Chapter Text
— HORNET —
“Is it everything you dreamed it would be, spider dear?” Lace pants as she lies on the ground. “Laying your claws into me?”
Hornet ignores the arch, cloying tone as she focuses on weaving silk around the wound which lances through Lace’s chest, showing all the fraying layers of her flesh. Lace’s threads shimmer where they are cut, frail and glistening. Pale pearlescence seeps through the cavity of her chest in place of blood. There is no heart. Hornet pushes her claws in deeper, patching the wound together thread by thread. Her body is feverish, twitching as Hornet binds new silk through the old. Lace hisses in pain, claws clenching in the dirt.
“I’ve laid my claws into you before,” Hornet says, more to distract her than to encourage her. “Or have you already forgotten your defeat?”
She draws her claws out all the way. Lace collapses on the ground with a grunt, pressing her arms to the newly healed wound. “That hardly counts, spider,” she says, voice still tight from pain. “You were trying to kill me.”
“And you, me,” Hornet says placidly.
She sits down next to Lace, smoothing out her cloak over her lap. The vestiges of fresh silk shimmers around her claws, sparking from being joined with another body. The corpse of the vicious caranid which had ambushed them lies on the rocks behind them, bleeding void. The Skarrsinger had kept the caverns of the Far Fields strong, even in her dying years. With her gone, they and their denizens are now falling under the Abyss’s last throes.
It had been needed, to secure Pharloom’s future. But that does not mean that their loss is not mournful.
“That was reckless,” Hornet finally says out loud. “You cannot fling yourself into danger like that.”
“So was I to let my one hope of survival be sliced to pieces by a bug gone mad?” Lace pushes herself upright, fumbling for her pin and sheathing it at her side. “I am not some soft, gormless grub. I can still pull my weight in a fight.”
“I never doubted your prowess,” Hornet says. “Only—“
She worries at her mandibles beneath her mask. They have never said it out loud, despite how it looms large in their lives. Ever since the Pale One who spun Lace into being was consumed by the Void, silk began to fade from Pharloom. It has been months since then. The Citadel was slowly beginning to crumble, divested of its divine presence. Theirs was a broken faith from the start—their prayers had gone into heresy counter to their intentions, to deepen the slumber of a furious god—but the Grand Mother’s silk nevertheless ran within the world. They could feel it then, and now, they could not. The laborers in the Underworks had nothing left to gather and clean and came to the slow, painful realization that their faith rested on a hollow shell. The choristors and maestros realized that their melodies no longer made the world shiver. The pilgrims possessed by the Haunting regained their own minds and made their choices as to whether to return home or continue to the Citadel.
And Lace—a child born loyal, spun from the Grand Mother’s own silk; fierce in learning to dream for more but still so frail—clings to life but has no silk with which she can sustain herself. The Pale One saved her from a death in the Abyss only to make her endure one slower and more painful.
At least it would be certain death, if there was not a Weaver’s child close at hand.
“You cannot heal as you once did,” Hornet says. “And I might be too tapped to heal you.”
Lace laughs. It is a high, piercing sound, bright and utterly bitter. “I suppose you want my gratitude, then. For saving me amidst all your woes.”
Hornet goes still. This has become part of their routine as well, through the various journeys they have taken to help the bugs of Pharloom rebuild. After the battles they fight against voided creatures or the remnants of the Haunting, each time Hornet has had to heal her, Lace reaches over. Sets a claw on Hornet’s knee and another on her hip, toying with the edge of her cloak. Offers herself in a giggling parody of gratitude while making it clear that she wants anything but. And if Lace truly were willing and eager—if she were not wholly dependent on Hornet for her continued existence—if she did not grow up the daughter of a Pale One who only knew love when it was obeisance—
If after if after if. The litany of conditions and contrafactuals stretches on, endless and obscene. The question of Hornet’s own desire is not one she even wants to consider now. Not while they are still searching for a way for Lace to have her own life.
She catches Lace’s arm just as her claw is about to close on her waist. “I’ve told you before,” Hornet says, trying to sound as cold and distant as she once thought she could be. “I have little interest in you now.”
Lace laughs again. She does it as though it is the only true expression she knows, the only avenue towards anger she had been afforded. “Then why keep me alive at all, spider? What profit could you possibly be hoping to reap from a broken creature like me?”
“It is not my profit I hope will be reaped, but yours, and by your own claw.”
Hornet pushes Lace away, ignoring her glare, and rises to her feet. She paces for a moment, mulling over her words as they rise to her fangs. “I raised you from the dark,” she says, enunciating each word carefully. “I would have you live again in the light.”
Lace scoffs. “So I can be eternally grateful to you, I see,” she says, cloyingly sweet. “A monument to your beneficence.”
“If that is what you believe,” Hornet says. She has long since stopped trying to convince Lace that she accompanies her without conditions.
“My, my, spider,” Lace simpers. It’s mocking, through and through.
She stumbles as she gets up from the ground. Only for a moment, but they still both see. “The ego on you,” Lace sneers. “I could have guessed. Only a self-centered fool could have had the temerity to take on a god.”
