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When the Witch attacked, Hornet was in class, reading a dull powerpoint she’d written on the necessary evil of Iphigenia’s sacrifice to a sea of uninterested faces. Beside her, her groupmates nodded along and pretended they’d contributed anything more than their names on the author page. She muffled a yawn. Someone in the audience snickered.
As the presentation came to an end, there was a tired smattering of claps. Hornet returned to her seat in the front row and sat, staring glassily at the clock in the front of the room. Her eyelids felt impossibly heavy. Perhaps that was why it took her a long moment to recognize the tolling of bells for what it was: the forming of a Witch’s labyrinth. It was only when the bells began to drown out the next presenters that Hornet realized what was happening.
She twisted around. Thick fingers of fog were crawling down the auditorium’s seating and up its walls, covering it all until the building and everyone in it vanished, leaving Hornet to fall ungracefully onto her ass.
The fog was cold and damp. A wall formed of bulbous shapes began to press in as Hornet pushed herself to her feet and took stock of the situation. If the Witch was weak enough, she should be able to defeat it with ease. And then she could finish the class, go off to work, and go home. Maybe she’d even get the chance to grab a bite of food. A light weight settled onto Hornet’s shoulder as she concentrated on the soul gem snared in her heart, forcing her transformation to the surface.
“Did you complete your presentation?” the Pale King asked, his voice emotionless as he wound his long, centipede-like body around Hornet’s arm, uncaring that her everyday clothes were shifting into the scarlets of her magical girl wear.
“Yes, it went smoothly,” Hornet said as her mask formed over her face and her needle materialized into her waiting hands. “I expect full marks.”
Her body–-achey and tired and still recovering from illness—was suffused with an otherworldly strength and speed that had, in the past fifteen years, become normal. It was a creeping sensation of empty cold, followed by the world snapping into clarity around her. The transformation was complete.
Distantly, a woman wailed static. The shadowy forms on the walls resolved themselves into hundreds upon hundreds of oversized, rusting bells that rolled over each other and fell onto the misty ground with crashes so loud Hornet could feel them in her bones. An environmental hazard. Would the Witch weaponize its surroundings?
“Excellent. Take care not to be crushed. It would be a waste of the time I've invested in you,” was all the Pale King said as Hornet dashed into action.
Hornet was five and she’d just found a weird doll on the ground. It was all white and shiny, dressed in a pretty dress. She picked it up and put it in her bag, immediately forgetting about it. She’d walked home through the forest until she’d reached her house and ran through the door into her Mama’s waiting arms. She’d eaten soup that night, she remembered, and her bag had come with her into her room and was forgotten as she ran around with her foam swords and pretended she was a dashing hero that would rescue princesses from dragons until Mama had come in to tuck her into bed.
The next morning she’d woken up to the doll hovering above her, looking down at her with its black, black eyes as its legs unspooled into a long, many-legged tail. Hornet started crying as it—he— told her that he was a king and he needed her help to save the world. Was she brave enough to help him? Her soul was so strong and bright, she was the only option.
Hornet, being young and foolish, said yes.
And the rest was history.
Witches weren't, on whole, all that dangerous. Sure, when Hornet was a child she'd screamed and cried and shook as the Pale King guided her body—temporarily made into an adult by the magic in her newly-formed soul gem— through the motions of killing the witch and seizing its grief seed. But she was older and wiser now, and killing was a simple fact of life. She’d destroyed countless Witches, collected hundreds of grief seeds for the Pale King. Her magical body no longer scared her, for it was her tool to use.
Still, something in the back of her mind rang alarm at the sheer size of the labyrinth the witch's grief had formed. “Is there anything else I should know about this?” she asked, mildly irritated that this hunt was more complicated than a simple fight. It wasn’t like it mattered, though. Time didn’t seem to pass within a labyrinth.
“No,” the Pale King said.
Hornet rolled her eyes, but didn’t pry further.
The deeper Hornet ran into the Witch’s domain, the more crowded the bellwalls became. Soon her run turned into a slow, cautious jog as the bells fell against each other in waves, crashing against the floor with earthshaking clangs. She fought the urge to clasp her hands to her ears and turn tail. This was part of the Witch’s strategy, it had to be.
When Hornet at last reached the centre of the labyrinth, the Witch was immediately visible. It was vaguely humanoid, with four shadowy legs extending from a morass of bubbling, boillike bells that formed a torso and a veiled face. To her surprise, the Witch didn’t seem to notice her—perhaps because it was preoccupied with chasing the small white form of another woman around.
Hornet couldn’t help but stare in shock for a moment. She knew that she wasn’t the only magical girl in existence. The Pale King had mentioned her predecessors before and occasionally referenced the existence of other beings like himself, but she’d never actually met another person who could see or interact with Witches.
“Get the grief seed before the other one does,” the Pale King ordered. His wings, barely audible beneath the clashing of bells, hummed to life and he lifted off Hornet’s shoulder to find a safe corner to watch from. Hornet’s lip curled. If she had any luck, a bell would fall on him and he’d be squished. But even then… her mother’s illness—
It didn’t bear thinking about.
