A Chimerical Hope

With closure on the battle, and nothing but uncertain danger urging them on toward an uncertain goal, a certain lethargy grows in the nymphs. They sleep like corpses, and awake at midday, ravenously hungry. Meal after meal, their bodies never seem to regain strength, their stomachs fill like pits too deep to see the bottom of, and the soft parts of their cuticle hold a feverish heat as if coals burn within them. It gets worse, and days pass like this. Sometimes one of the nymphs doesn’t awake for most of a day, leaving the others to care for them.

It’s made all the worse by the sudden, causeless inception of it. They suspect parasites from meat, or poison from misidentified herbs. The feeling wanes like the waning of the moon. It’s Ooliri who finally puts a true name to the condition. Each of their bodies had new passengers; adaptation to the vespers felt like a terrible sickness.

What finally drives them from their cave by the stream bank is the weather. Either the clouds have taken to raining at night, or somewhere further upstream, but the flow comes faster, and wider, and soon they would risk waking up drenched‍ ‍—‍ or drowning.

Walking away from the stream, they pass under the shelter of tall ferns. Makuja stops, prompting a glance from the other nymphs. She points at the ground.

Here, just meters away from where they slept, diamond shaped imprints sunk into the mud. The tracks of a maned wolf.

“Maybe we should have started moving sooner,” Ooliri says quietly. “We should put as much distance as we can between us and that…”

“No,” Awelah says. “We didn’t get this far by being cowards, did we? We need to get stronger. Train, and if that dog comes after us, it’ll regret it. It was almost dead, and prey isn’t plentiful this soon after a wispfall. It must be weak. It stands little chance.”

The gray nymph sighs. “Would you really say that after so many people underestimated Unodha?”

“Its master is dead,” she replies. She doesn’t linger on it, but Ooliri glances to Makuja, the red nymph’s face betraying no reaction. “It’s weak, and it’s alone. Didn’t you fight one of them? We’ll be fine.”

“I’d feel more fine if we weren’t alone in the wild. A little civilization around us, help to call out for.”

“And we don’t know where the nearest village is! You said your map burned up with your mentor.” A glance to Makuja. “And your team killed the roaches who knew where we were going!”

“We had orders.”

“Your new orders are to help us. And right now, that means training.”

Rather than acknowledge that, Makuja glances to Ooliri, whose antennae are spirals, his eyes cast away to the horizon.

Awelah put a tarsus over face, palps scraping. Why are you looking to him? He isn’t the team leader. He’s a wimp, she half‍-​murmurs, half‍-​thinks. She runs the tarsus back, sliding up to her antennae and running through her tangled fluff. “Remind me, why are we going to this village?”

“There’s rumor of a vesperbane they call Lady Earth‍-​shaper protecting it. They could teach us.”

Awelah smiles the smile of a trapper. “And they will be more likely to teach us if we’re already strong. If we didn’t waste all our time running.”

Ooliri starts off, “That’s not what—”

But she cuts him off with a click. “Look, if you want to be safe,” she begins.

Then she claps her hands together. The seal of focus draws enervate into her hands, and they buzz with the power. She thinks of her family’s signature technique, and she feels her fingers moving, forming more signs. She was only passingly familiar with tarsigns, and never learned this sequence, but the flow came naturally, in the way every limb had a way it preferred to bend, in the smooth inevitably of a martial form. Of course, she thought, it’s my birthright.

⸢Umbral Body Projection!⸥ She steps to the side, leaving a shadow in the air. It darks as it fills with enervate, becoming recognizable as Awelah’s silhouette.

“You need me,” she says. “You need what I can do.” Then she turns away from the two nymphs. She gestures at her projection, and then it moves after her, propulsed more than it walks. “I’m going to find a clearing. You can… join me.”

As she walks away, Makuja and Ooliri share a glance.

Projection dispelled, Awelah stands half‍-​crouched and punching a metataxite. It is about as thick around she is, but its lowest shelves starts above her head. With each impact, the great lichen shakes a little. With a grunt, she takes one step back, then makes the seal of focus, followed another tarsign, as natural as her last sequence. Then:

⸢Bane Blast!⸥ Her foreleg is thrust out toward the central fungal column, and before it impacts, a burst of black knocks her arm back. The taxite is only slightly worse off; now, it shakes a bit rather than a little. Some of its chitinous protective layer flakes off and falls to the damp mossy ground. She frowns at this result, as if it offended her.

