Serpentine Squiggles

Wisps and Pawns

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.

A Nymph and a Trap

Smaller, with big eyes and features defined by round shapes, the nymph looks up to her like the younger sibling to their elder. The refugee wears a look of calcined despair, of having lost everything yet gripping to one hope and determination. The nymph bears a look of emptiness, of having lost everything, of falling with nothing to hold on to‍ ‍—‍ like they look at her from down within an ever‍-​deepening pit. Somehow, her white eyes don’t look bright.

The refugee had asked the nymph why she should let them live. A nymph younger than her, and they don’t have an answer.

Awelah’s grip on the spear slacks, and her eyes darken with pigment as she looks at the nymph she’s threatening. For a moment, she’s not there. She’s in Duskroot, and she smells ash and blood. She hears the crackles of baneful fire, the pleading screams. She sees death and judgment.

The spear lowers, but it’s still pointing at the nymph.

“What are you doing out here?”

“I am gathering mint leaves. They will serve to make a salve. A roach nymph had hurt their leg running from a hound.”

Awelah’s messy antennae twist forward. “Where did the roaches come from?”

“Farmers from Duskhold. They tell me they supplied food to the stronghold of Duskroot, but now they flee… whatever had happened there. The region is dangerous now, and they believed I would be safer in their company.”

Awelah lowers her spear further. The second pawn had claimed their orders were to kill everything that crawls out of Duskroot‍ ‍—‍ and this nymph is not doing that.

“What’s your name?” the nymph suddenly asks.

The refugee is Awelah. “Awelah Asetari.”

There’s a look that flickers across their face. “I’m… I’m Makuja. Are you still going to kill me?”

Awelah stares. They look… pathetic. Awelah is struck by the thought that if she killed defenseless Makuja, she’d be just like her. “No,” she says. “Get up. Show me the roaches.”

Here stands one of the trees left in this countryside, roots carving into rock. Its branches are thick, but leafless and dead. Odd conic fungi grow underneath the boughs. They expand and contract as if breathing.

Beneath this tree, the roaches wait. The bugs are just barely bigger than the nymphal diamantids. They have bright chitin, faint reds and greens, and the largest pulls a small cart. They greet the mantids with waving antennae, rubbing against Makuja, but keeping distance of Awelah.

When Makuja introduces Awelah, a current of dread passes through the roaches, whose antennae jerk back like from shock. The roaches look between themselves, and then after a moment a matriarch kneels, followed by other roaches. “Honored Asetari, we thought you had all died.” Noble roaches don’t stridulate with their palps; they hiss through their spiracles.

Makuja asks why they would think that, and the mother roach replies that the noble clan of Asetari founded the Duskroot stronghold atop an enchanted mountain. Four days ago that cursed storm prowled in and an otherworldly destruction was visited upon the stronghold.

“Now Duskroot lies in ruins. Yet you are here. We thought the Asetari would have died protecting it.”

They watch Awelah silently, and she does not answer. Awelah casts her eyes down, antennae falling over her face. There was anger to be had at the insinuation, but shame, too.

The roaches turn back to hiss among themselves. Before they set off, the Mother directs one last question to Awelah: “We have no accommodations for a vesperbane, but if you can endure that, you may accompany us.”

Awelah stares at the light green face of this roach, meeting those dark eyes, and wonders what dwells behind them. Did she blame Awelah’s clan for the destruction that drove her and hers from their home? The mantis could scratch some rebuttal, felt the urge‍ ‍—‍ but that face… The Asetari had roachservants, maids who’d practically raised Awelah. Had.

Wary roach eyes turn to her, hearing her silence, seeing her hands clench into fists. But it’s not anger. Awelah had dwelt long on her family the past three days, but this touches a different, unexpected wound.

Unable to voice a reply, the nymph simply lowers her head‍ ‍—‍ what might be a single nod, or a small bow. It’s a level of deference a roach farmer would certainly never expect from a mantis, let alone a clan mantis. When the journey resumes, Awelah follows.

Long stretches of the road pass with roaches humming folk songs in their spiracles. The pale nymph has fallen back at a distance, far behind the convoy of roaches, where they cannot see her.

That night, Awelah sits on a rock while the roaches sleep. She stares above, to where stars struggle to shine through a dark sky. In the shadows, Makuja watches her.

In the morning, the roaches serve the diamantids vegetable stew. Unwilling to eat it, Awelah leaves to hunt a beetle with her spear, and she returns to share it with Makuja. The roaches watch this, uneasy.

They travel north across Duskhold. Language presents friction, but Awelah has long lived with roach servants, understands their speech well enough. She tells them of traveling on foot through the heaviest parts of wispfall, and is met with disbelief and question after question as to how she survived. She doesn’t mention the pawns. In return, the roaches fill air with stories or warnings about menacing shadows and howls of beasts that haunt the nights, and dour talk of neighbors who disappeared all asudden. Her antennae work as she listens, recalling their nonsense talk of Duskroot being “enchanted,” or the wispfall being “otherworldly.”

The conversation stirs trembling anxiety in the roaches, and the pace of their walking slows. It reaches an intolerable point, and the mother roach calls for an end to it and leads them into a new song. They recant legends of a vesperbane in a nearby land, whose will shapes the very earth‍ ‍—‍ this, Awelah decides, is at least believable.

The sun crosses to its apex in the sky, blocked at times by the clouds and wisp‍-​masses that linger above. Awelah breaks from the roaches now, spear ready. Makuja comes with her, this time. Together, they venture into a field of dust and leaf litter crunching like old bones. Row after row of trees stand as cenotaphs to another time.

Awelah catches movement and a distressed purring. They find a fuzzy jumping spider caught in a trap, struggling to free itself. The red nymph steps forward, but a pale foreleg stops her.

“Are you hungry enough to eat a salticid?” Neither nymph says it, but instead speaks someone unseen.

“What choice do we have? You wanna try eating wisp‍-​choked rations again? Unodha didn’t prepare us for a fucking nervestorm.”

When they appear, Awelah recognizes the brigandine. More pawns.

They’re going to kill the jumping spider‍ ‍—‍ and they’re going to try to kill her, if she lets them sneak up on her again. It’s a fight.

The leaf litter means they can’t surprise the pawns. Like the last one, they wield weapons‍ ‍—‍ one a raptorial ax and another a sword. Awelah’s skilled, but not skilled enough to fight two pawns at once. She hits one with a stab through center mass, but this gives the other pawn a chance to come down hard with an overhead ax swing.

But Makuja lunges into Awelah, prothorax turned to take the brunt of the attack. Her momentum disrupts the swing, but she still gets an ax carving into her.

The small nymph doesn’t cry out as she falls.

Makuja’s sacrifice gives Awelah the chance to seize the initiative and push back the other pawn, but given the choice between pursuing them or checking Makuja, Awelah lets them escape. Awelah kneels by Makuja’s form, applying pressure to the wound.

“Why would you risk your life for me?” Awelah asks.

“The way you act,” she starts. “You have purpose. A drive‍ ‍—‍ it would be an ugly thing if you were denied the chance to fulfil it.”

“A purpose.” Awelah considers the words. She remembers the fire, and what burned. “Of course I do. But what about you? You are a diamantid. You are a predator, like a wolf. A wolf is strong enough to live on their own, for their own sake.”

“Wolves hunt in packs.”

Awelah shakes her head. “Even a packwolf wouldn’t sacrifice themselves.”

Atop a hill, you can see the roaches wait for the mantids to return. Watch their antennae stretching out in concern as they spot Makuja, watch her slow, ginger walk, and Awelah assisting her. Hear Awelah demand something to bandage her wounds with.

The roaches, of course, ask what happened. Awelah has to explain the attacks from the pawns, all of them.

“Where there are pawns,” the mother roach says, “there are vesperbanes. Wretches and fiends, monsters hunting for your blood. The same curse that befell the mountain hangs over you, little mantis. But we… we cannot withstand more destruction, honored Asetari.”

Awelah hears the request in between the words. Please go. The refugee’s eyes darken, and she stands, and she leaves.

She splits from the path, and walks back into the dead forest of grave trees. She hears a crunch behind her. Someone following her.

It’s Makuja.

“What are we doing now?” the smaller nymph asks.

“I’m done being hounded, put on the backfoot by these pawns. What are we doing?” Awelah echoes. “We are wolves. We will hunt.”

The leaf litter makes tracking the footsteps of the pawn easy. They cross out to the other side of the forest. The edge of the forest overlooks a hill that rolls down to a craggy expanse dotted with pools and streams. They smell the lingering scent of smoke from a fire.

A camp. “There could be more than one remaining,” the pale nymph says.

Makuja asks if they’re still going to hunt them.

“Of course. But we need a plan,” Awelah says. “The camp must be hidden among the rocks, but it is nearby. Wait until dusk, and then strike from the shadows.” Awelah looks at Makuja, peering, face conflicted. “Do you want to risk your life for me again?”

Makuja pauses, some doubt or calculation deep within those white eyes. But she speaks steady and says, “I shall serve.”

At last, the sun sets. In the dark, they pick out the glow of the campfire, and set the plan in motion.

Makuja walks up to the camp from the most obvious point of ingress. Awelah’s startled by how silently the nymph moves.

Once at the entrance to the camp, having clearly gotten the attention of any watch, she’ll be intercepted by the pawns. With their attention, she’ll spin a story of having been abandoned by Awelah, and seeking protection, even offering to help them get back at the pale nymph.

While this is happening, Awelah sneaks around from the back, well hidden by the blackness of their cloak. She’ll use her stealth to pick off any sleeping pawns, and backstab any focusing their attention on Makuja.

There are four pawns in the camp. Awelah pauses by the first she finds, eyes covered as they sleep soundly in a bedroll. Her spear is out, and it wouldn’t take much for at all to put the blade through the eye. It should be easier than all the fights she’s won (or less) today.

But Awelah smells the smoke, hears the fire. Was it easy for her?

The nymph takes her eyes off her target, glancing to where Makuja should be causing a fuss. The bright tongues of a small campfire catch her eye easily‍ ‍—‍ and contrasts against the shadow of the meat it’s cooking. Awelah recognizes the body shape, and even the color of the chitin as it blackens.

She knows what happened to the roaches’ neighbors, then.

Her eyes are on the roach, when she thrusts her spear forward. She isn’t cutting down the innocent, she’s taking vengeance. This is good practice.

That pawn is left bleeding out in their sleeping bag. The next gets metal through their heart as they sit by the fire, sharpening a weapon.

Things go off the rails when Awelah comes up behind the two at the camp entrance, who now turn round with Makuja in tow. They see Awelah, see the blood on her spear, and intuit what’s going on.

The response is surrender. They explain that they’re the last ones‍ ‍—‍ “You’ve killed all of us. Even if we took you in now, our master’s displeasure is inevitable.”

“If you tried to to take me in now, I would kill you,” Awelah says.

“Exactly. So let us go,” the pawn says. They put down their weapons.

“Won’t your master just come after me now?”

“Of course. We have orders, after all. But we’ll… we’ll desert. She’ll think we’re still handling it. That’ll give you a headstart. Our master has more important things to handle out here. You might be able to slip away. Please.”

Awelah looks to Makuja, and the hollowness still in her gaze. Awelah lowers her spear. “Get out of here. If I see you again, I’m killing you.”

Two nymphs sit alone in one of the tents. Awelah is changing Makuja’s bandages, cleaning the wound.

She watches blankly, and eventually asks why she’s doing all this. Why she’s bothering.

Awelah says that she already decided she wouldn’t kill her. “What’s the point, if I go on to let you die?”

They sleep next to each other, and Awelah notices Makuja sleeps with a knife beside her.

In the morning, vesperbanes attack the camp.

A Bloody Wolf

Ooliri had never been on a C‍-​rank mission before.

Every mission that took banes‍ ‍—‍ and it had to have banes‍ ‍—‍ outside of the safety of the stronghold walls was a C‍-​rank at least. Even if combat or politics wasn’t mentioned in the brief.

Ooliri is staring down the reason why.

The direhound roars, crouching, and then it leaps for his vulnerable neck. The pawn is freezing up.

And that’s why I haven’t been promoted yet, he thinks.

A metal mass cracks against the hound’s skull mid‍-​jump. It falls limp and bleeding. Well, the direblooded are always bleeding. But it’s blood that flows rather than crawls.

The metal mass is attached to a staff, held by a diamantis with Ooliri’s same gray‍-​green chitin, same golden yellow antennae, and a welkinmark between them.

Oocid smiles and firmly pats his coxa. “Breathe, brother. I’ve got your back.”

His abdomen rises and falls, and his right raptorial is taken in the nymph’s grasp.

“Do you remember how to hold your baton?

Consciously, Ooliri tightens his grip.

“Do you remember how to swing it? Get ready, it’s standing back up.”

The direhound is panting, but still has fury in its eyes.

“Let’s give it a try.”

And, with his older brother guiding the swing, with him providing half the force, Ooliri knocks down the hound.

That doesn’t kill it. That happens when a brown nymph with burnt‍-​orange antennae comes up, and plants a sword right in the beast’s bulging heart.

“You’re wasting time,” she says.

“This is partly a training mission, Fihra.” Oocid directs Ooliri to hang his baton at his side. The older nymph steps away, graceful in flowing red and white robes.

“Was that the last one?”

“I took out the other two,” the orange‍-​antennae’d nymph replies.

Oocid nods. “Did anyone get hurt?”

Ooliri looks around to see if any of the other two pawns say anything. Then, hesitating, he lifts his foreleg.

Oocid curls antennae in concern. “Let me get that.”

He grabs a ritual knife and slits the palm of his tarsus, then his fingers contort into tarsigns. He has to make the full sequence of ten, then blood crawls out from the wound, over his flesh, deep red rather than mantid green. Empowered, the ichor of vesperbats grows brighter in the air, much brighter than blood exposed to air should. Then, it clears, transparent and pure.

Oocid’s mandibles crunch in concentration as he presses the hand to his brother’s wounds and closes them.

And that’s why I was supposed to be good enough to promote, Ooliri thinks. Oocid was only one instar older than him, and he was already using ⸢Serum Form: Pure Healing Palm⸥ in the field.

At Ooliri’s age, Oocid had already been promoted from pawn to wretch. They were both supposed to be the great prodigy sons of the Arch‍-​Sovran Silverbane, legendary knowledge‍-​hunter.

And he couldn’t even hold a baton straight.

“Excellent work, my little nymphs.” Their mentor steps forth, wearing the gray vest with the Windborne Stronghold insignia, four spirals arranged in a diamond. The same symbol, etched on the blood‍-​iron plate, adorned her antennae‍-​band. “This is why you never drop your guard when traveling the heartlands.”

It’s why every mission that left the safety of a stronghold was at least C‍-​rank: the world‍-​scars. Direbeasts were merely the most common, least threatening of the horrors plaguing this land.

And one had nearly killed Ooliri.

“Who can tell me what exactly this is? Was, rather,” their mentor asks after calling them all to sit before her. Oocid’s antennae perk up‍ ‍—‍ “I’d like to hear from one of the pawns, if you please.”

Through his goggled eyes, Ooliri glances at the other two, one shrinking down and the other tapping antennae nervously.

Cautiously, Ooliri lifts a leg.

“Yes, darling?”

“It’s a maned wolf, madam.”

“What do they eat?”

“They mostly live on a diet of fruits and smaller bugs.”

“Then why attack us?”

“It wasn’t just a maned wolf, madam. It’s infected with the direblood, which turns any mammal into a vicious predator.”

“And how do we deal with direbeasts once they stop moving?”

This time, all the pawns have an answer. “Burn them.”

“Adequate answers. But there’s more to these beasts in particular, I suspect. Pawns, set up camp. Oocid will need a meal after so much bloodletting.”

“Madam, it was only a few cuts I healed—”

“Oh, I don’t mean that. Dissect these beasts, and taste their ichor. I expect a full report of your findings.”

The pawns get to work under a sky still dark with clouds and black orbs. At least the wisps had stopped falling this morning. But the sunless land still felt desolate.

In the horizonward distance, you see the crags and creeks of the Duskhold territory. They could reach it by day’s end. Then they could start carrying out their mission.

As the banes and pawns eat packaged meals prepped over a fire, Oocid is sharing his findings.

“They’re arete‍-​touched,” he says. “This isn’t the result of natural direblooded infection. A vesperbane did this.”

The mentor is nodding. “I knew something was wrong.”

Ooliri can’t help asking: “How? What tipped you off?”

She points out toward Duskhold. “Tell me, what do you see in that country?”

“Hills… grassy hills? Crags from erosion, so streams, creeks, I’m not sure what you’re looking for, here.”

“Exactly that, darling. It’s a healthy land, more or less. Not many trees, but there are some, and the mountains are kilometers distant. And it’s late spring! Given all that, how in E’yama’s name is there a wispfall? A wispfall that lasted three damn days?”

Ooliri thinks to what his brother just said. “It’s a bane’s work too. But that would take…”

“Shadowcalling,” their mentor finishes gravely. She looks out, not to Duskhold, but the plains they had just crossed.

“Navera better not have sent us to die. Pray the prophets this just a C‍-​rank.”

The mentor is scraping out orders, tone buzzing high. “Fan out. Check the tents.” The team has marched upon a camp where two dead bodies are still lying around.

The noise spurs motion. The flap of a tent is opening. Awelah emerges. Makuja is behind her, the glint of a knife visible in her hands.

“Threat spotted. Fihra, engage.”

The wretch with burnt‍-​orange antennae rushes at the pale purple nymph.

Awelah has time to get her spear up‍ ‍—‍ having started unfolding it as soon as she saw the fiend‍ ‍—‍ and she blocks a swing of Fihra’s sword.

The pale nymph never gets a chance to attack; she’s buried under a rain of blows. Some she blocks, and some quick and weak blows break through her guard. In seconds, it is clear: this nymph, who had taken down half a dozen trained pawns, is utterly outmatched.

Fihra hadn’t even used any vespertine arts; just her hands and a sword.

The fight’s over when the wretch throws out a foreleg to wrap like a vice around Awelah’s. She’s pushed to the ground by the novice bane’s weight, and another foreleg seizes another limb, completing the lock. It doesn’t matter if Awelah gives up; she can’t move.

Makuja’s knives are nowhere to be seen; she’s now kneeling before Oocid, having surrendered in the course of Awelah’s fight.

“Stand down and face judgment. You are hereby detained under suspicion of defection against the Pantheca. Laymant, are these the bandits?” That last line wasn’t for Awelah, but for a mantis hidden safe behind the banes. They tentatively step forward.

“You!” Awelah says, struggling against restraint, making Fihra suddenly redouble her grip. “Why aren’t you killing me?” The mantis who stepped forward‍ ‍—‍ it was one from the camp, whom she’d spared.

The mentor arches one antennae. “There is no warrant out for your execution.”

“Beetleshit! Your pawns have been hunting me for days now, Unodha.”

At this remark, Makuja’s expression flickers.

“There has been a misunderstanding, then,” the mentor says. “Allow me to grant you context. I am Emusa Rutabrood, fiend mentor under the Windborne Stronghold’s countenance. We’re here because communication lines with Duskroot went dark days ago, followed by anomalous nervestorms in the region. Team nineteen‍ ‍—‍ that’s us‍ ‍—‍ were dispatched to assay the damages and provide emergency relief to any refugees we find, escorting them back to Solaroch.”

“I am a refugee!” Awelah says. “I was there, I watched my home get destroyed, and now you’re detaining me for defection against the Pantheca?”

“Your name?”

“Awelah Asetari.”

The mentor’s gaze flickers to her chitin, pale violet tint visible despite the grime and dirt. “Thought so. Release her, Fihra. The story checks out.”

“You’re buying it just like that?”

“You don’t have the diplomatic briefing I do. I know what a member of the noble clan of Asetari looks like, and I was advised personally to give any Asetari refugees high priority.” Rutabrood looks at the bug with orange antennae. “That was an order, wretch.”

Fihra complies. But Awelah’s eyes are on the traitorous pawn who led them here. But it seems she was the only one; they’re taking this moment to slip away from their baneful entourage.

Awelah shouts alarm with her spiracles, but the mentor raises a tarsus.

“They’re getting away!”

“Let them.”

“Aren’t you going after that lying sack of shit?”

“Outside of mission parameters. You and your companion are our concern.”

“They tried to kill me, and will try again.”

“Do you not trust banes of the Windborne Stronghold to defend you?”

Awelah looks to Fihra. The wretch smiles, baring her mandibles.

“Come on, let’s get you out of here.”

Awelah and Makuja join the vesperbanes on the road, and journey on‍ ‍—‍ but in the distance, they hear wolves howling.

A Beleaguered Journey

Upon a sheer hill, dark filaments rise up to the heavens. You can see for kilometers in the distance. There’s a far away lake or large pond, and near the horizon, there’s a hint of farmland.

Atop this cliff, the pawns‍ ‍—‍ Ooliri and two others‍ ‍—‍ sit in meditation. Oocid guides them, while the mentor stands off, regarding Awelah.

“I watched you fight Fihra,” she says. “You’re trained. You were going to be a vesperbane, yes?”

“It was my purpose.”

“And now, the banehold that would have countenanced you is…”

“It’s gone. All of it.”

“Yes. So, what now, Awelah? What is your new purpose?”

Awelah’s eyes darken in a way that the fiend looking at her, years of exposure to all the menace real monsters offer, can only find cute. “I will hunt down whoever is responsible for this, and I will find out why, and I will avenge my clan.”

The fiend nods. “For that, you’ll need the power the vespers grant, and for that, you’ll need the countenance of a banehold. The Windborne Stronghold is the strongest of all the provincial baneholds. It welcomes new vesperbanes, and one of your bloodline…”

“If it will make me stronger, then I will have to accept.”

“What does being stronger mean, to you?”

