A Chimerical Hope

Like the umbral filaments spilling from Tenebra, trail lines extend out from Wisterun, a small point whose influence magnified it. Around the town farmland fans out, starting not far from its walls of mud, stone and wood. The farms are delineated and crossed by those trails. Not roads: they lacked the stiffness and symmetry of the roads a diamantid would put down. No, the reason for these trails is only seen as Ooliri flies closer. Ants, dozens of them swaddled in colorful clothes, along them marched in ranks or, here and there, wandered alone.

Above him the zipline buzzes as the wheels roll down the wire. Ooliri listens to that sound waiting for a creak or snap. His eyes scan the cable. Can he see exposed strands and wear on the wires, or is it just anxious pareidolia? Quessa had gone down just fine. Yanseno had been confident, and Ooliri is already halfway down now. Below him the metataxite forests they’d traveled are thinning, giving way to civilization.

Wait, had Yanseno been confident? “Everything is unsafe,” is what he said.

Still, Ooliri’s strapped to the thing now. If he put up his raptorials in front of his face, then maybe he won’t have to repeatedly scrutinize the cables for fault, and won’t wonder just whether it’ll hurt more to fall down on the conks of metataxites or onto a wheatfield. But if he lifts his raptorials, that means they won’t be holding fast to his harness, and he likes having something to hold onto. Instead, he can just fold his antennae over his foveae…

“You did it!” he hears Quessa chirp. “I told you it’d be fine.”

Ooliri moves his antennae from where they wrapped around his compound eyes. The trolley stopped moments ago. He lowers his legs and they land steady on the stone‍-​cobbled platform. Roped fern‍-​stalks fence off this platform, and he turns his head a little to get Quessa’s green face in his sightlines.

“That was…” Ooliri stops. He doesn’t want to disappoint her, so he searches for a way to put it. “Better than running into another world‍-​scar in the wilds. Maybe—maybe I could get used to it.”

Quessa smiles, and then glances away. “Boleheva might take some minutes to run here. Do you want to wait over by the gate? I think I know one of the ants! But that one’s not supposed to be on guard duty. Or was it otherwise? Maybe that one was reassigned.”

Ooliri glances up at the now‍-​distant tower pointing up over the woods. “Shouldn’t we wait for Makuja?”

“Should we? She…” Quessa had a tendency to just stop, palps tapping her mandibles where another mantis might stutter or pad with ‘ums’ or ‘wells.’ “…seems scary.”

“She is scary. But most of that‍ ‍—‍ most of that scariness is for our enemies. You saw her fight that anteater right? She saved our lives there.” Ooliri rubs his bandaged arm. “Yanseno seems scary too. But, to you, he’s nice, isn’t he?”

“He is…” Quessa extends an antennae over, which brushes quite close to touching him. “Do you have a father?”

“Had one. He’s—gone now.”

“Oh. Do you miss him?”

“Every time I go home.” Which, Ooliri realizes with a start, he hasn’t, not for several shades. Would he be there right now, if this mission hadn’t fallen apart? “Oonserta taught me everything. I wouldn’t be half the vesperbane or have any idea what I’m doing without him.”

Quessa nods. “Yanseno is just like that.”

Ooliri wonders why she hadn’t just said the maverick was like father to her. He thinks about asking, but decides not to. This silences the conversation for a moment.

“What were we talking about?”

“You wanted to talk to one of the ants, I think? And avoid Makuja, because she’s scary. But I explained how she’s protective‍-​scary, like Yanseno.”

Quessa looks away, toward the ants milling around by the gate, and her antennae bounce up. “Yeah, there! The One Who Bites Water. He showed me some of the tunnels.” Looking back to Ooliri, she says, “I’d like to wait over there? At least until Yanseno gets back. There’s something… I think I wanted to say to that one.”

“Maybe. I’d like to meet an ant.” Ooliri glances back at the tower, and sees a mantis riding down the zipline. Makuja?

Quessa starts walking, and Ooliri plots out an approach. He could tell Makuja to wait here for Yanseno while he goes with Quessa, play it off as a way to make sure the maverick knows where to find them?

The gray nymph watches the image of Makuja smoothly getting larger and clearer, witnessing the descent from the other perspective. Where Ooliri had fidgeted and covered his eyes, Makuja rides down with antennae waving like short banners behind her.

She’s not all still, though. About halfway down, she turns. Is she leaning to one side? Why?

The distance obscures it, but peering closer, Ooliri sees her center of mass is lower‍ ‍—‍ and there’s not just antennae trailing behind her now. Those are the straps of the harness!