Even gods die. Hornet knows that very well.
“If that is what you believe,” she repeats.
She starts to walk. Behind her, she can hear Lace hesitate before following with a limping gait.
-----
Between their courier deliveries to the settlements and the hunts they pick up from the wishboards, they spend their time searching for something that would help Lace regenerate silk. Hornet brings Lace to all the old Weavenests she found in Pharloom to scrounge among their ruins. In Weavenest Atla, she pries at the panels around Eva’s old room as Lace meanders aimlessly, jumping in and out of the broken containment chamber as though playing a game with herself.
“What was it you said was kept here?” Lace asks, tapping her claws dangerously close to the edges of broken glass. “Some kind of Weaver abomination?”
“The Weavers wanted to create a god beholden to them,” Hornet says. “Eva was their result.”
The wiring behind the chamber is all decayed, the fuel capacitors long gone. “She was sustained by her cage and could not subsist outside of it. They deemed her a failure and buried her here.” At the back of her mind, Hornet catches snatches of a wordless song, as Eva presses up against the edges of her awareness to marvel at her old home. “She was very kind.”
There is a loud clatter. Hornet looks up from her scavenging to see Lace at the edge of the room, pressed up against the wall, as far from Eva’s chamber as she can be. “Why in Silk’s name have you brought me here, then?” Lace hisses. Her eyes are wide and fearful. “Do you wish to contain me? Rid yourself of me for good?”
“No,” Hornet says at once. “No, I do not.”
Lace is still looking at her like a startled prey-beast who has seen the hunter’s teeth. Hornet turns so Lace can see that her claws are empty. “This place is Weaver-made,” she says slowly. “They worked with silk. We are here to see if there is any technology pertaining to silk generation that survived.”
Lace takes one shuddering breath, then two. She slowly inches from the wall. “My mother would have never allowed any such technology to persist in Pharloom, least of all from her prodigal daughters.” Her voice trembles, and she tries to hide it. “It would have been the gravest heresy.”
“It is certainly heresy,” Hornet says.
She tilts her head, keeping her tone mild. “I would’ve thought you liked that sort of thing.”
A long silence, and then Lace starts laughing, still half-afraid, but only half. Hornet feels a shameful amount of relief at the sound. She turns back to the old ruined power relay and keeps prying open the old fuel cells with all the care in her chitin, in hopes that there would be a germ of silk production left within them. Little by little, Lace starts to dance again, following the glints of light along the piping. She spins along the walls, darting in and out of Eva’s cage to a tune only she can hear. Lace is beautiful, Hornet thinks. A dream of a dancer from a memory half-faded.
None of the Weavenests have anything of use for them. Karn is overrun by plasmified creatures, the walls covered with lambent blue flora. Cindril is void-corroded and refuses to open to the needolin’s song. They pry it open to find void tendrils brewing inside, reaching through every chamber. Absolom is long lost. Murglin—Hornet goes there herself when Lace is taking a short delivery through Shellwood, the kindest of the lands since Grand Mother Silk’s destruction. Murglin is as empty as it was when Hornet first encountered it, and the Stilkin are even fiercer warriors now than before. They still grieve for Groal. They sense the Citadel’s power loosening. Hornet barely escapes their grasp to crawl her way back to Bellhart, her silk reserves maggot-rotten. She goes back to her bellhome to find Lace inside, perched at her desk and reading through her records.
“Spider dear, you are tracking filth into your own home,” she trills, looking at Hornet over the long curve of her shoulder. “Were all your efforts for my sake?”
She reaches one coy claw out, and Hornet unsheathes her needle, forcing her back. Lace freezes. Hornet shakes her head. “The maggots,” she bites out. “They eat silk. They will kill you if you touch me.”
Lace’s eyes widen further, but in a different sort of fear. She skitters back to let Hornet go to the tub above her desk. Hornet submerges herself, mask, cloak, and all, and lets the steaming water wash the maggots away. The warmth relaxes her tarsals and sternum. She closes her eyes and lets herself float, imagining herself back in the salt pools of the White Palace, where the air was bright and clear, and the balconies had railings made of silver. She can barely remember what those rooms had looked like now.
“That was the only rule of Mother’s I never tried to break,” Lace says from below her. “I never tried to find Bilewater. Never tried to see what she hid there. I was always too afraid.”
“One of your siblings was stationed at its edges,” Hornet says.
Lace is quiet for a while. “Phantom,” she says, long after Hornet presumed that the conversation was lost. “I remember them. From—before Mother sent them away.”
She knows what happened, if Hornet says that she encountered them. The lull this time is heavier. Hornet takes her mask off and scrubs her face, carefully wiping the maggot gunk from under each of her eyes. Lace’s voice still pierces through the water, though it’s the softest she’s ever heard her. “I didn’t know they were there. Were they—did they still sing?”
Hornet lifts her head. “Aye,” she says. “They sang.”