Awelah pauses to think for a moment, eyes distant. Then, “Do you know… have you ever heard of a vesperbane that can walk through fire without being burned? Travel through blazing flames without crossing the intervening distance?”

“Ah, you’ve heard the stories of the One‍-​Winged Phoenix? The ashbane with an unpaired aviform myxokore… They are a mighty vesperbane. Is that your ideal?”

“How strong would I have to be to be better than them? Defeat them?”

“You… There are some banes it’s best not to compare yourself to. The Phoenix is heir to the great Thimithi clan, and a once‍-​in‍-​a‍-​generation talent‍ ‍—‍ she was the youngest bane to be admitted into the Arch‍-​fiend Selection Exams, the youngest to win, though they refused to promote her. Even if she were a normal vesperbane, she’s a fiend and you are a pawn. That’s enough of a headstart you might never catch up before one of you dies‍ ‍—‍ and, it’s there in the name, rumor has it the Phoenix can’t die. Mere training won’t beat greater training‍ ‍—‍ so I advise against besting your heroes being your goal.”

Awelah scowls at that.

“Lighten up, little nymph. I’m sure you’ll become a strong vesperbane in your own right. Now here, if I’m going to put a recommendation in for your enrollment, I want an idea of what Duskroot was teaching you. Fihra, come here. I want the two of you to spar. No weapons, no injury. Ready?

Without her weapon, without a foe who’d just woken up, and without the need for an efficient, immediate takedown, Fihra doesn’t cleanly outmatch Awelah. It’s still no puzzle which one of them has the greater physical power, and seasons more training. Awelah puts in a good showing, but her struggle against the wretch imparts her with mounting frustration. Her temper only makes her easier to shut down. The mentor watches on, antennae working in thought.

The other pawns gathered nearby, sitting with abdomens to the ground, and Oocid is guiding them through meditation.

“…and breathe out. Come back to me now‍ ‍—‍ what did you feel?”

One pawn shrugs, and another stridulates negation. Ooliri is the odd one out‍ ‍—‍ when am I not?‍ ‍—‍ feeling what might be unmistakable success. But if anyone could mistake it, he might.

None of the three pawns were quite of the laity, even now. Each had a single vesper nursed within their guts. A vesperbane had at least two; but traditionally, a pawn is given one vesper first, to give the body time to adjust, to see if they are found wanting in the vespers’ judgment.

A vesper feeds on a diamantids’ victual offerings, consuming them to bind arete, the foundation of a veserbane’s power. It’s energy stored in dense, umbral fatty tissue. Even a pawn with one vesper produces arete.

If arete is stored caloric energy, it should be within even a pawn’s power to withdraw. That was the goal of this meditation. The vesperbanes had eaten breakfast; the pawns had not.

Ooliri hadn’t eaten breakfast, and he felt full.

“So you succeeded, little brother?”

He nods. “But that’s not enough to get promoted, is it?” He hated the tone of hope that crept from somewhere into his tone.

The response is a click of mandibles. “It’s progress, certainly. But a vesperbane is a balance of mental and physical excellence. You’ve never been wanting in mental regards‍ ‍—‍ so to be promoted, you need to improve physically.” His eyes lose their focus on his brother. “I’m going to give you three a break, then we can try again later?”

When the wretch leaves, one pawn turns to Ooliri. Her name is Mita. “How. How did you do it? What are you doing differently?” Ooliri’s goggles are hanging around his neck. Without them, the world is blurry, expressions hard to parse.

He pauses a moment to consider where to start. “Relaxation is the first step, right? What calming image do you focus on to get there?”

The other pawn’s eyes flush, as if it were embarrassing. “Uh, I remember the day my mom walked me to the academy. I think about what she’ll say when I come back as a real vesperbane. Uh. Something like that. Like, thinking of your mother‍ ‍—‍ that’s got to be calming for anyone, right?” Mita finishes, defensively.

“Oh.” Ooliri is now thinking of his own mother. Wasting away from disease, dying of a condition father had thought he could save her from. A condition he probably could (or did) discover how to fight, in the end. If only they could decode his notes‍ ‍—‍ if only they could finish his research. Silverbane thought he could save anyone. Everyone.

“Sorry,” the other pawn is saying, and it sounds distant from this deep in Ooliri’s thoughts.

They’re traveling east along a dirt road, stopping regularly to let the pawns rest. Fihra isn’t impressed by Awelah hunting beetles with her spear‍ ‍—‍ but saving her the work, that’s convenient, she concedes. Ooliri gives the fresh kills strange looks, and shies away from eating them even as the other diamantids eagerly take them to pieces.

That night, they hear the howling of direbeasts again. When they make camp, they split into watches. The banes keep watch for direbeasts and bandits, while the pawns are told to keep an eye on Awelah and Makuja. It’s Fihra and Ooliri who get the watch in the middle of the night.

The sound of distant wolves howling haunts the night air. They swear they can see shadows crossing the distant countryside.

Is the howling getting louder? Fihra hears something and gets up to investigate.

Ooliri, meanwhile, is all but nodding off. He’s brought back to attention by Awelah.

Something’s wrong.

Ooliri asks why she’s awake.

Awelah hasn’t slept well in five nights. Thus, she noticed when Makuja got up, but assumed it was to relieve herself. It’s been a while‍ ‍—‍ Awelah counted to a thousand‍ ‍—‍ and the other nymph hasn’t come back.

“I’m going to look for her,” she states simply.

Ooliri can only follow behind. It’s opposite the direction Fihra went.

When they do find her, she’s on the ground, forelegs bound, and the pawns from earlier stand above her. Awelah rushes forward.

There’s a trap, and she trips it, getting caught in a net.

Awelah still manages to sound demanding. “You have me, now. Let her go.”

“No, I think our master will want both of you.”

Ooliri thinks. They’re some distance from the camp. Screaming for help isn’t the smartest thing to do in a night with direbeasts on the prowl. Would it work in the short term, thought? But Makuja was at the pawn’s mercy. What might they do, if Ooliri panicked them? So, not good in the short term, good in the medium turn, bad in the long term.

If he were more like Oocid, Fihra or even Awelah, this would be so much easier. Would this be already over, if Ooliri had the guts to act when it mattered?

Oocid’s words return to him. To be worthy to be a vesperbane he didn’t need to think better, but to do better. He reaches for his baton.

He wonders if the energy from his vesper would help. Probably not.

He draws a breath, and then runs forward. They didn’t prepare more than one trap, almost as if they expected only one to come here.

Ooliri swings the baton like his brother taught him. It cracks against his foe’s chitin. Fear is already flooding his mind when he gets a closer look at the weapons the pawns are wielding.

Then something happens when they’re distracted, advancing toward Ooliri as he backs up. Makuja is bursting up from where she lay on the ground, cut ropes falling off her limbs.

The first thing Ooliri registers is the bleeding, the pawns falling over. Then he sees the knives in Makuja’s grasp. She’s kneeling, and slitting the necks of fallen pawns.

“Y‍-​you’re killing them?”

Makuja just looks up at him with those empty white eyes. “Why do you sound so shocked? Are we not predators?”

“No, no. We’re beings. With thoughts, emotions, souls. They‍-​they were too. And you… killed them.”

“They were threatening us, so I made us safe. It is good for an axe to cut through wood, and it is good for a vesperbane to cut down the enemy.”

“Their life… Every life matters, Makuja. Weren’t you taught that?” he says. “I came to your defense because you matter‍ ‍—‍ you defended us because we matter. I don’t think anyone… anyone should have to die.”

They look at each other for a moment, but Makuja doesn’t have a reply, and Ooliri goes to help Awelah down out of the net trap.

Makuja looks thoughtful all the while, and her grip tightens around her knives.

A Hunter and a Dead Bug

Gaze upon mangled roach corpses. They’re familiar: the faint reds and greens, the mother’s face that once regarded Awelah sadly, now ripped away.

“You said the hounds were bane’s work, Oocid?” Fihra’s saying. “No fucking kidding. More and more of them, and they just keep getting closer. Feels like we’re being hunted, doesn’t it?”

“Get used to it,” Awelah scrapes. “Thought you noble Windborne banes were going to protect me?”

Fihra smiles with her teeth.

“Kindly quit it, dears,” the mentor cuts in.

“If we are being hunted,” Oocid starts, “the question is what to do about it.”

The mentor leans back, watching her wretches work through it.

“Any bane that could make direbeasts has got to be out of our league.”

“Any bane that hides behind minions is weak,” Awelah says. “It shows they lack the confidence to take on their prey directly.”

“Sure. And if you want to wade through a pack of direhounds to get to this weakling, be my guest, princess.” Fihra smiles at Awelah again, and the pale nymph scowls back.

“So our options so far would be… tracking down the bane behind the beasts, or run and hope they lose our trail.”

“Or were never on it.” The quiet voice is Makuja. “We’re assuming we keep feeling the hound’s presence because they’re after us‍ ‍—‍ but if it’s simply coincidence?”

“The pawns spoke about a master giving orders to kill all Duskhold natives. I am a Duskhold native. There is something out there hunting me.”

Oocid nods. “Pawns imply a bane, and the hounds imply a bane, and the hounds are fulfilling the pawn’s mission. All the pieces fit.”

Makuja backs off and says no more.

“I am satisfied with your analysis.” The mentor is all grim seriousness now. “We are returning to Solaroch at top speed. We are not prepared for an engagement with unknown hostiles.” The mentor reaches in their bag.

“Soldier pills?”

“You’ve learned how to use them? Oocid? Fihra? Good. Each of you pick up one of your teammates. I’ll carry the rest.”

The two nymphal banes are only big enough to carry one. Their mentor is much bigger. A pawn climbs on and wraps their closed forelegs around her, followed by Makuja. Awelah is reluctant to be carried like a child.

“Just do it, princess.”

It is faster. Over an hour, they see the hills and pits near the Spider’s Spine give way to the plains as they venture into the southern plains of Windhold.

It’s while running along a ridge that they see it. The ridge flattens down on one side to a small lake. And along the shore of that lake, a fight.

It must have started at great range. On their side of the lake arrows stick out of the sand at increasing frequency. A cloaked figure is advancing. From under their cloak, a trio of black orbs fly out, reminiscent of the wisps.

Their target strikes an imposing figure, even from this distance. Thick cords of muscle are visible between plates of chitin. They stand a head taller than any imago‍ ‍—‍ including their mentor.

In one instant, they kick forward, and an impressive spray of rocks and sand fly up. The innumerable small particles must destabilize the black orbs, and they lose momentum and are pulled down by absorbed mass. The kick sent the big bug back, too, so all three fall short.

They’re holding a huge bow. While gazes were distracted by the trajectory of the orbs, they had nocked, aimed, and launched a pair of arrows. In less than a second.

The cloaked figure dodges with an ethereal deftness. The arrows fly faster than any nymph can track, and still go wide of the target.

The banes above run faster, hoping to pass unseen. They might have. But the dodge of the ghostly figure briefly throws up their thick cloak.

Just enough for Awelah to catch a glimpse of their chitin‍ ‍—‍ a pale, subtle violet, just like hers.

“My clan!”

The only thing securing Awelah was willingly clinging to Makuja. She lets go. It’s a rough landing, due to the mentor’s great momentum.

Awelah stands and runs as fast as she can down the steep slope of the ridge, unfolding her spear.

Meanwhile, the two strange banes continue closing to melee. This much closer, each has less time to dodge the others’ attacks.

Now a few things happen in a very small window of time.

The archer crouches, and the cloaked one tenses, but when they make a massive leap, it’s toward Awelah.

Before they get there, though, Awelah is yelling. “Asetari!”

The cloaked bane glances at her.

That moment of inattention is exploited. They nock an arrow midair, and it flies true.

The other Asetari doesn’t move. Their hands are running through a short series of signs.

“⸢Astral form: Umbral Body Projection!⸥”

It’s like a physical shadow flying out from under the cloak. It floats between Awelah and the archer for one second.

Awelah had been prepared to thrust her spear at the incoming bane.

But then the shadow makes one tarsign.

It says nothing, but Awelah easily identifies the technique. One of the basic four spells wretches learn: ⸢Umbra Form: Bane Blast!⸥ Something between a punch, a small explosion, and an impulse of raw force.

The archer is shoved back.

Then the shadow spins in the air, and grabs Awelah by the spear, pulling her towards the now‍-​advancing cloaked bane.

“Awelah? You survived.”

Awelah makes an inarticulate sound at hearing a familiar voice. Her uncle, Honarari.

The other Asetari moves to stand between Awelah and their enemy.

“If my niece is watching… I suppose I’ll have to show just what made this clan noble. ⸢Asetari Style: Shell Game Technique!⸥” The bane’s cloak had looked thick, and it’s because beneath the cloak lay other cloaks.

There’s what looks like an illusion of tearing, and two identical figures fly out from underneath, both with their own cloaks, and each one of them like that physical shadow. The cloaks tighten around them, and they repeatedly swap positions as they advance, rearranging themselves faster than Awelah’s eye can track.

The enemy bane, who still hasn’t landed, simply nocks and fires three arrows at once, piercing all three forms. The shadows seem to waver, but they all persist.

“What? One of those had to be your real body.” The other bane is landing with three legs on the ground, staring down the two Asetari.

“Oh, it’s a clan secret.”

Each of the shadows move to surround them, throwing out punches and attempted grabs, all moving at speeds only high level vesperbanes can track. The other bane twitches back from the shadows’ touch, and they land several hits. There’s a unity to them that exceeds mere coordination; as if the archer fights one enemy with three bodies. When the larger mantis backs off, you don’t need the expression of wide, extended antennae to tell that the larger bane had underestimated them.

The shadows regroup and then fan out around the panting mantis. “Witness the power of the Asetari bloodline. Our astral will is divided, but undiminished. Each of my projections acts with full autonomy. You are outnumbered by far. Give this up.”

“Outnumbered? Then you are ignorant of the name Unodha.” The vesperbane makes a sound in their gullet that should be impossible for an insect.

She howls.

And her hounds reply in turn.

“Come to me, my children. Our hunt will end.”

Her uncle makes a fourth projection to lead Awelah away from the fight, back toward the ridge.

Team nineteen is already coming after her.

“It wasn’t supposed to come to this. I’ll engage Unodha. Fihra, Oocid, protect Awelah. Get her out of here.” The mentor moves forward, and eyes go to the shadow guiding her.

The shadow has vague tints, coloring the light that refracts or reflects off it, hinting at her uncle’s expression. “This is goodbye, my child.” The sound is unnatural, coming from the absence of palps.

“No. No.”

“You will be the last of us on this plane. Make our spirits proud from where they watch you, yes? You have to rebuild our clan. You have to avenge us.”

“I will. But you could—”

A head shaken. “My time is borrowed even now‍ ‍—‍ and Unodha is beyond me. Here is my advice, child. Heed it. Tell no one your name. Trust no scourge in this land: they heard our pleas, and still let our stronghold crumble. The Anthimati clan is your enemy: take no offers from them, and grant them nothing. And do not fear the light of dawn.”

Awelah nods with a look of determination, committing the words to memory.

“And at last, I have a gift to give you.”

And then the shadow steps forward, into Awelah, and the nymph screams.

Moments ago, the mentor stepped forward to confront Unodha. She leaps, and from a height, rains down a hail of throwing knives with a single sweep of her forelegs. It’s a two dimensional volley, and Unodha easily positions to avoid it, but in so doing goes right where the mentor wants her.

Two well‍-​practiced tarsigns. A mouth yawning open. Then:

“⸢Ash Form: Flamespitter Technique!⸥”

A jet of some liquid or gas bursts from the mentor’s mouth, rocking her back in the air. Then it ignites, and a gout of burning fluid is crackling toward the archer.

When smoke and ash clears, it reveals a wall of beach silt pushed up to defend Unodha, made almost glassy by the assault.

The mentor eyes the wall. A sand form user?

The fight picks up rhythm after that. The mentor closes to melee, and wields a torch doused in oil. Under her will, the flame bends, flying out to lick the bane like an additional limb.

Three direbeasts bound in moments later, and Unodha commands them with barks. She wonders why they weren’t already accompanying their master‍ ‍—‍ then realizes: they had been tracking a bane whose signature technique was called shell game.

The bane holds out a limb towards the canines. Under an unseen force, their muscles swell and convulse like a pit of snakes. Spurs of bone split their skin and fur. The hounds have bulged to half again their initial size.

The mentor has time to form a string of tarsigns, seemingly to no effect, before a hound is charging at her.

The mentor grits her mandibles, and the battle rages on.

Awelah, recovering from whatever her uncle had done, feels heavier, but not very different. She turns to watch him fight. He has five projections now, and that seems to be his limit. It was enough to check the disadvantage imposed by the arrival of the three hounds‍ ‍—‍ but even with a numerical minority, Unodha was just a different caliber of vesperbane.

They all were, really. What were these wretches, these pawns, next to the techniques the imagos were throwing around? The mentor has seemingly given up on the flame spells, and instead repeatedly makes the signs for a technique that rips or distintegrates chunks of flesh from the hounds. Their meat just shifts around to fill the gaps. Her uncle uses the water of the lake to give solidity to his vantablack creations, wisp‍-​like orbs and spears that result in utter deliquescence when they land. It’s not enough to resist Unodha’s pressure. Her arrows flow true, and her hounds swipe through his shadows. One projection dissolves, and then another. He doesn’t cast more to refill their ranks.

Awelah sets her features and steps forward.

“You idiot!” Fihra says. “Why?”

“I watched my entire clan die. I can’t stand by and let another be… slaughtered.”

“What good are you to your clan if you are dead?”

She scowls. “My uncle’s gift… perhaps it made me stronger.”

Awelah is rushing off before any replies reach her.

Unodha gives a bark of a laugh. “I’m glad at least one of you is coming willingly to your death.”

But it wasn’t just Awelah‍ ‍—‍ now others are running after her, to stop her. But Awelah moves fast. She sees one of her uncle’s projections disengage and kick off from the ground, move in Awelah’s direction, but at the wrong angle to intercept her.

Unodha nocks an arrow and switches targets right before firing‍ ‍—‍ from the mentor to Awelah.

The arrow is let free.

Somehow, a pawn is jumping over Awelah.

The arrow hits their head. From the force of the arrow, the nymph’s head bursts into chunks of flesh. The cost of her life rains down onto Awelah.

Ooliri has a moment to think I wouldn’t have taken Mita to be the type for self‍-​sacrifice. And, How did she jump like that?

Fihra is scraping her chitin raw, stridulating loud. “How many have to die for you before you wise up and save yourself?” The wretch is grabbing the violet nymph with raptorial spines, making Awelah bleed from her grip.

Even still, she is fighting her, trying to inch toward the fight. “I can’t… lose another.”

“My niece, you don’t understand,” one of the projections is saying. “Do you know how I survived all of my projections being shot through center mass?”

Another arrow is flung and it’s well within her uncle’s speed to intercept it.

This time, the cloak falls away.

It’s not a mantis underneath.

Just painted leather animated by a shadow projection.

“I’m already dead.”

Awelah falls limp, unresisting as Fihra pulls her away.

Before Unodha has time to make another move, the mentor’s authoritative voice is calling out.

“Oocid, hear me? Do you remember all our objectives? I’m transferring mission command to you‍ ‍—‍ immediately.”

“Madam, what do you mean?” It’s Fihra asking. Oocid is just nodding seriously.

“Get out of here. Fast as you can.”

“Accepted your fate at last, Wardens bitch?”

“With the assurance of yours.”

The mentor begins forming tarsigns. It’s a long string of them. Unodha’s meaty antennae straighten in surprise, and she starts backing up.

“This must be—”

“Do you smell it, Unodha? Ever since you brought your hounds here… I’ve been filling the air with heavy flammable gas.”

Oocid watches her tarsi, and makes the connection at the same time as Unodha.

“—a suicide technique!” she finishes, while Oocid’s palps ghost the words, ‘Self‍-​immolation.’

Emusa Rutabrood’s last words are thus: “⸢Ash Form: Funeral Pyre.⸥”

And the world erupts.

An Overburn

The nymphs are blown back by the blastwave of the explosion. The beach becomes but ash and smoke.

“We need to run,” Oocid says.

The other nymphs are struggling to stand, recovering from the trauma of the blast.

Minutes later, they’re climbing up the slope they came down, but spare a glance behind them. The smoke and flames are clearing.

There’s two immediately conflicting facts.

A new pit yawns deep into the shore‍ ‍—‍ like Unodha had used a sand form technique to dig in and weather the blast. But there are two charred bodies above ground, one lying atop the other.

The worst is confirmed after a dread moment of watching. The rise and fall of an abdomen.

More than that: the back and forth of mandibles working to chew. Unodha, clinging to life, has the mentor’s entrails in her mouth and devours them.

After swallowing, more of her moves. We saw the prelude of this when she transformed the beasts. She swells, muscles crawling to life across her husk of a body and attaching to limbs, like a colony of worms wriggling and then biting down.

A mewling hound, caught at the edge of the blast, ambles over. It lies down, and Unodha rips out its throat and starts to eat it. Blood gushes and splashes all over her, and this just accelerates the restoration.

The nymphs start climbing again, faster, but it’s not enough.

By the end, Unodha looks more canine than mantid. The red flesh covers most of her. From her side, where an imago might have nonfunctional wingcases, instead two limbs unfold or evert, born of liquid muscle and skin.

You could call it a pair of bat wings, or gaunt claw arms, and neither would be incorrect.

The bane begins to step toward the ridge.

Oocid looks at the nymphs with him, and makes a calculation.

“Fihra, Ooliri, Yugen, with me. We’re fighting.”

“What?”

“No way she’s at full power after all that. We’ve still got soldier pills in us. Let’s go.”

“What about me?”

Oocid smiles, but something’s missing from it. “It is the duty of the Windborne Wardens to defend you. Remember that.”

He lets go, and slides down the slope.

Fihra goes next. Then the pawns.

Awelah almost follows. Then Fihra gives her a look.