Snapping one by one, Makuja holds onto the trolley as her support gives out‍ ‍—‍ but at this speed, with this suddenness (and, Ooliri thinks, with that terrifying height beneath you), her grip cannot be steady.

Ooliri cries out in alarm, and it stops Quessa in her tracks. He turns to her with paling eyes. “We have to do‍ ‍—‍ something, don’t we?”

“I think…” Quessa looks up, antennae spiking as she sees what’s only a blurry image in the fringe of his rear vision‍ ‍—‍ that dreaded inevitability. “We need to wait for Yanseno. He’ll do something.”

Far from Wisterun’s gates, above the woods, Makuja falls.

Ooliri thinks I’m weak. Awelah watches the gray nymph slip on his harness as she steps down the steep stairs. Everything she’d done and endured, and one hit from Makuja makes them think she can’t bear putting on a starsdamned harness.

Her smaller form slips past Boleheva on the stairs, making the big imago stop with a quiet “Woah there.” She takes the stairs two at a time, and with the height of each step, she’s vertical enough to nearly flip over.

The stairs are spiraled, winding inside the six pillars of the watchtower, and when she reaches the spot above the landing, she jumps off the side, hitting the ground with sandals audibly squishing in the mud. Her legs bend enough till her abdomen smacks the ground and forced a pained exhale. By the time she’s recovered, Boleheva is stepping onto the landing.

“Goin with all the hurry in the world, ain’t ye?”

Awelah pats grime off of her, and with two false starts yanks her feet out of the mud. “Let’s go.” She walks off.

“You leadin’ the way, girl?”

Awelah points up to the zipline. “Unless you lied about where that’s going, I know which way it is.”

“Fair enough.” Boleheva leans her thorax forward and trots up to the pale nymph’s side. “Still, if you’re so hasty, might as well climb on. I’ll get us there fas’er than anything. Could even beat the maverick up there, I bet.”

The Asetari clicks her mandibles. “I don’t need to be carried like a hatchling.”

“Look, no one said that.”

“I have legs, that’s my answer.”

“Ye don’t understand it. I’m a bloodbane. Compared to my myxothews, you ain’t got legs.” She points back behind her. “I could climb that tower with one arm free and three grown imagos tied to my back, and still reach the top. I could run to Wisterun without stoppin for breath if I need to.”

Awelah looks away, and she walks faster.

“Is this about yer pride?” Boleheva asks, catching up with her one heartbeat later. “You think you’ll look like a baby if yer friends see you carried around? Fine, maybe. Ye know ’em better than I. But what do you reckon they’ll think if they have to wait an hour for you to get there?”

The conversation halts there when a small startled longicorn leaps from the ferns, darting across their path, long antennae frenzied in fear. Awelah, almost on instinct, turned to track it. But there’s no use hunting; Boleheva had some ration bars they’d ate this morning, and she surely had more.

The feet of many bugs had worn this trail, and that alone would have it easier to follow that the pathless wilderness on their way into this prefecture, but the metataxites and dewy ferns around them clear up twist by turn. Somewhere out there, Awelah recalls, that direhound is still creeping about. She isn’t finished with it. Clenching her raptorials, she longs to continue that chase. Nothing she can do about it right now, but she resists taking her mind off it. Awelah would be‍ ‍—‍ is‍ ‍—‍ a hunter, and she wouldn’t let her prey be forgotten, nor escape.

Above her lies a clear sight of the zipline throughout, and at some vantages could make out the distant raised roofs of the multistory Wisterun homes.

Glimpsing that distant settlement, a comment of Boleheva’s returns to Awelah.

“You said there were Duskhold refugees in Wisterun?”

“Ye.”

“Are there any… are we‍ ‍—‍ am I the first Duskroot vesperbane you’ve seen? Since the attack?”

“An attack? A bane force attack? Thought it was bad weather, or a world‍-​scar. But no, no vesperbanes seen till you three showed up. Maybe one of the kids is a pawn, but I doubt it. Ask Yan, he’d’ve seened it.”

“They attacked my clan, and all of Duskroot. I made it out alive but, I can’t be the only one.”

“Every detail you let slip makes me want to hear the full story. Don’t want to hear it twice, but if you’re not going to—” The ranger stops.

Above them, Makuja descends the zipline. Awelah doesn’t know why this merits attention, until she looks up herself, and sees it.