Phantom had worn a mask as well. It was cracking when Hornet fought them, stained by untold years of service in the Exhaust Organ, sorting through the refuse of the Citadel. They sang as they fought, pleading to be freed.
“Their voice was beautiful,” Hornet adds.
She puts her mask back on.
-----
After Bilewater, they return to the Citadel. Lace is leery beyond measure of the place, sneering and skittish in turns. She haughtily refuses to enter every other hallway and refuses to tell Hornet why; she walks through some rooms like a queen and others like a ghost. There are some pilgrims left in the Citadel—some newly arrived, even, who followed their beliefs during the most apocalyptic days. It does not matter to them that the Grand Mother is dead, or that the Citadel was never built in true worship of her. Their faith remains devoted to something greater. They try to talk to Lace and Hornet as they walk past, hailing them as the Citadel’s emissaries. Lace snaps back for them to know their place.
Hornet pulls her aside before they enter Songclave. “You will respect the pilgrims in this settlement, child,” she says, trying not to sharpen her words overmuch. “They are among my closest allies.”
Lace regards her for a moment before giggling. “Oh, the little fool with the chime,” she says airily. “I thought he would die on some spikes the moment he entered the gates.”
Hornet swallows down the hot anger that floods her mouth, sweet as poison from the fangs. “He lives.” She meters her words carefully instead of unsheathing her needle. “And he is very dear to me. I ask that you show him courtesy.”
“Well,” Lace says at her most saccharine pitch. “If you are asking.”
Sherma hails them joyously when he sees them, calling them Red Maiden and White Maiden and asking if he can provide them with any aid. They give him the packages from Bellhart for all the residents of Songclave. When Hornet refuses all the rosary strings he pushes at her, he hands them to Lace instead, praising her for all the help she has given them in the past few months. She takes them with an odd expression before patting him on top of his cymbal hat. It makes a clanging sound, even with his miter muffling the metal.
Lace is quiet as they make their way through the Whispering Vaults, into the Underworks. The archive bugs in the Vaults largely ignore them as they search and come up with nothing. Lace spends all her time breaking the Silkfly lanterns, giggling as they shatter, as though to dare the Vaultkeepers to stop her. None of them do. They descend into the Underworks, which are now vast and empty. All of the workers have left. It is only a matter of time before the Citadel falls into ruin, now that those bugs are no longer there to be exploited—unless it learns a different path.
Lace finally speaks when they are crossing the lava pits. “They hated me.”
It is on the tips of Hornet’s fangs to ask her to narrow down the particular field to whom what might apply. She keeps her mouth shut, though, until Lace continues, “The pilgrims. They saw me as frail and mad, yet still blessed, so they feared and reviled me.”
Hornet does not know how much of that hate was truly from the pilgrims, and how much of it was learned from somewhere closer. She imagines decades or centuries of this for Lace—living in a citadel surrounded by fellow bugs but treated like a rabid beast, to be avoided or placated at any cost. Her sibling, the one being who might have known her as she was, lost to exile. Hornet understands what it is to be alone, but this seems an especially grievous sort of loneliness. Lace keeps talking as they cross into the Cauldron. “So I hated them in return. I reviled them. Of course I did. I picked them off whenever I thought they needed to be kept in line.”
Revulsion, hate; both are shared. The fear—that is unspoken, but likely still reciprocal. “Did they ever fight back?” Hornet asks at last.
“Not successfully.” Lace giggles. “Mother healed me afterwards. Whenever I was wounded, she said it was proof of a job well done. Her citadel protected, and kept in order.”
Lace pirouettes mid-step, striking a pose with her pin. “I—” she proclaims, “was her finest child.”
She bursts into laughter, clutching at her belly. It sounds painful. Hornet wonders how young Lace was, when she was first set to this task. Whether she was trained, like Hornet was in the Hive, or if she was only told this was how she was created to be.
“It was strange,” Lace says, after her laugh peters out into hard breathing. Her voice softens, growing uncertain. A true confession. “Being hailed by the little fool as a savior. I wanted to ask him if he was playing a trick on me.”
Hornet frowns beneath her mask. “He would not trick you.”
“He should,” Lace says with a sniff. “It is only what I would do to him.”
Her steps are swift over the walkways, as they should be, for how long she patrolled these halls. The Cauldron is searing hot. The light limns her, catching on all her fraying silken threads and gilding them with a painter’s loving eye. Hornet finds herself hanging back one step, then two, then three. All so she can watch and wonder.
-----
The Twelfth Architect is dead. Hornet allows herself a moment to be stricken as she looks at the gears and wiring which used to be their form. Bug-Red, they’d called her, from a form that drew living music from dead metal. If she were to think about what holiness has meant to her through all the days of her life, the old Master construct would be one of the closest proofs of it the Citadel possessed. They had been devoted to their craft. To their creations.
And now—they are no more.
Over the Twelfth Architect’s body, the Second Sentinel stands, blades crossed in repose. It twitches, sensing Hornet’s approach.
