Chapter Text
— LACE —
Hallownest is a mere footnote in the volumes within the Vault. A kingdom fallen centuries ago, to waves of infection and madness. Shakra has never heard of it, despite her many wanderings. The crotchety old Vaultkeeper has no recollection of it, much to its consternation. It is the Second Sentinel who provides her with the link she needs. High up in the Cradle, it finds the original of the maps given to the full Chamber of envoys and choristers who were sent into the kingdom of the White Wyrm. Their directive was to retrieve a Weaver spawn to sate Mother’s silk-hunger.
Lace looks at the commandment scrawled to the side of the map by whatever bug her mother had possessed as her oracle: Claim the Weaver, in half-part. Last of their line. Sensed strong with silk. Resistance anticipated. Quell with rune cage.
She remembers when this commandment was given. Remembers the longing and revulsion that had shot through her upon seeing the Chamber march out the Citadel gates. A half-Weaver could be rounded up to a full Weaver—a full daughter to replace the ones who betrayed her so long ago, one who was strong in silk and will alike, more than Lace could ever be. It’s why Lace tampered with the expedition once it crossed back into Pharloom. She wanted to be the one to bring the Weaver spawn in. To prove her worth, once and for all, as Silk’s true daughter.
Now, it is surreal to see the spider being described with such impersonal avarice. Even more surreal to imagine that she could be taken down by a single Chamber. Hornet is half god. The Citadel entire couldn’t stop her. Lace smiles to herself, unable to do anything against the surge of fondness in her chest.
Shakra accompanies her from Pharloom’s bounds. They travel with the Bell Beast and her brood as far as the tunnels extend, and then they continue on foot. It takes them long days, but they cross from lands familiar into unfamiliar, until they are walking beneath cliffs lined with hulking gray roots and the fossilized corpses of beasts long gone. Some bugs hail them, heading down the same path; others wave as they travel the other way. They all seem to be friendly passerby. Humble and non-combative. Boring through and through. Lace cannot see Hornet here at all.
They cross a bridge over a deep ravine. The bridge looks new, like it had just been rebuilt after some disaster. Most of the buildings they’ve seen are like that, or they are nothing more than tents pitched on rubble. Life crawling from the dirt, clinging to existence. The town on the other side of the ravine is barely large enough to be called such, but it is still a town, with a travel station and a map-bug’s store. Shakra deems it safe enough for her to return to Bellhart and her own duties, making Lace promise to send word as soon as she finds Hornet. Lace is left alone. For a moment, she stands in the main square and looks up at the fireflies. They dance around in the bulbs of the streetlamps, trapped behind glass as the silkflies are. Lace shivers, wondering where they came from. Who was bound and buried to make such gleaming light.
“Ho there, traveler!”
A croaking voice comes from behind her. She spins around to see a horned bug who’s seen better days. He seems to be in high spirits, though—too much so. “Have you come to explore our town? We haven’t much, but our innkeep will gladly provide you with dinner and a roof over your head before you venture down below.”
He says that with the air of someone who is unaccustomed to visitors but desperately wants them nonetheless. Lace narrows her eyes at him, immediately suspicious. “Old bug, I come looking for a spider,” she says. “White mask, red cloak. She told me she was among the royalty of this kingdom, though I suppose she might have lied about that.”
“Oh—you are here for the Lady Hornet,” the old bug says.
The smile drops from his face, letting Lace see who he is beneath the cheer: a sad and tired shell, worn out by years of grief. It suits him more than the unpracticed happiness did. Lace’s suspicion fades in favor of a different sort of wariness. “It’s a grave, sad state of affairs for her, White Maiden,” he says. “Hallownest’s princess and protector. Our kingdom has only just begun to rebuild, and it already suffered such a loss.”
Lace’s claw is creeping to her pin. The old bug is no Sherma, and she likes what he is implying about the spider’s well-being even less than his address. “Spit it out, you withered shell. What happened to Hornet?”
“She was gravely injured in her attempt to commune with the Abyss.”
Lace goes still. Why in all the Haunted lands did they let her descend again? Did they not know the cost of it? “What do you mean by that?”
“She was on the verge of death when we found her, and she has not recovered. She has spent the last month in a deep repose, lost to dreaming.”
With the sharp snick of metal on metal, Lace’s pin is in her claw. Not to attack the bug, or to make any threats, even—just because her nerves are thrumming, and she knows no other way to react. “Has she woken up?” she demands shakily. “Tell me she’s woken. Tell me she’s woken up, old bug—”
“Nay,” he says softly. Lace feels sick from it. “Would that it were so.”
The old bug looks down at the ground, shoulders slumping. “She has not yet woken. We do not know if she will ever wake again.”
-----
The City of Tears greets her with its crystalline rain, which sings as it falls over the rooftops, down into a hundred fountains. It is beautiful, all silver spires and cobblestone alleys, and shops newly opened with their patchwork signs. Lace barely sees any of it as she dashes through the water-gilded streets, searching for the Healer’s Ward. This kingdom is not Pharloom. Whatever calamity it had endured made it infinitely kinder than Pharloom had been under the rule of the Citadel and her mother’s Haunting, but all Lace’s mind can conjure now is her memories of the Whiteward: the mortician-bugs with their sharp shears, the surgeons who pulled silk from any shell they thought too frail to work. She needs to find Hornet. She needs to wake her up before she is spun into nothing but dregs.
It is easy to follow the signs to the Healer’s Ward. It doesn’t look any different from the rest of the city Lace has seen. A bug in neat robes greets her when she walks inside, asking for her ailment. Lace grabs them by the collar and drags them close.
“Show me to the spider,” she hisses. “Now.”
The bug tries to pull themselves from her grasp. “I know that you are afraid, miss, and I will do my best to help you. But I will remind you that our priority is our patients’ safety and privacy, and you will be removed from the Ward if you attack physicians or staff—”
“Her name is Hornet,” Lace says tightly. “White mask, red cloak, half-spider. Lost to dreaming. And you will help me by showing me to her.”
The healer bug stops struggling. Their eyes rove over her face before widening in recognition. “You are Lace,” they say.
That gets her to release them. “How do you know my name?” Lace demands.
The healer only bows. “My condolences to you,” they say. Before Lace can skewer them through for their temerity, they gesture for her to head deeper into the Ward. “I will show you to her.”
