Chapter Text
The heavy noonday sun bakes any inch of exposed skin it can reach through your threadbare shirt, and the tearing wind's talons claw at any cover left to shield you, spitefully flinging burning sand into your eyes just for good measure. You ran out of water earlier in the day, and you're dizzy enough that you barely notice the surface of the sand dune under your feet start to dip down until what looked like a sand dune is suddenly a slope tens of metres high that you are currently tumbling wildly down. Picking yourself up a few meters from the bottom and vengefully spitting cloying sand from your cracked lips, you stagger to your feet and take stock of your surroundings.
You're in some kind of basin, a massive depression in the landscape that stretches for miles around, with steeply sloping sides around as long as a stadium. A few hundred metres away is a building standing solidly three or five stories tall that's still larger than any you've seen in your life, with nearly every window cracked, partially broken off, or most often, missing entirely. Off in the distance, swimming back and forth from the high temperatures, are a small set of squat, oddly conical buildings looking for all the world like unhatched insect eggs sprouting out of the ground. Given the day you've had, there's honestly a good chance they're straight-up mirages. You weigh your options. The towering glass-and-steel carcass in front of you looks no more real than the shimmering heat hazes you've been stumbling towards this whole week, but it's either that, or climb right back up the lip of this basin and out into more desert.
You sigh.
Trudging through the hot sand, you drag your body to the base of the spire. Thick beams lie squashed together in a crumpled mass at one end of the structure; there's a tiny, jagged hole in the crumbling metal. You crawl through, pulling yourself forward on your forearms at an agonizingly slow pace. The metal quietly scraping your sides makes you viscerally aware of the possibility of tetanus. Partway through, you hear something softly rustling and freeze, feeling horribly exposed. Slowly, you trace your eyes through your surroundings, but the forbidding dark of this place, with most of the outside light blocked by your body anyways, is such a stark change from the blinding sun you've been tramping through for the past several hours that your efforts are totally defeated. You're more than halfway through anyways, so you pull yourself the rest of the way through with a minimum of struggling and rasping sounds, then stand and quickly dash for cover to the corner nearby, flattening yourself into the dark as your eyes adjust. Somewhere above you, another rustling. A skittering, this time. You glance upwards just in time to see something cross one of the many beams criss-crossing the inside of this cavernous building.
"Who's there?" it calls.
"Hey, I'm not looking for a fight," you pant. "I just want a place out of the sun. Maybe some food and water if I can find it somewhere in here. It certainly looks more than big enough for the both of us."
"That's a shame. I don't want you in here," it replies coldly. She? Maybe a she?
"Listen- if you could come down here," you call, searching for its silhouette, which still hasn't reappeared. "Where the hell are you? Just come down here and we'll talk it out."
"Look up."
You slowly pull your gaze upwards and a slow shiver rolls down your spine. Directly above you is a rail-thin figure perched like a spindly gargoyle in the rafters. Its voice is raspy as the rusted beam it's standing on, and the only thing even dimly illuminated is its bony face, its left eye gleaming dully in the dark as it searches you up and down. "Fine," it croaks after an agonizingly long pause, and slowly descends, hopping from beam to beam with various muted clangs.
"Thank you," you breathe.
Then it drops to the floor in front of you, and your first look at it takes your breath away.
She's emaciated; fully skin and bones with eyes sunken and hair stringy and matted. She looks more like a starving animal than a sentient being. The rags she's wearing hang so loosely off her body that her entire left shoulder, and a good portion of her right, is exposed.
"Jesus!-" you cry before you can stop yourself.
She laughs with a grating sound like two hand saws having sex and straightens up shakily. "Wow, thanks." At 'full height', as comparatively short as that is, given the shrunkenness and curvature of her spine and posture, she nonetheless towers markedly over you.
"I- I'm sorry, I just-"
She shrugs, and the skin around her shoulders stretches frighteningly tight from the movement. "Whatever," she says. "Okay, do you have any weapons?"
You shake your head. "Couldn't find any. Pretty sure I have a rock in my right boot, if that counts."
She snorts. "Sure. I'll search you then, if that's okay."
"Go ahead," you answer, and she conducts a search with lots of effort and absolutely no idea what she's doing. You're not sure you know any better, though, so you don't say anything.
She finishes her messy pat-down and seems satisfied. "Great. Thanks, I'm sure you understand."
You exhale. "Yeah, I guess."
She steps back, and every step has a second, quieter echo behind it, and possibly even more. You look down, and realize with a shock she has more than two legs. Some shaggy, shadowy mass hangs behind her.
"Oh. Didn't know you were a chimera," you say.
She scowls. "Drop it," she hisses, and she steps back so that the rest of her body is concealed in the darkness.
"Sorry, I was just curious-"
"Shut up. This way," she mutters, and you go where she points, your every pace followed by those same second-step echoes into the dark.