Awelah and Makuja climb up to the top of the ridge and with how close Unodha now stands, team nineteen is in no position to see those whom they’re defending.

The nymphs stop even as Unodha is approaching, suddenly overcome.

It’s overwhelming. Standing before this monster. Yawning, incongruous maw of teeth. Serrated claws. Mass far beyond what a mantid frame should support. Blood crawling. Eyes that are the eyes of death.

“This feeling…”

“Killing fear. A will to maim and destroy so powerful it spills out, becomes palpable. Enough to paralyze the weak,” Oocid says.

“But it can’t stop us! We are Windborne!” Fihra yells and takes a step forward. The others, inspired, follow her example.

It’s dark on the battlefield. Lingering smoke hangs above them, casting shadows over them all.

At the front, Fihra engages with sword, and Oocid with his staff. Each is able to fend off either of the fiend’s wing‍-​claws.

The pawns make to encircle her, attack from her undefended flanks.

It’s an error. Unodha spins. Her hindlegs kick out, and claws dig into Yugen. You can see her gullet emerging, severed, from her thorax. Muscles spill out alongside everted tracheae still flaring, trying to convey breath. Her dorsal nerve is cut, and she cannot move. She falls, never to rise.

The monster’s forelegs, though, are reaching for Ooliri. Tarsus wraps tight around his neck and lifts him up. Oocid swings down with his staff, but Unodha’s arm could be a stone pillar for all the difference it would make. A wing‍-​claw brushes him aside, carelessly, leaving long gashes.

Two limbs reach for Ooliri, as a wing‍-​claw goes to the ground to support her. One grabs hold of his arm, pulling on it, and another is swiping for his abdomen, now hanging beneath him.

Even in this danger, there’s a part of him still analyzing. Why is she doing this? It doesn’t seem the quickest way to kill me. Oh.

She’s playing with us.

It’s the last thing Ooliri can think before his mind is lost to fear and pain. He feels something tearing in his arm, and wishes that was the worst. The monster is clawing at his abdomen‍ ‍—‍ it’s reaching, punching, in.

Ooliri feels his heart.

So does she.

Then she pulls. Rips the nymph’s heart out of his abdomen. Holds the bloody, bouncing thing for a moment while his brother watches. Squeezes it.

Eats it.

Oocid roars and charges at the fiend. He gets one swing and a sick crunch of his staff before a single full‍-​force punch to the head sends him flying back sliding and scraping across the ground. He doesn’t get up. His dear older brother doesn’t move.

Ooliri, still watching with darkening vision, tries to say something and cannot. He’s dropped, a discarded toy.

Fihra is the last one standing. She holds her sword high against the monster, undaunted like a hero.

“How does it feel to be the best of your sorry lot?” Uhodha gargles, barely intelligible. “To be the best, and still worthless? I don’t need to kill you. If you run screaming, I will let you escape.”

Fihra can only articulate two words. “You’ll pay.”

“I won’t.”

Fihra steps forward. She thrusts and sinks her sword into bleeding meat. Dodges around wing‍-​claws. Ducks under forelegs. Steps over kicks.

She truly is the best of team nineteen.

It’s not enough. She’s a wretch, and her opponent fought a fiend mentor while outnumbered and lived.

Tired, injured, and down her primary weapon, Unodha is still bigger, stronger, faster. Better.

She makes a sign. Fihra trips; the ground had sunk beneath her.

The nymphs lies there. She feels the killing fear reach a crescendo. She knows she’s lost. She sobs once.

Then Unodha’s leg comes down like a judge’s hammer on her head, and then her skull and eyes and brain is so much gore. Fihra is dead.

Ooliri, shadows dancing across his vision, watches this. Did his vesper have something to do with why he was still hanging on?

The last thing he sees, before a final darkness takes him, is Makuja climbing down the slope and slinking up to Unodha.

She doesn’t attack‍ ‍—‍ neither do. Makuja offers clothing.

It’s Awelah’s cloak. A single drop of blood falls from it.

Makuja looks up. Unodha nods at her.

And Ooliri watches her walk off with her master.

Then he does not see, and does not think.

A Servant, a Scholar, a Scion

Makuja is a good tool. She does what has to be done. When it requires violence, yes, but also when it requires patience.

That’s what sets her apart, she thinks. She isn’t just loyal. She’s clever.

Unodha’s other pawns are dead, and she lives. Why? Because she had a plan. She didn’t just join the others in marching like ants to their deaths.

She found refugees. Instead of killing them, she gained their trust, traveled with them. They would lead her to others. And when a great many refugees had banded together, there would have been a slaughter, and her master would have been proud of her plan.

And then she had shown up. The Asetari. It was doubly important to ensure no Asetari lived. But she’d seen her fight the other pawns. Makuja wasn’t a fighter. Makuja was an instar younger than her, half a head smaller. The Asetari had reflexes, and slept a weightless sleep, held up by nightmares.

Makuja wasn’t just violent, she was patient. So she waited. For the Asetari’s sake she took a safe blow that bled much but wasn’t terribly threatening. (That pawn had been surprised, hesitant, when he saw whom he was hitting.) This would gain the Asetari’s trust, let her get closer. She hadn’t expected the Asetari to care, to bandage her up just like she did. Makuja ought to kill her just for that.

She tried to let her fellow pawns escape when they raided their camp. But they were too afraid of Unodha to plan more deeply than taking the first opportunity they saw, every time.

She thought they’d learned a lesson, when they came to her with the plan of luring the Asetari out, into a trap. It nearly worked‍ ‍—‍ and then that Windborne pawn showed up. Confused her with lies. She killed both of her fellows‍ ‍—‍ at this point it was for the good of her and her master. It was just making things chaotic, keeping them around. A blade should never cut its wielder‍ ‍—‍ her master always said that. This mission had been a test, and she decided they had failed.

Success had been down to her, in the end. As always. But the Windborne banes made her plan intractable. How was she to kill the Asetari, when two of this ‘team nineteen’ were on watch every night?

But her master always made things simpler when she came around. Now they were all dead.

—‍ even the one with the goggles, who pretended to care about everyone‍ ‍—

Now they were all thankfully dead. Makuja had served her master well. She was a good tool.

She had the Asetari’s cloak to prove it, fresh with the blood of her master’s prey.

Unodha takes it, and sniffs it. She regards her tool with a slow nod, frowning.

“Why not bring me her head?”

Because her knife had trembled even as she finished it, and you would have seen the imprecision and hesitation of her cuts.

“Beheading is slow with my tools of choice. Speed in my returning to you was essential. You suffered gravely in your battle.” Perhaps she could attend to her master’s wounds, for once.

The battle was over, and with the octopamine fading, she watched the muscles that had crawled over her master’s form retract and shrivel away. It had been an advanced stage of the myxokora manifestation‍ ‍—‍ the wretched raptorials could only emerge in the heat of battle, when a vesperbane’s heart rate had elevated to extremes. To have encompassed so much of Unodha’s body…

“Will you survive?”

“Do not pity me. Did you sabotage your mission because you thought I was too weak to fight a couple of runts?”

No mission matters more than your master’s life. You told me that. “Forgive me, master. Shall I make camp and tea for you?”

“Do it. That shadowy ’cel claimed your target was the last of those fops. Let’s make sure.”

“We’re staying in Duskhold? It’s within mission parameters to return to our client now with what we’ve accomplished.”

Unodha grunts as she starts moving. She bends by the corpse of that ashbane she fought, retrieving something rectangular, untouched by the flames.

Makuja keeps talking. “Our recruits are all dead. Your hounds are dead. Your bow is beyond repair. You’re on the edge of death. No mission matters more than my master’s life.”

“We’re staying in Duskhold. We’ve got a mission to do.” The words are stated, and it’s missing the characteristic growl of her master. It’s unlike her.

Makuja meets her eye, and see something she’s never seen there before. Not emotion, but dark lines flowing across her compound eyes. An inscribed pentagram. Or is it a trick of the shadows, the lingering smoke? It seems to fade.

The nymph follows the bleeding imago in silence. At length, they stop and the red and black nymph sparks a campfire, and bows before leaving to gather herbs.

She’s a quick study, and had familiarized herself with the flora of Duskhold in preparation for this mission. She can tell sweet creep apart from paralytic ivy. Gather the spiral roots without the blight‍-​mites. Cut away the leaves of the red might, so similar to blood mint with deadly amounts of enervate.

While cutting the herbs, the force of her knife goes too far, and she draws her own blood.

A blade should never cut its wielder.

There is darkness.

When you die, there was nothing after. That’s why it was so scary‍ ‍—‍ it was the ultimate loss of all that matters. Some, clouded by mysticism, believed in a fiery Welkin deep in the earth where the flames of all our ancestors burn forevermore, and all were united and exalted. Some thought the umbral filaments were souls uplifted into the sky, to rejoin the stars and gods. Some thought the vespers themselves were our spirits reincarnated.

The only story father thought acceptable to believe was that, if someday a technique were devised to restore life to the lost, then there really was no death, only a long, uncertain sleep.

Ooliri’s thoughts are scrambled. He couldn’t help but think of metaphysics as the darkness came for him‍ ‍—‍ but if he was still thinking, it hadn’t come, had it?

“Wake up, little brother. Please, I have to speak with you.”

Or maybe there was something to the story of the Welkin?

“Oocid? How…? Is this the pure branch?”

“No… A technique… I saved you. I always have your back, little brother.”

“I watched you d‍-​die.”

“I miscalculated. Unodha… stronger than I thought. I faked death. She must not have been concerned enough to check.

“How am I…?”

“Your heart… you didn’t have one anymore‍ ‍—‍ so I gave you mine.”

“But… that means…”

“Yes. Only the vespers are keeping me alive, now. I know a little bit about venomotion, but I don’t have much arete left. So this is goodbye.”

“No!”

“Take my bag. You know what’s in it, how important it is. What we promised. It’s up to you to bring her back now. Keep father’s notes. And our secret objective… our real mission. Find the surgeon, father’s colleague. They escaped Duskroot before…”

“But… I can’t. You’re the genius. So you have to live. I can’t figure it out on my own.”

“Elders… family shouldn’t have to bury our youngers. You have more life ahead of you.”

“No! You’re better. Take your heart back, stupid brother.”

“Don’t want it. How could I live without you? Love you too much…”

“How could I live without you?”

“You have longer to learn… Remember how to hold your baton, Ooliri.”

“Please. You did all this… there has to be some technique you can use to save yourself now.”

“Maybe… but shush. You can’t hold your baton if I don’t get to work on that arm with the time I have left.”

Ooliri’s eyes pale as his vision fades to sleep.

When he again awakes, Oocid’s corpse is lying beside him, holding him, in death.

There is a bloody hound that must have attacked him, leaving a gaping wound in his abdomen. The hound is still, dead‍ ‍—‍ or if it was alive, Ooliri didn’t want to wake it. Not yet. He’d come back for Oocid’s bag. For now… he didn’t know if could he bear to disturb him‍ ‍—‍ his body. He reaches out as if to touch, then gives a startled look down at the arm he lost.

It’s not gone‍ ‍—‍ or rather, it’s replaced? Healed? It feels different. It’s all bandaged up, like a cast, and beneath it… skin and bone, no chitin.

There is a deeper darkness.

“A new spirit enters the astral plane‍ ‍—‍ and here I thought I was the last. Greetings, Asetari.”

The speaker is a shadow in the form of a mantis. Its head leans closer, peering at the new arrival.

“No… Awelah? No, you were our hope. You cannot have…”

It takes a moment for Awelah to move her palps, reach for her voice in this new form. “I was betrayed.”

“You were foolish. I thought… I thought I had done enough to secure you a path… Maybe I have. Every child of a noble clan is born with the vespers. Pray to them now. Only the kindling dream can save you.”

“Will this be my pharmakon rites?”

“Yes. You’ll have to fend for yourself, learn the ways of the chimerae without a teacher. Find one soon. Flourish, or the vespers will devour you whole.”

“Can I ask… is this the pure branch? Life after life?”

“No. It’s a technique your grandmother Uvema discovered. A way to preserve astral projections. If each member of our clan is a tree, and their projections the limbs thereupon… My tree is severed at the root. Dead. I will rot. I am just a memory. But here in the astral plane… the Asetari and our teachings will not die, even if we no longer live. But for that, we must have a living Asetari on the mortal plane. Begone, child. Survive. Avenge. Flourish.”

Awelah wakes up screaming. She has nightmares every night.

When the nymph awakes this time, she is not alone.

A Chimerical Hope

Everyone was dead.

Oocid. Madam Rutabrood. Mita. Yugen. Fihra.

And Awelah. Unless…

Ooliri had climbed up the ridge. With Makuja’s seeming betrayal, it shouldn’t be a surprise to find the pale nymph lying there, bleeding out.

Her cloak was gone.

A filament of enervation extends down to her body, trailing from the wisp‍-​masses high above. It makes him quirk an antennae.

Ooliri sits, and his eyes pale in meditation.

There was no reason to expect this. But he had a feeling.

He’d done this same ritual yesterday morning. He’d withdrawn arete from the crypt of his one vesper.

And now…

Now he had multiple vespers. He was a vesperbane.

Make that three gifts from his brother, then. Why entrust all this to him?

But if he had his brother’s heart pumping blood, if this arm was the design of that medical genius…

Ooliri had watched him make the signs enough times. Centipede. Cricket. Mite. And so forth.

⸢Serum Form: Pure Healing Palm.⸥

Blood pools in his new hand. He feels a tug of what is not his will, and follows it. The blood brightens and clears to purity. He presses it to Awelah’s back.

Healing yourself with ichor is hard. Healing others is much, much harder. So much could go wrong. But Awelah is dead anyway.

The filament extending up to the sky fades to nonpresence. Awelah screams. Ooliri does not know if that means it worked, or didn’t.

Awelah’s eyes scramble for focus. She finds him sitting there. Antennae spiral defensively. She leans away. Her murmur is barely intelligible.

“Traitors…”

Awelah clasps her tarsi together into the seal of focus. Holds it for a moment, and when her tarsi release, the palms are covered in black nerve.

She nods once, and her gaze flickers to the clear liquid on his hands, albeit stained with hemolymph now. Awelah is wary, but this seems to confirm that she at least had one ally remaining.

“So we’re vesperbanes now.”

“Long awaited, and yet I find the circumstances… distressing.”

“Let’s make our first mission getting back at the ones who did this to us.”

Ooliri wants to say no. It was stupid. They would die. Just like the rest of team nineteen. But…

“Before he died, my brother told me what our mission really was. We need to find our father’s correspondent and”‍ ‍—‍ this was inference‍ ‍—‍ “help them decode his last research notes.”

Awelah waits, listening for more.

“I checked our mentor’s body. The notes aren’t there. I think Unodha has them.”

“She has my family’s cloak, too.” Awelah stands with a groan, and wobbles for a few moments.

Ooliri stands with her. “It’s not defeat until you fail three times. That’s how the stories go, right?”

A clear sky yawns above. The wisps are gone. It feels like something is ending.

The sun seeks darkness at the horizon. As it sets, the tone of everything warms, like the world had been set alight.

Makuja’s world had been set alight. She’d watched master burn in that warden’s suicide technique. She wonders how much of her had burned, in that conflagration. She wonders how much of her remains.

They sit at their camp. Unodha drinks her tea. She is condensing enervation, binding arete to replenish her reserves. Makuja sharpens her knives.

Their camp is not hard to find‍ ‍—‍ they thought everyone else in a large radius was dead, and they’d be leaving soon. Two figures round the bend of a ridge‍ ‍—‍ a familiar, vexsome pale violet and a gray against gold.

It seems they hadn’t been hard to track, either.

Unodha didn’t have her bow; Makuja hadn’t retrieved it.

Dutifully, she says, “Enemies incoming.” Doubtless the fearsome hunter her master was had already noticed.

“You should have brought me her head,” Unodha growls. “You told me you killed her.”

“She has returned to life, much like the nymph whose heart you set free.” Makuja grabs her other knife. “Shall we put these angels back in the grave?”

“Gladly.” Unodha takes the skin of tea and downs all of it. “Bitter. You should know better,” she murmurs.

Makuja smiles. “Allow me to spill your blood?” she requests.

Master arches one antennae.

“You do not have the arete left to manifest your myxokora. Nor your bow, nor your hounds. You have me, but my body is young and weak. I am an assassin, and with only my natural endowments, I will be of little use in this battle. With your blood, however, you can use ⸢Blood Wolf Howl⸥ and grant me strength.”

A moment, and then Unodha holds out a foreleg. Makuja stabs, and drinks. The wound closes itself.

In moments, Makuja feels the blood in every muscle fiber. It hurts.

Awelah and Ooliri arrive.

There’s no will left for posturing. It’s the dregs of two exhausted armies meeting, each disfigured by attrition.

Awelah has one word for Makuja. “Traitor.”

Indeed. How perceptive.

Ooliri has a proposal. “There’s still a possibility of an amicable resolution if‍ ‍—”

Unodha’s voice is not a growl. “Die.” Makuja watches closely, sees the shadow of a pentagram in her eyes. Her master seems to lose all swagger when it comes to this mission.

Her master lunges forward and the nymphs flinch back. She slams a leg into the ground and casts, ⸢Sand Form: Rising Ground.⸥

The earth in meters’ radius around them expands, granting them the high ground.

Master had explained to her the limit of this technique: it was just an air bubble supporting them. Excess weight would pop it. But would fresh pawns know that?

The mystery of her survival is joined by a new inexplicability. Awelah is a vesperbane; she claps her tarsi together, and casts, ⸢Umbra Form: Umbral Body Projection.⸥

A second pure black Awelah joins the first, but without the spear.

How can a nymph who was pawn yesterday cast such an advanced technique?

They rush in to engage Unodha, and the bane is moving substantially slower now.

Something has changed in the gray nymph. Ooliri closes in with so much less hesitation. And why should such a soft larva outdo her in that regard?

Time to play her part.

It’s with a rush of power that Makuja enters the fray. Her legs pump, and she darts forward. Her arms swing forward with weight. She breaks Ooliri’s baton swing.

Then Awelah claps and swings her foreleg and her shadow is rushing for her, faster than the pale nymph herself can move. Makuja dodges back, and its raptorial stab misses. Then she replies with a lunge forward, and stabs once, twice, three times with only her knife. The barrage unravels the projection, and it melts.

The blackness clings to the metal of Makuja’s knife, and it no longer reflects light.

When she blocks a swing of Ooliri’s baton with the knife, the metal bends. She drops the useless, degraded tool.

Awelah can do more than make projections. She holds out her palms and casts bane blast‍ ‍—‍ but it’s nothing like her relative’s efforts. It’s more of a black sputtering, spitting enervate at Unodha.

A scrape of master’s raptorial spines across the gray nymph’s thorax leaves a gash. Then he makes a sign and slowly runs a bandaged arm over the wound, messily closing it.

Makuja evaluates the tide of this fight. Her chance to end it would be soon.

It comes when Awelah stops, stabbing down on her master’s foot, briefly rooting her to the spot.

The red nymph takes a deep breath.

Makuja does what needs to be done. She is not just violent, but patient.

Last thoughts flicker through her mind.

A blade should never hurt its wielder.

No mission matters more than her master.

Makuja is a good tool, and does what needs to be done. But whose needs? Who would wield Makuja, when this was all over?

Makuja crouches with the great power that hurts her legs, and she leaps. She flies like an arrow and buries her knife to the hilt in what was her master’s neck.

Unodha roars, and there’s something uncertain in it.

“Your tea was poisoned. This fight was over before it began.”

Makuja wasn’t done. The two former pawns have halted in confusion. The nymph pulls herself onto Unodha as she begins to struggle. Reaches for her abdomen, retrieves her knife and stabs again. Begins to dig.

Feels her heartbeat accelerating.

Makuja grabs Unodha’s entrails, rips them out and bites down.

Blood loss gets to the huge bane, and she shudders and crumbles. Makuja turns to face the nymphs as she feels something squirm in her gut.

And now, to inherit. She’s seen her master do this.

⸢Vesper form: Chimerical Sacrifice.⸥

Three nymphs’ eyes pale in unison.

Two entities, wriggling in dark crypts, so tiny, yet growing, reaching out‍ ‍—

—‍ through an endless procession of profoundly rotting corpses, worm‍-​colonized and fungus‍-​rooted, the gravestones like pillars upholding realms‍ ‍—

—‍ through a grand bat with wings like the heavens above, exalted above every last thing in existence, his head a fractal of horned antlers like a great lord’s crown‍ ‍—

—‍ through a small mantis kneeling supplicant, whose eyes are spirals and tarsi are joined in prayer, whose back is wingless before bat wings climb free and there is kneeling no longer, never again‍ ‍—

⸢Vesper form: Pharmakon!⸥

When lucidity returns, two nymphs look upon bloody Makuja, standing atop the corpse of her teacher, her guardian, her master.

She hyperventilates. From her side, liquid muscle erupts. It sculpts itself into a form broad and long, tipped with claws.

The two nymphs look upon Unodha’s heir.

Awelah moves first, forelegs reaching for the projection mass Makuja earlier dispersed, compelling it to reform.

A new battle unfolds. From a distance, it resembles the first fight of the day in miniature.

Awelah flanks her with her projection. Makuja surges. She feels the blood in her muscles. It doesn’t pain her. It’s not her masters’ power now, but hers.

It’s a dance. Wing‍-​sweeps meet with spear thrusts. Myxokora meet with projections. Makuja meets with Awelah.

One thrust lands true, and Makuja leans into it. Awelah is forced to readjust her grip. She now holds her spear just beneath the head as Makuja closes to extreme close range. Myxokora hug Awelah, box her in, and Makuja stabs and stabs with her knife.

A bane blast and a touch from a projection frees Awelah from the hug, but dangerous proximity is inescapable. So she leans into it. The next beat of the fight is a climax.

Makuja’s knife is just under Awelah’s head.