The physician’s halls within the Ward are bright and airy. Lace is shown to the private room the spider was given, which overlooks the City’s central square and the rain falling in fine silver chains. She barely hears the healer bug excusing themselves and closing the door behind them.
They’ve laid Hornet in a bed by the window. She is horribly, awfully still. Her mask has been removed, so Lace can see all her eyes. Six of them, small as gems, are cloudy-red and unseeing. Her true eyes are closed and sunken beneath their lids. Lace stumbles to her bedside and presses her claws to her face. Her chitin is marred by seeping cracks and veins of void. It feels papery, dry. Like she is about to flake away in the manner of fallen leaves. She is so cold. She should not be this cold. All of Hornet’s effects are spread out on the table in the corner, as though they expect they’ll have to bury her with them tomorrow. Her mask. Her arsenal of tools. Her pale needle. Her cloak, folded neatly. Her journal, which she always kept with her.
It is opened. That feels wrong, though it must have been the physicians who did it, searching for clues to what plunged Hornet into her slumber. Lace has spent long idle hours wondering what sordid or tragic secrets lie within its pages. She hesitates now before deciding to read it, only to find that it is nothing more than an annotated list of all the foes the spider has faced in Pharloom. How disgustingly practical. Lace’s chest feels as though it is being cracked open at the mere sight.
There are even entries for Lace herself, her movements and attack patterns, her reliance on the Haunting’s silk. Her connection to the Pale Being in the Citadel. And then finally, her fall into the Abyss. Hornet’s script is neat and inexpressive. The cursive of her writing does not change even as it declares: To quell the mother’s rage, and see this kingdom saved, I will claim her back.
This one…the dark shall not take.
Something withered sticks out of the pages at the very end. Lace flips there to find the bloom from Shellwood, meticulously pressed flat to preserve all of its petals. She starts laughing then, sounding like she’s being gutted as she lifts the dried flower to her face and inhales. If she were truly mad, she would think that she still smells traces of its perfume, sweet and loamy.
“Fool of a spider,” Lace giggles, biting back a sob. “What have you gone and done?”
There is no one to answer. Lace sits down at Hornet’s bedside, still holding the flower. She clasps it to her chest and breathes deeply before laying it in Hornet’s lax claw. Her own claws tremble around her pin as she pulls silk from the Reserve Bind and strings the length of metal. The song of the rain soothes her enough for her to recall the melody, sweet and bitter in turns.
Lace closes her eyes and begins to play. The room around her unravels into nothingness.
-----
When Lace wakes, she is in a world of silk and void. She panics, thinking herself in the Abyss again, bound in her mother’s dying threads, but after she claws and scrabbles herself free, she discovers that she was scratching at nothing but her own form. This is not the Abyss where Lace was swallowed and consumed, but it is not so different from that, either. Masks litter the ground, each hollowed and cracked. It is eerily quiet, though there are little ghosts everywhere, with the lambent eyes of children. They watch as she picks herself from the ground and begins to walk.
The silence grows heavier with each step. Her gut churns with remembered guilt, though for what, she cannot say. There is a pale flower in her claw, but it is fading away within the void, and she is ready to die within the Abyss’ grasp before a familiar presence floods the dark. A little ghost she knows too well, and behind it, the countless other Vessels thrown into the depths in the name of Hallownest.
I am sorry, she wants to tell them all. I am so sorry.
But now she is the one with no voice to cry. No mind to think. No room for feeling other than the crushing weight of the seal she had helped keep on the Abyss, from the very beginning of Hallownest’s fall. The dear ghost catches her as the Everbloom goes dim and brings her up—up—up—
Lace tumbles onto solid ground. She curls in on herself and gasps for breath, mind reeling as she forces herself to breathe through the secondhand force of the spider’s grief. It had accumulated for centuries within her, wound so tightly around her heart that she no longer knows the shape of herself without it. Hallownest was long past atonement, but Hornet still felt bound to try. When Lace sits up, she catches the flutter of a red cloak, the patter of nearly soundless steps, only for the spider to hasten away once more.
“Spider, wait!” she calls.
The apparition does not heed her. Lace dashes after her, through worlds half-formed from silken threads, all but lost to memory. At first, she is in a beautiful village of soft cocoons and adoring shadows, surrounded by countless others. She is beloved, their dearest daughter. Lace races through the cobweb chambers, trying not to lose Hornet within the crowd, but then something falls into slumber, and Hornet, no longer a hatchling but still so young, has to leave her home. The village swells and blooms like a seed under the sun, and suddenly they are running across the length of Hallownest when it was at its most glorious. Bugs from across the world came to marvel at its glittering towers. The Hive glowed golden, and the rivers ran clear and sweet, their banks lush with flowers. The Crossroads swarmed with proud stags and merchants from every corner of the land. Between one step and the next, the Infection comes. The land withers; the bugs fall to sleep and then madness. The anger of a being Pale cannot be averted into perpetuity, especially if it is righteous. One by one, the crowd around Hornet fades until only she remains. Family, mentors, friends, lovers; none can be saved. The ruins of the kingdom loom over her, and she is all alone with the knowledge of what lies beneath it. Yet still she must guard it, for that was her oath.
She runs on. Alone for decades. Alone for centuries. Alone until she stops counting the years, and this is the Hallownest she knows best: broken, blighted, and empty. Only she is left to bear witness. Her existence narrows to standing sentinel to a land that is dying, then dead, then long-buried and forgotten. Everything starts to vanish into brightness, and Lace shouts for Hornet to stop again, but it is too late. She, and the world, are gone.
There is nothing Lace fears more than being lonely. She crumples to her knees, unable to stand the suffocating emptiness. “How in Silk’s name do you live on, spider?” she shouts into the bright void. “How can you bear this?”
Hornet stands before a Hive Queen, performing her needle flourishes until they are flawless. Practice. The scene shifts, and she is kneeling before a silver-crowned king, accepting her stewardship over Hallownest for as long as they both stand. Duty. The earth moves beneath her as the years unroll again, and with them all the loss and pain, but this time, Lace knows what kept Hornet standing beneath their staggering weight. What kept her needle strong and sharpened, what she held close even in the emptiest of nights—what sent her diving into the Abyss twice over, without fear, without hope of reward; she knows it in her deepest threads—
Devotion, deep and true. That which transforms duty into love.
When Lace opens her eyes again, she is in a palace made of light.