“Hunter in Red,” it says. Its voice hitches, eyes flickering. “F-f-f-followed their directive, this Master did. C-c-c-created for this kingdom eternal, until the end.”
Hornet bows her head. No kingdom is eternal. That is a bitter lesson for anyone, construct or bug, to learn. “They did,” she says, stepping to join the sentinel. “You had a noble creator, gilded one. Their work was fine, their purpose true.”
Behind her, Lace is very still. The sentinel does not look to either of them. It keeps gazing at what had been the Architect. “W-w-w-watch over their gears, it desires. But p-p-p-purposeless it is, to watch those gone. No protection, it affords.”
“Vigil is not purposeless,” Hornet says. “I have kept it for many.”
Her mothers. Her kingdom. The Vessel sealed within the Temple, and the entrance to the void below all things. Different vigils, with different ends. She mulls over her words for a moment before asking the Sentinel, “How long have you been here?”
“Since the f-f-f-fall of the dark, this construct has stayed. When the v-v-v-void no longer corrupted, and it was less needed.”
“So you have been mourning long,” Hornet says softly.
She remembers the centuries she spent walking the ways of Hallownest as the cities crumbled around her. The decades she spent in the Beast’s Den, looking over the tomb of Herrah the Beast. Queen, Beast, Dreamer—all those things, Hallownest knew her by. Hornet could not claim any different. She did not remember her mother’s touch. She never knew her face outside of her repose as a Dreamer. All she has known of her is mourning.
Keeping vigil is exhausting. A watch spanning months would be little to Hornet, but she knows it is not so to the sentinel.
“Gilded one,” she says. “Know that we keep vigil for the sake of the living along with the dead. Rest, and carry them with you.”
“R-r-r-rest, this construct does not know.” The sentinel’s whole body jerks, as though all its wiring misfired. “Only its d-d-d-directive.”
“But you just told me that you have desires which differ from that. Which means that you have enough burden to rest.”
The sentinel finally lifts its head. It regards her for a long moment before it shivers and glitches one last time before it launches itself into the air and vanishes into the rafters of the Cauldron, leaving the two of them with what had once been the Architect. Lace shifts around, starting to rifle through the debris in the chamber. Hornet bows her head, continuing the sentinel’s vigil a little longer. The air smells of solder and glass, the last echoes of the Master’s work. Their constructs are still arrayed throughout the chamber, in all the stages of creation. They will persist, in brass and gold and cogwork. They will be their memorial.
“Should I mourn for her?” Lace asks abruptly.
She is looking at the Architect, but her words are not for them. Hornet looks up at her. “I do not know,” she says. “What would be your cause for mourning?”
“She was my mother,” Lace says. “My creator. If a bucket of rusty nails is mourning for its maker—”
She trails off and turns away to hack at the fallen stone in the far corner. Lace sees herself as the construct’s kin, Hornet realizes. More than she sees the likeness between herself and Sherma, or Hornet, or any other living bug. A child created. A thing built to be used to the dregs and then thrown away.
“I grieve for many,” Hornet says, truncating the child before it can leave her mouth. It is habitual; she is old enough that she can address nearly everyone so, but she does not want Lace to believe that is all she will ever be. “But mourning is not the measure of a life.”
She also starts to look around the chamber for anything that might be of use. The Twelfth Architect has a bounty of tools and half-finished constructs scattered all around their sanctum. Diamond-bladed sawtooth wheels; gleaming metal tarsals and claws each etched with fine flowering branches; cogflies; psalm cylinders; gramophones. Robotic hearts and minds splayed out along the walls, their most intimate mechanisms exposed for all the world to see. None of them have anything to do with silk. Hornet hesitates a moment before going to the old Master’s body. With the hilt of her needle, she breaks the glass bulb in their head containing a frenzied Silkfly, letting it free, before she hauls the body up to look at their gears. There is a pristine shard core tucked deep in their chest. Hornet leaves it where it is.
“I know how to mourn,” Lace says, half-musing and half-defiant. “This was Phantom’s favorite place in the Citadel.”
Silk frays from her neck as she cranes her head up to look at the automata hanging suspended from the rafters. “They spent all the time that was their own around the Architects, watching them build the Choruses. They were always making things. Miniature song cylinders and copper flutes. Black feathered capes from ragpelts, which they wore and pretended were Abyssal.”
Lace speaks in the cadence of a plea long-remembered. “They—made things. It was just how they were. They never thought of it as rebellion.”
To a Pale Being such as Grand Mother Silk, only her rank can delight in creation. For everyone else, it was meant to be a duty. Impinging on this holiest of prerogatives would be rebellion to the extreme. The gravest sort of failure.
“I wanted to be like them.” Lace says. “To make things.”
She curls in on herself and shakes. When she speaks. her voice is thin as thread and seven-fold as fragile. “But then they were exiled. And making things—that was never to be my lot.”