“She’s gonna fall. Bloody pits, and there’s not a chance to catch her.” Boleheva parts her eyes from the red nymph holding on to the zooming trolley, and regards Awelah. “Look, girl, there’s no time for stubbornness now. Climb on, or I’m leaving you here.”

Awelah doesn’t hope Makuja is injured. But if she is, and if Awelah were there and the former mercenary needed her help…

The pale nymph doesn’t wrap her forelegs around the yellow imago. Her lower four tarsi clutch the rope of Boleheva’s outfit, and she folds up her raptorials in front of her. Not a moment after, Boleheva lunges into motion, with speed that’d make Awelah’s running a standstill. The acceleration jerks the passenger, and forces her to hug closer to the ranger to not be tossed off.

Awelah had heard stories of vesperbanes in the northern swamps, or the forests to the south, who could cross the country in the treetops, never setting foot on the ground. One wonders if Boleheva had learned from them, as she jumps off metataxites, using their trunks or shelves to launch herself forward. The verticality is needed to clear bits of shrubbery and soar across some gullies, but, if the way even the larger the aboreals are left shaking in her wake, Boleheva needed to keep most of her weight on the ground.

Their first step is to walk perpendicular to the zipline cable, seemingly at a tangent to wherever Makuja had fallen. But once Boleheva crosses under the cable, she can follow its length as the hills wind down to Wisterun‍ ‍—‍ this would have to intercept Makuja’s falling place.

“Is that it?” Awelah calls out.

Boleheva slows before she responds. With the blur of motion easing, the pale nymph can look closer. There’s a telling crater of crushed moss, but Awelah had seen something else: a certain bit of leather lying at the edge of the clearing.

Climbing off, crossing the field and then bending down to pick it up, Awelah’s doubt vanishes. It’s a torn set of straps that would have been the harness, at one point. There’s blood on it.

“She must have dropped this. I can track her scent‍ ‍—‍ do you know anything about tracking?”

“Most o’ my problems come right at me. So no. If you think you can find her, by all means.”

Awelah looks back to the harness.

“You can leave that, though. I can get a new one made, that one’s clearly trash.”

Bloody harness falling behind them, Awelah and Boleheva set out in search of Makuja.

The Silverbane would have simply panicked. The Asetari would have flailed for a way forward and found nothing. Of the three of us, Makuja thinks, there is none more suited to once again face death. The thought is a still image in her mind as her foretarsi fail and she plunges into open air.

As she looks down at the dozens of meters that yawn between her and the ground, it’s not that she doesn’t feel fear. The weightless acceleration, the wind tearing at her antennae‍-​fluff, the aboreals limbs that don’t escape comparison to sharp weapons… no, she feels the nearness of death with her every sense. Yet just yesterday she stood at crippling height with nothing beneath her. This reprise is instead exhilaratingly familiar.

Faster, faster.

Like before, the gush of blood presages her myxokora, and it still hurts. But the blood knits together, and fibers become muscle become limbs and claws. How would they be best used? Catching hold of an arboreal might see them ripped right off. But if she put them beneath her, cushioning her fall? With how the liquid muscle formed and reformed, permanent damage couldn’t be a risk.

The other option she wielded, her blast‍-​jumping technique, would require so much more precision. There’s barely any mass to the air, and if she tried blasted with nothing beneath her‍ ‍—‍ throwing a knife straight down might give her as much thrust.

She started forming the tarsigns anyway. She doesn’t bother conducting the umbranerve through her midlegs; her raptorials would do just as well. Better, if it gave her even a hair’s more precision.

Her plan would play out best on flat ground, so she abandons the thought of catching an arboreal. The size of her myxokora limbs gives her room to adjust trajectory. She aims for a clearing, but at the speed she’s going, forming tarsigns at the same time, there’s no chance for ideal circumstance.

Moments later, a tree branch scratches across her wretched raptorials, wood snapping and muscle bleeding. But it’s her cue that the ground is near, and it’s time: Makuja makes the sign of release.

At point blank range, she would have gotten the most thrust, but timing like that is nothing but a wish. She lets go at a cautious distance to the ground.

⸢Bane blast!⸥

Black nerve erupts from her tarsi. It pushes her, and it pushes on the ground. She slows, and her forelegs bend back as she gets low enough to see pebbles, in time for her myxokora to be her cushion. To the feeling of muscle crushed beneath the force of seconds of freefall, blood bursting from its folds, there’s only one response Makuja can muster: the loud, harsh cry of a wounded animal.