The balconies are made of spun and spiked silver; the towers as well, glittering beneath the illumination that comes from everywhere and nowhere. The halls which lead from room to room are paved in radiance, metal polished until it gleams. The fountains flow rich and pale, as though they are thick with salt and silk. In a daze, Lace passes from room to room, shielding her eyes against the brightness. Even the trees in the courtyards are white, dripping with leaves of pearl and silver. Flying silver Wingmoulds bob up and down in the blank sky, listless as any caged silkflies. Outside of their aimless loops, all is empty and still.
Hornet loves this place. Lace can see it in every line of the towering spires, every curl of the filigree on the balconies. She loves it so much that her devotion to it has outlasted her memory. The pale palace frays wherever Lace looks too long, but the gaps in the spider’s recollection are filled with other things remembered with the utmost care: Shellwood’s flowers, petals fine as silk. The white roses of the Cradle, each one lush at the peak of its bloom. Preserved dutifully, to brace against the inevitable future where they too are lost to time. Lace walks through the patchwork silver and white of the palace gardens, cataloguing the pale blooms. Some are intricately wrought metal. Others smell of soil and something she cannot name.
The spider is sitting on a bench overlooking the garden. She is clad in silver armor, a masked effigy on the verge of vanishing into the brightness. Lace almost does not recognize her, except for how she would know her in any dream. Hornet does not look up as Lace approaches. The eyes of her mask are fixed on the flowers.
“I came of age here,” Hornet says into the glittering air. “I swore to this place. I miss it still.”
Her words are small and fragile. “I know what it cost.” She says it like the gravest confession. “But I—I miss it still.”
If Lace were Hornet, she would despise Hallownest. She would despise its Pale King, and his palace, and all the lands he ruled. She would spit on the kingdom’s name and be glad it fell to ruins and dust, along with all the bugs within it. How dare Hallownest force her to live through millennia alone, bereft of everything save her promise to stand sentinel? How dare it bind her to an eternity of fruitless, thankless vigil? A life of loss. A life of mourning. All that borne unflinchingly in the name of duty.
How dare it tell her to know no love save devotion?
The bench is wide enough for two. Lace carefully sits down next to her and looks out at the white flowers.
“It is beautiful,” she says.
For a long while, they do not speak. Little by little, the silver of Hornet’s armor slips from her, melting into her familiar worn cloak. The red is the only spot of color in the entire expanse of memory.
Hornet is the first to try again. “Lace, you can still—”
“Don’t.”
The spider falls quiet at Lace’s command. “Don’t ask that of me,” Lace says. Her words are thick with tears. “Don’t insult me, spider. You owe me more than that.”
“I only—” Hornet shivers before she can continue. “I only want you to live.”
A low ringing builds at the back of Lace’s skull. “The first months we spent together,” she says slowly. The spats, the fights, the slow evenings in each other’s company. All of Pharloom lay open for her to see. Lace didn’t even care that she couldn’t spin silk for herself, not when her life could now be called her own. If Hornet were to enter Lace’s own mind—
“They were the happiest days I’d ever known.” Lace tells her. Her voice cracks in the sudden lash of her fury. “Did they not count as living enough for you?”
Hornet is shocked into stillness, and then she starts laughing. The sound is low and broken, the opposite of happy. Lace feels as though she is gazing into a mirror as she watches Hornet double over from the force of her grim laughter. “Lace,” Hornet says. Her claws twist in her cloak, pulling at the worn threads. “Lace. I fear I have harmed you much.”
“Yes,” Lace snaps. “You have.”
Through her presumptuousness. Her condescension. Her selfish, ineffable pride. Lace is not above a moment of petty pleasure as she watches Hornet lower her face to rest in her shaking claws—but only a moment. She is in the deepest sanctum of Hornet’s mind, so she knows firsthand that even in the spider’s dearest dreams, she cannot imagine her home as anything other than hollowed and hallowed. A memorial built to loss.
“You have,” Lace repeats. “But you have not lost me.”
Hornet looks up at her. Her claws fumble as she readjusts her mask. The bone of it is old as well, Lace realizes. Worn velvet-smooth and stained by all the years. Almost against her own will, Lace’s voice gentles. “I tracked you to the edges of the world. I dove into your maudlin dreams and chased you here. And I will not have you escaping me now.”
Hornet only laughs again at that, sounding helpless. The White Palace glitters above them. Below, there is the teeming sea of Vessels who paid to make it stand. Hornet had fought to keep them there. There is void in the Wingmoulds. Void beneath the balconies. Void here, in the heart of memory. Hornet does not fear the Abyss below all things; she loves it as her own, in the only way she understands. Lace knows what she is doing now: setting her long life under the open sky against the eternal dark in the Abyss which is the Vessels’ lot. The scales are impersonal. They only tell the truth.
Before the pans can fall with finality, Lace seizes Hornet’s claws within her own and squeezes. “Come back with me.”
Hornet shakes her head. “I swore to keep the seal on the Temple,” she whispers. “I kept all of them trapped in the Abyss in Hallownest’s name. For my father’s kingdom—”
Lace might have a touch more understanding of what that means now, but there is something else she knows with vastly more certainty. “The little ghost saved you,” she says. Even with her fractured recollection of that day, she remembers the void tendrils which lifted her to solid ground, and the way the darkness had borne the spider back into the world with gentle care. “They wanted you to live. Honor them, and me, and live for yourself, Hornet.”
She gets up from the bench. Everything in this palace is mirror-bright and searing. Uncompromising, in how it demands devotion even now. Lace turns back and holds out her claw.
“You raised me from the dark,” she says. “Let me take you from the light.”
Hornet gazes up at her, unmoving for long, aching moments, before she takes Lace’s claw in her own and rises. The light around them blazes bright, and then it is gone.
-----
The first thing Lace hears upon waking this time is the rain. The second is breath that is not her own. Her head is pillowed on the mattress of the spider’s bed, beside which she had keeled over in her seat. Her pin is wedged between the chair and the bed. The pressed flower is crushed beneath her cheek. Above her, the sheets rustle. A claw strokes over the silken threads at the back of her head, light as featherfall.
“Hornet,” Lace gasps. She shoves herself upright and stares down at her. All of the spider’s eyes are open now. She is wan but smiling still. Lace sways from the force of her relief. “You came back.”
“Aye,” Hornet says. “I did.”