A child created. A thing built. Always rendered in the passive, as an object—the recipient of another’s will. It echoes in Hornet’s mind as she sits down in front of the Twelfth Architect’s body. The old Master had been the source of many of the tools in her arsenal. In their name, she takes out her tool pouch and goes through them one by one, considering each anew. Lace wanders the chamber, looking with a resentful sort of longing at the body of the old Master. Hornet wonders if she is wishing she had lived their life of free creation, bound by nothing but the directive of their craft, or if she is wishing she were one of their creations, made of metal and wire burnished to a perfect shine. Faultless through all the years; loved enough to mourn in turn.
The final tool at the bottom of Hornet’s bag is the bronze and gold spool of the Reserve Bind. Her claws fumble across it before they catch. She had dismissed it at first—too small, too temporary—but she draws it out now and fills it with her own silk one last time.
“The Second Sentinel—it gave me this when I faced it in battle,” Hornet says out loud. “It holds enough silk for one healing bind.”
She waits for Lace to turn around and look at her questioningly before holding out the bind. Lace’s pearly eyes widen, before she sneers. “In case you’ve forgotten, spider, I can no longer produce my own silk. I would have to scurry back to you and beg for scraps every time I used it.”
“So now we will search for silk,” Hornet says.
She holds the golden spool between them. “Take it,” she says. “Use it the next time you need.”
Lace stares at her for so long that Hornet grows uncertain of what she should do next. Between one heartbeat and the next, she then snatches the spool from her claw, quicker than the eye can follow.
-----
Each time Hornet journeys from Bellhart now, she loops by the Halfway Home and Sinner’s Road to gather silkeaters from Styx. When she first brought up the possibility of unwinding the silkeaters for their half-consumed thread, Lace despised the idea. Foul and filthy silk, covered in the sick from a shriveled-up maggot, she had jeered, refusing to even touch the cocoons. So Hornet did it herself at first, picking the thread off layer by layer and winding it around the spool until it broke too often to use. The secondhand silk worked for a healing bind. It worked as silk in most other capacities as well. When Lace discovered that she could play the needolin for a few precious minutes using a bind, she demanded that Hornet bring her more silkeaters at once.
Styx can only make so many in a day. Hornet feels exhausted each time she passes through the region. Lace will sorely need that silk to heal one day—but all that matters little in light of the joy on Lace’s face whenever she plays a tune on her needle.
They spend their evenings like this now: Lace perched on the cot, Hornet at her desk, plucking out melodies on their needles together. Lace sometimes tells Hornet to refill the Reserve Bind so she can keep practicing, but she just as often does not, and lies down on her back to stare up at the fairy lights, cradling her pin to her chest.
“Whatever are you going to do once you’re rid of me, spider?” Lace asks now. She very nearly sounds wistful.
Hornet sets her own needle aside. “I would return to Hallownest,” she says. “There is much to be done in my kingdom.”
“Your kingdom?” Lace echoes. She sits up and smiles, arch and glorious in it. “Are you a queen as well, searching to expand your dominion?”
Hornet shakes her head. “A princess,” she says, “and a daughter of three queens. Though there is little left in Hallownest to rule, even if I wished to. The bugs there have suffered much under their rulers. I have no desire to add to their burdens.”
The words hover somewhere between truth and lie. Dominance, dominion, a ceaseless yearning for worship and power—the instinctual cravings of the strains in her blood, Pale and Weaver both. There has never been a day when Hornet did not long for them. She has indulged those instincts many times over her own life, and she nearly did again when she discovered the sleeping god atop the Citadel. It would have taken so little effort to usurp her, far less than what Hornet did in the end. She does not regret her choice, but she still knows what clamors at the back of her mind. Better that she knows, so she can guard against it.
For countless years, Hornet kept Hallownest’s secrets. Guarded her kingdom against the truth of its foundations, kept hidden that which the Pale King wished to hide. Hallownest is hers in every sense—to rule, to break, or to atone for.
Lace flops back, giggling. “Spider, spider! Without a doubt you are the worst Weaver I have ever met.”
“The Weavers were gone from this land before your time, as I understand,” Hornet says, mild. “It is a marvel if you have ever met any.”
Lace waves her claw dismissively. “The worst Pale One, then. Or the worst of both! You had the chance to usurp Mother’s rule over this kingdom, and you spat on it to claw your way down to the Abyss for the sake of an empty child instead.” Hornet freezes, but Lace does not notice, continuing her berating. “And now, here is a subject freely offering obeisance, worship, love—and you’ve done nothing but reject me. I might take offense soon, spider dear.”
Hornet is quiet for a moment, and then she snorts. Lace has taken offense, vocally and repeatedly. But Hornet bears that offense gladly, as proof of Lace’s ambitious nature. A being created, pushing with gritted fangs beyond the conditions of her creation.
“Obeisance, worship, love,” Hornet echoes. The sum of all desires to a being Pale. She remembers the White Palace where she came of age, its austere beauty hanging suspended above the void. “Those are not the same.”
Lace shrugs, uncaring. “They are, as they were taught to me.”
“I know,” Hornet says.
