest.
She does not explain. The only explaining she’d known had been brutally straightforward, as anything from Deepnest ought to be. When every sideways glance was met with her brandishing her needle—something that had earned her respect amid the low-guard as much as it did contempt from the Court and scoldings from the King. So Hornet did what made the most sense at the time. What felt instinctual. What felt right.
She pushed through the gathering mourners, distantly noting the whole town must have shown up. She cupped the halves between her claws, scoping them up from the mound of keepsakes, into the nook formed from the chapel of her elbow and chest, then, hesitating, holstered her needle and took the bag containing their belongings. She ignored everything and everyone, clawing forward like she was hauling herself from that crater all over again. She needed to keep moving. She didn’t know what would happen if she stopped.
Her eyes remain straight, mask dipped down, not meeting any of their faces. Only one says anything. An outraged rebuke from the map-maker’s mate. She tries to follow but is stopped by the others, her husband’s pincer around her wrist.
It took every scrap of Hornet’s composure to walk rather than run. Decades spent a dauntless sovereign meant nothing to the expectancy fizzling like acid beneath her skin, a sense of hostility she otherwise could not ignore. Fear was something she’d long excised from herself, but apprehension was a survival instinct too valuable to ignore. Any moment she expected another shout, an admonishment, someone to break from the group in pursuit, to demand the remains be returned.
No one else tried halting her. Perhaps they were too shocked at her brazenness, the gall to do such a thing in a sacred place. More likely they were afraid of her needle. It didn’t matter. Not right now.
She felt their stares boring into her shell, like wriggling things, all the way to the well.
Just before she threw herself over the edge, Hornet took one look at the town that was slowly sinking into the sand. The streetlights flickered, and firelight danced quietly from behind dirty glass windows. For a gash of a moment something rose from the substrata of her memories, almost circumventing conscious thought. It rested on the tip of her tongue, tauntingly close, almost material. But when she tried to reach for it she found only the vessel’s remains already occupying her claws.
She steps over the edge without faltering. Hollownest, cold as the heart of a king, welcomes its heir back.