She hesitates before she adds, with the utmost care, “And I am sorry, Lace. I am sorry to have hurt you.”
Of course those are the first words out of her mouth. How saccharine. How grossly earnest—and is that not the greatest gift of all? To have a Weaver and god apologize to her without any thought for the weakness they are revealing in turn? Lace reaches over and cradles Hornet’s face in her claws, tracing under each of her blinking jewel-eyes. “Spider dear,” she says thickly.
The words clump in her throat like silkflies. How I’ve wanted to wring your neck. How I’ve wanted your claws in me. How I’ve wanted the worst of you and the best of you and everything in-between. Lace leans down and presses their foreheads together, shaking from the force of all that she wants to say.
“How I have missed you,” she manages at last.
Hornet wraps her arms around Lace and holds her even tighter. They breathe in tandem as the rain falls outside the window, down the silver spires.
It takes three days for the spider to recuperate enough to sit up in bed and put her mask back on. The voided veins slowly drain from her chitin, leaving it ash-filmed and brittle. Even after she can leave the bed, she stays in the Ward for tendays on end, building up her strength until she can leap and spin again. Lace gets a room in the adjoining inn and visits her every day. She sends letters back to Pharloom, and soon the map-bug comes, along with a small delegation from Songclave with the sweet fool at their head. Even the offputting infant slug from the Halfway Home crawls her way into Hallownest to sit at Hornet’s bedside, waxing rhapsodic about all the new bugs she’s gotten to taste. Hornet’s voice grows steadier as she speaks to them and listens in turn to how they, and Pharloom, fare.
When she is not needling and heckling the spider as she practices her spinning, Lace spends her time exploring the City of Tears. She is not just unknown to the bugs here—she is no one, merely another face among the crowd as she skips through the rain trickling down from the cavern’s roof. It is thrilling; freedom the likes of which she has never known. The water soaks into her silk, carrying with it mineral-rich soil. She splashes and twirls in the puddles, giggling all the while, and when she tires of that, she pokes into all the shops that line the streets. She spends whole days among the archives, learning about a kingdom that existed outside of her mother’s command. They too were told that nothing existed outside of a Pale One’s rule, and they too suffered for it, but Hallownest is more than its calamities. It is an ancient land, with myths and gods all its own.
Gods with command over souls, and hearts, and shells—but they have all been lost to time. Or so the tomes all say, but Lace’s mind still races with the possibilities.
After the healers deem the spider well enough to leave the ward for short trips, she and Lace walk through the City claw-in-claw. Lace drags her into all the shops to watch her squirm as the merchant-bugs try to give her things for free. They hail her as Princess; she tells them to call her by her name. They stop before a fountain with a statue of a great masked knight at its center. The effigy is cracked, half-fallen into rubble, but still the rain fills the basin.
“What was this place called in its prime?” Lace asks. “Before it became the City of Tears.” That too is set to become a thing of the past, as the bugs here are preparing to rename it once the Wards are reconnected. She hopes the new name is something tacky.
Hornet’s mask is tilted up towards the broken statue. It takes her a long time to answer. “I no longer remember.”
She takes a deep breath and squares her shoulders. “And I am content to let that be.”
Lace looks at her beneath the rain. Her mask is pale beneath the lanterns, silver-gilt as the light catches on the falling rain. She is dearer than any rare metal can be. Dearer than silk in any of its forms. Slowly, Lace reaches for her. She strokes one of Hornet’s horns before letting her claws drift to the fastenings of her mask. At the spider’s nod, she undoes them and leans in. The first press of Hornet’s mouth is soft and fangless. Lace hisses in displeasure, shoving her down onto the rim of the fountain and climbing into her lap. She bites at Hornet’s mouth until the spider laughs under her breath and bites back, sinking her fangs into the places where Lace’s silk is most thin and tender. Their kiss turns honeyed with venom. It is the headiest rush Lace has ever known.
That night, they lie curled up next to each other in Hornet’s bed in the Healing Ward. The healers know better than to try and chase Lace out by now. Lace burrows her face in the nook between Hornet’s chin and shoulder, the way she has wanted to since they began to share a cot in Bellhart.
“I am unpracticed at this,” Hornet says into the top of Lace’s head. Each word buzzes pleasantly against her silk. “I have not taken a lover since my youth. Not since I realized that my years outpaced theirs too readily, and the end would always be the same. And when I did—”
She breaks off. In those days, Lace knows, the spider had been nothing less than the daughter of a Weaver and a being Pale, proud of the instincts of both in her blood. Proud in her kingdom and her stewardship over its lands. And in the ever-widening expanse of time between then and now—
—she’s had nothing but her devotion.
“I’ve only had lovers from Silk’s worshippers,” Lace admits. To them, it was communion. To her, it was an attempt at ripping at the walls of her world. She is not a kind being, but she was especially unkind to them. “They feared me above all.”
Love as power. Love as duty. Love, in the awfully mirroring ways that they were taught. Lace pushes herself up to look at Hornet’s face. The tips of her fangs poke over her jaw as she worries at her cheek in contemplation, sweet in her uncertainty.
“We are both old, spider,” Lace murmurs. “But perhaps we can still try to learn.”
“I shall,” Hornet says. Her tense mouth loosens just enough to smile. “But only if you do the same.”
Soon, the spider’s strength recovers enough for her to be discharged from the Ward. The healers send her off with a strict if still-confused warning not to tangle with the void again. Before they leave the room she had been given, Hornet goes through her pouches one last time, checking over her maps, journals, tool arsenal. Absurd creature of habit, Lace thinks, watching her fondly. They have plans now, to spend a few more months in Hallownest before returning to Pharloom, where they will stay until the road to the King’s Pass calls to them once more. Hallownest began to rebuild itself without Hornet’s claws. The bugs here adore her, but they do not need her—a truth sweet and bitter both.
There are parts of this new Hallownest which Hornet does not know. She had looked ashamed as she confessed that, but also stricken with wonderment. And she will have the time now to learn it anew. All of the kingdom lies open to them; they only need to pick a direction to begin. Greenpath is lovely, Hornet tells Lace. The Crystal Peak is as well, though the mines fared poorly in the Infection. The Fungal Wastes are beautiful in their strangeness, as is Fog Canyon—
“Spider,” Lace says. “I have a question.”
Hornet looks up from where she is pressing the Shellwood flower back between the pages of her journal. “Speak it.”