She looks away and closes her eyes. Lace takes a long time to reply. “Is that what makes me too broken for you, spider dear?” she asks at last. Her words are slow and uncertain beneath the mocking edge that reaches its sharpest whenever she is hurt. “That I do not know how to love?”
“You are not broken,” Hornet says. “No more than I am.”
They were taught the same things; she has only had more time to reckon with the world beyond them. Lace laughs derisively. “Well, then it’s hopeless for me.”
Hornet smiles at the sound, unable to do anything but. She holds her claw out for the Reserve Bind, and Lace hands it to her with a questioning look. She fills the spool before giving it back and perching carefully on the edge of the cot.
“Let me teach you a new song,” Hornet says.
“You need to decide, do you want me in your debt or not?” Lace croons, poison-coy. She leans in close, propping her chin in her claw. “Otherwise, it’s just too confusing for a mad thing like me.”
Hornet takes a deep breath. She neither moves away nor moves closer. “I think you would like the song,” is all she says.
She strings her own needolin, tuning the threads to a melancholy key. “It is a teaching of the Snail Shamans,” she tells Lace. “They were shunned both in my kingdom and in yours. It was their work that brought your mother into the Abyss, and the void into Pharloom.” She pauses. “It was also through their work that I was able to free you from it.”
Lace sits up a little taller, her interest now wholly unfeigned. “Where are they now?”
Hornet tilts her head. “Dead,” she says. “Save for their melody.”
She starts to pluck out the Elegy of the Deep from the threads, humming along to the bittersweet tune. Lace tilts her head as she listens. Hornet wonders what echoes she can hear in it—the Pale One’s song of doom, perhaps, or her sibling’s own creations. Lace unwinds silk from the Reserve Bind and begins to mimic Hornet’s notes. Neither of their songs are empowered, but the notes still hang in the air and make it thick with things long gone.
It is a song for those lost. A mourning song. As they play, they bow their heads and remember.
-----
The silkeaters work. They are still not enough.
Hornet screams as Lace is impaled by the tendrils from a void heart. In a lurch of gut-deep fury, she spins her silk into jagged nails and hurls them in two volleys at the black-spitting abomination, slicing it asunder, before deploying her cogflies. The metal constructs zip up to gnaw at the void heart, distracting it enough to dodge around the black tendrils and retrieve Lace’s still form. She’s dipped their teeth and wings in poison, so the cogflies make quick work of the void heart as Hornet retreats around the bend, still carrying Lace.
The silk in the Reserve Bind, which Lace carries around her neck on a thin golden chain, is voided through. The silk of Lace’s body is also voided, crumbling into noxious black tar. Hornet presses her claws into Lace’s wounds, uncaring of the void burning through her own chitin. She wipes off the foul miasma and tries to suture the threads together, but her own silk reserves are too low. The Pale Nails. Blast it all.
“I shall return,” she says shakily. “I—I shall—”
Lace does not respond. She cannot hear her. Hornet looks at the alcove where she has hidden the two of them. The entrance is covered by the white flowers which bloom throughout Shellwood. Lace will be well-hidden, and Shellwood is safe. There are few bugs here who are left hostile. That is why the two of them had gone together on his hunt; it was supposed to be easy. It was supposed to be simple. They hadn’t known that the trail would bring them to a cluster of abyssal hearts.
Hornet hastens to find the pondcatcher bug stationed a grove over. She asks them to point her to anything that might need a needle; they gladly direct her towards a nest of wood wasps that has sprung up high over one of the benches. The wasps are easy enough to address, even with her jittery claws and distracted mind. When she returns, Lace is conscious. She looks up as Hornet enters, forcing a smile across her face. Her breath wheezes out of the punctures in her chest just as it does from her mouth.
“Spider dear,” she whispers. “I thought you had grown sick of me at last.”
Hornet ignores her and pours silk into her wounds, spinning her carapace anew. Lace groans, loud and pained, as Hornet’s claws rake along the tattered edges of her. The voided thread burns away as new silk takes its place, fusing strong in the fever-heat between her thread-ribs. Pulling on the last of her reserves, Hornet fills the spool dangling from Lace’s neck. Afterwards, her claws linger where they should not, pressing desperately against the rewoven gashes before she breaks herself away.
“Lace,” Hornet says.
They both startle; they so rarely use their true names with each other. Hornet takes a deep breath. She knows her next words will swiftly be met with ire, but she says them nonetheless. “It might be for the best if you stay in Bellhart for the next little while.”
“No,” Lace says at once. Blankly, in clear disbelief.
“Just until—”
“Until what, spider?” Lace snaps. “Until you resurrect my mother and demand that she give me silk? Until you tire of me and throw me from your home? Until you die and I wither away?”
She shoves herself upright, face contorting from the pain. “Silk is gone from Pharloom. The Weavers are long dead. There will not be a solution to my ailment, spider. There is nothing left to find, not even for you.” Lace points with a trembling claw as she spits, “And I will not be caged in your bellhome like a mindless beast. I will not abide by that again.”