And Awelah’s spear is right against Makuja’s neck.

But it’s not restraint holding them back.

It’s Ooliri.

“Stop it. We won.”

Awelah stares at Makuja for a moment, then pulls away.

“Your eyes,” the pale nymph says. “There’s light behind them now. Something’s lit a fire inside you. You really needed it.”

“And you… I see reflection, faintly. A deliberation of impulse. Perhaps you’re learning patience.”

“Are we…” It’s Ooliri speaking. “…allied? Were you against Unodha all along?” They look at the corpse. Unmoving now, they finally get a look at her antennae‍-​band: a copper plate with two nested, concave hexagons, thinly trisected. The insignia of the Bloodweb Stronghold.

“I loved my master.”

“Why?” “How?”

Beside her, Makuja’s myxokora are falling limp, and squishing as they invert back into her. She says, “Years ago… the poorest of my village were stricken with a blood plague. Unodha and her apprentice came through on a journey, but had no reason to help us. Eventually, I convinced them to heal my family and my neighbors… the cost was I would be taken, as per the law of heroic exchange. So I became her pawn. She taught me strength. She gave me everything.”

Awelah latches on to one element in that, as if hunting for lies. “Unodha has an apprentice? Where are they?”

“She had. They were the one who healed the plague. But one day, after I had trained with them for seasons, they disobeyed an order master gave. So my master… disabled them and ordered me to… strike them down, to prove my loyalty. I was loyal.”

“I‍ ‍—‍ I’m sorry,” Ooliri says.

“Don’t be. Traitors deserve death.”

“But you… your master…”

“Unodha betrayed herself, in the end. It’s what she would have wanted, were she in her right mind.”

Awelah hisses. “You betrayed me, nearly killed me. You tried to kill me.”

“I failed. My‍ ‍—‍ my hand lacked the confidence to strike you down.”

“What does that change? You. betrayed. me.”

“Your trust was freely given. I freely discarded it.”

“So it doesn’t count?”

“A traitor forsakes their sworn ideals. I swore you nothing.”

“So swear you will atone for what you’ve done.”

Makuja pauses as if considering. “Why should I?”

Ooliri says, “We have to stick together? We’ve each lost all else.” It doesn’t win her over. “What do you want, Makuja?”

“Want… My master’s will was not her own. She would want me to find out why, and strike it down. So I must know what all of this was for. Who wanted this?”

At the mention, Ooliri looks down and sees something. Emerging from the dead bane’s head, a thorned black stem beneath an orb glowing baleful red like a terrible rose. A shadow, as of a snake’s pupil, splits the orb.

“Whatever is behind this, I think this is our first clue.”

“You mentioned research notes Unodha stole,” Awelah says to Ooliri. Glancing at Maku, “Did she seem interested in them?”

“She did retrieve a sealed object from the master warden’s remains.”

“The notes, the control of Unodha, and the eradication of Duskroot. It must all be connected. Someone wanted all of it. To find out who… we share that goal.” Awelah leans toward Makuja. “Swear loyalty to us, and we can work together.”

“You make it sound like we’re some organization.”

“We can be a team. United in the wake of Duskroot… Team Duskborn.”

“So be it,” Makuja says. “I shall serve.”

“Then where do we start? We can ask around, about whatever this thing is, about the surgeon or what happened in Duskroot… but I get the feeling that just leads to more people coming to kill us.”

“The roaches,” Makuja says. “They were heading to a village to the east. They say it’s blessed by a guardian who shapes the earth. I suspect this means a powerful vesperbane lives here, on the border between Duskhold territory and Windhold territory. Perhaps they’ll be willing to teach us the arts of vesperbanes, or grant direction.”

“Or we could just report back at Solaroch,” Ooliri notes. “I’m registered as a pawn of the wardens.”

“And get picked off on the long road over? And let everyone know what happened, who we are? Whatever enemy we have is powerful, and subtle. We need to… we have to hide, and become stronger.”

“So that’s our first mission as Team Duskborn, isn’t it?”

Makuja nods. “When the reaper cuts away at foliage, only the toughest stems resist. So many have been cut down… but we remain.”

“That already makes us strong, doesn’t it?”

“Or lucky.”

And so, team Duskborn escape the doomed land amidst the ruins of Duskroot, and journey further to the east. The sun, having gone to the darkness at last, leaves them. Night has engulfed them all, and dreams elude.

Yet the omen of dawn remains.

Lingering Clouds

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.

Direction Without a Path

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.”

A Wasp and a Pond

A Spar and a Specter

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.

Two Techniques and a Beetle

Once all of that was over, they could resume what was interrupted: Awelah passing Makuja the bit of rope she asked for. She needed some bits of baneleather too. Then, as they continued their journey vaguely parallel to the now‍-​out‍-​of‍-​sight creek, Makuja fiddled with the rope and tough fungal patches.

Ooliri watches with clear interest, but he’s not the one to ask‍ ‍—‍ perhaps on pain of hypocrisy for keeping his own project a secret.

“What are you doing?” Awelah says. “I’d prefer it if your eyes were out scanning for threats.”

“I’m making a sling,” Makuja replies after a moment. “Master had planned for me to take after her in use of a bow‍ ‍—‍ but hers is too damaged, and far beyond my strength. Until I can obtain my own, this will suffice.”

“And sling what, rocks? Do you think that’s going to be any help against that mutt? You saw the armor it had.”

“She could imbue the rocks with enervate,” Ooliri added quietly.

Makuja’s tarsi pause at that suggestion. She hadn’t thought of it. “You’ll have to show me how to do that.”

“You’ve, uh, already done it? Bane blast, but without the louse sign? You performed a simple enervate discharge when we were investigating Klepé.” Ooliri taps two antennae together. Then, perhaps feeling awkward at offering nothing, adds, “Maybe this will help.” He makes a tarsign with tarsi clasped together, one dactyl interleaving. “The wasp sign is for controlling and measuring enervate. Where louse builds up pressure for an explosive release, wasp gathers a specific quantity.”

Makuja picks up a rock while she walks, then halts to try it. She rubs dirt off of it, then bites it to hold it while her dactyls are busy clapping the focus seal. She makes an approximation of the wasp seal Ooliri showed her, adjusting it slightly until she feels the twitch of malign coldness shifting in her gut. The rock drops into her open hands as she splays one out in release. Enervate drips into her palm, like a small flow through too large a pipe. The enervate seeps into cracks in the rock, and it’s like rapid erosion. There’s a popping sound like the thing was squeezed so tight.

Makuja throws the rock at a tree, and the thing flies off into many pieces.

“Maybe you used too little?”

The red nymph casts her eyes to the ground for more rocks, but Awelah scratches her file.

“Are we really going to sit around here doing experiments?”

Makuja stops. “She’s‍ ‍—‍ right. It’s more important we don’t make targets of ourselves.”

Awelah pokes the compass for direction, and they trek further into the pathless wilderness. Despite all of the metataxites and big ferns with hard stems, the largest of the flora remains uncontested. Ancient trees whose branches had the breadth of houses dot the scape like landmarks. When Makuja confirms that Unodha’s dogs (is he still Unodha’s, now?) had trouble climbing, Awelah makes the plan to suspend hammocks high in a tree, and sleep there. Spring had come shades ago, so there should be leaves enough to obscure them.

“Could the sensor sense us sleeping?”

“There’s nothing we can do to hide from a good enough sensor‍-​bane. Sleeping in the tree is fine, or we have no hope,” Makuja says. “We have an advantage: the older, stronger you are, the easier you are to sense. We are new vesperbanes, and consequently there is little for a sensor to catch.”

“I’m not weak.”

“How do you know all of this?” Ooliri asks.

Makuja has a small smile. “There is a reason I was more useful as a pawn than a full vesperbane.”

Ooliri frowns, and looks away.

They find their next camp site where a stream intersects with the creek they had been following. The flow of water exposes the roots of a grand tree, and the things clung so tightly with its roots that the stream curves around it.

An hour passes of climbing up and down the tree, securing supplies and bedrolls‍-​turned‍-​hammocks with their rope. Awelah falls out of the tree at one point, and screams before she lands just fine. Ooliri has trouble climbing, and they fashion a kind of a ladder of sticks for him to reach the lower branches.

That done, they gather at the base of the tree as the sun nears the horizon. On previous nights, they’d make a campfire, but now the fear of revealing their presence stops them. There are ways to create stealthy fires, and they talk for a while trying to recall the details from their separate trainings. They know it involves digging a hole.

“Do we have anything to dig with?”

“I have this,” Awelah says. It’s the trowel they used to gather the old lady’s clay. Ooliri scowls, and Awelah rubs palps. “I was holding onto it and forgot to set it down before we left.”

“You should return it.”

“How? She’s like a day behind us now.”

“It’s not important,” Makuja adds. The conversation ends there, and they do manage a fire whose smoke won’t reveal their location.

After that, the three separate from each other, focus on their own pursuits. Ooliri is tying rope around his barrel. Awelah claims she saw a wild cicindela, and wants to see if it’s still around. She leaves, but not before Ooliri calls for her not to go far.

Makuja completes her sling, and then gathers rocks and practices imbuing them with enervate. The rocks needed to be uniform; cracks and mixed materials meant the enervate would render them unstable. She needed to hold the wasp seal for longer‍ ‍—‍ confusingly, the rocks become more unstable the less enervate she added. A small amount, and the rock fractures around a hard core. She had better results when she doused the rocks in the discharge‍ ‍—‍ but a few times doing this, and she found herself feeling painfully empty; she must be running out. She leaves the rocks by the streambed, and that’s all she does for the night.

Awelah found no sign of the cicindela, but did find two isopods to roast.

They fold in to sleep, and for once, when night comes there is no howling.

Waking first, Makuja unrolls the ladder to climb down. She lands softly and takes one step. She is not alone.

It had the size of a large roach, with black and orange patterns emblazoned on its elytra. Antennae like a beaded necklace wiggle above its dark black eyes. It was an erotyle; more commonly, its kind was called the pleasing fungus beetle, as a kind of placating flattery. The head is lowered, and the wet palps lick at rocks‍ ‍—‍ the same enervate‍-​laced rocks she had discarded yesterday after her practice.

Makuja bends her knees, heartrate quickening and stance swaying as she calculates. Erotyles are a danger‍ ‍—‍ they, like a few other beetles, are distinguished as one of the few creatures capable of natural nervecasting, adapting enervate to defense. Yet it’s a still wild thing, nonsapient, offering no safety of reason. And lashing out with a spell would be far, far worse than teeth or claws.

Folktales told that the things had some vague way of sensing intent‍ ‍—‍ it’s why mantids flatter them. Makuja doesn’t know if it’s true, and can’t rely on that. But the obvious recourse is always available.

Makuja picks up a rock from the ground. She could throw knives, but that’s too much threat, and if it fled with a knife sticking out, she’d never get it back. Briefly, she considers imbuing the rock, testing her sling. But that would just contribute to the problem, wouldn’t it?

She tries something new.

Focus. Wasp. Louse.

She holds louse for a moment. If the erotyle could sense enervate, would it know to be unsettled by the prepared spell? Would that be enough?

It lifts a head to stare at her, antennae extended out.

Fine, then.

Release. Makuja performs the modified bane blast after palming the rock. The blast hits the rock, and the rock flies out. It doesn’t strike the beetle, but it lands with a crash beside it, and the bug jumps, startled.

Makuja raises her raptorials and abdomen, and hisses —a threat display.

The beetle opens its mouth, wide. What is it planning?

⸢Umbral Body Projection!⸥

Awelah’s projection floats down from above them, and the beetle stares at it as if transfixed. Taking advantage of the unexpected distraction, Awelah’s spear strikes down from on high, cracking the elytra and piercing through the abdomen. The projectile lands offcenter, missing anything vital, but the bug is now pinned to the ground. Enough for Awelah to light down in a three‍-​point stance, then kill it with a bane blast to the head.

“Can we eat this thing?”

Makuja, for once, is the one scraping frustration. “There might be more of them. I wasn’t going to kill it.”

Awelah shrugs. “It offered itself to us, practically on a plate. Nature takes its course.” She gives the beetle and its patterned chitin another look. “Is this one of those spellbugs? They eat fungus, don’t they? This is probably equal to a plateful of venjaspirals on its own.”

“You will be taking care of the body. It’s not mine.” Makuja turns and walks away. She kneels by the extinguished campfire to revive it. Behind her, Awelah glances at the rock submerged in the ground, a crater of cracked dirt and roots around it.

While the three gather around the fire at breakfast, Makuja meets Ooliri’s gaze. “I have done it,” she says. “Shall I show you?”

“Hm?” Ooliri is writing something in a notebook they’d recovered from his team.

“Your suggestion. The principle works.” Makuja retrieves a small river stone, holds it for a moment as if weighing, then tosses it into the air. Focus. Wasp. Release. Enervate surges into her palm, where the stone returns to be suffused in the black void. The enervate is sucked in, and the stone blackens until it looks to be made of shadow itself‍ ‍—‍ but there’s so much enervate that the black still curls off it.

To demonstrate, she tosses the stone at a fallen log. Despite the cracking wood, it impacts silently. It rolls to the ground, but where it first hit, a black circle of enervate soaks into the wood.

The key lies in the quantity, Makuja learned. An excess of enervate is required; when there’s more enervate than can imbue the rock itself, the excess can be imparted to the target. Enervate seems more willing to imbue solid objects than the air around them.

“Good job! I’m glad my idea worked out.”

“Well, it doesn’t.” Makuja is curling up her antennae. “You see how it imparts enervate when it touches the wood? I cannot use it with my sling.”

“Ohh… I’m sorry.”

But Makuja picks up another stone‍ ‍—‍ she had a few in her bag, now. “I can, however, do this:” She tosses it up again, and then: Focus. Wasp. Louse. Release. She catches the stone, splays her tarsus for enervate to surge up, then quickly closes it again and thrusts her foreleg straight out, pointing down and away from anyone. When her tarsus splays again, the familiar explosive pop of bane blast sounds, and the stone flies out with it, smashing into the ground with a crack and a cloud of dirt.

“Woah!”

“So that’s what you did…” Awelah murmurs.

“I could show you how to do it, if you like?”

Awelah pauses, mouth slightly open, but rolls up her antennae, and scratches. “Why would I need to fling rocks? I have better techniques.”

Makuja’s antenna twitches, and she combs a palp through it, freeing her from being able to respond.

“Maybe hold off on further nervecasting? I think I may be able to get my idea to work today, and it’ll work best if you’re near full reserves.”

“Do you want to learn my technique, Ooliri?”

“I, uh, I’m still having trouble with regular bane blast, sorry.”

Makuja inclines her head with spiraled antennae, and turns to leave without a word. She leaves to the west.

“We’re still training today,” Awelah says. But, sensing the mood, she stands to take her leave as well, grabbing her spear. There’s drops of beetle blood still on it.

“Still hunting that cicindela?”

“It’s got to still be around.”

Awelah goes east. She doesn’t get ten strides out of the camp before a yell erupts from her spiracles. Ooliri comes; Makuja doesn’t. (It’s not a cry for alarm, just attention. She may not have even heard, having left soon, in the opposite direction.)

Dead beetles. They find three erotyle corpses, when they start looking, littered around the outskirts of their camp. Cause of death is similar in all cases: bit and clawed to bits in a manner that suggests exactly one creature. The footprints are here too. If there needed to be more confirmation, Ooliri finds direblood festering in two of the bodies.

“So it’s still out there. It came this close.” Ooliri scans the wood around them, but there’s no skeletal dog stalking them.

“I’m going to track it.”

“Alone? Shouldn’t we get Makuja?”

“We know I can scare it off with my projection. You… no offense, but I don’t think you would help much in a fight, and you definitely would slow me down.”

“What about the vesperbanes?”

“Think about what we actually saw yesterday. The dog was moving slowly. The vesperbanes were running, and fast at that. We know they weren’t traveling close with the dog, and it must have been even farther than it seems if they were moving faster than it. Look at the beetles. All bites and clawmarks‍ ‍—‍ no tools, no nervewounds. I don’t think the vesperbanes were with it.”

“Maybe. It all seems so tenuous.”

“Ooliri, I’m not hunting the thing‍ ‍—‍ if it hasn’t smelt us and came back, it might be gone entirely. I just want to make sure it’s not nearby; I’ll be back soon.”

An Elusive Wolf, a Relentless Wolf

Experiment and Application

An Occluded Path

Occlusion. Safety is occluded by tension, by the sudden absence. Certainty is occluded by questions, doubts, the most dependable part of their morning ripped away. Clear thinking is occluded by the vestigial fingers of poor sleep pressing against their mind.

For Awelah, though, those fingers slip away as a thrill of urgency and motivation comes, a problem to solve, a new hunt beginning.

“Look around. Let’s see what tracks we can find.” A vesperbane would be trained to avoid leaving tracks in a way a direbeast would not. Her next fear, after the diamond‍-​shaped prints, would be three sets of distinct tarsus‍-​tracks.

Eyes darken and focus as a closer search unfolds. Despite the dark occlusion of their moods, the sky above them is pock‍-​marked with breaks in that days‍-​long overcast that had shadowed them. Shafts of dawn light shine as the sun rises. In uncaring contrast, today is bright.

Maybe it’ll be easier to find her, then, Awelah thinks.

Makuja is a light step, but her weight falls on muddy soil, so her tracks remain. In face of the evidence, an oddly dreaded third possibility fits where others have failed.

She left alone. Of, one assumes, her own will.

“She didn’t say anything to you?” Awelah says.

Ooliri shakes his head.

“I know her scent. Follow me.” Her messy antennae uncurl, extending out and sampling the air. Feeling the ghost of an old gradient that agrees with the footprints, the pursuit advances.

“I’m… surprised. Tracking is a bit of a… masculine thing, isn’t it? No um, no offense.”

Ooliri, even at this instar, isn’t quite yet all that different from the girls. His antennae are longer already, though. While length isn’t all that matters, his sense of smell surely outsteps her own in sensitivity.

Physical sensitivity isn’t all that matters, either, though. Olfaction isn’t just given to you. A certain skill lives in how Awelah moves her antennae, learned from observation and correction. A certain kind of focus in probing apart scents, and a theory of wind and diffusion to make sense of them. Ooliri, it’s quite possible, has never tried or learned.

“I don’t think it’s too masculine to know how to hunt,” is her reply.

Ooliri nods‍ ‍—‍ since speaking, his face had been a little bit scrunched up, worried his words had been too careless.

By scent and by sight they are led to the creek‍-​ravine. There’s two large dents in the ground at the edge and the trail led right to them. Awelah, without yesterday’s headache addling her thoughts, puts two together with this one.

“That’s how she did it.”

Makuja had been so evasive, so agile in that fight, and seemed to be preparing a spell she never cast.

“What did she do?”

“Did you catch it yesterday? I hated that she cast that spell at me‍ ‍—‍ so much I didn’t think about how. She used her middle legs.”

Ooliri nods slowly with a frown, not unappreciative of the knowledge, but failing to see the relevance. Then he looks back at the dents in the ground. “Explosive force. If directed under her… clever. But we can’t cross that gap.”

Awelah knows that. She’s looking from this edge to the other side. At a loss, but knowing the answer would be found. She wouldn’t fail.

Ooliri looks too, but his thoughts stray outside the confines of what lies in front of them. They still have rope, after all. Could they—

Then Awelah jumps. “Feel that?”

“No?”

“The wind changed. It’s coming from…” Awelah looks down the creek. “That way.”

“What do you smell?”

“Makuja smells… heavy. And she’s been exerting‍ ‍—‍ running, maybe.”

“Or, or fighting. Do you think…”

“I don’t smell the mutt. I would. I don’t smell any hemolymph either. I don’t expect violence.”

“But you sound so…”

“She wasn’t in a good mood yesterday. You sense that? It’s worse. It’s… Let’s go.”

Awelah, anxious to move, closes the distance the only way available, even as Ooliri looks back to the creek, wants to remind her that maybe they should close that gap first‍ ‍—‍ but the pale nymph is already quickening to a jog, and needs to catch up.

The word on the tip of her palps, that she refused to say, was ‘familiar.’ You couldn’t read all the nuances of a mantis off of pheromones, but sadness had an odor, an aroma. Bitter, or spicy, or… there is a certain twist to it, a scent unpleasant, yet very much not aversive, like lead.

Awelah wouldn’t be running if she hadn’t felt despair of this depth, this pungency, before. Years ago, it was a stale autumn day in the Asetari compound. She’d learned that mommy wasn’t going to be a vesperbane anymore‍ ‍—‍ she learned it from a distant pair of cousins, from the rumor mill, instead of directly. She couldn’t find her mom, only her dad. She confronted him, he told her where to look. She found her taking a deep bath, and only the sound of her daughter calling brought her out.

Ooliri knows none of this, only that he can’t keep pace with Awelah, nor what would have her concerned if she can’t smell an enemy.

The wind had come from down the creek, but it is only down as the water far below flows. The hills get higher. At least the vegetation is clearing. The gorge gets wider, deeper as they go. Above, the peak of the incline lies on the other side.

Ooliri only catches up when Awelah stops. Awelah stopped because she spotted Makuja. She’d be hard to miss, now.

The sun rises in the east, and the creek runs east. She’s shadowed there, alone on the highest point around.

“What is she doing?”

There’s only an answer to give because, at that moment, she does something. Perhaps she saw them.

“Running.”

Makuja is observant. Makuja is patient.

She’s been to the edge of the gorge. She’s calculated the extent. She’s not going to make it.

She doesn’t calculate the way the gray nymph does it. She feels. She’s done the boosted leaps enough times now to know how far she goes. She had picked just the right part of the ravine to cross over, where it was thin enough she landed. The gorge in front of her is not that. She’s not going to make it even with a boost. Unless her calculations are wrong.

