A Chimerical Hope

Three nights have passed and no dawn has risen to break them. A torrent of black wisps is falling from the sky, the dirt eroding with each silent impact. The wisps stick to everything. A malevolent mist chokes the air, and above, strange flashes illuminate the sky, like rifts to unseen heavens.

In these brief flashes, the light hints at a skeletal land of crags and gorges. A lone figure stumbles through the dark on four legs. Wisps slide off her heavy cloak. Atop a distant mountain behind her, scant light silhouettes the ruins.

It must have been a journey of many miles, every one of them urgent, as written in the wheezing breaths, the aching, trembling muscles. A dusting of ash lies beneath the cloak.

The figure, a mantis, walks alone. In this light‍-​starved climate, though, you can’t see for sure, can’t banish impressions of other figures in the shadows‍ ‍—‍ but if they had left other survivors, the refugee would know. She’d surely know.

A hiss of pain comes when a wisp slips under her cloak, and she stumbles when a large one falls nearby. The wisps feel hungry, like voids sucking at the world, pulling in matter just as they pull other wisps. Squeezing the air, and compressing the dirt. The dark things absorb sound, leaving the procession oddly silent. You cannot even hear the refugee’s desperate footsteps.

So she jumps in shock when a half‍-​muted cry cuts through the dark. There’s no mistaking the direction: there could be no echo, no sound reflection in a wispfall.

Hearing this, the mantis looks around, and starts into a fast trot. Following after the noise brings her beneath a tree’s shelter. Glowing bulbs hang off the tree, warding away the black wisps. There aren’t many trees in the countryside, fewer still that live. The refugee keeps looking. The thrill of urgency fades.

A stridulating call brings it right back.

“One little scream in the wild makes a hero out of anyone, doesn’t it?”

A mantis steps forward, compound eyes dark, antennae curled into spirals. They had no cloak, just heavy cloth, brigandine with metal studs. It’s armor for a battle‍ ‍—‍ one that already looks lost. The cloth appears torn and melted from the wispfall.

“What brought you out in this evil weather? No place for one to be at all. Unless…” Those mouthparts come together, wrapping into a smug, triumphant curve. “You had no other place to be. Refugee, arentcha? Fleeing the crush?” A dangerous tenor inflects the voice. The hairs on those mouthparts grew together like little spikes, little fangs.

The refugee reaches a foreleg into her cloak.

“You should have had the sense to stay and die like the rest.”

Then the speaker lunges forward, raptorial forelegs wide open and spikes deadly. The refugee dodges. A near thing, and the target backs up several more paces. But against a diamantis? Still a dangerous place to be.

The attacker spins around and strains to see where the refugee went. In wispy darkness like this, it’s two shadows fighting. The defender has retrieved her quarry from her cloak, and unfolds it in quick, practiced motions. Trained, she can do it without seeing. She can do it without thinking.

She can’t do it without the click as parts secure together, though, and freed from the torrent of wisps, sound isn’t so strangled.

Another lunge, and another dodge. It will be the last. Now, the weapon is held true.

“Good reflexes. Good reflexes. Where’d you learn‍ ‍—‍ ah, you’re a pawn too, arentcha? Same as me. Or not, because you have nothing left, not with Duskroot cleaned off the map.” They take a moment to steady their stance. “But if you were a pawn… I really can’t let you live. Orders, you know? What we’re training for‍ ‍—‍ we do what we have to, even when it’s ugly. It’s what vesperbanes are all about, right?”

The refugee wonders if the words are for her, or themselves. She readies herself, plans. There is no third lunge, the speaker now wary of whatever came from the cloak. But she doesn’t even need it to be that easy.

The refugee’s reply comes very suddenly, a midleg’s tarsus punching out as she leaps forward‍ ‍—‍ and meeting empty space. She is turning as she lands.

Then, as the speaker stops, recovering from the dodge, they die.

Most fights don’t last long. It only takes one mistake to get a spearhead run through your gullet, right into your head. They fell for the feint, right into the trap.

The refugee pants through their abdomen, releasing the spear held in a grille designed for her raptorial vise. Dropped, it makes no sound on the black‍-​imbued ground.

The excitement was over. Instead of collapsing, the refugee catches themselves with forelegs as the legs holding her up give out. The thrill is gone, the strength is gone. Can she even stand back up?

She looks at the body, the pawn they just killed.

We do what we have to, even when it’s ugly.