“I read in the archives that Hallownest is a kingdom of many higher beings. Is that true?”
The spider takes a moment to weigh her answer. She puts her journal away and starts on tuning her cogflies, sending one up into the air with a practiced twist of her claw. It chitters, looking around at the strange new world. “Higher beings, Pale Ones, and bugs that are neither but still made their own myths,” Hornet says at last. “Aye. There used to be many in Hallownest, but the old rulers of this kingdom are all gone. The Infection and its curing consumed their final strength.”
The spider goes still, considering Lace’s question anew. “Why do you ask?”
Lace takes a deep breath. She had been created with a pin in her claw, to be her mother’s defender, but the path of a ruthless knight will not be hers again. She cannot walk it; more than that, she does not want it, not anymore. Silk is gone from Pharloom, and Lace does not want her or it back. She lives, as viciously and selfishly as she has ever dreamt, and she would not desire any other life. But if power high and Pale lingers in this kingdom—
She does not want godhood. She does not want a king brought low or the Abyss surmounted, or even her body made anew. Lace is not searching for a miracle here. Only the possibility of making a path of her own.
“Hearts can be taken,” Lace says, tapping on the hilt of her pin. “But I was wondering—can one be made as well?”
Hornet has gone very still. “You wish to make an empowered heart,” she says slowly. “An Old Heart from the old might of Hallownest. One that you can use.”
“Yes,” Lace says. She narrows her eyes. “Me, spider. I would be the one to make it, not you.”
The spider laughs. It is somehow only a little rueful. She stands and joins Lace by the window, where they both spend long moments looking into the hazy distance. The cogfly whirrs as it flies in lazy circles around them both. Lace reaches up to pet it to give her claws something to do. She clears her throat. “I suppose that matters little, though, if they truly are all gone.”
“They are gone,” Hornet says at once. “That does not mean they have faded.”
On the other side of the window, the City of Tears stretches out before them, eternal in its mourning. The rain will persist beyond whatever new name the bugs here will choose. Hallownest entire is a mourner’s kingdom, which means that it hangs on. Grief is the finest work of memory, enshrining that which is lost. Lace thinks of the enormous fossils lining the King’s Pass, where time and soil had turned bodies of the beasts into their own memorial. She thinks of the spider’s own mind.
When Hornet next speaks, her voice is spun thin from the force of love and memory. “There are some who might still answer when we call.”
-----
They first head west from the City, into forests of lush green. The vines and blooms remind Lace of the ones in Moss Grotto, or maybe more of the ones tucked away inside the Memorium from the old kingdoms to the east of Pharloom. She’d spent many a secret hour marveling at them, the emerald leaves and ruby-bright spines, piled up in glass and copper rooms as though in a treasury. They are even more glorious here, given centuries to grow wild and tangled, wherever they pleased. There are the ruins of buildings among the greenery as well, white marble columns and iron filigree wrought with the heraldry of Hallownest. Wisp-lights hang thick on the air, like the remnants of cast silk. Lace reaches up and breaks one of the lanterns with the tip of her pin. The fireflies within whirl for a moment, disoriented, before clustering back around the amber bulb at the lamp’s heart. Lace stares at them before moving on.
They open a grand gate to push into what had once been a statuesque garden. The wild vines grow tangled around ruined fountains and overgrown gazebos, which all drip with tender lilies of the valley. Lace and Hornet are not alone here. Mantises tend to their torn wings in the awnings of their meager tents. Moss-pelted bugs huddle around spots where the fireflies gather, chittering softly to themselves. The gifts which Hornet had brought—bottles of nectar tied with ribbon; long curved knives engraved with flowers; charms infused with the power of the land, meant to make the greenery flourish—sorely outclass the survivors clinging to life amidst the leaves, but the spider gladly distributes them nonetheless. She seems relieved to be met with anything other than unsheathed claws.
The greenery grows wilder as they journey deeper into the garden. Wilder, and more strange. Silver starts to edge the leaves on the vines, like some glittering blight. Pearly lichen consumes the lilies of the valley, leaving them stunted but bright. The air itself is thick with motes of light, the vestiges of a being Pale.
At the heart of the garden, they come to a grand white tree.
It eclipses all else in the grotto, bleaching the color out of the withered leaves and tangled vines. The trunk at the base is wider than twenty bugs can surround if they linked their claws; it is thickly knotted with grand roots which must run through all the gardens, if not the whole length and breadth of Hallownest. The branches burst from the top of the trunk in long curves of pure light.
“The White Lady,” Hornet tells Lace. “The queen who raised me. She took these lands from the Mosskin and called them her own.”
Lace stares at the tree uncomprehendingly before she realizes that there had once been a face at the top of the tree trunk. White branches grow from the sockets of what had been her eyes. If Lace had not known that there was a Pale One within the tree, she would have never thought to look.
“She bound herself here,” Hornet says. “In shame from her part in the Vessels’ creation.”
Lace watches as the spider kneels down in front of the tree. Her voice wavers between distanced and reverent as she says, “Lady, I took the first flower and fulfilled our promise.”
No one answers. Hornet does not seem to care. She bows her head and continues, “Know that it was not in vain.”
The grotto is quiet and still. Lace gives the spider time for memorial. She wanders over the roots in silence for a while, poking at the fallen white leaves with the tip of her pin, before she sits down at Hornet’s side. The light gathers along the length of her pin, making it hum in her claws, as though it wants to join the vigil. Lace draws silk from her spool to string it and starts to pluck out Phantom’s melody. It’s her favorite mourning song.
The sweet-bitter notes hang between them as Lace plays. White threads unspool from the air with a grace she has never seen before. They weave themselves into a path leading to the White Lady’s heart. Lace hears Hornet gasp as the luminescent bark of the trunk cracks and parts. Something glows within, pulsing in time to the song.
The final silk from the Bind runs out, snapping in Lace’s claws and ending the song abruptly. Lace stares at the white ember in the tree, wholly at a loss.
“Lace,” Hornet whispers. She sounds like she is caught between rejoicing and fearing that it would be taken away, should she rejoice. “Take it.”
Lace gets to her feet. Slowly, cautiously, she creeps towards the opening in the grand tree. The glowing thing is warm when she closes her claw around it. It thrums in her grip. She breaks it from the trunk in a great thundering crack, recoiling as the bark instantly seals itself back together.