Makuja is patient. She stares at the wide gap below her, where the incline of the hill abruptly drops off. She’s eyeing the distance one more time. Sometimes she doesn’t feel the success or failure, not immediately. She’s patient, and can wait for her calculations to reach unoccluded certainty.

Makuja has killed. So many times, she’s stood poised, knife ready, but not feeling if she was going to make the cut. To be sure it would kill, to be sure they wouldn’t struggle, retaliate, raise the alarm, she could wait. She is patient.

She had done the same to Awelah‍ ‍—‍ waiting, and not knowing even as she moved the knife if she was going to make the cut. Why, then?

“There’s not a best time to fire an arrow,” she recalls her master telling her, not long into her apprenticeship. “You can wait on the wind, wait on the target, wait on your own damn nerves. You wait for a better time, and there’s no best time‍ ‍—‍ but there is a worst time to fire an arrow.”

“When?” Her voice had been higher, then. Her mind slower, too, not catching that she’d been all but given the answer.

Unodha had sharp teeth, and even palps that looked fit to bite.

“Too late,” she says.

Makuja starts running.

“She’s heading for the edge. Is she going to jump?”

Awelah’s face is set hard, even as her antennae continue to move. “What do we do?”

They are far from the opposite edge themselves, and even if they weren’t… it’s a long way down. How could they catch or stop her from this side of the gorge?

“My technique is all we have,” Awelah says.

“How? Do you even know it can move fast enough to get to her in time? If you do… can it push with enough force? What would you accomplish‍ ‍—‍ you might kill her yourself! We don’t use techniques like that on allies.”

“We have to do something.”

“I don’t even know if it’s safe for you to try. Remember‍ ‍—‍ remember how you screamed yesterday?”

Awelah puts her forelegs together and Ooliri snaps a tarsus out to pull them apart.

Her heart is beating faster, faster. Her blood is stirring in her every extreme. It is alive, her capillaries like the tendrils of some greater thing.

Her heart is beating faster, the resting rate feeling like the tides in their agonizing slowness. Now, her blood can move, and each pulse, each thunderous impact of her legs, feels things speed closer to how they should be.

She is so close.

Across the gulf, they see the red nymph running faster and faster, gravity accelerating her. Then she moves even faster than that‍ ‍—‍ it must be her technique.

When she reaches the edge, she jumps with no tarsigns. Their eyes are magnetized to her form as she sails through the air‍ ‍—‍ for fear of where they’d go if they traced their trajectory.

Not all of her is occluded by the overwhelming sensation of blood flow. Her eyes are in front of her, still eyeing that gap, calculating even as her legs bend.

She’s not going to make it. Not with her momentum, not with the power of her leap.

It still feels like flying. The other edge is so far away. She wonders if birds feel always like they are falling.

She looks down. It’s so far. Vesperbanes heal fast, but puddles don’t.

She remembers things. So many things come to her so quickly.

She remembers asking Ooliri a question.

She remembers the night this all began. Appraisal. Investment. The power she felt, from somewhere deep within, somewhere beyond, somewhere vespertine. Her blood lived almost as it does now, but more. That night, she had felt so much like her master. She was dead, but Makuja would be a worthy heir. Wouldn’t she?

She remembers her master. The first time she thought she had lost her, only for Unodha to rise from the ashes. Bow gone, dogs dead, she still had weapons. How must she have felt, then? She doesn’t know. She must have no idea. She isn’t worthy. Her master is dead and she’s a useless tool. How must it have felt to fight her, killing fear spilling forth, death unstoppable? She knows that better, in this moment, the ground coming up closer, inch by inch. Her true worth would be evident, in the end.

She remembers asking Ooliri a question he didn’t have the answer to, as she approaches the other edge, and sees that edge get lower. She goes below, and she is going to slam against the ravine wall and die.

She remembers asking Ooliri a question and then, she doesn’t need the answer.

Gravity works fast, and at this point, Awelah would not finish the tarsigns in time.

Makuja had tried to kill Awelah, and then did it again. Why did she care?

“I don’t‍ ‍—‍ I don’t know why.” It’s Ooliri.

“Do you know what I said, the day we had our first fight?” Awelah’s voice is nervous‍-​fast. “That if she wanted vengeance, there’s only one mantis to go after. That in her place, I’d want vengeance.”

Awelah lets the enervate she’d started molding disperse into herself. Makuja hits the top of her arc, and begins to fall. Awelah starts running, anyway, like there’s something she can do.

Maybe she can jump off the edge herself, use the force of the bane blast to descend faster, catch her, and then…

She has felt a bit numb, for many days now, everything she cared about, all that grounded her, gone. Being so reminded of her past, old emotions coming back, feelings, has her rawer and off‍-​balanced. She feels the same confused panic a younger Awelah felt.

But little Awelah didn’t pull her mother out of the bath‍ ‍—‍ Mewla had come out herself.

The pale nymph stops, stumbling, because Makuja has wings.

“Ha‍-​ha.” Ooliri’s laugh sounds more like a cough. “One—one of the last things we said, she had asked me. ‘What are the tarsigns for the wretched raptorials?’ and I didn’t know.”

Her heart is beating faster, faster. It feels like she might burst. She sees the wall getting closer, closer. The pressure of her blood is immense with nowhere to go‍ ‍—‍ would she pop like a fruit when she hits the walls? It all came back to death. All of her plans were literally crashing around her. The outcome she’d calculated when she jumped is being realized‍ ‍—‍ she isn’t going to make it like this.

Her blood is so tight, her death is so close. If only she had the power, if she were worthy, useful.

The pain almost doesn’t register. A red gush bursts from her side, and the spray of blood doesn’t stop. The volume increases, and the droplets are joined in one mass suspended in the air. It’s clotting, the red congealing to solidity, and then transforming as blood does not. Tightening, knitting together like muscle. It happens so fast, it feels so hot.

Her blood is alive. She has control, shaping the form, controlling it, grasping that feeling of death, controlling it. How did Unodha feel, wielding this technique? Certainly not afraid of death.

Her blood, her myxokora, takes the form of those thick claw‍-​arms her master had. Smaller, for her frame and lesser blood volume.

They have the reach to extend, hook around the edge of the gorge. She does hit the ravine still, but she holds steady, and pulls herself up.

She rises to see her two teammates running at her. She rises, her blood exulting, alive, and the world is occluded no more.

It’s hard not to feel threat, approaching a bane with monstrous limbs of gleaming blood. The unease they feel is palpable, but Makuja does not attack. She pants, and her myxokora flex and bend in the way an idle mantid’s antennae might.

“What were you thinking! You could have died.”

“If I died,”‍ ‍—‍ she looks at her myxokora‍ ‍—‍ “if I could not manifest my master’s myxokora… then what use am I alive?” Her new growths extend out to their full length. “I was thinking I would prove myself. And I did.”

“You were worth something either way.”

“You knew,” Awelah says, stepping closer. “You didn’t expect to die. You could have told us.”

“You would have stopped me.”

“Of course we would have,” Ooliri says.

Something in her phrase triggers a memory. “What happened after you left, yesterday? You started acting different then.”

Makuja looks between them, and her wretched raptorials flex, as if she briefly considers something unsavory. (How often did she consider such things, when there was nothing to give it away?)

“I encountered Vilja. He bit me. His blood‍ ‍—‍ master made him. It was her blood. My blood, now.”

“Why would you keep that secret? It’s important.”

“The direblood must be affecting your mind.”

“No,” Makuja takes a step back, and it’s not clear why until her myxokora lunge. “You don’t feel it. You encountered Vilja. You cast one spell and he runs. I encounter Vilja. I nearly died, nearly didn’t escape with my life. We encounter the centipede. With one spell, you brought it death. The best I could do was nothing, nothing but grant you time. Useless tools are to be discarded.”

“You’re not useless. You just said it‍ ‍—‍ you survived. You helped Awelah! Do you think we could have made it this far without you?” Ooliri looks at Awelah.

“You may as well have thrown all of us off the cliff with you.” Awelah’s voice is low, almost unheard, palps tight.

“I knew. I had these claws on that night, but never drew them again. Against Klepé, against you. I stole this inheritance, but couldn’t use it. Against Vilja, I felt close. I felt it in my blood. I needed something more, to be able to bring it forth.”

“The esoteric component,” Ooliri says, drawing glances. He explains, “Sometimes, a technique takes more than knowing how it works, the formal component, or the signs, the tarsal component. But you must have figured it out, the esoteric component of the myxokora.”

“Phagein,” Awelah says, unbidden, perhaps without meaning to. “My… cousin told me. She couldn’t do it until… it’s like the legends. Mantids stole the vespers from the bats by killing them and eating their entrails. And our first endowments, the technique the bats could never learn, was the wretched raptorials. Mantids are hunters, and the myxokora are the ultimate hunting tools,” she finishes. “But you did it, that night. What were you missing until now?”

“As I fell, I thought about Unodha, and what she had that I lacked. She was… fearless.”

“A predator,” Awelah finishes.

Makuja nods. “Exactly.” At her sides, the red flesh has pulled closer. Inactive, it begins to sink back into her body.

Ooliri is frowning. “While I don’t think this was the best way to figure it out,” he starts, “Well, now that we have, we could, maybe, test it some? Although that might mean…”

Awelah smiles, mandibles almost visible. “Hunting.”

Ooliri almost looks like he wants to change his mind. But they wouldn’t always get lucky, if they encounter something else like a direbeast or erotyle or a sapiovore. At this point, it felt more like when.

A Pursuit Concluded

Water flows downhill, so on past the gorge’s crest, the land declines. Sharply, too. The creekwater rushes through rapids, and the three nymphs interlock arms to safely descend, half‍-​falling, half‍-​stumbling from plant to plant, hanging onto trunks or stems. In the process, they uproot one fern. On this side of the hill, more metataxites creep up, even with the angle. (Perhaps the great lichens were eeking out where the trees had more trouble.)

They sought what they could not find above: level ground. It’s a ways before the steepness stops, and still longer before the arboreals thin enough for their purposes. Ooliri sits by the side, marking segments off a rope. “I want to see how long they are,” he says. They are going to test the wretched raptorials.

Makuja nods, and looks towards Awelah sloughing off some bags. The pale nymph’s load is lighter, owing to her injuries‍ ‍—‍ something that presented a recurring source of argument, the Asetari arrogating loads that Ooliri would have to negotiate down.

The red nymph goes to stand over in the clearing, and her partner follows after a moment. They bow to each other.

“Don’t try to kill each other this time, please.”

Awelah has opted to start the fight at the same distance as the last one, not forgetting about Makuja’s other new trick. The issue unforeseen, however, is that this initial distance gives Makuja the liberty to pick when the engagement really starts. The red nymph has gained adeptness, tarsigns coming quicker as she dances around the bigger nymph. The fight proceeds, and the rhythm is once again different.

It’s, all told, not fair. Awelah still aches from her injuries, limiting the strain her prothorax can take (ruling out most use of her raptorials), and without the Umbral Body or Volatile Body (techniques that would only not kill if they missed), she has no advantage to match Makuja’s spells.

“I can stop,” she says, after pinning Awelah to the ground. “Stick to only martial arts.”

The Asetari is torn between asserting that she doesn’t need her to, and the fact that she does.

If their spar were broken into rounds that end when one of them hits the ground, three more rounds pass. Two more end with Makuja victorious, and with the last one, Awelah seizes victory on account of Makuja stopping to stare at her side, looking strained, expecting something to happen.

Even that upset doesn’t impart enough suspense to hold one’s attention forever. Ooliri, where he sits at the edge of the clearing twiddling his rope, leans down onto his raptorials and the soft moss, and nods off into a light nap.

When he comes to, they’re still at it, Awelah looking dead on her feet, swaying, Makuja hardly looking better.

With a frown, he stands, and walks over. “Um, Makuja? I understand your… intense desire to practice your new spell, but, well, we need to save some energy for traveling. And defending ourselves, if we encounter hostiles.”

Awelah, sighing through spiracles, stops and folds into a sit, stretching her legs and lying them down.

When her foe stops, Makuja falls to the ground. Not (wholly?) in despair, but perhaps because the momentum of battle was the main thing keeping her on four legs. “Am I cursed? I had it again. I felt it. And now…”

“If,” Awelah starts, taking a moment to steady her voice. “If the missing component was the mind of a predator, then a spar was the wrong way to test it. You aren’t fighting me like a hunter.”

“Reassuring, at least, I hope?” Ooliri says.

“Perhaps we should try to kill each other, then.”

“We should get moving. If we can find Lady Earth‍-​shaper, if we can get a teacher, they’ll surely know how myxokora manifestation works.”

Further on, they’d covered enough land to reach the road they’d spotted in the distance, yesterday. It leads southeast, and they take it. The flatness reprieved them of climbing logs and hills, cutting through ferns, and the enveloping fear that a new (or old) monster would come all asudden out from the occlusion of foliage.

Mud pooled between the stones of the road, and in long tracks at the edges. A consequence of the flatness, puddles litter the ground all around. Had it rained harder, on this side of the hill? Ooliri makes a game of hopping from stone to stone on parts of road where the puddles dominate. Awelah loops around through moss, and Makuja walks straight through. Ooliri learns well what opaque muddy puddles can hide when he slips on a stone, and plunges into water that might be half a meter deep.

When they break sometime after midday (it’s hard to tell; despite glimpsing the sun, the clouds hadn’t gone anywhere‍ ‍—‍ was it too much to hope it a sign of clear weather coming?), Awelah makes the suggestion that if Makuja can’t kill her‍ ‍—‍ she had sworn loyalty, after all‍ ‍—‍ then perhaps hunting game would be appropriate of a predator.

While they wait, Ooliri’s (emptied) barrel floats unsteadily in a deceptively deep puddle while he tries to balance on top of it. Awelah polishes her spear. Seeing the instrument, Ooliri wonders how much of her suggestion had been genuine, and how much covered for the fact that she couldn’t effectively hunt on her own, given her injury.

In the minutes they wait, Ooliri points out the calls of katydids early in the season. In a fit of pique, Awelah tries to imitate them‍ ‍—‍ and then Ooliri gives his own attempt, higher and more accurate. It becomes a competition, then. There’s bird calls to imitate, too, but they don’t stridulate. Awelah stops suddenly, when they have company, but Makuja is silent, mandibles out, focused in a hunting mood.

Makuja returns first with a small longicorn nymph. Then a large crow. Then a variety of digging beetle Ooliri couldn’t identify.

“Don’t you think that might be enough?”

Makuja doesn’t respond.

“No luck with the technique, I take it?”

The most fractional nod.

“I have an alternative theory,” Ooliri starts. Makuja finally meets his eyes. “You’re just tired. Whatever it took to activate that technique, you don’t have enough of it to cast it again. Maybe you’ll be able to tomorrow?”

Awelah extends antennae out, and gazes into the woods around them. “So, how are we going to start a fire when it’s as wet as it is?”

The question cut right to a more distant concern. Since starting down this road, they’d seen no trees larger than saplings. Given their load, carrying firewood had never occurred to them.

“Well, conk should work just as fine.” Ooliri gestures to a metataxite.

“I hate the smell of burning conk.”

“You never got used to it?”

“Lucky you,” Makuja murmurs.

It’s a pitiful fire that they make, and Awelah only ends up cooking the crow. She takes raw bites of the beetle, and ties up the longicorn for later.

“I wonder if the smell of that is going to lure something to us.”

“Then we can eat that too.”

Further ahead, the flatness is broken up beside the road, where boulders and logs sit. They must have been pushed out of the way, to clear a path. A sign, the first they’ve seen, stands nearby.

Wisterun, 30 km →

“Hey, we’re on the right track! Maybe we’ll finally be able to sleep on something other than hammocks or bedrolls soon.”

Ooliri goes to run along the boulders, and while Awelah is detouring around the deep tracks in the road the passage of the debris left, she sees another sign‍ ‍—‍ or the remnants of one. It’s blacked, burnt with a branching pattern to the scorch marks. Had it been struck by lightning? It must have rained harder out here.

As the journey continues, they’re on the lookout for trees to sleep in. They find metataxites, giant ferns, and even the occasional locust‍-​leaf bush which usually took a vesperbane to grow and maintain. The longer they sustain this attention to the aboreals, the more aware they become of an inconsistency, a certain pattern. In patches, they saw taxites large enough it’s fair to call them ‘full height’. These patches stand separated by long stretches of land where the aboreals are much shorter‍ ‍—‍ younger‍ ‍—‍ and so shrubbery and weeds claim the expanse. It’s all like some second‍-​growth forest, but intermittently.

Ooliri is the first to comment on it. “If we’re approaching a town or village,” he says, “you’d expect to see, before any of the settlement itself, farmland.”

Makuja gives the fields a closer look. “It’s derelict. It must have been abandoned long ago.”

“If we came all this way for an empty village, I’m gonna…” Awelah trails off. “What would we even do then?”

“The old lady said she gives clayware to the bugs in a village.”

“She’s old. She’s nuts. Maybe she’s been around so long she doesn’t realize it’s been years since her last visit. Or maybe she just forgot they all packed up and moved.”

“A town doesn’t just pack up and move, though,” Ooliri counters. “We haven’t even seen the town, we shouldn’t get lost speculating.”

“Maybe this was a trap,” Makuja says.

“No speculating!”

“Danger must be anticipated.”

Not long after that, they see the first house, in a sense. From only construction, some inferences come, even from this distance. A mantid’s house is something vertical, of platforms to be climbed, like a tree inside and outside. A roach’s house is squished, flatter, with fewer windows.

Ant houses aren’t much more than a hole in the ground. The dirt is raised around it, from excavation or an expansion in size, and inside it’s undoubtedly labyrinthian. Outside, you don’t see much more than a colorful woven tarp to be thrown over the entrances in case of rain (it’s not thrown over the entrance), and intricate flags and banners raised to declare just whose hole it is.

They walk on, see more holes, and the various cloth adornments that remain look harshed by the elements, all soaked and muddy, torn, rotting away.

“Maybe,” Ooliri suggests, “it’s not all the way abandoned, and the ants are all hiding in their tunnels?”

“We saw ants yesterday. It could make sense.” Awelah has a tone awkwardly amassed of unease and ambivalence.

“All signs point to total abandonment,” Makuja says. The matter of fact statement stabbing a hole in their hope.

“I guess it can’t explain why the flags are… like that. The ants really like their weavings, don’t they?”

Before the conversation can continue, Awelah is shushing them.

“I smell something.”

“Him,” Makuja says. “Vilja.”

Awelah unfolds her spear. Ooliri grips a baton.

“Which way?”

“I only catch a hint. North, but it’s unclear how old or which way it’s moving.”

“Maybe it’s looking for other prey, now. We can’t be the only thing it ever goes after.”

“It doesn’t pursue us like a normal predator. It’s,” she pauses to find the right word, “obsessed. Scared of my projection, yet it keeps coming?” She shakes her head. “Stay alert.”

Other than slowing when they pass near woody patches, staying aware doesn’t hamper their speed by much‍ ‍—‍ diamantis have a wide field of vision, and there’s not much overgrowth in the abandoned fields.

When they round a blind curve in the road, it’s there. A recurring fear waiting with utter patience.

Bone scrapes against bone as it rises from where it had sat, and slow steps are taken in approach. It gives three barks, ringing out in the emptiness around them. Those bloodshot eyes land on Ooliri, Awelah, and finally on Makuja. Then it starts growling.

Shifting her spear to a midleg, Awelah brings her foretarsi together.

“No,” Makuja says. “Allow me.”

Even as she says it, she doesn’t know exactly what she intends. She could fight Vilja now, with a renewed hope of winning.

But did she really want to hurt Vilja? Even after he bit her, she remembers.

No, she couldn’t. Should she let Awelah go ahead then? Or could she…

Unodha never taught her ⸢Blood Wolf Howl⸥, and a spell so advanced, a signature technique, couldn’t be something she’d easily learn even if her master still lived. But she pulses with her blood, and so does Vilja. There has to be some lingering connection. She knows firsthand what it feels like when the spell is used, and she’s in control, she’s powerful, now.

Does she remember what it looks like when her master would cast it? The tarsigns, different entirely from what she’s learned. More interlocking, tighter. In her memory, only one configuration is seen clearly enough she could hope to recreate. She hopes it means something.

One tarsus wraps around another, squeezing it, and the dactyls of the other rise despite, like a candle flame, or a water spout.

The whale sign.

She steps forward, and with each step, each bit of proximity sacrificed to the direhound that had nearly killed her, she feels her heart beat faster. Not fast enough. Not fast enough for it to truly be alive.

But she recalls the sensation, the pain she had felt as Unodha used the technique on her, as the first step of the plan that had killed her master. She feels her pulse in the bitemark that still remains from yesterday, even as the wound scars over. She squeezes her tarsus tighter.

Will this blind flailing of a technique do anything? She steps closer, betting her skin on something clicking. The direhound hasn’t taken another step, isn’t growling any more.

She breathes in, and her blood eagerly sucks up the fresh air. She moves her palps. “Begone,” she says. She breaks the sign, and bravado turns to caution as she jumps to her back up plan. Familiar seals. Focus. Louse.

But the direhound makes a sound, a… whining? It’s backing away, red eyes looking from her to Ooliri, to Awelah, and another bark, and then it turns. It runs off, the sound of old bones softening, occluded by the foliage. It runs north, at an angle to the road, off into the overgrown fields.

Makuja smiles. It seems the Asetari isn’t the only one who can scare off direbeasts so simply. She turns her small smile to the nymph in question, but Awelah has a deep frown that only deepens as her antennae work. Her eyes are on the fleeing hound.

“It doesn’t act like a predator at all,” she says. “I scented it to the north. If it could track us, the shortest path to catch us was not that. We can’t outrun it. Looping around like that only makes sense if—”

“He wanted to intercept us.”

“It was waiting for us. I can believe it‍ ‍—‍ ambushes are a natural tactic. But something about it, with everything else…”

“Feels… It feels like we’re being herded. All these days, looking back… this was never a hunt, was it? If it wanted to hurt us, it could have. If it wanted to eat us, it would have given up.”