“How did you do that?” Ooliri asks. Even now, his voice is higher pitched than either of the girls.

They find the Asetari not long after she had left. This clearing is due to a giant tree that fell and rotted until it was just a crumbling line of woodchips, wreathed by former branches. It must have been the last relic of when this was a land for trees; now ferns and metataxites seize the ground. Hidden by fronds, they had watched briefly, unobserved.

When she doesn’t answer, he tries, “Were you… were you taught?”

“It comes naturally,” she finally says without glancing at him.

He looks down to his arm‍ ‍—‍ the one without the bandages, and extends long antennae toward it. “….How?”

Awelah closes her raptorials, then walks away from her fungal foe. Standing before Ooliri, she demonstrates. “I make the seal of focus and then… I feel the rest of the signs like a pull, like my hands want to make them.” She sees the look the gray nymph is giving her. “Is that unusual?”

“It’s not how tarsigns work‍ ‍—‍ not how I learned they work, anyways.”

“How do they work, then?” Awelah says. There’s a moment for Ooliri’s slight surprise to register in a small bounce of antennae, and then she is already defending. “I didn’t learn anything about nervecasting. I hadn’t been promoted yet.” There’s something in how she says that last word, some emotion. And it was different from the loss he had heard in her tone so many times before. Was there something… bitter, to it?

It’s then that he realizes there’s another expression on her face‍ ‍—‍ she’s expecting a reply. “Um, could you hold out your midleg?” It’s a moment before she does. “And bend it?”

Then Ooliri chops at the joint, and the leg kicks out. It almost hits Ooliri in his thorax, but he leans out the way. “This is how Emusa demonstrated the concept. Did you kick out your leg?”

She frowns. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Exactly. It’s just how the body is wired. But imagine if you couldn’t control your leg at all, so if you wanted to kick, you had to hit it like that every time. That’s what tarsigns are. When there’s enervate in your hands, twisting them in special way sort of… tugs on enervate elsewhere in the body, in ways we haven’t learned to do directly, yet.”

Makuja had come beside Ooliri. Silent, she had been easy to miss. She speaks now, though. “Yet the signs are tugging on her instead.”

Awelah draws her raptorials together. “No, it’s more like I’m remembering them. Muscle memory, except I hadn’t done it before.” The longer this conversation went on, the more her tone seemed to waver with uncertainty. As if she’d never questioned it, and now that she does…

Then Makuja asks. “Can you do the signs again?”

It was a simple sequence. Focus seal, then a sign like two fists pressed together, then the dactyls of both tarsi splaying out flat.

Ooliri is nodding. “Bane Blast is one of the simplest spells. I think that’s the louse seal, which… compresses enervate, right? And then the basic release seal, which just… expels it.”

Makuja takes a step to the side, then runs through the same set. She holds the louse seal for a second longer than Awelah had, then on unseen cue, makes the release seal and points her foreleg at the ground. A spray of dirt announces her success. She plucks a worm from the pits.

“Wherever this memory comes from, it only needed to grant knowledge of the seals,” she concludes. She’s placing the worm in a compartment of her bag. Done, she looks at Awelah. “Will you show us the seals to your other spell?”

“No.” The red nymph, the killer, holds her gaze, and after a few seconds Awelah is twitching antennae. She stammers to add, “Would you even have enough enervate to cast it?”

“She has a point,” Ooliri says, nodding. “Emusa thought the most important thing for pawns to be learning, besides martial arts and tactics, was the arete binding ritual. It builds up the arete reserves necessary for more advanced techniques.”

Makuja glances down at the pit she’d made the very first time she attempted the spell, like that was counterargument enough. “I’ve been a pawn longer than you,” she says. It was true; he’d told them as much over one meal by their campfire. “I know how to bind arete.”

Ooliri inclines his head in concession.

Point made, she looks back to the last Asetari, gaze challenging her once again.

“I’m not teaching you the spell,” she says. “It’s my clan’s technique.”

