A Chimerical Hope

That night, they slept without the security of the cave they’d grown accustomed to. It was in a field near a hill, and all the security they had was boulders and a few trees. (Trees, not metataxites.) For Awelah, she slept here and remembered her second night after the wispfall, sleeping in bedrolls just hours before occupied by now‍-​dead pawns. She remembers killing them. She doesn’t sleep well, but you never sleep well the first night in a new location. Still, the memories don’t help.

She wakes up with the sun‍ ‍—‍ perhaps the subtle sound of Makuja leaving to gather breakfast had awoken her. Regardless, she’s up. She approaches Ooliri’s bag to wake him, and has the sudden image of standing before a pawn asleep, moments before she had thrust her spear forward.

They’d all had orders to kill her. Awelah has sworn to kill a certain bane, and along that path there’s sure to be more regrettable deaths than the stupid pawns of a cruel mercenary‍ ‍—‍ she knows just who she’s after.

No, she thinks. There will be no regrettable deaths. Because she shouldn’t regret, so long as she stays true to her ambition.

Those pawns had killed roaches. Killed them and roasted them like prey. How could she regret avenging that?

It’s morning and she’s safe in a camp with her allies. She looks around, eyes pigmenting to refocus. Awelah decides to let Ooliri sleep.

After her fight with Klepé, mud still clings to her cloak. Her cousin’s cloak, which had secured her escape from the ruins of Duskroot, and across the wisp‍-​occluded countryside. She has to clean it. The water from the creek is also muddy, but less so once strained through a bit of cloth. She climbs a tree, and her heartbeat slows while she rubs dirt out of her cloak.

Despite the focus on her task, she catches the bit of movement‍ ‍—‍ Makuja’s return. She watches as breakfast is made. When the work concludes, the pale nymph hops down from the tree. She’s frowning as she approaches the red nymph. There’s an emotion like a shadow beneath her thoughts. Like a shadow, its details are obscure, unnamable to her.

Makuja is walking to Ooliri, to awaken him, sleeping beside his barrel, and that’s when Awelah intercepts her. The intent look of the last Asetari is what has her pause; the palps themselves working without making a sound. It’s a moment before Awelah articulates her words.

“I killed a lot of your teammates,” she says. “I know you’ve sworn loyalty to us, but did you ever want to… avenge them?”

“No. They failed. They were flawed tools, in the end. I only cared about one.”

“Your master,” Awelah guesses.

“I wake up in the morning, and I’m halfway through making meal before I remember I’m serving you and not her. I wake up forgetting she’s gone and this isn’t one more mission.”

“I can’t forget.” Awelah’s voice is quiet but hard. “Don’t have that luxury. Every night I dream of how each of them died. I remember every detail, experience it.”

“I dream of the people I’ve killed,” she says. “Do you?”

“Sometimes,” is all she commits to. “The only mantids I’ve killed were your teammates.”

“Do you ever…”

“Regret? No. They were obstacles in my path. They stood in the way of my goal, and that’s all that matters.”

Makuja nods. “We fulfilled our purposes. It’s good that a tool does its work. But perhaps it’s good also if that work doesn’t need to be done. Ooliri says everything deserves to live. So, at times, I think about them… alive.”

“I’m not a tool. You wonder about them living like it’s an idle thought, but you don’t care, do you? If I were you, my purpose would be to avenge them.” Then she pauses. “But to avenge your master, you’d only have yourself to go after, wouldn’t you?”

Then Awelah is on the ground.

Makuja punched her. She’s walking away, now.

“Get back here. That was a cheap shot. Give me a real fight. Makuja! Fight me!”

The departing figure doesn’t turn around.

No one needs to wake up Ooliri, now. He’s sitting up, looking around confused. With Awelah, he eats in silence, repeatedly shooting glances at her.

When he finally speaks, he’s interrupted. “Awelah, you‍ ‍—”

“I’m going to fight her,” she states. “It’s training. Sparring. Real vesperbanes do it all the time. Would you prefer I sparred with you?”

Ooliri sags, and bites a mushroom cap. “Don’t hurt each other, then. No spears, no knives.”

“We aren’t stupid.” Then, with that established, “I’m going to kick her abs. Don’t need weapons to do that.”

Awelah is waiting outside the camp when Makuja returns. Ooliri went out to retrieve her, and there’s a tight curl of her antennae at seeing Awelah regarding her with raptorials open.

“If we must,” she says. “Are we doing this formally?” She isn’t looking at Awelah. She is unstrapping a few knives and placing them at the base of a tree. Awelah wonders if that’s really all the knives she has.

“Of course not. We didn’t become vesperbanes to do formal duels.”

Still, Awelah bows, and Makuja reciprocates. Then, the fight begins.