The nymph wrests control of herself, rolls onto her back and goes silent. Her myxokora writhe and flex. They recover from their brutal compression with a speed that reminds her why the mantids of old thought of bat blood as animated by some principle surpassing natural life.

Ripping the leather harness off her, Makuja eyes at the tears and the age of the leather. Had it been ill fortune that she fell, or malicious design? The harness falls into her myxokora’s grasp, and the red claw curls tightly closed around it. She squeezes. If this had been an attempt on her life… how vulnerable are experienced vesperbanes to a knife in their sleep?

Yanseno called himself an umbracog and a sensor‍ ‍—‍ so her attempt would be no more than an elaborate request for death. Makuja’s only way forward would be fleeing, if she and her team were under true threat.

What would that threat be? No one present showed any awareness of Kuon’s plans‍ ‍—‍ except, what could reading an umbracog accomplish but misleading oneself?

Movement behind her. For all that she delved deep in thought, Makuja’s eyes remained sharp, her entire body pulsing and ready to act. The ferns had shifted behind her, and the red nymph snaps around to see.

White and green and every accent between the two patterns the cloth’s maelstrom of color‍ ‍—‍ so attention‍-​catching you see the attire before you see what wore it. A spinner ant, gray chitin around pure black eyes. The head is a sleek square and short setae rise in the center like a mohawk. Below, mandibles chew on the encircling cloth the way a nymph might chew on a shirt. Palps pull at the thread and antennae fold down to rub across it.

(To Makuja, it’s a mild sight. The ant, however, had pulled away the fern and witnessed a vesperbane, dark aura wafting off her forelegs, bloody clawed limbs bursting from her side, and a labrum raised to exposed mandibles‍ ‍—‍ every kind knew the sign of a diamantid ready to kill you.)

With one high “Eep!” of a chirp, it runs, and Makuja gives chase. The ant dodges around metataxites, weaving evasion in the twists and turns of its route. An ant could run for longer than a mantis, maybe even faster than a nymph like Makuja, but she works enervate into her legs as she moves. She plans a surprise for when the ant thinks it has closed to a safe distance.

Was it coincidence that the ant showed up right after what may or may not have been an assassination? Perhaps. But Makuja has questions the ant can answer, and if nothing else, she needs directions to Wisterun.

Where the small ant passes without issue, Makuja slides through mud, offbalance until a myxokora thrusts out to push off the ground. Steadied on her feet, Makuja has lost sight of the ant. But her waving antennae catch the faint sulphuric odor of alarm pheromone; the ant was kind enough to mark a trail.

All told, it was a momentary chase. There’s another chirp seconds later, and Makuja has one moment to wonder why. It shouldn’t be a surprise. As a rule, the eusocial kinds, spinner ants least of all, do not work alone.

The red nymph rushes forward and breaks out onto earth denuded enough it must be a trail. Four square heads turn her way, each a muted dark shade, and each shawled by garrish frayed fabric. The ant she pursued is panting, cringing inward as other ants move to surround it, a defensive formation. Two spinners rear up at her arrival, lifting forelegs into the air as their rear legs scrape some harsh warning. The third follows a moment later.

Makuja is undaunted and faintly annoyed by the threat. Facing the three ants arranged into a vague arrow pointed at her, shielding their winded comrade, she calculates. Her thorax leans forward and her weight falls onto her midlegs, whose tarsi splay and release the umbranerve she’d molded.

Deescalation would take too long, she thinks.

The vesperbane blasts forward, and her angle takes her to the left, toward the ant who’d been last to respond. Her myxokora lifts to put a wall between her and the lead ant while her raptorials close around the ant’s forelegs.

The ant scrapes high‍ ‍—‍ surprise and fear more than pain, because she doesn’t apply pressure enough to break anything. Makuja lifts it up, and even as it kicks, twists it around so she holds it around the alitrunk against her thorax. She palms a knife, and presses it to the ant’s neck.

At this range, at this angle, her myxokora or even her raptorials could be more deadly, more damaging. But the knife sends a clear message. The ants halt, the lead stumbling backward at the suddenness of her appearance. When the ants recover, the lead is wordlessly buzzing at her.

Makuja didn’t know what Boleheva or Yanseno planned, and there may be nothing she can do, no control she can exert to change it. She didn’t know if her teammates are safe, or if some new danger awaited them past the town’s gates. But she does know that a little pressure could kill this ant, and she knows the ants before don’t want that. It’s a little bit of power, and with that leverage she gets a little bit of control in how this plays out.

“Take me to Wisterun. Now.”