“Meaning, whatever is going on, something doesn’t want us continuing down this road.” Awelah looks southeast, down the procession of more abandoned tunnels and dead flags.

“We could turn back.”

“Backward is closer to Vilja.” Makuja places a hand on her melanized scar. “Forward means farther from something that has hurt us, and still could.”

No one wanted to go chasing after the direhound. Onward they walked, and hoped solace awaited them in Wisterun. Ooliri seems most shaken by the encounter, and stays close to Awelah.

“It’s evening,” Makuja says. “It’ll be dark soon. Still no trees.”

“We could stay in one of the antholes.”

“Sleeping in abandoned tunnels when we don’t know why they were abandoned is a stupid idea.”

“We could block the entrances, prevent Vilja from entering.”

“It’s spooky but,” Ooliri says, “it sounds safer than sleeping on the ground, or in a small arboreal.”

“If we up the pace, maybe we can reach Wisterun before it’s too dark,” Awelah says.

“I’m not sure I want to go there when it’s dark.”

“Why not?”

The discussion continues without anything new being mentioned or decided. Awelah turns Ooliri’s earlier ‘no speculation!’ back around at him, and at one point, someone suggests they dig their own hole. The conversation spirals into a weary, absurd back and forth that at least gets some laughs, eases some tension.

Above them, the sun might be closer to the horizon than the midpoint, but not by much. The way forward twists a bit, and the mud has dried enough that Awelah is able to kick a stone down the road. Then Makuja is pushing a stone forward with her new technique. And then Ooliri is showing Makuja how he finally managed bane blast, though it takes a false start for him to pull it off.

After the centipede encounter, the team is starting to get better at noticing when the absence of sounds is giving something away. Dimly, they notice the absence of katydid calls, or bird chirps.

Far along the road, they see tarp set over a makeshift shelter held up by bundled fern stems. A camp? Is the quiet due to hunters, perhaps?

They smell the hemolymph before they get close enough to see what died. The smell is old, has diffused throughout the area. Right now, the wind is behind them, and their smell is carried ahead.

They see the furry form moving. It’s fast. Its shrill screech cuts through the field.

They smell direblood. They see the size of its claws. Closer, the thinness of the muzzle, the bushy tail, puts a name to the creature.

It’s an anteater. A direanteater.

And that smell, those unmoving forms in the camp, must be the ants they saw yesterday.

The blood‍-​crazed anteater is closing fast, and Awelah brings her tarsus together and weaves the seals. Ooliri doesn’t stop her.

The Asetari finishes, and opens her hands.

Nothing happens.

She has the time to run the tarsigns through one more time while that shrilly scream sounds again and still nothing happens. They stand face to face with a direbeast bigger than Vilja, and the spell that had saved them from the hound, from the erotyle, from the mantis‍-​eating centipede, has failed them.

Death in the East

A Distant Dark Lake

A little nymph cries over a great dark lake. Her abdomen heaves with sobs and so much effort as her frail legs push paddles. Her boat is just large enough to contain her. It stutters along with each slow cycle of her paddling. The oars splash water that’s as black as if it had fallen in one of those evil wisp‍-​storms. There is no reflection at all.

The waters ripple and churn on their own, and it pushes her boat off‍-​course. There are other boats and they are far away. She can see their lights and they are so very small from here.

She has a torch for light because it is night time. Is it yet bed time? Even later? She cannot remember if she has a home, if anyone is waiting for her.

She cries. It would be awful to be alone in this great dark lake. Then her cries louden.

It’s worse: she isn’t.

Lake Wisterun seeps into the cracks of the land, that vast murky mass of its waters at length dragged eastward through the veins of Entcreek. The liquid skin reflects the sky, and that sky is lightening with the veiled and cloudy dawn which is by now so familiar to this land. Yet the lake is not thereby illuminated. Beneath the slowly lifting mists, and below the surface the winds sing waves across, the waters extend down with three depths.

First is the mirrored depth of the sky, rank upon rank of clouds drawn together and hanging expectant, faint as a wave‍-​riddled reflection. You can see far beyond those clouds, as little more than a hint, the moon Tenebra, a blot on the unseen sky, as it nears its darkest, most expansive phase, tendrils casting shadows on the clouds.

Second is the mundane depth of the waters themselves, impenetrable for the muddy inflow of the creek. Bugs have boasted of boating far from the shore and descending for minutes without touching the bottom, but many tall tales surround the Lake Wisterun.

The last depth is that abstract, imagined depth of secrets fleetingly known from details that surround. How it roils under the waxing moon, how the damselflies and red‍-​feathered ducks explore the fringes but dare not light near its heart, how the fishermant’s wife disappeared not one moon ago.

But if that is its depth, then it must be distant from the surface. From here above, it is just a lake, and it is majestic when viewed afar from the watchtower outpost.

“Ain’t it the prettiest sight in the whole county?” Boleheva says, standing on the outpost’s balcony. She has her raptorials outstretched, the entire lake encompassed between them. Lake Wisterun is big, and at this distance, it took a big mantis to have legs long enough to do this. “Leaves me awaiting this stop on my route every year. Wond’rful patch o water, right wonderful. All so long as ye don’t drown in it.”

“Have people drowned in it?” Ooliri asks.

“Just once, since I started working this county. Townsbugs ain’t forgettin it soon though.”

“No one’s planning on taking a swim,” Awelah says. “We’re only here to find information about Lady Earth‍-​shaper. That’s all.”

“I wouldn’t mind taking a swim,” Ooliri says. Then he glances at his newly bandaged arm, and perhaps thinking better of it, corrects to, “Or maybe a ride in a little boat.”

“There will be lilypads and algae worth sampling. Leaving without visiting the lake would be a waste.” Makuja perches on a railing that encircles the outer platform of the watchtower, yet she faces inward rather than admiring the view. Being a few strides away from the ranger, she is positioned to have both the yellowshelled imago and a green nymph close to her focals at once. She watches with stillness and perfect balance. When she moves, it’s a minute adjustment of her head, a glance toward the spiralling stairs that accessed this platform. A mantis is climbing up now, burgundy head already visible, abdomen held up to cradle as it carries something.

He’s clicking his mandibles; he has heard them. “Don’t mistake your stay in Wisterun for a luxury visit, nor a mercenary venture. Not yet. Right now, you three are unknown threats to be evaluated, motivations and backgrounds to be accounted for.” Yanseno had a metal cup of water he’d held over a fire downstairs and poured bitter brown powder into. It floats in the air, the umbral darkness around one tarsus the only thing holding it up. The cup rises, aromatic steam wafting over his palps. It almost seems an unspoken reminder: with just as much effort he could pull out one arquebus strapped to his back.

“Yeh. Don’t reckon you’ll be out of our sight till we’ve got yer names in writing.” Boleheva turns away from the balcony, and takes a step toward them, as if she’d awaited Yanseno’s return.

“They seem nice,” comes a mellow voice. Quessa had stood at the other side of the balcony, gazing with pigmented eyes at the sunrise over lake Wisterun. “I believe in them.” She has a smile when she’s stepping after the vesperbane ranger.

“I’ll save my credulity till I know exactly what I’m believing in.”

“Why save it?” Awelah asks. “We could just tell you right here.”

“Ain’t no point,” Boleheva says. “We’re not ants but we’re not moonbrains neither. Sit pretty till we’re at my desk and Ruby can keep note of what yer claimin.”

“Can’t Yanseno do it?” Quessa asks. “He has a perfect memory!”

“Look, I can’t allow that. You know this.” She looks at the green nymph, then, with the palp‍-​swipe of one who misspoke, corrects herself, “He knows why.”

“Because I’m a maverick, and an umbracog at that. You don’t trust me.”

“It ain’t that. You’re—” She stops. “It’s about what the gold will think. I tell them I got my report from a distorty, and then? They toss it out and ask questions. Better get it done with tradition.”

“A report?” Awelah’s posture has straightened. Antennae‍-​fluff rising up, she asks, “Who are you reporting to?”

“We’re in Windborne, girl. Take a wild guess.”

“Solaroch. Nearest stronghold,” Yanseno supplies.

Ooliri is nodding. Makuja is impassive, and only Awelah looks like this is new information.

“I’m not handing my secrets off to the first hold that asks.”

“Bah. You are. Keeping quiet ain’t an option, but this going smooth instead of rough is. I’m not asking your life story, and don’t need to hear it. I do need to hear what good reason there is for you lot nabbing the headbands of three good banes of Windhold. If I like your reasons, we might even be friendly after that.”

“Then we have every reason to arrive with haste,” Makuja says. She breaks her stare, now, eyes tracing the line from up here to the lake, as if calculating the distance.

Team Duskborn and their escort, had arrived at this outpost last night, when the clouded sky above grew too dark to continue a trek through the wilderness. They slept here under the promise of reaching Wisterun in the morning. Boleheva had awoken first, before the sunrise, at length roused the rest of them to witness the sunrise Boleheva wanted to show. Quessa had slept the hardest, last to awaken. Now, it’s time to move on.

“Wait,” Awelah says. “We can’t go to town yet. We still haven’t done anything about…” she trails off, waving a tarsus toward her face. “I can’t be recognized. Not if I’ll have more killers looking for me when we get there.”

“Hm? Only new faces here are a few Dusky migrants who lost their huts to the wisps, and the bees. Bees’re already leaving, ain’t they? Bah. If there were hired killers skulking around town, I’d know. I’m the ranger! You think I’d let them blot you out?”

Yanseno is taking a sip of his hot drink. When he lowers the cup and swallows, he regards Awelah. “You’ve made us aware of this situation.” He reaches behind himself. The purple nymph tenses, and the red nymph brings her hands together. He keeps his guns behind him. But the burgundy imago is turning, revealing what he retrieved from downstairs: a pile of cloth, straps and metal bars. His tarsus closes around a bit of cloth, and passes it to Awelah. Cloth doesn’t throw well, but the dark aura around Yanseno’s tarsus speaks to some assistance.

The black cloth fits around her mandibles and face, tying secure at the back of her neck. The fit is loose enough to move her palps, and speak a bit muffled. She’s given gloves, too. Clad like this, she didn’t need an antennae‍-​band to look like a bane.

“You have a cloak, so wear it. With that, maintaining anonymity is up to you.”

“What’s the rest of that for?” Ooliri asks, eyeing the mass of straps. From where Yan had retrieved the mask.

“Heh. Didn’t give this tower a close look, did you?”

This tower they’ve climbed is so much banestone scaffolding, six pillars rising in a hex with crisscrossing supports between them. Inside the hex, secured to the pillars, a staircase spirals steeply up. Set atop a hill, the tower rises even higher still, and at the top lay three stacked floors, stocked with supplies. Yanseno had just come up from one of those rooms.

Boleheva, standing at the threshold between the outer platform and the interior where the nymphs now perch or stand, is pointing to another edge of the platform. “This is an old vesperbane outpost, ye know? The ranger before me had this tower propped up, and then he ran a rope from here right down to the gates of Wist’run! Crazy fella.”

“A zipline,” Yanseno supplies. “A faster route to town than the footpaths.”

“For y’all.” Boleheva taps her abdomen. “I’m too big. Ol’ ranger was smaller than I, and one of those harnesses might snap with me on it!”

“Has snapped. I saw you fall. A good little laugh.” Yanseno takes a sip, perhaps hiding a smile.

Ooliri darts to the railing, looking down the distance they’d be falling. “Is it safe?”

“Everything is unsafe. You should be well acquainted with the dangers of traveling the wilds by now. After all, if that direanter had a babe, the father’s out there. The direhound too, if it isn’t yours. Everything is unsafe. So ask instead if it’s worth the risks.” (Makuja straightens at the mention of Vilja.) Yanseno puts down his cup, and steps toward the outer platform. “Myself, I’ll be fine without a minute more in these woods. For you, it’s your choice. Walk with Boleheva, if you must. But decide quickly. I’ll be going.”

“Ye know tiercels,” Boleheva is saying with one antennae curling up. “Too delicate for these harsh wilds.”

Because he is walking away, they don’t see Yanseno’s reaction to this.

“So, which will it be, nymphies?” Boleheva asks.

Makuja is glancing to the ranger first of all, but Ooliri is the one who speaks first.

“Awelah should go with her.”

The red nymph frowns. “Why?”

Ooliri’s tone has a certain sharpness to it, speaking to the red nymph. “Her injury, you know. Your thorax is still sore, isn’t it?” Awelah stares, then gives a nod.

“What happened to her?”

“Got hit with some enervate. Nothing big.”

“You didn’t ward it?” Yanseno asks, glancing back.

“What?”

“I sensed you were a blackbane of some development. Was I wrong?” Yanseno asked. His eyes on Awelah, coupled with the labrum raised, exposing just a hint of mandible, makes the evaluation latent in his regard evident. He’s probing Awelah’s abilities.

There’s a pause, and Awelah’s palps tap in thought. A dilemma underneath is: keep her secrets, or boast? She says, “Of course I’m a blackbane. And I’ve learned two forms: bane blast, and my clan’s technique: umbral body projection. I’d prove it, but…” She frowns, tossing a scowl at Makuja, and finishes, “It’s… painful when I try. The injury.”

Yanseno laughs. Awelah frowns, but before anything else, the dark red imago is making a few tarsigns.

Familiar tarsigns.

⸢Umbral Form: Umbral Body Projection!⸥

Aura flows smoothly out of his forelegs, and takes on his shape, darkening until this umbraform stands before them. Shadow‍-​Yanseno waves, then puts his forelegs together and dispells himself.

“Nothing clan secret about it. It’s a standard enough technique. Nobody uses it because it takes too much rhiza to mold, too much umbra to cast, and what’s the point? Might as well just sack ’em with a melter ball. All around more efficient. Maybe your clan’s got around that.”

“You’ve never heard of my clan?”

“Nope. Should I recognize you?”

“The Asetari are the founders of Duskroot. Our will is divided but undiminished‍ ‍—‍ the astral projection technique creates autonomous spellforms that are controlled, yet independent.”

“How interesting,” Yanseno drily states. He turns to take a step toward Awelah, and then lifts a tarsus, and points it at the pale nymph’s head before jerking it upward as if from a gun’s recoil. “Boom. If I was out for your head, you’d have given me all I needed. I told you your anonymity is up to you‍ ‍—‍ you’re going to have to try harder than that to keep it.”

Awelah frowns. Her palps move wordlessly for a moment, stumbling over how to respond. “If I can’t trust you…”

“I don’t trust you. Not yet. So don’t get familiar.” His eyes drop to the girl’s thorax. “About the injury, though, just sounds like your coils got damaged by the blast. I’m a sensor. Might give you a look, see how bad it is‍ ‍—‍ if I get recompense. Think about that, while Boleheva walks you to town.” Yanseno’s eyes leave Awelah, and roam over the other nymphs present. “Hope that little episode gave you enough time to decide what you’re doing. Who needs harnesses?”

“I think,” Ooliri starts, “I might walk.”

“But it’s fun,” Quessa says. “It feels like flying. It’d be sad to miss out on it.” Her antennae bounce, and she smiles. Ooliri reciprocates, and wonders if she’s smiled for any of the other, or if he’s that much special, for now. His antennae rise at the thought.

“Quessa was scared her first time, too. Got over it quick.”

“Was I?” she asks. “Oh, right.” The addendum is slow and flat, absent recognition. But soon she’s skipping over to Yanseno and grabbing two of the harnesses, glancing down to inspect them. She passes one to Ooliri. The material is old and worn baneleather, with metal buckles.

Makuja glances at Awelah, then drops from her perch. “Larger groups walk for longer. We should get there quickly.” She walks to collect a harness for herself.

On the platform, Yanseno is attaching Quessa’s harness to the zipline’s trolley. Two ropes glide down over the forest in parallel, and the trolley secures to both of them.

The trolley’s wheels roll down the line, steady and unslowed by the friction that mere sliding would entail. When Quessa is released to fly down the length, she soars forth with a laugh stolen by the wind, and she flaps her raptorials like a bird.

Ooliri stands with tightly folded forelegs. He looked over the edge once, and resolved to keep his eyes pointed upward after that. Nerves breaking, he opts to go after Quessa and get it over with.

As the harness slides over the gray nymph, Yanseno decides he’ll be the last to go. “You kids will find some way to get it wrong, or freeze up worrying you will.”

Ooliri settles with some fidgeting, harness attached to the zipline trolley. Behind him, Makuja is sliding the leather straps over her.

Of the four zipline harnesses that leave the watch tower, three make it to the gates of Wisterun.

A Final Stretch

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.”

A Wisterun Welcome

“It’s all under control,” Yanseno says, his harness lifted off him with a single swipe of his aura‍-​wreathed tarsus. It drops to the smoked conk platform beneath them, forgotten. “I sensed Makuja moving, chi‍-​nrv burn suggestive of active bloodletting. Mending, or her myxokora are out. I signaled Boleheva to tail her.”

“Is she okay?” Ooliri asks. “Why not tell her to help?”

“Your girl’s agitated. Don’t trust that brute to handle a sensitive situation, not when it’s her fault.” Yanseno glances at the gray nymph. “I get the impression she isn’t the most stable of your group, is she?”

He thinks of Awelah. “Well, it’s more…”

“Of a competition? Yeah, I could see that.” Yanseno shifts his eyes to the distance as he slips a raptorial into his trenchcoat. A moment later, he’s palming a dark ball. Ooliri wants to call the material glass‍ ‍—‍ it has all the trappings of vague translucency, the only problem is the images suggested in refraction were unlike anything actually present. A dark plain without trees, without clouds in the sky, the scape dotted with twisted scleritomes. Ooliri doesn’t even need to ask before the bane is explaining, “Sensor ball. Easier, cheaper than doing it with endowments.”

“Could I use it?”

“Nope.”

“Erm, is that no as in you won’t let me, or no as in it wouldn’t work?”

“Both. Don’t want to clean your umbra sig off the glass, and you don’t have the control needed to sense much of anything, nor the training to understand what you could sense.” A chill comes, underscoring the words, and the glass darkens. Yanseno looks out in the direction of the tower.

Fringing the town is foliage whose consistency of height and spacing suggest they were planted. The expanse is like a second wall around the town. Yanseno peers into it. Paths aside from the big main road out of town were winding affairs cutting through the arboreals‍ ‍—‍ ants were fond of mazes and he supposed this is another. Meant he couldn’t see Boleheva or the kid coming through. But he’s a sensor. He waves to the boy. “Let’s go face the mess coming this way.”

Ooliri’s about to ask what’s wrong, but as the sensor is stepping directly over the fence (rather than going through the gate), an ant clad in dark blue and green rags is scuttling up. Little feet kick gravel out of the way as the ant approaches. That one pokes Yanseno with an antennae. There’s a high‍-​pitched stridulation. One leg taps a sheet held by mandibles.

“Not now.”

Ooliri comes up behind him to give the ant a look. Seeing Ooliri, this one turns and presents the sheet. Slips of cloth are pinned to it and strings are drawn between the clothes. Each of the tag‍-​like bits of cloth has a word sown onto it. As Ooliri peers, an antenna taps on a word, and then rides a string to another tag, taps that, and so forth. This one is rubbing legs against its gaster all the while, stridulation pitched higher than a diamantid voice‍ ‍—‍ and after a moment, Ooliri realizes it sounds almost like words. So different from a mantis’s palps, the ant must be unable to pronounce most words of Panthecan, only simple articles. The words on the cloth are all nouns, and parsing them together with the chirps, Ooliri realizes it’s communicating, as simple and odd as the implied sentence is.

“Hi! [Vesperbane] has [attention] for [[pleading]]?” It taps vesperbane one, the other antennae pointing at Yanseno. Attention is tapped twice, and it repeatedly taps pleading as Ooliri stares.

“I think he’s busy right now. He might be able to speak with you soon?”

This one continues fiddling with the strings as Ooliri speaks, rearranging the tags with a speed he can’t quite follow. Ants have awful eyes, he recalls, so he isn’t sure how they could use the tags if they could even see the sheet in front of them, which they can’t. Unless‍ ‍—‍ those words are sown onto the fabric. Is it feeling the bumps and telling the words apart like that? While Ooliri muses, a new sentence is readying, and interpolated with more chirps.

“Buh, buh. [Inquiry] of [smallness] with [promptitude].”

A quick and simple question? “Our friend might be hurt. I think he’s worried about that right now.”

“Hmp. [Mirror] of [colony].”

What? Mirror… the same? Did colony mean ‘us’? “Your friends might be hurt?” Ooliri asks, even as it clicks. “Oh.” He glances to Quessa, the green nymph with antennae drooping and a growing frown. “Do you think they’re…”

“That one expected an arrival?” Quessa asks, looking at the blue‍-​ragged ant rather than Ooliri.

“Uu. [Emptiness] of [knowledge] as [[delivery]] to [fullness] of [knowledge] as [[returning]]. Not [returning]. So [emptiness] as [return]. So [attention] for [scouting] and [foraging] of those ones who [return].”

Before Ooliri can tease out what that means, Yanseno calls.

“She’s here.”

Even without the sensor to confirm it, the energy of the ants crowding and passing the gates changes. The first to react are the ants waiting on top of the wall, bigger bugs tightly clad in black, with bulky mandibles distinct even from this distance. They stand on four legs, antennae stretched out into the sky, and, with a twitch as if catching a scent, drop to sixes and move. Meanwhile, the ephemeral flow of ants in lines up and down the trails slows, changes direction. Grouped in threes and fours, those who carrying bags or carted wheelbarrows stop and look around, while the ants with empty backs don’t dawdle, gathering into a massed crowd.

A wall‍-​mounted ant has traversed to a wider platform and, half obscured by a railing, it takes a mallet and strikes it twice against a small gong. The sound carries farther than their stridulation would, yet near enough only those outside the gate clearly hear.