They both fall silent. Hornet settles back on her hindlegs, reeling as though from a blow. “That was never my intention,” she says at last.
“And yet that would be your effect nonetheless.”
Lace doesn’t even sound angry, only tired. Hornet cannot find anything in her words to rebuke. They are struggling against inevitability here—silk is gone from Pharloom. The quantity they would have to find for Lace to be able to heal herself as she wishes, it would be the equivalent of the threads needed to spin all the hanging houses in the Distant Village. Enough silk to last a lifetime of dancing and glorious danger. Reserves like that no longer exist with the Weavers gone, if they ever did. They search because they have to, because they must sustain hope. Not in expectation of finding anything more than ghosts.
In the breeze, white flower petals drip from the cave mouth above them. Hornet finds her gaze drawn to them. They are so delicate that they almost look like silk, spun into blooms with a meticulous claw.
“The last Old Heart,” she realizes. “There was one from this region. One I did not take.”
Lace is a silk construct. She is malleable—no, she has boundless potential for adaptability, for change. She was not created with a heart, but her form would learn to use one. “We could find the heart,” Hornet says, sitting up straighter. “And you could use it. You would not be able to regenerate silk as quickly as you once did, but it would let you heal nonetheless. You could—”
She is cut off by a shrill, desperate laugh from Lace. “So not only are you as broken as I am, but twice as mad! What has stolen your senses, spider?”
“The shamans told me where it laid,” Hornet says, taking out her map. If she squints, she can still see the remnants of the faded ink. “It should not prove too troublesome to find it.”
Lace snatches the map from her claws, making Hornet jolt. “The issue is not with finding it,” she says tightly.
She finds where the Old Heart used to be marked and rubs at it with the scalpeled edge of her claw until the parchment is scraped clean. “Before she was put to slumber by her prodigal daughters, Mother conquered all of the lands around his kingdom,” Lace says. “Made them bow to her godhead and prove their piety. The Old Hearts were the only remnants left of a Pharloom she did not rule. It was heresy to even mention their bearers in the Citadel.”
Lace gestures at the flowers around them. “This is the only land left blooming,” she says. “And it is because of the Heart of the Wood. To take it would mean the destruction of Shellwood entire.”
That is true. The loss of the Skarrsinger’s heart led the Far Fields to crumble to magma and void. Were they to take Shellwood’s heart, the forest would not long survive. It is not that Hornet did not realize this cost, but it is only now that she recognizes how easily—how instinctually—she had accepted it as a commensurate price. That takes her aback, as does sweet-bitter longing in Lace’s voice.
Hornet’s words are clumsy when they rise to her fangs. “I would have thought that you would be eager to seize that power for yourself.”
“And I would have thought that you would have seen the madness in condemning a whole land for my sake,” Lace retorts.
She rolls the map up, clutching it tight between her shaking claws. “Were it only the heart, only the power—a wood, and only a wood—I would,” she says. “Do not think me so kind or selfless, spider. But my mother was the one who forced these lands under her dominion. The Heart of Shellwood survives, despite the efforts from her, and her daughters, and the Citadel’s crusaders, and me.”
A child created is not meant to feel guilt for the edicts of her creator, but Lace has always been far more than what she was made to be.
“I will not have you completing her ambitions,” Lace says. The note of command is unmistakeable. “Not even for my sake.”
Hornet bows her head in deferral. Little by little, the fervor slips from Lace’s form. She hands Hornet’s map back to her and slumps into the greenery, looking up at the gently floating petals. Hornet puts her map away and lies down next to her, breathing deep of the sweet blooms and loam.
“Besides,” Lace adds suddenly. “I quite like the flowers here.”
Hornet nods, remembering the white roses which had filled the Cradle. The gleam of the Everbloom, incandescent within the Abyss, memory made real. Shellwood’s blossoms are just as fine. Just as radiant. Lace rises from the cave floor. She leaps up to pluck a pale bloom from the vines, cradling it close as she sniffs at it. It matches her seamlessly in its pearly brightness. Behind the petals, her smile just peeks out.
“They are lovely,” Hornet says, stricken by the sight.
-----
When they come back to their bellhome, Hornet sits down at her desk. She looks across at her vials of materium, over her records. A testament to all she has seen; a witness to all she has done. For both good and ill. Behind her, Lace enters, still holding the flower from Shellwood. It is already wilting. She pokes around the shelves and demands to know where Hornet keeps her extra vases, preferably one not smeared in some horrendous bug’s secretions. Hornet gives her an empty vial, and she immediately goes to fill it with water.
Hornet waits for her to return. Lace is humming when she comes back, not Grand Mother Silk’s song, but the one she just learned. She sets the flower above her side of the cot and spends a moment adjusting it so the petals fall just so.
“That melody I taught you,” Hornet says. “It is called the Elegy of the Deep.”
She takes a deep breath, and then she adds, “It has a purpose.”
For a long while, it is silent. Lace finishes fiddling with her flower. She slowly slides off the cot and goes to stand in front of Hornet. Hornet looks up. Lace’s face is shuttered and cold.