“It’s—wood,” Lace says, confused.
There is a piece of silver-gleaming wood in her claw. The banding on it is intricate as any lace, a record of millennia of life. It has its own heartbeat.
“The heart of the tree,” Hornet says, almost disbelieving. “It’s heartwood.”
Above their heads, the grand tree rustles as though in confirmation. Lace stares at it. There isn’t anything she can do but laugh. The sound echoes around the grotto, setting the light to dancing.
Once they pitch a camp in Greenpath, Hornet sets her tool pouch out for Lace to use as she pleases. Half of the implements, Lace doesn’t have the faintest idea how to use, much less how helpful they would be in carving a heart, but the repair kit for the cogflies seems simple enough. She chips away at the silver grain with the hammer and chisel, following whatever direction the heartwood leads. Lace has never done this before. Her first couple gouges are ugly and clumsy, and she nearly throws it away in disgust before noticing that the wood is smoothing itself over, reshaping itself into something more.
That, and remembering that this is what is left of the heart from Hornet’s adoptive mother. The spider would probably do something drastic if Lace threw it into the river.
It gets easier as she goes. The chisel parts the grain smoothly, drawing her claw along with it. Lace hums as she works, going from Phantom’s song to the one she had learned from the spider to the descending notes of her mother’s melody, until they slowly start to blend into something new. In the end, she has a heart. It is a little lumpy, jagged and splintered in parts, but still a heart. Its pulse is loping and unsteady as it beats in her claws, but it beats nonetheless.
It’s her heart. Her own. Hers to shape and choose. Lace clutches it close as she falls asleep and dreams of all the days to come.
-----
They then go into the tunnels beneath the City. Builder-bugs and young stags are swarming there, building new access points and shoring up the drainage pipes. Deeper still, beneath the tunnels, there is a freshly renovated tram station. When Hornet tries to buy them both entry with her pass, the bug working the kiosk excitedly tells her that they have never seen a pass this old before. They don’t even know if it’ll fit into their new machine. She should think about selling it as an antique.
“I shall look for the relic keeper,” Hornet says mildly, before buying a new pass for herself. The bug gives Lace one of her own as well.
Lace jumps into the window seat and plasters herself against the glass to watch the scenery go by. She has never been on a tram before. They’re like the Ventrica chambers, but much faster and more spacious, and they go so much further as well. The deep lands of Hallownest whip by so quickly that they blur into smears of colorful shadow. When the light comes, it is blinding and sudden. The tram emerges onto pale cliffs and stops. Their hindclaws sink into the layer of powdery ash which covers the ground when they step out. The powder falls thickly and continuously, like the snow on Mount Fay, but is not cold. Strange, the things that Hallownest holds. Lace wonders if there are also fayforn here, nesting among the falling white.
“This was the furthest edge of my father’s kingdom,” Hornet tells her, looking up at the cliffs somberly.
“I never hear you talk about your father,” Lace says. She shakes the ash off as it accumulates on her head and shoulders. Something isn’t right about it. It smells faintly of stone-rot, like a corpse left to rot until only the strongest shell remains. “I don’t know much about fathers, but he must have been an awful one if you needed a whole three mothers to make up for his absence.”
Hornet has gone completely still. Her claws tighten in her robe, as though quelling the urge to reach for her needle. Then she slumps, sighing. “He sired me as part of the agreement he made with the queen of the Spider Tribe, for her to become a Dreamer. I was wanted by her, desperately so. For him—”
She trails off. “He was my liege,” she says. It is as good as an admission. “I swore to Hallownest, so I served him. It was my duty, and I was glad in it.”
“Like I said,” Lace says, satisfied. “Awful.”
Hornet laughs, fond and bitter all in one. She kicks the ash out of their path as they walk. “He abandoned his greater form high on these cliffs so he could walk among the bugs of Hallownest as their king.” She pauses, glancing sidewise at Lace, before adding, “This is all shed from his body, you know.”
Lace shrieks in disgust, covering her head with her claws in a vain attempt to save her threads from the ash. When Hornet laughs again, the sound is a little less bitter. A little more fond.
They reach a collapsed entryway at the very base of a cliff face. Lace makes sure that every speck of the foul-smelling ash is gone from her silk before she joins the spider in digging through the cave-in. They use their needles to pry through the rocks, opening up a tunnel just big enough for them to pass through. Hornet shores up the sides of the tunnel with her silk as they go, binding the rest of the stones together so they won’t fall suddenly. They dig through rubble, through clay, through gold and amber crushed in the dirt, and finally hit honeycomb gone to rot.
Hornet cuts through the dark, misshapen comb with her needle. The liquid that seeps from the cells is thinner than honey and smells sweet-strong, like the most potent nectar, but with an acrid bite. Behind the rotten comb, the space opens up into a grand chamber lined with honeycomb still pristine and golden: a grand Hive, now empty.
“The Hive never bowed to my father’s rule,” Hornet says. “Herrah’s last wish was that I be trained by its queen, so I knew how to fight before I took my place in his kingdom. I believe they left this land entirely, once the Infection grew too strong and she met her end. The only bees left were the ones who succumbed to it.”
Inside, there are bee-corpses, half-embedded in misshapen comb as though they madly threw themselves against it in a final frenzy. They are the only darkness in an otherwise radiant Hive. Lace cannot help but be awed, looking at the tall golden windows and glittering long tables. The winding stairs and graceful alcoves, all made from honeycomb. Envy always comes with awe for her, but she does her best to push it down. They make their way into the very heart of the Hive, climbing over the bodies of Hive Knights who were slain before they came.
At the Hive’s very center, the body of the old Queen hangs unmoving. She is so grand that she spans both stories of the nave. Her chitin is cloudy, flaking ash as well. She has been long dead.
“Majesty,” Hornet says.
She steps in front of the body and bows crisply, as though to a commander living still. “I have returned through many travels, and my shell only stands today because of your teachings. I stung with my blade, guided by your memory. I learned when to stay it as well. I hope—”
The sharp deliberateness fades from Hornet’s posture, leaving her strangely young as she says, “I hope you would be proud.”