Around them, they can see the ants who had pushed barrows reach into them, and retrieve farm tools, passing them around. Big, black mandibles lift the tools as improvised weapons.

At first, Boleheva’s acrobatics had been impressive. The staid banes of the Asetari clan were much more inclined to walk at speeds that could only be called a procession, and even in duels, it played out so much more like a game of sworder draughts. Awelah grits her teeth as the thought of her clan leads to its inevitable end point. But she wouldn’t cowardly deter her thoughts to spare herself. She wouldn’t forget this pain.

“Holdin’ on real tight there, aintcha?”

Awelah only grunted.

At first, Boleheva’s acrobatics had been impressive. But with every creek or pit leapt across, every metataxite kicked off of, Awelah had to hold on tighter to not fly off. She was a vesperbane now‍ ‍—‍ why force her to clutch tight like a child to their mommy? (Though if Awelah were still that child, would she ever let go?)

When the acrobatics stop and Awelah need no longer cling, her first thought is that she wants to keep going.

“Why did we stop?” She doesn’t see Makuja anywhere near her.

“Looks like someone needs our help. Lift yer eyes.”

Awelah sees it, then, up in one of the ferns. An ant clutches its topmost fronds, bending them toward the ground yet still hanging meters above it. Some of the branching stalks look to have slipped in between loops and ribbons of cloth that all spinners wore, holding it there. The ant is wriggling a bit now, having seen them. They hear dissonant chirps‍ ‍—‍ distress.

“I got ya, little one.” Boleheva pick Awelah up and sits her down‍ ‍—‍ with some difficulty, as Awelah twists and pushes away her tarsi.

“We don’t have time for this,” the nymph says.

“Shouldn’t take more than a wee minute. Longer if ye argue.”

“Makuja might be hurt. This ant looks fine.” Awelah looks around, then glances for prints in the mud. “It has friends in the area, doesn’t it? It’d have too. Ants are a hive race.”

“Think a bit before you speak, eh? We saw where your girl fell. Ain’t there‍ ‍—‍ means she must’ve gotten up and moved. Can’t be too hurt, and this anty might have seen her. Now quiet.”

As she gets closer, grabbing hold of the fern, a pronounced size difference is highlighted‍ ‍—‍ the ranger’s foreleg is longer than the ant, and only a bit thinner. Jostling the fern a little, the yellow bane looks the entrapping plant up and down.

“Hold tight a moment, friend. I’ll get ye right down.”

Awelah hears a bit of fern stalk crushing as her grip tightens, and her other foreleg is drawn back. Boleheva exhales, and the foreleg shoots forward, slamming into the fern below her grip. The thing shatters, hard green splintering and brown oozing out. The ant cries out, jolting, as Boleheva lifts the whole giant fern with her other foreleg, bearing the weight just a moment before the other foreleg turns it to a two tarsi grip. Steadied now, Boleheva carefully rotates the severed stalk, so that the ant is right side up, and lowers it to the ground.

“There ye are, right as ye wish. Before you go, can I ask how ye got like this?” Simultaneous with speaking, Boleheva is waving at the pale nymph, dactyls curling to beckon her forward.

The ant chirps slowly, eyes downcast. “Wugh. [Bat‍-​bug : red, black] who [screams] had [threat] and [command]. Urm. This one who [hides] in [fern : big] has [expense]. The ones who [read] have now [duration : longer] for [arrival : later].”

“You make much of that, girl? Don’t know much formic myself‍ ‍—‍ Ruby usually handles things with the locals.”

Awelah’s family’d had a few spinners; they’d woven their robes. She didn’t know them well‍ ‍—‍ hard to talk to spinners if you can’t read‍ ‍—‍ if you couldn’t read for years after than your agemates could. When older, she had dealt with them formally, at the point where playing with the servants would only lead her to long evenings in the sitting room with father. (Awelah waits for the stab of loss, and this time it does not come.)

To the imago, Awelah only clicks her mandibles, palps curved in a downward frown as she scrapes, “This is a distraction. It’s here to waste our time.”

Boleheva glances between the ant and the fern. “Threatening my people, tossing them up in ferns.” Vesperbane eyes could get so much darker than laymants. “Just as I said, there best be a damn good reason behind your behavior.”

Awelah meets that hard gaze, and wonders what in the gulfs Makuja is doing.

“While I’m normally not one for heroics,” Yanseno starts, “you’re making that a difficult habit to keep. Haven’t even stepped into town yet and you’ve already got a knife to innocent bug’s throat.”

The maverick had met her, stopped her right where the path to Wisterun opens up. She says, “Ants don’t speak fluent Panthecan. Those I encountered mistook me for some danger, made an intimidation display. If I was attacked, it would not end well for them, so I ensured they could not make that mistake.”

Yanseno glances to the knife she holds to the ant’s throat‍ ‍—‍ something one might mistake for danger‍ ‍—‍ and opts not to comment. Instead, “Can’t blame them, myself. Not when you stink of killer fear. They were made to be scared for their life.”

Red antennae fold at that, fluff furrowing. The kid hadn’t realized it? She says, “Nevertheless, faced with the choice to entertain their threats or not, I chose the option that gave us both what we wanted quickest.”

“How selfless,” Yanseno mutters. “It was pointlessly rash. Because you were scared too, weren’t you? Fallen from a height that might’ve killed a laymant, might’ve crippled your friends, you survived, but it shook you up, didn’t it? Hate that it happened, but I need you calm.” Not waiting for a response. Yanseno chooses to make a tarsign, for all that he has control enough to not need it. ⸢Nouform: Calming Draft!⸥

Makuja’s antennae splay out. Her grip on the knife and the ant slack enough for the ant to wriggle free. The ant walks up to one of this one’s companion, who wraps two legs around that one in a hug.

As Makuja’s myxokora unknit and drain back into her body cavity, she asks. “What was that?”

“Simple nouspell. Easy way to get someone calm fast.”

“You manipulated my mind?”

“Does a splash of cool water manipulate your mind? Not much more to it. I could show you the spell, pretty low level stuff.”

A momentary palp‍-​tap‍ ‍—‍ she’s considering it‍ ‍—‍ but she shakes her head. “A lethal accident which may have been an attempt to kill, and you’re forcing me calm? I will not be distracted from this.” What went unspoken‍ ‍—‍ the kid wasn’t subtle enough to leave it unimplied‍ ‍—‍ was that this action is just what an assassin covering their tracks would go for. Mighty suspicious, ha.

Yanseno says, “Sure. I’m not stranger to paranoia myself‍ ‍—‍ it’s a survival skill in this business. Don’t mistake my cool head for a cocky dismissal of the possibility. This could have been deliberate‍ ‍—‍ there could be killers in every shadow, and sometimes there are. But it’s weak evidence for a faint hypothesis. It’s about proportion, kid. Don’t let mere bad luck get under your skin like this.”

“Mere bad luck,” she said it as if, after hearing the words, she needed to spit them back out.

“Who’d need that much setup to take out a bug no one will miss? Course it was bad luck‍ ‍—‍ the incompetent cause more trouble that the malicious. Boleheva doesn’t use the zipline, and that bane might get nothing done if she didn’t have the wardens holding her to it. Nobody but her pets do inspection of ranger equipment around here. If this is what’s got your suspicion hackle’d up, I wouldn’t want to see you glimpse a scarecrow at night.”

“The hypothesis is more than faint.” First Vilja attacking her and only her, and now this? Perhaps this is how the Asetari feels. Makuja glances to the thickening crowd of ants as thoughts work through her antennae.

Yanseno listens to the unspoken. “Don’t want to share what you’re thinking in front of a crowd?” he asks. “Maybe you know something I don’t; save it for later. Now, I can see Bole getting here. She’s gonna be pissed when she finds out what you did. I’ll go smooth things over with her. Keep your knives in your sheaths while I do that?”

Yanseno turns from Makuja, flicking his attention down to his sensor ball. The end of the conversation is punctuated by a wave passing over the ants that surround them.

Outside of Wisterun spawls a kind of lot, a flatten expanse of packed dirt and gravel, with workcarts and barrows parked by the wall. The ants present aren’t enough to fill the lot by any stretch‍ ‍—‍ perhaps a dozen, pressed closely enough together they take up even less space. Tightening mandible‍-​grips on their improvised farming tools, the ants press closer to Makuja.

Yanseno glances up from his black orb. “Unless I need to stop a lynching first?”

The answer comes from one of the bigger ants. This one’s word‍-​sheet is much smaller, the antennae‍-​pointing less graceful. The chirps are deeper as it conveys, “Aa! [[Threat]] to [colony] from [bat‍-​bug] who [stabs].”

Another, smaller ant behind that one supplements: “[Disjunction] of these ones will [attack] or the one who [breathes : black] will [attack].”

The big ant, again, underscores it with, “[Colony] will have [defense]. Aa!”

The chorus of ‘aa!’ is repeated by other ants, becoming a mantra.

The burgundy bane lifts a foretarsus to rest on his head. But he doesn’t need to say anything.

“Wait!” high‍-​pitched mantid voice comes from behind him‍ ‍—‍ Ooliri and Quessa are trotting forth from the smoked conk platform. Ooliri has his notebook out, held in one tarsus. “This is a misunderstanding.”

(As he scans the crowd for an opening to slip through, the sensor mutters, “Wouldn’t that require an attempt to understand?”)

Quessa takes the lead, mellow voice quiet but insistent. “Please don’t attack our guest. She is our ally, and yours!”

“Feh!” a small ant says, pulling a new tag out from a fold of cloth. “No one who [threatens] in [alliance].”

Quessa looks around. “Who was the one who came to us earlier?”

“You called him the One Who Bites Water, I think?”

“Right.” She scans the crowd once more, and picks out the one clad in blue and green. “You! You had something you wanted to ask?”

“An expected arrival,” Ooliri provides, “messengers, you were waiting on them, weren’t you?”

“[Affirmative].” A head bobbing slowly, as if in immitation of mantid expression.

“They’re dead,” Yanseno puts it simplest of all. “Got ate up by a direanter in the old farms.”

“But it’s dead now! We killed it!” The green nymph points at Makuja. “She killed it. If not her, we would have never been lead to it. If not for her, it wouldn’t have been weakened and distracted enough for us to land the final blow.”

(Another quiet comment from Yanseno: “Laying it on a little thick there, ha.”)

“Most importantly,” Quessa continues, raising her foretarsi, bringing them together, “if not her, I wouldn’t have been able to read some of the ants message‍ ‍—‍ and store it with one of my teacher’s technique! I can tell you of what the ant wished to say! But his rank of the spell can only store about a page of text, I’m sorry, I saved what I could.”

She had been making tarsigns‍ ‍—‍ now she completes them. For release, she brings a finger to her head, and presses it between her ocelli. ⸢Nouform: Poet’s Recital!⸥

“Ooliri, if you’d hand me the sheet?”

A page torn from his notebook falls into her heads, and a bit of charcoal.

She begins writing, and as she writes, she says, “I will tell you‍ ‍—‍ but only if you stand down, and thank our guest for what she’s done for you.”

The biggest ants who had formed the frontlines of the mob glance to the smaller ants behind them. The ants chirp like a choir of birds, looking among those beside them, weaving and unfurling the threads of their head‍-​clothes and rubbing antennae against the cloths of others.

“Thank her? For this crock of spidershit?” With that exclamation, they knew: Boleheva, at last, had arrived.

(One ant among the crowd reacts to this, the one called Bites Water looks to the ranger, the look becoming a stare as this one hisses faintly.)

Yanseno only smirked, as if something had come together. Addressing the ants, he says, “If it makes your decision any easier, act as though Makuja is in our custody already. Your ranger can attest. It’s his jurisdiction, but if the Entcreek colony has objections… I suppose you’ll be fine explaining this intervention to the Stewartry?”

The ants are quiet now and black eyes glance dartingly at each other, elbowed antennae drawing back in apprehension. The ant in blue and green takes this moment to step forward. This one scuttles up to Quessa, poking her with an antenna. “Baa, this one who [remembers] has [message] for [[pleading]]?”

“Of course!” Quessa smiles, and then it falters a moment after. “I… may need to cast the spell again. It… may have slipped from my mind.”

As the ants gather around Quessa, and Yanseno is thus at last freed to continue over to Boleheva, Makuja instead glances to the one mantis who hasn’t spoken. The Asetari, coming up behind the yellow imago. Makuja finds the pale nymph is already staring at her.

Yanseno points at Awelah and gestures for her to scram. She frowns, says something unheard from this distance, but the imago only repeats the gesture. Makuja’s approaching, beckoning her teammate over.

“Asetari.”

“No‍-​name. Why did you do all this? Are you,” she stops, and then continues, “did you get hurt again?”

“I needed to do something. I’m fine. That’s not important. What is important is,” Makuja stops, and glances around before starting to walk around the perimeter of the lot. She continues, “that we can speak with some privacy.”

Awelah lifts her labrum. “What do you want?”

“My fall‍ ‍—‍ I still don’t know if it was an accident.”

“You did it on purpose?”

Makuja lifts her own labrum. “Boleheva, or Yanseno, could be conspiring to kill me. My fall makes it more likely. What do you think? You were with Boleheva‍ ‍—‍ did you notice anything?”

“Boleheva was surprised, concerned. Nothing about her suggested wanting to kill, let alone being capable of hiding it.” She clicks her mandibles as punctuation.

“But it was her harness.”

“Why use the harnesses, though? Boleheva could kill you in one punch.”

“I’ve been thinking about that. It’s a poor choice of weapon‍ ‍—‍ it did not work. What constraints would birth that approach? My theory is only one of them wanted to kill me. The benefit of the harness is that it looks like an accident.”

“Probably because it is.”

“Do you think we’ll survive assuming the best? I wish to be prepared, and need only know if you’ve seen a thing I haven’t.”

Awelah bites a palp. Then, “I have.”

Makuja frowns, pausing as if worrying Awelah would reiterate her disbelief. “Tell me.”

“You’re too much of a killer.”

The red nymph lifts one antennae.

“Your training, your thinking, it’s fit for assassination, not a fight. You try to kill bugs with one sudden move. So you think this was that one careful move, aiming for the heart. You assume it failed. But in a fight, you’ll throw punches you don’t expect to land, and certainly couldn’t end the fight. You jab to probe the defenses, to set up a better attack.”

Makuja glances at the pair of vesperbane imagos, having their own private conversation.

“Just… Don’t just pick apart the failure. If I thought this was enemy action… Figure out what opening you gave them, and what follow up is coming next. That is, if you aren’t just punching a sandbag.” Awelah starts to turn away, but reverses to add: “Thing I’d wonder first… why target you? I’m the one with teams hired to kill me.”

That hadn’t been their mission parameters. But Makuja doesn’t correct her. “Recall what their first impression was, from us fighting the anteater.”

“Oh,” Awelah says. “So they’d think you’re the strong one.”

“It’s not inaccurate, is it?”

Awelah turns around fully this time. “I see.” She tooks a step back, then took quick steps toward the two imagos. They follow after Quessa and Ooliri had gone to the gates, to ask the ants to please open, and Awelah catches up.

Makuja walks forth alone as they finally approach Wisterun.

Suspicions and Sermons

The first impression one has at finally arriving in Wisterun is… disappointment. The few dozen towering mantis homes upthrust from the creekside look like the entirety of a tiny village.

The gates of Wisterun are slabs of smoked conk held together with hard mud. As the slabs close behind them, they start forward onto rock‍-​studded dirt from which weeds arise. The towers are placed with all the logic of trees in an old growth forest‍ ‍—‍ an image completed by the catwalks stretching between them, suggested a parallel canopy of bridge‍-​streets. Below them, the streets weave around, winding, width waxing and waning abruptly.

These streets pulse with intermittent activity, yet the townspace is more absence than presence. Still, groups abound: mantids, most wearing only metathoractic shirts and abdomen sheaths dyed earthy shades, while at their feet roaches scurry, wearing hats and boots. Ants march, some in their familiar swaddling, yet those often lead larger ants that look naked in comparison. One heavy, horned beetle tugs a carts behind them. And so on throughout the space visible from entering the gate‍ ‍—‍ which was at least a quarter of the town.

Awelah is looking around. “Is this it? Where’s the rest of the town?”

“The sign said ‘welcome to Wisterun’, so…” Ooliri, at least, shares her bemusement.

“My clan’s compound was bigger than this.”

“Including the training grounds?”

“Yes. Fine. Maybe there weren’t as many houses but… this is tiny.”

“I hatched in a village not much larger than this,” Makuja murmurs from behind them. “Home to a mine; the mine is barren.”

Looking back, Awelah lifts a skeptical antennae. “What did Unodha want with it?”

“Hunting legends of lost treasure. I told her where to find it.”

A single nod. “Ah, so that’s why a real vesperbane would bother with you.”

For a second, Makuja halts. Before that thread of conversation could continue, Yanseno cuts in from the front:

“Heartening to know I’m not alone in being used to the real cities. But your intuition is on point, Awelah. Wisterun has a few roaches, some mantids‍ ‍—‍ but it’s an ant town. And why would spinners build a town you could see? Not even just ants living down below. You’re in perhaps one of the larger towns in the prefecture, if you look underneath.”

As they walked, streets felt even emptier in practice; they never worried about running into anyone; mantids would look up and glance at their antennae‍-​bands and clear a path. (Though roaches and ants often cleared way for mantids as a matter of course). The nymphs wore bands too, but not real ones.

(There had been an argument about it. “It’s fraud,” had been Boleheva’s insistence when wearing the Windborne bands was suggested. “It’s practical,” was Yanseno’s rebuttal. The compromise was cloth painted with blood: where an official band would have a insignia plate, there’s had a twisted, linear shape (symbolic of a vesper), inside of a sphere (like new moon Tenebra, or a soul kernel), and branching filaments around it (like veins or roots). It suffices to identify them as vesperbanes‍ ‍—‍ an impression Ooliri’s bandaged arm and Awelah’s masked face only underscore.)

A few buildings behind them, they see the first evidence Yanseno was right: a hole digging into the ground, rounded conk slab acting as the lid. They’d seen other lidded holes before, but this time an ant is moving the cover out of the way; the fact that it’s a hole clicks.

“Are we going underground?” Ooliri pokes at the ground with the exposed toes of his sandaled feet. “Where are we going?”

Yanseno glances to the big yellow bane beside him. “The syndics were kind enough to hand this one a whole office right in town hall. Big fancy desk and everything. Doesn’t even know how to use one.”

“I can stand on my desk just fine, don’t shade me.”

A golden antennae lifts, then a glance back to see that the ranger is smiling. “Was that a joke?”

“Course it was. Am I stupid? Course I know a desk is where you sink yer blade when yer not using it.” The smile turns to a laugh now.

“This isn’t time for jokes,” Awelah says. “Answer the question. Where are we going? Where is town hall?”

“Who are ye to be ruling the talk? I’ll joke as I please.”

“Town hall is in northside,” Yanseno says. “But we might be stopping by a tavern, first. There’s one at the edge of gateside. Drop off your bags and such‍ ‍—‍ you’ll be here a few days, won’t you?”

“Yeah, probably,” Ooliri says.

“No. We need to get Boleheva’s report out of the way as soon as we can, no use stopping along the way.”

“Easy for you to say,” Makuja says. “You aren’t carrying anything.”

“I carried plenty, before you—”

“There’s six of us,” Ooliri says. “Maybe we could split? Leave someone to handle the bags?”

Quessa looks up. “I can do it. I’d be happy to.”

“You’d probably forget half of them,” Awelah says.

“But I don’t forget important things!”

A violet antennae arches.

Before that continues, Makuja clicks her mandibles. With a glance to the burgundy maverick, she asks, “You mentioned northside and gateside. Those are districts?”

“Entcreek splits this town in half, pretty much, going southeast, and the incline that the river is riding means one end is up higher than the other. This is gateside, we’re west of the river and at the low end. Northside is east of the river, higher up. Main way into northside is the big bridge just over the little tiered waterfall. To get there, we need to dip into hillside before crossing over.”

“What’s the other quarter?”

“Mudside. Where most of the roach burrows sit,” Yanseno said. At Awelah’s frown, he adds, “There’s a ladder up to northside, but a roach isn’t much of a climber, and the south bridge is rickety, in disrepair or slumping ’neath the waters more often than not, so getting in or out of mudside typically means wading through the earthy shallows. ’Swhere the name comes from.”

“Why not do something?” Awelah asks with some indignation. “Why make them swim through mud.”

“If you ask the administration, the roaches like the mud.” Yanseno bites a labial palp, teeth combing through the fluff its little beard. “Probably can’t even afford it, between the Stewartry, the Pantheca and the grand colony all taking a cut.”

“Speaking of burrows,” Boleheva says, “you see there any runners around? Need to let Ruby know I’ll be by the hall. She’s got the key.” Her eyes roam over the throngs of people milling throughout the down. “Ah, you! Yeah, you!”

Her dactyl singles out to a lone roach, pale green chitin like some newborn plant. Antennae jolting upward, the bug looks around, left and right, before realizing it must be them the ranger has singled out. Glancing up at the vesperbane ranger, eyes staring at the bloodiron plate of her antennae band, the bug’s legs bend downward into a slight bow.

“Run a message for me, kindly? Ye find Ruby of Redbane, ye tell her I’m back. That’s all.”

The roach’s voice is a halting song. “Madam, is there someone else you could ask? I don’t know—”

“Just ask around, should find someone who knows her pretty quick.”

Ooliri watches the exchange with a frown, but as the roach asks for a description, he feels a hand on his shoulder. That small‍ ‍—‍ it must be Makuja. He jumps, a small yelp from his spiracles. When he turns to see mere inquisitiveness on Makuja’s face, his frown takes on a tinge of the apologetic.

“There was a question I asked you earlier,” she says, and the loudness suggesting the words aren’t just for Ooliri’s sake. She steps back, expectant gaze implying Ooliri would follow.