Her mouthparts tighten. It has been three nights‍ ‍—‍ perhaps more, when no dawn can pierce the inscrutable dark heavens above.

It’s what vesperbanes are about, right?

Cannibalism is distasteful‍ ‍—‍ but it has been three nights. This mantis was lucky to escape at all‍ ‍—‍ they had nothing but the amalgam‍-​dark cloak on their back and the spear.

And the knowledge. The knowledge of just who was responsible.

She gives the dead pawn one more look, and her mandibles part.

The refugee sleeps under the tree. When she awakens, light is bursting from the horizon, a cavalry come at last, and those sunrays reveal the sight of a heartlands sky. The heavens crawl with lines and waves of dark energy, emanating from the waxing fullness of the black moon Tenebra like blood from a deep cosmic wound. Dawn has arrived, cavalry has come, but the night may have already won.

She stands and resumes her trek across the countryside. In the dawn light, you can see this bug, this diamantid, with the big eyes of an adolescent nymph, and white chitin streaked with dark purple patterns. The lines cross each other in shapes like stars. It may have been pretty once, but now it’s dirty with ash. Above, antennae once cleanly‍-​trimmed now grow wild and unmaintained setae, and she runs a tarsus through her dark locks as she marches on through the land.

The uneven packed dirt she travels is lucky to be as flat as it, as it meanders around mounds and boulders. Moss and ferns cling to the land all around. They sit as cover for mollusks: with the passing of the wispfall, snailflies of several kinds have unfolded out of their shells, gliding around for seeds and mates, and evading opportunistic birds. Perched on the prominences, those crows watch, perhaps lured by the carrion left deliquescing in pools of black. Her pointy auricles hear the kraa of their calls to each other.

The path now winds between taller, steeper hills. No crows perch on them, and a few scurrying longicorn beetles pass her by. The refugee works her antennae into uncertain loops, a part of her put on edge. A vesperbane would be suspicious; this nymph is still taken by surprise.

A diamantis lunges at her from behind a blind curve. Dressed in the same wisp‍-​liqued brigandine, this one wields blades in their raptorials. A good hit lands on her thorax, but cannot cut her cloak.

She hops back and sizes up her foe. In the daylight, you can see the other pawn is also a nymph, green‍-​shelled and scant instars older than the refugee.

With the moment afforded by her distance, her spear is out. Then she throws it at the ground in front of her foe. They’re distracted one moment by the tactic, and that’s when she rushes in. She grabs a blade‍-​bearing foreleg in the vice of a raptorial arm. Squeezes and digs in with its spines until they drop that blade.

But the pawn had been taken off guard, not cowed. They don’t hesitate to slash with the free foreleg‍ ‍—‍ and there’s no room to avoid it. Her other arm gets cut as she brings it in to hold secure the other foreleg.

So she sweeps her leg underneath them and uses her hold to shove the pawn to the ground. She grabs the spear with the tarsus of her midleg, and points it at the diamantid’s gullet.

“Why?” she demands. “Who sent you?” Her palps rubbing against mandibles is a soft stridulating buzz, and the sound ragged‍-​edged from days of disuse. The reply comes:

“It’s orders,” the pawn says. “Just orders. Kill everything‍ ‍—‍ every bane, pawn and especially every clan bug‍ ‍—‍ that crawls out of Duskroot. That’s what we were hired to do.”

She stares at them for a moment, and pushes her spear closer till it sinks just barely into the chitin, and stops. Then she says, “You failed. Get out of here.” The spear is taken away. She gets off them.

The pawn gets up. Then they’re lunging at her for another attack. She sustains another cut.

“My master won’t accept failure.” They punch with a foreleg, and she catches it. “So I cannot fail.”

She didn’t have a choice, did she?

It only takes one more misstep to bring it to an end. They’re speared through the thorax, severing the dorsal nerve. She rips away pieces of their cloth armor, digging till she finds fabric not blackened by wisps, to loop around her injuries and hold back the bleeding.

The only thing she can do is keep moving, march further on. The more distance she puts between herself and Duskroot, the safer she’ll be. Behind her, those mountaintop ruins stand, pale from the distance. It was Duskroot.

She walks a packed dirt road as it meanders near a creek of darkened water. Down by the bank stands another nymph, picking at small plants in the mud. Their chitin is dark red with black spots. The refugee spots them, but they haven’t seen her.

She readies her spear with a click and jumps down onto the bank, rushing up to the nymph to pin them. Held at her mercy, she asks them why she should let them live.