The other girl doesn’t reply. Her antennae fold up, and no frown comes to her palps, as if that admission was victory enough. She looks to Ooliri. Rather, she looks to his bandaged arm. He’d revealed to them that it was soft skin and bones beneath them, not chitin.

“Can it channel black nerve?” she asks.

Uninterested, Awelah resumes her assault on the metataxite.

Makuja makes a ‘follow me’ gesture with the arm facing away from Awelah. She walks, and then waits for Ooliri on the other side of the clearing.

“We have to train to become stronger,” she says, her tone an echo of the last Asetari. “But sharing a spell that might make us stronger?”

“It… it’s not just that. Her clan is dead. I understand why she’d be protective of anything she has to remember them with.”

“Sentiment over practicality.” Makuja tilts her head. “Is that why she gave you time to mourn your teammates even when moving on would be more practical?”

Ooliri cast his eyes down. “I guess… but people have their own feelings and priorities. We should be understanding of them. What else can we do? She’s not going to stop caring about the things that are important to her if we tell her to.”

“We only have to agree there’s a problem. Then we can figure out how to solve it.”

“Solve it…” he murmurs, eyes paling a little as his palps brush the words, and he remembers who he’s talking to. He glances down at her black hands, as if checking her for weapons. “Don’t hurt her, Makuja. Please?”

A sigh. The red nymph shoots one last glance at the one out of hearshot. Then a more neutral look at Ooliri. “You didn’t answer my question,” she says, not answering his request.

“Huh?”

“Can your new arm channel enervate?” When the boy only frowns uncertainly, she commands, “Make the seal of focus.”

Haltingly, he lifts his hands, but it takes Makuja grabbing his wrists and slapping them together. After she does, he says, “Odd… there’s a coldness flowing in from my core‍ ‍—‍ that must be the enervate. But I only feel it in one hand. In the other… it’s just my heartbeat.”

“The louse seal,” she continues.

He does it before she intervenes, and, getting the idea, he proceeds to make the release sign with his bandaged arm‍ ‍—‍ and it flares rod straight in an instant, quickly and with force. It’s like a punch, and the impact hits the red nymph in her thorax. She’s knocked back a step, tips off balance, then catches herself.

“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to it was‍ ‍—”

Makuja tone is only confused. “That wasn’t Bane Blast.”

“No,” he says slowly, his confusion instead born of her lack of concern. “It wasn’t.”

“Do it again. With your other arm this time.”

Ooliri starts again. He doesn’t turn, so Makuja steps out of his way this time. When he throws out his normal arm, nothing happens. When the red nymph steps around to check, she reports there are black globules on the surface of his hand.

“That’s consistent with the spell, at least. I must have failed to cast it.”

“Try holding the louse sign for longer?”

“When I made it, my heart started beating faster. It scared me, so I stopped.”

“Your heart will beat faster in a fight, too.”

Makuja oversees a few more attempts from him, then leaves Ooliri to figure it out on his own. She goes a few paces away, though still closer to him than to the other girl, and takes out a knife. She feels its weight in her hand for a moment, then pulls back and throws it to impale an old fern. The projectile hits hard enough a spasm goes through the plants limbs.

Dreary and overcast as the day had started, the air is still and humid, so their actions bring a kind of life to the clearing, with these bits of motion. Makuja compares the shaking of her fern to that of the metataxite Awelah now trains against, which catches her eye from across the clearing.

She compares it in turn to another, slighter shake from a fernbush, sitting among a clump of the things a ways away from either of them, as she draws another knife. Her eyes settle on her target, and she weighs her knife. Then she stops.

Why was that fern moving? None of them had gone to that side of the clearing. Why, when the rest were still, so it could not be wind?

Her knife is gripped lightly as she moves. None of the nymphs glances over.

She finds the clues after a moment of staring. Folded leaves of one frond on the offending fernbush as if gripped, and far behind the clump, she saw crushed moss, widely spaced as if they had avoided stepping in the mud that separated them.

She picks up two rocks, and throws them in sequence; one to hit Awelah on the head and another to land beside Ooliri. Silently, she gestures for them to come over.

“Something was here,” she says. “Something was watching us.”