“I should have known,” Lace says.
There is a bitter twist to her mouth, even as her words remain honeyed. “What happened to thinking that I would like the song, spider dear?”
“That is why I did it,” Hornet says, as steadily as she can. “But it has additional benefits.”
She takes out her needle, not to string it, but to lay it on her desk. “The Elegy of the Deep allows a bug to descend into the memories of an ancient being. To explore their dreams; to see their lives as they once were, even if their glory has been lost to time. And, if one so wishes, to seize that glory from them. To take their might, and their heart.”
“That was how you found the Old Hearts,” Lace says. There is no surprise on her face, only that bitterness.
Hornet nods. “I entered the dreams of their bearers. I felled them and took their strength so that Pharloom may persist. And I did not think of this at first, but they are not the only ancient beings in this kingdom. I bear enough strength and centuries to enable the workings of the Elegy.”
Lace does not delay in her reply. “Then you should have saved yourself from the faculties of thinking,” she sneers.
Her voice is venomous through and through. Hornet closes her eyes against the steel-pang sweetness of it. “If you took my Weaver heart, you would be able to thrive again,” Hornet says. Pleads, for that is what this is. “You would be able to spin silk. To heal yourself. To fight and dance and travel as you wished. Lace—you would be able to live—”
“Hornet,” Lace says.
Her jaw works soundlessly, silk peeling from its once-smooth edges. She finally says, “You would have me kill you.”
Hornet shakes her head. “I am not so drained as the Skarrsinger and the Coral Tyrant were, or even the Green Prince. I have more spirit left in me; there is a chance I will not die—”
“You would have me kill you,” Lace screams.
So how would that be wrong? Hornet has lived scores of centuries beyond what a mortal bug could wish for. Her death was once what Lace sought with every thread in her being. And for the destruction she has wrought on Lace’s life—Hornet holds little guilt for saving Pharloom, but she has been a hunter since her youngest days. She understands the law of reciprocity. “My life has been long,” she tells Lace, trying to convince her to understand. She has done much that she now mourns for. “This would be an ending without regret. I surrender it gladly to you.”
Lace’s whole frame is shaking from the depth of her fury. “So it was all a lie,” she says, jerkily stepping a few paces. “Everything about helping this kingdom and yours. Either it is all a lie—or you would rather kill yourself and all your hopes than live with me.”
Before Hornet can protest, metal sings against metal, and the tip of Lace’s pin is wedged beneath her mask. Her claws tremble around the hilt. Hornet doesn’t move, for fear of slicing herself open.
“You would rather die than live with me,” Lace says, as though coming to a revelation.
Hornet is shocked into silence. Lace does not stop. “You would rather die than tolerate my presence. Tolerate my burdens. Tolerate this fickle, frail form of mine. I am a problem to you, and my fixing is unbearable to the point where you prefer death,” she spits. “Do you understand, spider? That is what you are saying with this unspeakable plan of yours. You would rather die than live with me as I am.”
Hornet does not know what to say. She had sat down at her desk thinking she might breathe her last today. She did not prepare for the possibility of her offer being the thing to break them asunder. The thing to bring the fears left unsaid to light, in the manner of a world’s ending. “You were never a problem,” she says, as steady as she can. “It is only—I thought you wanted to have your own life.”
“One with you!” Lace giggles, shrill and pained. “One I thought you might have wanted too! But now I see how that was only a dream conjured by my maddened mind.”
Want is too small of a word for the force of Hornet’s longing. The truth—that she would gladly live for all her future centuries like this, with Lace laughing and dancing at her side, forever graceful, forever hers; woven by her silk, healed by her claws—cannot be voiced. Not ever, but certainly not now. “I do,” Hornet says carefully. “I do want that. But I also want you to be hale and happy.”
It wasn’t careful enough. Lace sheathes her pin. She is still shaking. “I should have known,” she says. “You have always thought it your prerogative to tell me what to be.”
That was cruel. That was not Hornet’s intent; none of this was her intent. But she knows better than most how intent counts for little in light of effect. Lace paces frenetically for a while longer, worrying at the Reserve Bind in her claws. Hornet knows what she is about to say next. She wants to plead with her to be sensible. To think about her safety. To stay where she can be taken care of. All things she would say to a child not yet grown, so she does not say them at all. Lace has the Bind and the silkeaters. It is not as though they have found anything else.
“I am leaving,” Lace says.
Even though she has braced herself against it, it still stings. Hornet swallows hard and bites through her own cheek to stay silent as Lace continues, “You will not stop me.”
Hornet breathes deep and lets it go. “Very well,” she says. “If that is what you wish.”
Lace stares at her for a long while before she snarls wordlessly. She takes the basket of silkeaters and walks out the door. With that, she is gone. Hornet sits down heavily on the bed. The flower Lace had picked still shines in its new vase. She plucks it from its glass and carefully runs her claw across its petals. They are already starting to wilt. She cradles the pale bloom to her chest as the hours tick by and the shadows come.