The pale nymph charges, and the terms are set immediately. Awelah is bigger, older. She has more reach, and her punches hit harder. Smaller, quicker, Makuja dodges, crouched lower than Awelah can comfortably reach. When the bigger nymph takes the bait and kicks, Makuja jumps out of the way, spinning when she lands‍ ‍—‍ her nimble legs sweep across the ground behind her. Awelah has to abort the kick, jump straight up, to avoid being flipped on her side.

Then Makuja strikes, a raptorial foreleg flying out to snap around one of her arms. Awelah hops back.

She starts making tarsigns.

And Makuja strikes again, lunging forward with another raptorial snap. The Asetari is interrupted, and no projection comes to her aid.

“You made the same mistake yesterday. This time, I’m not covering for you.”

Awelah only grunts in response, throwing a trio of jabs to make Makuja dodge back, resetting the terms of the fight. It’s almost a reprise; the following exchange pushes Awelah back once again, and again she tries the tarsigns. Again interrupted.

“It’s not going to work. Is it the only tactic you have?”

Makuja always struck Awelah as one to take her foes down silently. But this?

“Are you taunting me?” she asks. Then, “You’re not taking this seriously.”

“It’s a spar. To make us stronger. How are you to improve, if I don’t tell you what you’re doing wrong?”

“Tell me if I’m doing wrong after I win,” Awelah says, and swings her forelegs down to smash Makuja. It’s an easy maneuver to dodge, but it buys the pale nymph some space. She’s backing up further, but the red nymph is on her again, reaching out and grabbing her cloak to stop her. The thing starts to slide off one of her arms, and Awelah kicks back, pivoting to resist Makuja’s force. The two actions combined see her turning round, and stepping away. The hold grows untenable, is released, and now Makuja is coming after Awelah. It’s a short chase.

Awelah angles for the nearest tree, and breaks into a run. She doesn’t know if she can outrun Makuja, but she can make it to the tree. She doesn’t stop, and starts running up the tree with Makuja behind her.

The red nymph is stopping short, but Awelah is already kicking off. Her next move has two components. Makuja will be jumping out of the way, to avoid the bigger nymph landing on her, but she won’t be expecting the cloak. Awelah slides it off the other arm, and the heavy thing lands over her opponent’s face. The smaller nymph did make it free of her obvious trajectory, but her foe still lands at her side, and promptly tackles.

It’s wrestling, but it’s wrestling done with Awelah’s mid‍-​ and hindlegs. It lasts for several moments, Makuja is split between needing to slip out of Awelah’s hold and pull the cloak off it. When she rips it free, Awelah is backing away from her in the shade of the tree. She’s smirking.

Makuja lunges again, and Awelah dodges, maneuvering around her. The Asetari throws out her hand, but it’s nowhere near hitting Makuja. Then Awelah is reaching out as if to grab for her neck. It leaves her open to a counterattack from her.

But before she can make another move, she feels the chill beside her. In the blurry fringes of her vision, she sees the blackest shadow.

While she was under the cloak, Awelah completed her projection. The last Asetari holds her by the throat while her enervate is poised to touch her. She recalls what even a little bit of the stuff did to the bodies of animals. Deliquescence.

“I think I win.”

Makuja flinches away from the projection placed so close to her. Enervate never felt nice to be around. She doesn’t contest Awelah’s victory.

She asks, “Your earlier attempts, were they some kind of misdirection? Shaping my expectations?”

“If I could end it that easily, I wouldn’t complain. But I was right, wasn’t I? You were underestimating me, thinking I’d fall into the exact same trap as yesterday.”

Makuja inclines her head.

“I was going to be a vesperbane since the day I hatched. I know a few things about tactics.” Awelah reaches out and touches a foretarsus to the projection, unblowing the bubble, and Makuja is released from the unpleasant vibrations.

Ooliri watches the dispelling with undisguised interest, curiosity overwriting his concern and disappointment at Awelah’s tactics. Before the boy can say anything, she’s speaking again.

“What about you?” She means Makuja. “Why are you holding back? Not just today‍ ‍—‍ it happened yesterday. What happened to the bloody wing‍-​claws you stole from your master?”

Makuja brushes her palps against her pars stridens and makes a sound. She turns to collect her knives.

Neither quite heard her, and it’s impossible to say if the words they missed were “I don’t know” or “I can’t.”

“Why do you have that barrel, anyway?” Awelah asks Ooliri. Her eyes are on the unrolled seal Klepé had gifted them, revealing the way forward.

Beside her, Ooliri still carries the awkward thing with both forelegs as they walk the road beside the creek. They had waterskins big enough, and a water source near enough, that there wasn’t serious worry they’d run out.

Still, as they walked, Ooliri occasionally darted out to look at the creek, as if checking something. This was the only hint as to what he was planning.

“I’ll show you if I figure it out,” he says. “You still have the rope my… old team had, right?” Of the three of them, Awelah carried the most of their supplies. She confirms with a quizzical nod.