Lace looks away. It seems too unguarded, too intimate a moment to bear any witnesses, even her. She pokes around the wax cells at the perimeter of the room, looking at the trinkets hidden in the crusted pollen and dust to give the spider time for her communion. When Hornet straightens and nods at her, she approaches the old Queen and strings her needle. The whole chamber flares gold at the sound of Phantom’s song. They would love this, Lace thinks as the light brightens and brightens, swirling around the pillars like a swarm of bees in the wind. Hearing their song played by others, in the act of creation. It was all they wanted when they were young. When the song ends, the light coalesces into a single point of bright, burning amber, clasped between the Hive Queen’s claws.
Hornet harpoons herself up the walls to retrieve it. “True Hiveblood,” she says, sounding like she is caught between wonderment and disbelief. “The oldest of the comb. I’d forgotten—it makes itself anew.”
Her voice goes soft as she adds, “But I do remember that it is very sweet.”
The chunk of comb is a rich, deep gold, no bigger than the width of Lace’s pin but redolent with the scent of honey. Hornet rubs her claws together after she hands it to Lace. She turns away so she can surreptitiously loosen her mask and lick away the last of the honey on her claw tips. When she sees Lace watching, her shoulders slump, as though she is ashamed. Lace opens her arms and beckons, holding Hornet tightly as she slumps against her shoulder.
The spider tells Lace how the Hiveblood works as they take the tram back to the City. It can only ever heal a fraction of a bug’s health, but it heals nonetheless, as steady and unflinching as the worker-bees who toiled to make it. Back in their room at the inn, Lace sets the comb on a plate and slices it in two. The bigger piece she sets into the open chamber of her heart, where the wood immediately entwines with the wax and honey, sending veins of glistening amber through the silver grain. The pulse of it isn’t quite steadied, but it’s stronger nonetheless.
Lace holds the heart up against the silk of her sternum. The threads recoil from the organ, even though her claws were the ones that made it.
“It is not yet mine.” She frowns, brow furrowing. “I think it still needs silk.”
Why is it always bedamned silk? Hornet leans over her shoulder, looking at the heart. “It needs something to bridge between its flesh and yours,” she says, matter-of-fact. It never ceases to amuse Lace, how well-versed the spider is in this most macabre of affairs. “Silk would be the easiest option.”
She falls quiet for a moment. “And mine—”
“No, spider dear,” Lace says, patting her claw. “Yours won’t do.”
Hornet’s head tilts in the way Lace knows means she’s grimacing behind the mask. “Mine might not even have strength enough. This kind of work diminished with the full Weavers.”
“All the more convenient for you, then,” Lace says tartly.
She pushes the plate with the bit of honeycomb in the spider’s direction. “Eat. I saved it for you.”
Hornet hesitates. Lace shoves the plate even closer, glaring at her until she relents. She eats the comb slowly, looking out over the falling rain.
-----
The next day, they take the tram again. The bug at the kiosk asks Hornet if she’s sold her antique pass yet, and Hornet laughs as she demurs. They also ask if they are absolutely sure they want to travel to the far western station, looking worried when Hornet reiterates their travel plans but scanning their passes nonetheless.
“You two look like you have needles and blades aplenty,” the bug says as they scan their passes. “So I won’t be stopping you, Princess. But I will be watching most eagerly for your return.”
Lace takes the window seat again and watches as all hints of color whip past and vanish, merging into the gloaming dark. Hornet activates her cogflies, dipping them in a poison concoction before winding them up to fly. “We are entering Deepnest,” she says. “The bugs here hated Hallownest even before the Infection, since the moment my father attempted to bring them under his dominion. They do not take kindly to intruders, and I do not know if they will recognize me as Herrah’s daughter before they strike. Or if my mother’s blood will be enough to surmount the Pale stain, in their eyes.”
It is more trust than the spider once had, then, to even let Lace step foot into such a land. Lace sticks out her claw. “Give me the throwing pins,” she says. “I’ll get them from a distance.”
The tram station is thick with shadow and dusty from disuse. Hornet wraps silk around her needle, imbuing the metal with a faint glow. She holds it in front of her in the manner of a lantern as they descend into the dark.
The spider was not lying; the bugs here are fierce and resentful, and fight with a desperation Lace recognizes. Hornet is not recognized as anything of theirs. They skitter along the walls and leap to ambush them from the shadows, clawing in frenzied swipes at their faces. Lace lets the spider heal her when the silk in her Bind runs out. She is not too proud to want to leave Deepnest alive. They fight their way to the furthest edge of the land, past the very darkest corridors of pitch-black shadow back into the light. The caverns widen out into vast rooms of gray stone. They are utterly empty, save for the odd pile of rubble from broken effigies.
Hornet falls still in the middle of one of the rooms. She cranes her head around, searching for something neither of them can see. “This used to be the Distant Village. A haven for Weaver-kin,” she murmurs. “There were once cocoons and webs as far as the eye could see.”
Lace knows how her mother had searched and searched for decades to find someone as strong in silk as a Weaver in half-part. Their line has long been weakened, on the verge of flickering into the dark. Weaver-kin are little more than pharlids with half-remembered hallucinations of who they used to be. With Silk and her gifts gone from the world, they would be able to spin no more than Lace.
“I spent my first years here,” Hornet says. “I remember every wall and corner thick with downy silk. I witnessed its fall to the Infection, and that was grievous, but—”
She trails off and shakes her head. “It somehow feels worse, to see it so bare.”
At the very corners of the room, tattered cobwebs remain, the barest dregs of silk. Hornet inhales sharply at the sight of a discarded mask, cracked straight down the middle. She kneels down to fit the halves together, re-forming its wide, uncanny smile.
“My nursemaid,” Hornet tells Lace when she asks. “And the midwife for our tribe, though she had little opportunity to carry that out, even in my youth. She was a wily and ravenous bug, but always kind to me, especially after my mother fell into slumber.”
She carefully tucks the halves of the mask into her pouch. “Whenever I returned to watch over Herrah’s sleep, she kept me company in my vigil. I hope—she might—”
She breaks off, as though it would be chancing the whims of the world to utter her wish out loud. There is no body next to the mask. “If she’s half as clever and hungry as you say she is, she would’ve just eaten her way through the tunnels,” Lace says. “Silk knows there are enough bugs throwing themselves in your face for that.”
Hornet laughs a bit. “She did have quite a lot of teeth.”
The spider wanders through the empty rooms though she herself is the ghost. She sometimes lifts her claw to point out something to Lace before tilting her head, confused, and letting the words die before they ever leave her fangs. Frustration—grief—anger are lit clear in every step she takes, from one cavern to the next, chasing the stages of her memory. They climb upwards through a maze of corridors with broken Weaver statues marking every turn, before Hornet stops mid-step and stares.
