A Chimerical Hope

Premonitions of a storm haunt the three nymphs lost in northern Windhold. The sun, which had abandoned them after their defeat of Unodha, returns now fleetingly. Clouds amass from the horizon to the dome of the sky, and rays of light shine fadingly through till the east is but a blurred region of rosy light.

Even that is muffled further by thin banks of fog, but the warming air gradually banishes them to mere humidity. By the time Awelah awakes, it is only vaguely misty and visibility is fair.

The pale nymph lifts violet antennae and looks around. Then she bolts up.

She immediately rouses Ooliri, her tone whispered and suspicious as her eyes dart around their camp, a firepit ringed by hammocks suspended on the fungal columns of a metataxite. There’s her and the gray nymph. Her folding spear is already in her tarsi and she levels it at a sudden motion in a wall of ferns. It’s nothing but the wind. She turns, and has to stifle a jump at the appearance of the red nymph. Makuja flits into the camp with ghostly steps. She got this close, and Awelah hadn’t heard her, hadn’t seen her.

The pale nymph jabs the spear at her once, then scowls when the red nymph doesn’t dignify her threat with concern. Makuja has gathered materials‍ ‍—‍ tubers and fruiting bodies‍ ‍—‍ and sets about making breakfast. The nymph moves like she’s used to waking at dawn, used to making meals.

Ooliri eyes everything she’s gathered with extended antennae and bright eyes. “This was thoughtful, Makuja.”

Awelah frowns. “We need some meat to go with it,” she says. “I can hunt a longicorn.” It’s more impressive than the other nymph’s weed‍-​plucking, she thinks.

“You’d take too long. I gathered grubs.” Makuja points at some slender forms pinned by needles. The chitin of her fingers is black, like natural gloves. It’s hard to see the hemolymph on them.

Awelah gives something of a growl or grunt. “Fine.” There’s not room for arguing. The nymphs are ravenous hungry; even the pale mantis shakes from weakness. Ooliri tasks himself with taking down their hammocks, while Awelah stalks away from the camp. In this brief moment alone, we see her start to practice her spear jabs.

Their meal is served on flat rocks. Ooliri is poking skeptically at ghastly black mushroom caps.

Awelah’s mandibles open in surprised recognition. “Venjaspirals?” When the other nymph looks over curious, she continues. “All the older nymphs started eating these as soon as they made wretch. My cousin, she hated these.” Then recognition on her face turns to numb shock, and then folds into anger. A tarsus goes to grip her spear, but neither of the other nymphs were target of her offense‍ ‍—‍ or defense. She doesn’t raise the spear, just holds it like a talisman.

Ooliri frowns, eyeing Awelah in sympathy‍ ‍—‍ but he never figures out what to say, and limply returns his gaze to the mushrooms. “I was always told to avoid these. That I might die… or at least it’d be painful.”

“For the laity.” Awelah’s voice is flat, mistakable for frustration. “They are poisonous. But that poison is enervate.”

And then Ooliri gets it. “Which is unpalatable for most creatures, but not a vesperbane with growing umbracoils.” Ooliri sighs, and then looks up. “We really are vesperbanes now, aren’t we?”

“It only took losing everything.” Awelah says it, but the sentiment could have come from any of them. The statement’s punctuated by silence, moments stretching until Ooliri clicks his mandibles.

“We should pay our respects to them, somehow.”

“Bury them, you mean?” Awelah chews on the thought for a moment, then. “No. We need to keep moving.”

“But—” He gets interrupted, and not by the Asetari:

“No, we go back and we bury them. Not for sentiment, but for practicality. If the bodies are hidden, it’s that much harder to piece together what happened, slowing down anyone else who comes after you.”

“And my brother, my teacher, everyone… they were vesperbanes. They had supplies that could help us.”

“Fine, but we’re not making a long ceremony of it. We go back, we get it done, then we’re back on the road.”

Makuja gives her a wide‍-​antennaed look that’s so innocently curious it could only be an act. “You don’t care about the dead, Awelah?”

“Something about this feels disrespectful,” Ooliri murmurs.

He watches as Awelah puts on Firah’s antennae‍-​band. The cloth had hemolymph on it, along with bits of her shed setae.

“We’ll raise less questions this way. Without antennae‍-​bands, we look like unsavory defects.”

“We could always just pretend we’re of the laity. Easier to go unnoticed that way, even.”

“If I have to kill someone, I shouldn’t be tried like a common mantis.” Makuja’s voice came from farther away, as she left footprints in the ash of the scorched lakeside, picking through the half‍-​exploded, half‍-​disintegrated remains of the fiend mentor, Emusa.

“And I don’t suppose I could offer not killing anyone as consideration?”

“The danger we’re in is not up to us.”

The scene has a dim buzzing ambience to it‍ ‍—‍ snailflies by the swarm have found the bodies, and now stick to them, scraping at the meat with radulae. It won’t be long till their slug children were oozing around inside as well. Maybe they already were. Crows had found the bodies too, but had flown off when they arrived.