Hornet waited until the Witch was directly engaged with the other woman, then leapt onto its back and thrust her needle down between the bells. The Witch screeched and thrashed, managing to buck Hornet off and send her crashing into the walls. Hornet threw herself out of the hollow her impact had created moments before the bells rolled down where she had been.
The Witch turned on her. Four more shadowy arms extended from its body and it pounced. Hornet bent backwards as the Witch’s claws sailed over her, stirring wide trails in the misty air. As the Witch’s torso got closer to her, Hornet tightened her grip on her needle and thrust it up, dashing underneath the Witch’s body to cut a wide swathe through its torso. Bundles of fabric fell out of its body, bouncing and unravelling into a pile of gentle white as the Witch yowled and began to run away toward where the other woman was getting back to her feet.
Hornet made a mad dash to the other woman in hopes of getting there before the Witch could trample or consume her, but to her shock the Witch leapt over the other woman’s head instead and scrambled up the wall into a bellvein, which promptly sealed up behind it.
The other woman looked at Hornet accusingly. “You let it get away!”
Hornet stiffened. “I did no such thing.” She hesitated before adding, “You were the one last close to it, couldn’t you have done anything?”
The other woman scoffed, yanking her dropped rapier free from the ground. “I would have killed it if you hadn’t intervened— I had it right where I wanted it.” Now that there was no longer imminent danger of death by Witch, Hornet could take the time to examine the other woman.
She was slim and clad head-to-toe in white. Her pants and shoulders both looked padded, giving her a faintly absurd outline. Like Hornet, she wore an oversized mask. Unlike Hornet, her mask was made of an inky black stone, with two white eyeholes that stared back at her. Not an inch of her skin showed.
“Sure,” Hornet said. It wasn’t worth getting into an argument, even though she’d been pretty sure that the fight against the Witch hadn’t been going in the other woman’s favor, judging by the blood and rust scrapes that dirtied her outfit. Then, because it was faster to get to the point than dissemble: “What’s your name?”
The other woman paused. “You can call me the White Knight,” she said, placing a delicate hand on her hip.
Hornet inclined her head. A fake name was probably smart. “Spider.”
“Huh?” the White Knight said, looking around. “Where? I hate those things.”
“No, uh,” Hornet said, trying to regain control of the conversation. “Spider. Is my name. Anyways, we should get—”
“---That’s an awful name,” the White Knight interrupted. “Who would name their child after a bug?”
Hornet, whose name had been chosen by her godmother, tried and failed not to be offended. She cleared her throat. “Spiders are arachnids, not bugs. Anyways. The Witch?” Surely the White Knight would offer to assist Hornet and they would decide who got to keep the grief seed after the Witch was dispatched. It would be nice to be able to work alongside another person, even if she was strange and rude.
The White Knight pushed Hornet onto her ass and took off running.
Hornet squawked in dismay, the bells jangling harshly from her fall. “You can’t just—!”
The White Knight laughed. It was almost unnervingly high pitched and tinkling. Hornet thought she might hate it. Still, as she got back to her feet and chased in the White Knight’s wake, she thought it might be nice to not be alone.
Finding the Witch proved to be more complicated than Hornet had thought. This monster was wilier than the others she’d dispatched, and its labyrinth properly labyrinthine. The White Knight was clearly growing more and more frustrated with their inability to find the runaway Witch, and Hornet quietly despaired of her temporary companion’s hastiness as the White Knight dragged Hornet past disturbed bellveins in her quest to find the Witch first. And, well, Hornet would hate to let someone else win a competition. So a race it was.
“Do you have a guardian?” Hornet called out to the White Knight as she followed her across a wide gap.
“Do you ask anything but stupid questions?” the White Knight laughed, using the hilt of her rapier to send a cascade of bells into Hornet’s path.
Hornet leapt over them with ease. “I was only asking because surely someone as immature as yourself would need someone to look out for her.”
The White Knight stopped dead in her tracks and turned on her heel, coming face-to-face with Hornet. She stabbed a white-gloved finger into Hornet’s sternum. “I. Don’t. Need. You,” she hissed. “I need the grief seed. You wouldn’t understand; your wish was probably something stupid.”
A white-sheeted bed. A machine beeping slowly. A long, tearful talk with a hospital’s grief counselor. Hornet shoved the chemical smell of antiseptics to the back of her mind. “Assumptions, assumptions,” Hornet said, taking the White Knight’s hand in her own and shoving it roughly away. She began to run again, using her needle as a harpoon to swing herself into a bellvein high above the White Knight’s head. She heard cursing in her wake.
Her head start didn’t last long; the White Knight caught up to her in less than a minute. “Poor little spider, skewered in a Witch’s labyrinth… how will you ever get home?” the White Knight said, her voice sugary-sweet in its anger.
Hornet saw movement from the corner of her eye pivoted on her heel, turning her forward momentum into a neat pirouette as the White Knight lunged forward, her rapier flashing as it pierced the end of Hornet’s cloak and ripped free with a loud tearing sound.