At first glance, there isn’t anything that makes this barren stone room different from any of the rest. It’s empty. Remnants of rotten silk pennants hang from the ceiling, shadowing the chipped bases of long-broken effigies at the corners of the room. In the middle of the cavern, there is an empty stone dais, like a bed or a coffin bier. Around the dais, the remnants of countless Hive-wax candles lie scattered, burned to the nub. As though one was brought for every night of a vigil that lasted for centuries. Hornet moves as though in a trance. She does not bow; she does not kneel. Instead, she sits down on the dais and gazes up at the tattered banners. She looks very small.
“Here laid Herrah the Dreamer,” Hornet says, sounding sick with all her longing. “Herrah the Weaver, Queen of Deepnest. Herrah the Beast.”
Lace goes to stand next to her. At her nod, she sits down on the other side of the dais. “Your mother,” Lace says aloud, completing the litany of epithets.
Hornet nods. “Herrah, my mother who bore me. I can no longer remember her.” She does not seem grieved; only stuck with that most potent desire for something which she never knew. “Not as she was in life. I only know what she taught me.”
It is easy for Lace to imagine the spider as a babe. Already masked, but stubby-horned, looking from the cradle up to the soft, silk-covered world. Already in red silk, but swaddled in it, instead of the worn red cape she drapes around her shoulders even in her dreams. Bright-eyed. Tiny, as all young ones are. Too small for the losses she had to endure even then.
She cannot ever remember being that small. She was born as she is now, never allowed to know what it is to grow.
Hornet takes out her journal. She speaks as she flips through the pages. Her words are halting and unvarnished amidst the emptiness. “Greater, grander, Weaver, guardian, Queen,” she says, with the cadence of a prayer remembered. “If I had taken on those dreams as my own, I would have returned with more to give to you. Jewels and silk by the hoard. The softest fineries from every land. Fresh prey for all our tribe. All that you deserve, and all that they—”
Hornet breaks off. It takes a moment for her to find the rest of her words. “And all that they would have needed.”
She turns to the end of her journal and gently lifts the Shellwood flower from its page. “But I have only this, Mother.”
Hornet sets the pale bloom on the bier between them. Lace traces the shape of its petals and bows her head.
“For I have fulfilled your wish for me,” Hornet says. She squares her shoulders. Her claw brushes against Lace’s as she adds, “And my own.”
The tomb does not answer her, for good or ill.
When Lace plays Phantom’s melody, nothing happens. There are no motes of light, no fine thread drawn from the air and spun into a glittering path towards the thing that would complete her heart. She plays until the silk on her Bind runs out and the tomb is silent again. Hornet inhales deeply, steadying herself. The quaver lingers in her words, despite her best efforts. “I feared this might happen. In their quest to break the seal on the Pure Vessel, my sibling slew Herrah and freed her spirit. She no longer lingers here. There are other Weaver remnants, though, which might provide silk for you—”
Lace cuts her off. “Spider.”
“We will find something,” the spider says. Her voice is thick with tears. “We will find something.”
“Hornet,” Lace says.
It’s loud and sharp enough to startle Hornet from her daze of conviction. Lace holds out the Bind. “Fill this with silk for me. So I can teach you Phantom’s song.”
She winces. That came out more like a demand than the balm for Hornet’s grief she had wanted it to be. It’s more proof that Lace wasn’t made for this, just as she wasn’t made for the act of creation.
But that’s all the more reason for her to keep trying.
Lace clears her throat and looks down at her lap. “That is. If you want to. I’d like to teach it to you.”
Hornet stares for a moment before grabbing the Bind with a shaky claw. “I want to,” she says, blunt and ungraceful. “Lace—of course I want to.”
Hornet strings her needle. Lace strings hers. They spend the afternoon playing the needolin together and talking about Phantom and Herrah. There are no ghosts left to be summoned by their song or their words, but still they sing and listen. Hornet hums along as she plucks out the notes of Phantom’s song. It’s slow and halting, unpracticed. All the lovelier for it, as proof of Phantom’s song being learned by someone new. At the end of it, Hornet lies down on the bier. She holds her needle to her chest and breathes slow and steady. Lace grabs her claw and squeezes, and Hornet squeezes back, just as tightly. When Lace looks down between them, she sees that the faintest pale threads have wrapped themselves around the pressed flower, so thin that they would be indistinguishable from the petals, save for how they glow with a light of their own. She picks the bloom up, barely daring to breathe.
The last vestiges of Herrah’s silk. They are so fine that they are fading even now.
They’ve brought the heart with them. When Lace lays the flower on its silver chambers, the silk quietly unwinds itself to sink into the golden veins. With it gone, the flower crumbles and dissolves into the heart. Lace picks it up and thinks she can feel echoes of her home alongside Hallownest’s three queens as well—Pharloom in all its flowers, as beautiful and wide as she is only just now learning it can be.
She lifts the heart to her chest. The threads of her sternum reach out once, unwinding themselves to wrap around the remnants of Weaver silk. Vicious and wanting, as she has always been. Lace will always be greedy for more than she was given. They drag the heart into her and seal it deep between her ribs.
A thundering pulse reverberates through her whole body. Lace keels over, gasping from the shock of it. The heartbeat skitters down each of her limbs, up her throat and into her mouth: golden-bright honey, dripping thick down the comb; iron-strong chitin and fruit-sweet venom, mixing joyously with dirt. The tang of clear air and silver towers, now lost to all that it cost to keep them bright. Neither silk nor blood, but something that nevertheless starts to patch together her fraying layers, thread by slow and aching thread. She is no more alive than she was before she set it in her chest, but it is still her heart. Made by her claws.
Lace starts to laugh. The sound spills out of her, buoyant and piercing, and once she starts, she cannot stop. She laughs until she is sore from it, clutching at her heart, and then she keeps laughing until she sprawls down on the bier, aching and thrilled at the ache. As she pants for air, she keeps her claw pressed to her chest to savor each heartbeat. It’s loud and unflinching. The wingbeat of a hunting-bird, in all its sharpness and lightness. The dream of a dancer, forged in the waking world.
Around them, the tomb is neither light nor dark, but something in-between. After Lace catches her breath, she looks up to see Hornet looking back at her.