Makuja finds the headband, and pads back to the two nymphs. She hands the headband over.

“Wear it,” Awelah says.

“I want to wear my master’s.”

“We’ll raise less questions if we aren’t two Windhold banes traveling with a Bloodhold bane.”

Makuja bites her mandibles together, but she folds her antennae back and complies.

Ooliri wears Oocid’s old headband. “Now, I suppose, we get digging.”

“Would be less work to put them in the lake.”

Ooliri sighs. “Sure.” He gives the bodies another glance. “There’s spells for burying vesperbanes, for preserving and exhuming the vespers. None of us know any, do we?”

A pair of shaken heads. “Couldn’t they do it for themselves? The vespers, I mean. They’re the source of every spell, right? Shouldn’t they all know the burial rites or whatever they are?”

“Maybe.” It was noncommittal with the effect of a negative; if the vespers knew, they aren’t telling.

Swarms of snailflies burst away in a panic from the bodies while the living bend down to grasp them. Some fly poorly, and crash into eyes or soft chitin. Their sharp shell‍-​wings come uncomfortably close to cutting.

For the older nymphs Oocid and Fihra, it takes Awelah and Makuja working together to carrying them to the lake. They put rocks on the bodies so that they sink beneath. The pawns are next, and Ooliri is staring at the lake depths for a moment. “My father… he was insistent there were no gods, no heaven, no metaphysics to this world beyond the vespers’ will. He did tell us about the empyrean, the welkin, the transmigration cycles, but wanted us to decide for ourselves. Oocid didn’t believe either.” He turns to Awelah, then Makuja. “What about you two? Do you believe?”

Awelah shows her mandibles. “There are no gods, because we killed them. Mantids don’t serve any higher power than ourselves and those we care about. That was‍ ‍—‍ what my mom said. I… do believe in something after life, I think. I have to.” She’s remembering her dream‍-​like visit to the astral plane, and she’s remembering the stories and legends and rumor of that same place among her clanmates. “Not for everyone, though.” She’s not sure how much she should say, how much those outside the clan were allowed to know.

“It’s not about gods, or heavens,” Makuja murmurs. “I don’t remember any of that. Before I left, I knew about the fivefold natural order that united everything. Mantids were separated from it, but we could become one with it again, by living well.” She has a knife in her hand, and it’s not clear where she had hidden it. “But being a vesperbane, killing, is not how you do it.” There’s an odd cadence to her tone, when she stops talking but sounds like she would continue. Makuja isn’t one to sound unsure, and yet… At length, she concludes: “I don’t need an after if I fulfill my purpose.” Then, with a look to Ooliri: “Your teammates died with purpose.”

On the other side of her, Awelah is frowning. And she cuts in, “Better to live.”

“Yeah,” Ooliri said.

Without rebuttal, Makuja turns from the lake.

Awelah claps her hands. “Anyway, we’re done. Now let’s—”

“We’re not done.” Makuja is looking at Unodha’s hounds, who were easily as big as a nymph.

“You’re joking. They’re dogs.”

Ooliri is looking at the direhounds too, but for different reasons. Emusa’s last technique had left their flesh charred. They wouldn’t have to burn the direbeasts themselves, then. He looks closer, counts them. “Hey, weren’t there three hounds in the fight?”

“Yeah so?”

But Makuja is nodding. She glances to Awelah. “Two bodies,” she says slowly.

“It’s odd,” Ooliri adds as he crosses the weed‍-​pocked sand behind Makuja, and starts tugging at one dog.

Awelah opens her mouth, but thinks for a second, and decides it’d be faster to just get this over with. It’s more work than the nymphs had been.

“They were good dogs,” Makuja says.

“They tried to kill us.”

“Exactly.”

Above them, the sun is slipping by a crack in the cloud cover and a ray of light shines through, briefly. The crows have returned in small number, and watch them from the hilltops. Tiny bubbles rise to the surface of the lake, air escaping the recently dead.

Awelah has been ready to leave. She pokes the sand with her spear tip, glaring at Ooliri. Beside her, Makuja throws flat stones at the lake, making them bounce a few times.

Ooliri sits with all the bags they recovered from the vesperbanes, and all the odd burned remains around Emusa, and he pulls things out and pushes things aside and he looks and looks. He’s rummaging. Antennae bounce erratically above him, and Awelah can smell his unease.

“What are you looking for?”

“A sealed parcel. Emusa or Oocid was supposed to have it and it was fireproof and it has to be here. It’s so important. A crow wouldn’t steal it, right? They couldn’t. Where is it where is it…”

Makuja watches him, and after a moment she puts her rock down and walks over. She extends her foreleg to Ooliri’s head, touching an antenna, and running along it from base to tip. His setae have a wavey pattern that flares wide, the strands longer toward the end. “Breathe three times,” she says. “What was it?”

“One of my father’s research journals. He’s gone and—”

“Like the one my mast— Unodha took?”