She didn’t hesitate before slamming her elbow into the White Knight’s neck, its point finding purchase in the hollow of her throat. The White Knight choked and gagged and lunged to grapple Hornet to the ground with a strength that belied the thinness of her limbs. Hornet writhed against the White Knight’s body, seeking purchase against the silky material she wore in order to wrest the White Knight off of her. Her breath left her in a whoosh of air as the White Knight sucker-punched her once, twice, three times before Hornet was able to get her legs between them and kick the White Knight away.
Hornet staggered to her feet, hands on her knees and breathing heavily as the White Knight did the same. “We don’t have to fight,” she pleaded. “Shouldn’t we be focused on the Witch?”
The White Knight cackled and assumed a pose of readiness. Her rapier flashed in the dim light as she lunged forward.
Of course, that was when the Witch attacked.
There was only the quiet jangling of bells to announce its return as it burst from the bells above their heads, claws fully extended. Hornet brought her needle up to block the attack, absorbing the force of the blow in a deep stance before riposting. Beside her, the White Knight launched a similar attack, aiming her rapier at the Witch’s covered head while Hornet aimed for its swollen belly.
Both attacks found a home in its body and for a suspended moment, all was still before the Witch’s body pulsated and several previously invisible lines attached to its body shimmered into view, pulling jagged shards of bell into the ground in an eruption of rusty metal, forcing both Hornet and the White Knight to retreat to the furthest edges of the room until the eruption ended.
Hornet watched the White Knight as the other woman clung to the wall on the opposite side of the room as her. She was crouched on the thinnest lip of a bell, her head tilted. Hornet couldn’t tell if she was injured or not as the Witch scrambled after the White Knight, sending an avalanche of bells cascading beneath them as the White Knight hopped from bell to bell in an attempt to dodge the Witch’s attacks before leaping to the ground.
The Witch followed without hesitation, landing on all six limbs and charging forward like a raging bull. The White Knight darted out of the way and the Witch collided into the wall beneath Hornet’s perch with an ungodly clamour. It didn’t look up as it pulled itself from the hole it made, turning labouriously around.
Hornet’s brow furrowed. Interesting how the Witch was focusing its attacks almost solely onto the White Knight. She could use this. Probably.
She watched as the White Knight hopped backward, her rapier raised in preparation for further attack. The Witch reared onto its bottom four limbs and its weight shifted forward, exposing—-
There!
She leapt once more onto its back, stabbing down and beneath the bells. A woman’s breath caught. Hornet heaved her needle forward, splitting the Witch into two. She reached down the Witch’s chest cavity and curled her fingers tightly around the node of warmth within, closing her eyes and heart to the dizzying flood of angerragefurydispairdispairdispair that was the Witch’s final cry as she wrested it loose.
The room fell silent as the Witch dissolved, its grief seed captured securely in Hornet’s hand. She panted, her heart rate slowing as the adrenaline leeched from her system. Hornet looked up just in time to see the White Knight slash at Hornet’s arm, a shriek of animalistic anger escaping from beneath her mask. Hornet, her hands full with her prize, braced for impact, only for a flash of light and sound to stun her. When the stars had cleared from her vision, the Pale King was curled around her hand, his wings extended in aggression. Where had he come from? Hornet hadn’t realized he’d followed her into the bellveins.
“Stand down, vessel,” he commanded, his typically soft voice louder than Hornet had ever heard it. It made something deep inside her freeze in ancestral terror.
The White Knight was sprawled on the ground nearly two meters away, her arms thrown protectively over her face and her rapier laying forgotten to her side as she trembled. Blood dripped from beneath her mask, staining her white clothes red. Around her, bells glowed red-hot. There was a sickening scent of cooking meat.
The Pale King turned. Hornet, still frozen with fear, didn’t react until his tail tightened painfully around her wrist. She forced her fingers open one by one. The smooth, doll-like face of his mask split open into four sharp mandibles, and then he descended onto the grief seed in her hand. Hornet looked away as he crunched through the grief seed with a sound not unlike breaking glass.
When held in one’s hands, a grief seed felt like potential drowned, the weight of a lost soul struggling against its inevitable end. Hornet had her suspicions about the origin of grief seeds. The Pale King had never told her what they were, nor what caused a Witch to hatch. He simply demanded, and Hornet rose to meet the demand. For what choice did she have? Her mother lived solely due to the Pale King’s intervention and continued goodwill.
The world dissolved around them, leaving Hornet standing in the college’s courtyard in her costume and the White Knight curled and shaking on the grassy ground. The White Knight’s breath hitched in stifled sobs. Where her clothes had touched the ground, her costume was burnt away, exposing the charred flesh beneath. Already the burns were beginning to heal over, the layers of viscera scabbing and bubbling back into a flawless dark brown.
Hornet opened her mouth. To apologise, perhaps? To offer to lend a hand?
The Pale King turned to look at her, maw tucked back into his featureless mask. His black eyes bore into her own. “This is your enemy. Don’t be a fool.”
She closed her mouth. Swallowed back the bile in her throat.
Hornet turned away.