Makuja looks up from where she walks behind them. In a low tone, she asks for some rope. Before Awelah has a chance to dig any out of the bag, Makuja tenses. They all look forward, hearing it, seeing it.

Sprinting toward them, it grows larger. Each of Unodha’s dogs had been outfitted with overlapping plates of yellow bones, like a mammalian exoskeleton. The last of them has those plates cracked and dark with dried blood, and each bounding leap of the beast produces a loud rattling as the bones hung loose over a newly gaunt frame. The sound comes ghastly, like the rattle of a snake before it’s your death, or yes, a skeleton arisen from a grave to skulk and haunt.

Overcast as it is, the world waits engulfed in clouds’ shadow, and in the dimmed afternoon light, all environs rendered misty and vague, it feels appropriate to witness a horrible specter.

“There’s three of us and one of it. We can do this,” Awelah says.

“Are we running or are we fighting?”

“Fighting. Let’s end this.”

The sight of Awelah working through tarsigns is familiar, even if she would never let the signs themselves become so.

It stops fifty strides out, slowing bound by bound until it’s creeping forward, the rattling of its bones now a low ostinato.

The wetness of a submerged eye shines from behind its skull. You can tell it’s looking at Ooliri, and then to Makuja.

Then it growls, head low.

Makuja draws a knife.

It barks, high and loud, and lunges forward, distance halving in a huge leap. The many cracks in its armor are dark with many shadows, the largest of them like a dark portal, almost square.

Awelah casts her projection about then. She gestures, and the black figure drifts forward to the direhound.

The growling stops and it jerks back from the projection. Awelah’s mirror doesn’t stop moving, and the tenor of the growling changes.

They smell blood.

“It’s getting bigger.”

“That’s… they couldn’t do that. Not on their own‍ ‍—‍ Unodha told me her spell alone could trigger it.”

Ooliri, holding his baton securely, takes a step toward the hound. It glances at him and then back to the projection.

“We need to run.”

“Are you scared—”

“No. I’ll explain. Make it flee from your projection, then catch up with me and Ooliri. Cross the creek. Run to the treeline.”

Makuja grabs Ooliri to yank him in the right direction, and with that impulse given, he’s running after her to hop down the walls of the creek, then cross the waters. Dripping water, Makuja drags herself up the other creek wall with stabs of her raptorials.

When she looks back, Awelah is still trying to get a hit on the bone‍-​dog with her spear. But it’s too focused avoiding the projection. Beside her, an impact kicks up dirt‍ ‍—‍ Makuja’s knife, thrown to get her attention.

Unable to stridulate and be heard across the creek, unwilling to yell through her spiracles, Makuja gestures wildly for Awelah to get over there.

She doesn’t, not until the red nymph palms another knife. Awelah snatches up the already thrown knife and throws it back like a kind of revenge, but it lands handle‍-​first against the other wall of the creek, kicking up dirt and burying itself in a little avalanche of the stuff.

Awelah starts running. Unlike the other two, she leaps directly from the top of the creek, landing hard on the rocks of the other bank. With a small limp, she climbs the other wall.

“What under the stars is this about? Why—”

“Follow me. We need more distance.”

Awelah scrapes frustration, and stomps the few strides Makuja wants. The red nymph gestures at a tree and starts climbing. Awelah stares for a moment, then sighs and follows.

“Look.”

At first, they see only the hound back away from Awelah’s inert projection.

“Can you command it from here?”

At a gesture, the projection drifts forward toward the disengaging dog.

“Dispel it.”

“I’m not your—”

“Dispel it and I’ll explain.”

Awelah makes the projection instead drift towards them. It’s not any faster now than before, and it’ll be a minute before it reaches them.

“Start explaining.”

“It wasn’t just the strange behavior of Vilja that set me off‍ ‍—‍ I saw it, attached near the flank. A sensor tag.”

Awelah doesn’t know what that is. Her projections arrives, and Makuja shivers. The thing is dispelled while she explains:

“Sensor‍-​banes can track them from far away. Someone is following that hound.”

Purple compound eyes look away from her, and toward the road they’d just left. The direhound‍ ‍—‍ Vilja must be its name‍ ‍—‍ is canting off perpendicular to the road. It reaches the other treeline and disappears into the foliage.

Then other motion catches the eye: three figures charging over from farther down the road. They move with speed that might be vespertine, and little more can be made out, certainly no antennae‍-​bands. The three are of disparate builds, one with the bulk of a female imago, another slender like a young lady or older tiercel, one that could only be a nymph. Several long forms are strapped to the back of one, but before Awelah can analyze further, Makuja is pulling her down from the tree.

“Bushes. We need to hide.”

Mantids had a wide field of view; to ensure they weren’t spotted, they hid where the new arrivals were obscured from them, and they saw no more.

Hours later, they peek, and the three mantids are gone.