“No.” Ooliri produces what they recovered last night, the rectangular folio firelicked but intact. He cracks it open, and flips through the pages of wavey, cryptic symbols as if it showed something. “I can open this. It’s a cheap copy. A fake. The code was imitated, seemingly by someone who didn’t know what it means. But Emusa had this! Why? Maybe, maybe they thought, they knew someone would try to take it? But my brother said, it has to be here. It‍ ‍—”

“Look,” Awelah snaps. “We’ve already scoured the whole field. You’ve looked at everything we’ve recovered twice over. It’s not here.”

Makuja runs a tarsus along Ooliri’s antennae again. She looks up to the sky. “There might be a storm soon. It would be best if we could find shelter before then.”

Among their supplies, Team 19 had oil. Like direbeasts, it’s advised to dispose of a blood fiend corpse with fire, if there were no haruspex to perform true burial rites.

“There’s one last thing.” Ooliri stands away from Unodha’s body, and is looking at anything but. “Oocid mentioned it in his report. He dissected a direhound, examined its blood. It was strange. That’s how it figured out it was a bane’s work, of course. But more than that‍ ‍—‍ more than he even shared with our mentor. Something about the blood felt… he used the word regal, and for everything I can’t figure out why.”

“This matters?” Awelah asks.

“It’s been bothering me, as I think back over the fight. Emusa acted like her final gambit would have killed Unodha. Yet she survived. Oocid thought she would have to be terribly weakened. Yet she still put up a fight. There’s… something more, explaining this. I want to know why.”

“We had the bad luck to be up against a A‍-​rank maverick. A lot of banes die to these kinds of unpredictable… flukes. This world doesn’t always have a good or fair explanation.” Something in Awelah’s tone was the slightest bit strangled, saying that.

“But you have to be looking for one,” Ooliri says. She looks down.

“Unodha was B‍-​rank.”

“Huh?”

“Her entry in the bounty books. It lists her as a B‍-​rank fiend. She was never A‍-​rank.”

Ooliri is nodding. “A B‍-​ranker shouldn’t have survived all that.” The pale nymph frowns.

“So what?”

“We have some sealed glass jars and alcohol. I want to preserve some tissue samples and find someone to examine them. Or do it ourselves, when we’ve learned more.” Ooliri then glances to Makuja. “If that’s okay with you, of course.”

“A corpse is a corpse. She would have done the same, if she had reason to. We have reason to.”

Handling corpses, drowning and burning them, doesn’t exactly stoke the appetite, but it had been several hours by the time they were marching east again, and hunger was undeniable. Awelah hunts beetles and Makuja gathers flora and funga. Ooliri opts to accompany the red nymph, and she occasionally murmurs pointers.

Still, Ooliri refuses beetles and grubs. It garners quizzical glances from the other two. Every nymph knew mantids couldn’t live on plantmatter alone. It wasn’t hard to sneak after him when he left to do his own scavenging, particularly with Makuja’s stealth. Their suspicions and bafflement only deepen when they at last learn his preferred source of protein.

Ooliri liked to eat slugs.

“I don’t like them, okay. They taste fine, but you’re right. I do have to eat meat. But,” he trailed off. “I’ll put it this way: would you eat a mantis?”

Makuja looks thoughtful. “If there were no untrustworthy witnesses? Yes.”

Awelah had flinched and stilled at the question. “I have,” she says.

Ooliri had backed up at Makuja’s remark, and backs up further at Awelah’s. He looks between them, antennae spiraling up. He is smaller than them, and feels like prey.

Awelah glares. “I marched three days through a wispfall. If I didn’t… resort to cannibalism, I wouldn’t be here today,” she says. Then adds, “And you wouldn’t either.”

Ooliri sighs, relaxes his antennae, but doesn’t return to his closer position.

“What were you intending with your question?” Makuja asks.

“Well, would you eat a roach?”

“No!” Awelah’s word is emphatic.

Makuja bounces her antennae in a shrug. “The answer doesn’t change.”

Awelah glances at her, antennae drawn back as if repelled. “What? Would you eat little nymphs too?”

Ooliri waves. “We’re getting off track. I just want to say that if eating mantids and roaches is bad, it’s also bad to eat lower insects.”

“They aren’t people,” Awelah says.

“But they still deserve to live. It still hurts when they die.”

Ooliri turns his gaze back to a fat slug he’d caught. It wriggles and struggles a lot like the grubs Makuja had caught.

The eveningstar, herald of worldly beauty, dances above the horizon, barely visible as the sun descends. It’s time to make another camp. This time, they lay out soft rolls on the rocky shore of a small creek. The wall behind it rises high like a shelter, curved almost like a shallow cave. They scare a snake out of its home here before settling in. Makuja makes a kind of stew. They stare up at the clouds and the stars are withheld from them.

Distantly, they hear a howl. Each nymph listens closely, and tries to find something unfamiliar in the sound.

It’s Awelah who speaks the dread in words. “Didn’t… didn’t all of Unodha’s dogs die?”

No one has an answer, and their dreams are troubled for that reason.