Some time stumbling through the dark allows your eyes to slowly adjust to the forbidding darkness. She points you upstairs, passing around several frosted glass walls and up many flights of stairs, gradually passing through slightly brighter and brighter areas in the process. The low howl of the winds outside, although muted, is ever-present. Along the short journey, you manage to scope out, at least, that she's got around six legs, but she's very protective about her back half. Each time you try to turn around and look, she canters in the direction that most effectively blocks your view and snaps, "Watch where you're going." At one point, you catch a glimpse through a broken mirror of a round, cigar-shaped body and a dinky little tail.
After a few minutes crisscrossing through abandoned concourses and trekking past fountain-covered rooms that were probably once elegant, the two of you summit one of the top floors and she halts in front of a cracked window that spills sand and light in equal measure. You turn around and she shoos you forward.
"Listen, I'm sorry," you begin, and that seems to still what she was about to say. "I promise I'm just curious, I'm not trying to hurt you. I really don't understand why this is such a sensitive thing for you, but I'm generally just really awful at reading people so maybe if something big I'm missing. Either way, if you genuinely don't want me to know, this can be the end of it. But I promise you that I won't say anything malicious, or anything whatsoever, if that's what you want."
You pant softly, exhausted from trying to get it all out before she says anything. Though you were so sure every second you spoke that she would interrupt you, she never did. She stares at you now, eyes scanning your face.
"Okay," she rasps. "Step back." There's a powerful, but rattly, bass to the way she speaks that would make her voice deep and elegant if not for her current ghoulish state.
You scuttle back as fast as you can, but the corridor bends into a corner right behind you and before you can even blink limbs are uncurling out in front of you and she's so, so huge and moving into the light and oh god there's so much of her and-
Her body continually unfurls; she's stretching out the best she can, showing off her brittle body and papery skin just for you, high-stepping slowly in a circle with a half-embarrassed, half-grimly determined expression. She has a second body section that's just as dirty and thin as the rest of her, to the point that even in the stronger light you honestly cannot fucking tell what the hell she is. It's covered, though, in muddy, patchy fur that was probably gray or white, once. A ratty tail in a folded-up-fan shape, almost like a bird's tail when at rest, hangs limply off the end, shamefully hiding a shriveled final section which barely sticks out under it.
You look up into her face, seeing for the first time the small eye slits hiding in the thick curls of her hair - tiny gashes concealing sunken, tired black beads, sprinkled in a gentle fan around her face and blinking at you in slow, uncoordinated waves. She's giving you her usual scowl, but you can sense, for the first time, a softness behind it.
"So?" she growls, shattering the moment.
You swallow. "You're... a spider-centaur?"
"Mm. A drider." Her voice is a dry, carefree breeze, but those eyes bore into you, digging barehanded through your brain matter for any offensive thoughts. "Anything else?"
"No, no," you stammer out, "I don't really know much about chimera types or anything like that, I promise I really was just curious-"
Something about your answer calms her, visibly releasing her from under whatever burden she's been carrying.
She holds out a hand to silence you. "Okay, okay. ....Thank you."
You look at her a little curiously, but return her gratitude nonetheless. "Yeah. Sorry I don't know much about, like, spider species or something. Hope that's not offensive."
"No, it's fine. Come on," she says, before you have a chance to ask anything further.
She opens with a compromise. "I want to survive. You want to survive. My policy is: I'm happy to share food and information with you if you're willing to do the same. We can work together, and I won't hurt you unless you try to hurt me. Deal?"
You nod. "Plus, I'm sure this deal benefits you, seeing as even though you have tons of information, you're starving."
Being caught out causes the first full smile you've ever seen on her to blossom across her face. "True. Also, most of the food in this place is long spoiled. I managed to scrounge up some preserved stuff for the first few months," she says, "but eventually I ran out. Plus, as great as dried peaches are, there's only so many times you can have them before you get tired of it. It definitely doesn't help that I don't have a damn can opener."
"You couldn't find one in those little huts on the other side of the crater?" you ask, gently.
She laughs and shakes her head. "They're a lot bigger than they look. Most of 'em's buried under the sand." She hesitates, seeming like she's about to say more on the subject, but doesn't. "Actually, that's where I came from, but I didn’t think to go back and look more closely until I needed it. By then the storms had gotten way, way worse. Feels like they kicked up every time I tried, just to spite me. Plus, that trek's way further than it looks from the lip."
"Buried under the sand?" you ask.
She looks uncomfortable. "Yeah, not much of it, but yeah. In a few days, I'll show you."
She scuttles over to a pile of jagged metal, faded paper labels, and food. "In the meantime, uh... I made do. I busted cans against the wall, even made my own shitty can opener." She gestures in the direction of the pile, at the edge of which lies a tetanus delivery device made out of scrap metal. "Anyway. It's my hell and now you get to share it with me."
"So... partner.." you venture. "Feels weird waiting this long to ask this, but... Do you have a name?"
"Twyla."
"Twai- ..what?"
"Fuck off."
"No, seriously, I didn't understand what you said."
"Twyla. And if you make me say it again I'll punch you."
"Twyla. Okay. Nice name."
"Thanks. I'll let my mom know, she helped pick it out."
"Ha ha. I'm Kadira."
"Nice to meet you, Kadira," she says, and steps forward to hug you. "Really looking forward to.. not dying together."