When he does, she’s asking, “Is this about the myxokora? Sorry again that I didn’t know what you needed.”

“I figured it out on my own. It’s all I needed.” Makuja’s voice is low, but Ooliri’s doesn’t reciprocate.

“You could ask Boleheva about it! I saw her using myxokora of her own yesterday.”

“No, that’s what I needed to speak with you about. I’m not sure if I trust Boleheva. Not when her harness nearly killed me.”

“I thought it was an accident?”

“I’m wary. Now that I know the ants were just fools, there by coincidence, and Awelah assured me Boleheva let nothing slip in her time with her, I am considering if it is just shadows I’m seeing. But I didn’t survive by lowering my guard once it’s been raised. There are those who seek to kill us.” Even Vilja is among them, now. “Now that we know the zipline takes us right outside of town, I wonder why we had to stay overnight in the tower. It means there was time to set this up, if needed. The ranger was even the first awake. This could all be coincidence‍ ‍—‍ but if they wanted to take us out, I would be the one they’d start with, and by making it look like an accident, they would have all the doubt if they fail, in addition to attacking from an unexpected angle, one we aren’t prepared for.”

“It’s not… well, I don’t want to say we expected it, because we didn’t, but Yanseno was warning us before we got on, right? I was worried I would fall the whole way.” Ooliri curls up his antennae, looks away and then looks back. “I’m not… I hear you when you say that people want to hurt us, and this is something it makes sense for them to try. But Boleheva? I don’t see it, I’m sorry.”

“Why not?”

“We know the sort of bane who’s out for Awelah‍ ‍—‍ your master was a maverick from the Bloodweb Stronghold. Boleheva is a warden for the Windborne Stronghold. And she’s… I can’t see her scheming like this.”

“Yanseno, then. My other suspect, and a maverick.”

“Maybe. Umbracogs are kind of spooky. But… maybe you’re thinking too narrowly? Yanseno mentioned other bugs are responsible for maintaining the watchtower. Could it have been them? A third party… maybe they weren’t even targeting you! If Windhold won’t cooperate with the mercenaries, then killing or crippling one of them would be a win, too. And no matter who fell, there’s little enough trust that they might blame us. And if we’re fighting among ourselves, then we’re distracted from them— you could be playing right into their plans with your suspicions!” When he shakes his head, his longer antennae swing widely. “I don’t know what’s going on. But I think the Wisterun banes are on our side‍ ‍—‍ and if someone out there is behind this, well, they’ll have a next move, won’t they? I hope we’re ready.”

“As Brillen returned from afar, she wept, for the lands she had known as a nymph had been turned to naught but ash! All of the houses, all of the fields, all of the blessed possessions, but ash! Her family her friends, all whom she knew, but husks! You don’t know desolation like that. None of us do. And imagine! For Brillen, the mother of the blaze itself, she then knew that if not for her work, none of this could happened. It could have been prevented. So she thinks to herself, it should have been prevented. For if not for her, none of this tragedy. And it could happened very well anew‍ ‍—‍ did she not have a duty to prevent that? So she contemplates.

“But while she still lived, the spirit of the ancestors beyond arose to speak to her, scolded her of that foolishness. She could not give up, they exclaimed it to her! But why shouldn’t she, if she had lost everything? She asks this, begs for an answer. But the ancestors were silent, then, quite silent. I’m sure you’re all familiar with that. But Brillen listened. She had faith! And thus she persisted.

“Imagine. Months of living, surviving without shelter, with all plants around turned to ash, prey frightened away. It was torment! But Brillen persisted. Her spirit burned with determination, and at the change of the season, she was graced once more with the presence of ancestral spirit. They spoke to her…”

It is a thin road, blocked on once side by a sheer slope that ferns clung to with exposed, eroded roots. Before that wall, A mantis with silken blue robes and a pointy hat, wide‍-​brimmed with tassels, gesticulates to a crowd of mostly other mantids, about twelve of them, with three roaches scattered amongst, huddling by the legs of mantids.

“What’s the hold up?” Awelah asks. The imagos were leading them, slowing as they approached the crowd.

“Seems like a street hierophant, peddling welkinist flyshit by the sound of it,” Yanseno says. “I wonder how many more sentences she can go before the politics comes in.”

“…and Brillen demanded to know why the ancestors had ignored her plea for counsel, why subject her to such a fate alone, so terribly alone! Their response? Do you know what they said? Why this burden was hers alone to bear? Just as great heat hardens our weapons, sloughs them of slag‍ ‍—‍ just as the sculptor’s violence reveals the beauty within‍ ‍—‍ this great privation of Brillen was needed to grant her exalted purity. Today we call her Brillen Fire‍-​starter, the mother of blazes, we have remembered her for centuries. She lives for‍-​ever, and do you think that immortality would be hers if we were weak? If she had given up? If a season in a scorched wilderness all alone was too much for her?”

The speaker goes quiet now, raptorials folded up as her eyes survey the gathered mantids. She begins nodding. “No. She suffered, and she was pure, and she was rewarded. None of you have lost everything‍ ‍—‍ none of you have endured such hardship. Your burden, no matter how your back sags in carrying it, is a load you are well‍-​equipped to carry. Bear it proudly! Bear it with strength! The ancestors would not want to see their children weak. The fires of welkin are for those with dignity. Foul oblivion awaits those who shrug away their duty.”

By now the banes are a few steps from the edge of the crowd. It’s a semicircle around the speaker, but skirting around its perimeter is not enough to get through, when the other edge of the street is the back of a building.

Awelah says, “Are we going to stand here and listen to all of this?”

“Eh, it sounded like she was windin down,” Boleheva says. “That one hates bein interrupted.” The confident stride of the ranger’s voice had a hint of some subdued quality to it now.

She continues: “This world is a challenge, a proving grounds. We are diamantids, each of us E’yama’s children! All this world thrusts upon us‍ ‍—‍ wispstorms, anteaters‍ ‍—‍ are nothing we cannot overcome. But that’s not what we do, is it? We seek the foulest of assistance!”

(“Here it comes,” Yanseno says, scratching a bearded palp. “Credit at least, took a full minute longer than I expected.”)

“Vesperbanes. They abduct our children and call it tribute! Use them as pawn when they don’t kill them outright! Dazzle us with their weapons and war games, call it protection. We tell ourselves they are necessary, the price we pay for safety. No! Vesperbane kill mantids just by existing, and their apologetics are no more than a jeweled wasp leading a roach into the tip of its ovipositor.” A tarsus goes up to adjust the hat, and the brim lifts. The mantid’s eyes go up, and at last catch sight of Boleheva and Yanseno. “Here they come now. And there’s more of them! Missus Boleheva,” she drags out each of the four syllables like a mother scolding, “have you attained permission to bring more of them from the council? No you have not‍ ‍—‍ I would know if you had.” The angle of her head lowers, addressing the crowd again. “Tell me: will you allow our dear ranger to taint the purity of this town with more of her kind, or will we stop this?”

Boleheva speaks simultaneous with a sigh exhaled. “Tempit, yer council will get yer report as soon as Solaroch does and no sooner. These ain’t recruits. Let us through, kindly, we have business to attend to.”

“Ha!” This artificial stridulated laugher is Tempit’s response. “A vesperbane’s word is worth less than nothing.”

“I can swear it on my true name, if ye like.”

“You and your minions will take yourselves no further. Good people of Wisterun, show her that our will is not something she can so flagrantly ignore!” She throws her arms out, and it’s the signal the crown in front of her has to move. It’s not unanimous, and it’s not coordinated. A few of them regard the vesperbane with something‍ ‍—‍ not sympathy, none of them are sympathetic‍ ‍—‍ indicated only by a frown and folded antennae, the exact tenor of this consideration perhaps unique to each onlooker. But those objectors are moments later obscured by the advance of those who heeded Tempit’s urging. Facing them now is a chitinous wall of bodies, whose frowns are so much clearer in their meaning.

Yanseno lifts his labrum, mandibles visible. “Did you burn out all your wits sitting in front of a welkinfire, Tempit? Preaching survival, yet not realizing that standing against six vesperbanes is giving up on life more than anything else.”

“Oh? And you seem not to realize how hard your stewartry wants to keep its image of amicability. Flagrant assault on a laymant is not something it’ll look past. But I suppose that copper headplate says all that needs to be said about your regard for the law, doesn’t it?”

“Look, look. Yanny was just speaking hypothetically, we ain’t here to menace you.”

“Then turn around and show your pawns to the gate!”

“I need them in my office for a statement. If you knew what we’re dealing with, you’d know I didn’t have time to let the council give one of the infamously swift decisions.”

“You can get their statement outside the gates while you wait for that decision. I’m sure we’ll look kindly on your trying to circumvent—” The tirade, short or brief as it would be, is cut off:

A gunshot rings out, resounding off the walls around the road. A plume of dark smoke announces the source‍ ‍—‍ and Yanseno is handlessly opening an arquebus to load more bullets and powder. He says:

“I’m not kind enough to make empty threats, or waste more bullets. The next shot’s going in a mantis if I’m still standing here in ten seconds. Clear a path.”

Dark, implacable determination wells in the brown eyes of Tempit‍ ‍—‍ but the hierophant is not the target. This demonstration sparks fear in the gathered mantids, and it spreads faster than fire. They scatter, more than half of them bolting away in the next seconds, and the another quarter backing up slowly. Determined or not, one mantis is not sufficient to block their advance.

“You’ll be hearing from me later. This will not stand.”

“Assuming in the meanwhile you don’t try to stare down something else that tops you on the food chain. Stay safe, Tempit.” There’s nothing pleasant about Yanseno’s smug smirk.

Mantids had already been avoiding them due to the antennae‍-​bands, but the gunshot cleared the streets. Except for one dark green mantis drawn over by the sound, who only runs faster when their eyes catch the headbands. Over their thorax, they wear a vest of thick cloth gambison and they have a musket strapped to their back.

“Boleheva, madam!” The mantis raises a raptorial and outstretches it in salute. “The constab sent me to run for more watchbugs, but you can help us too, can’t you?”

“Spit it out, darling. Town pays me enough that any little mess the watch could handle won’t cost much extra.”

“There’s trouble at the tavern by the creek,” they say. “Get there quick‍ ‍—‍ there will be blood.”

A Debt Uncollected, a Demand Unfulfilled

A gunshot. Who died? Has he found me? Does he know?

“One bullet for each traitor. No more, no less. Remember that, child.”

Her forelegs tighten, wrapping around‍ ‍—‍ empty space? Where is she? There is supposed to be a hug here. There is supposed to be comfort now. Where is‍ ‍—‍ I’m alone.

⸢Nouform: Calming Draft!⸥ At this point, the signs are habit. She could do it signlessly.

“I’m not alone. I’m strong,” Quessa whispers to herself.

The technique is misnamed. It isn’t calming. More like stillness, all cognition and desire sucked out as if by a swarm of oskeila. It’s like suffocating, if you didn’t need to breathe. Quessa doesn’t fight it anymore.

The green nymph has backed away unknowingly‍ ‍—‍ now some strides behind from the other banes as her breathing and heart slows to rest. She sees a gray nymph turn and look till he finds her. Yellow antennae outstretch as he steps forward.

“Are you alright?” Why is he asking? He cares? He’s‍ ‍—‍ a friend?

She smiles. Rubbing the frills of one auricle, she says, “That gun was right beside me.”

(They had actually been walking some ways behind Yanseno. She forgot.)

“Your tarsus‍ ‍—‍ there’s a penumbra,” he says. He’s seeing the bits of gas‍-​like enervate encircling her hands, lingering after the spell.

An awkward nod. “Yeah, I just,” she stops. And now it’s a pause. Why is it so hard to finish the sentence‍ ‍—‍ to tell him she casts the calm draft on herself sometimes? The sentence dies, and there’s no transition. “Look what I can do!”

She pumps umbra to her hands, mixes it with what’s already there. Feeling the burn as aura expands outward, she points at Ooliri’s head and it’s like blowing bubbles. The spell is unstructured.

“Ah!” Ooliri is stepping back and rubbing his eyes, needing a moment to shrug off the slight mental perturbation. “What was that? A‍ ‍—‍ a nouprojection? Isn’t that supposed to be really advanced. Like, fiend stuff?”

Quessa paused. Again, it’s hard to respond. At length, she shrugs. “Yanseno is a good teacher?”

“I guess it’s not so surprising now. You did cast that memory spell. That spell, do you think‍ ‍—‍ could you have a perfect memory if you got really good at it? Is it very hard to learn?”

“It’s…” she starts. “It’s like keeping a stack of paper on your head while there’s wind. Or keeping a round little bird egg balanced there. It rolls off but if you try too hard to keep it there, you crack it! It’s distracting. And it takes a while to change or look at it. So not like memory at all.”

“So it’s kind of like a clay tablet stuck in your head?”

“I… Yes, that’s a fine description.”

Quessa. The nouprojection comes as a half‍-​remembered scrape in the back of her mind. She recognizes the voice. Right, there are other people here.

“Yanseno wants my attention.” Quessa shifts her gaze and looks beyond Ooliri‍ ‍—‍ the crowd has cleared now, the pointy hat‍-​lady walking away and some bug with their own gun is talking to the yellow imago.

“Seems like Ooliri’s stolen your heart,” the burgundy bane says when they rejoin.

Who? Quessa meets his eyes, and follows his gaze to the golden‍-​fluffed nymph, placing the name. “Oh, right.”

Beside her, his antennae jolt out. “No, we’re not—”

Yanseno pats his shoulder with a foretarsus and squeezes. “You and me are gonna have a chat.” Looking to Quessa, he says, “You’re gonna go with Boleheva.” For her benefit, he points. Beside her, the other nymph’s antennae are creeping higher and higher up in alarm. “Before she does that, though, boy, give her your stuff.”

At this, Ooliri trips over himself explaining: “It’s not, we’re just—”

“Calm it. We’re splitting up, is all. Quessa offered to take care of your bags, remember? Boleheva can carry the rest, and she’s heading there to quell what barfight or other has people spooked. Best if the townfolks don’t see too much more of you till the syndics give their oh so crucial approval.”

“I’m going alone? With the ranger?” Quessa asks.

“Just how it is, baby girl.”

“Here.” Ooliri is unstrapping his bags. Then he’s pointing out one with with an anteater scratch. “Be very careful with this one. It has the, uh, blood in it.”

Giving him a salute, the green nymph takes the bags, regarding the scratched up one with careful attention.

“Ye’ve got till ten to open this door, or I’m knocking it down. I ain’t payin for it either.”

The ranger had ichor in her veins, hardening her chitin, strengthening her muscles. It meant that when she wanted to be loud, a laymant simply couldn’t match her. Quessa takes a step back from the volume. The reply, muffled by the door, is unintelligible.

“Ye ain’t gotta get gone. I talked to ’em. Ye just gotta step out a minute and talk to these fine folks. They had some questions for ye.”

Quessa frowns.

Earlier, there had been no scene when they arrived at the Mercure Ale. A pair of tame cicindela chewed on dried moss outide, roped up a few paces from the rickety trap door of an entrance. Those ridebugs were suggestive, she thought‍ ‍—‍ perhaps as a first step, they could search for bugs with the leather chaps fit for riding, or whose boots lacked the patina of mud you couldn’t escape when walking in this weather.

Or, perhaps, as soon as they step in and observe the tavern illuminated by pale sunlight striking a contraption of mirrors, they find the only bugs standing tall are two mantids in all black rope‍-​robes, clean and symmetrical, their compound eyes each obscured by dark wraparound glass. They stand taller than anyone here except the imago beside her, with bulk at the edge of what could be natural for a mantis. Former vindicators? Quessa frowns.

You can smell them against the backdrop of the tavern (unwashed bugs, alongside pungent brews and fresh honey). Altered hormones (the likely source of such bulk) mean altered pheromones.

Together, the two mantids advance with sharp strides that attack the distance between. One has antennae whose fluff swirls away, an inappropriately gentle shape for a mantis with metal lining her raptorials. There’s business in the smile she gives the yellow imago. “You must be the ranger. My salutations. We have a warrant of inquiry for the bug you may know as ‘Mogs.’ Can we beg your assistance?”

“Bah. Common law is no concern to me,” the ranger says with the confident disregard only a warden could manage. “If you want my help, pay for it. I’m here because I’ve a contract with the people of Wisterun, and you ain’t from around here. Speaking of,” The yellow imago can take her eyes off the black robed mantis as soon as she’s done speaking to them. (Quessa still watched intently, anxiety tight in her curled fluff.) “Who runs this place? What’s the trouble? Would I be prejudiced to guess it’s these strange ladies?” The volume of her voice resounds in the half‍-​underground chamber. It draws the gaze of the few patrons‍ ‍—‍ ants, roaches, and a few mantids‍ ‍—‍ who hadn’t already been piqued by the scene before.

The swirl‍-​fluffed mantis waves a foreleg. “I assure you, madam vesperbane,” the facade of politeness hadn’t wavered, but is there a touch of brittleness, now? “Our interests are aligned. Mogs, in fact, is the source of the commotion that brought you here.”

Drawn by the yellow imago’s raised voice, a dirt‍-​red mantis is climbing up a descending ramp.

“Ah, there ye are! I recognize ye. You own this place, yeah?”

“You’re thinking of the One Who Argues the Stars‍ ‍—‍ that one has the deed. She‍ ‍—‍ that one isn’t here right now‍ ‍—‍ but I do represent.”

“Right, right. So what’s the problem?”

“Mogs. Hid from these two, and when they found him she kicked up a huge fuss, grand ol argument could be heard across the bar. Raptorials came out‍ ‍—‍ miss Seta tried to break it up, and Mogs had a batdamned knife. Ran back to his room, locked the whole thing up and by the time I got the master key, door’s barricaded. Bloody barricaded. Get her out. Don’t care if she can walk by the end of it, do what you have to do.”

The ranger drums a closed fist against prothorax as salute. She walks off with Quessa behind, and the rope‍-​robed mantis nods.

Now, the ranger has counted to five. She stops, and says, “Ye know I’m getting in no matter what, dontcha? You can’t keep me out, so your choice is how much of my time you waste, and whether you really want to do that.” Then, “Six. If I hear you moving whatever you’ve got in front of the door, I’ll stop counting.”

There’s a scrape. Then, when the door opens, a diamantid stands, a shell pattern of light gray against brown. Much shorter than the yellow imago, she’s either a late instar nymph, or wingless. There’s a bit of her compound eyes that’s discolored, bruised. (She looks familiar. Has Quessa met her before? So many bugs in this town look familiar, though.)

“You snitched me out,” she says.

“Friend, I don’t even know what there is to snitch.”

“It had to be someone from the city. Must’ve been you or that gun toting bastard.”

“Town’s big enough you’ll have a time lookin. How about I help you get started? Follow me.”

The gray mantis frowns, and that curve’s mirrored in her antennae. “Those collector bastards still out there? You working for them?”

“They asked for my help and I told them no. Not from Wisterun, not my problem.”

The gray mantis still doesn’t move. “Not from Wisterun myself.”

“I’ve got business to attend to today, girl. If you don’t start walking I’ll pick you up myself.”

“I’m moving, I’m moving, just gotta grab some stuff.”

“Ye gonna be able to carry all your stuff out with ye?”

“Not a chance.”

“Then ye’d have to come back, wouldn’t ye? Let’s go.”

When the gray mantis finally emerges from the room, she’s got a tarsus full of loose objects‍ ‍—‍ claw and bone pieces, slips of paper, an objects that glint like metal. (Is there a knife among the mess?) Her prothorax is bare, while a patchy cloth garment falls over her lower thorax and abdomen, parting in front like the bottom half of a coat. She’s slipping objects into the inner coat pockets.

“Quessa, hold up the rear.” Behind the ranger, the green nymph nods without responding. “So, Mogs, what’s the story here? What exactly brought these strange ladies after you?”

“Debt. Owe some people some stuff. Thought I’d lay low for a bit, I’d get the money together, just needed some time. But someone snitched me out. Don’t got it all yet.”

While she’s talking, Quessa spies something fall down as the gray mantis tries to stuff the bones and paper and metal into a pocket. A ring, the tiny metal band falls to the dirt floor with a small thump. The light gray mantis doesn’t pause talking‍ ‍—‍ doesn’t notice.

Behind him, Quessa bends down to pick it up. She’ll hold onto it till this conversation’s done, then give it back to her.

“So you borrowed all this money without a way to pay it back?” the ranger says.

“Oh fuck off.”

“Can’t do, not while I’m still on the job.”

“Vesperbane, huh. You flappers must be loaded. Help me out some, mant. You’re supposed to help bugs, arentcha?”

“Get a job, friend. You want money, you gotta earn it.”

“Sure, if money’s all this was about. You think I’m going be around next shade if these bastards aren’t satisfied with what I put together? You ain’t doing charity, you’re saving my life.”

They’re on the ramp now, and the ranger doesn’t respond before their head are poking over the top. The gray shelled mantis looks up, glimpses the eyes behind dark glass turn around to watch him.

“Oh, see how it is. You never cared a hair on your head, did you?” The gray mantis turns, but before she lifts a leg, a bigger tarsus is wrapping around her foreleg.

“Come on now, we’ve gotten this far.”

The gray mantis looks down, meets Quessa’s eyes. She goes still, says nothing. The expression regarding her hardens into a scowl. The mantis stops resisting the ranger’s pull, and the bigger bug guides her up the ramp, crosses the distance to the big pair in rope‍-​robes. They hold up a foreleg, and the ranger pauses.

Addressing the gray mantis, the swirl‍-​fluffed one says, “And what do you have for us now, hm?”

The ranger takes a step back.

The light gray mantis starts pulling paper and bones out of his pockets. “Look, it’s what all I have—”

“It’s not nearly enough, is it? You can count, yes?” She hooks a dactyl under the gray bug’s labium, pulls the head upward to look her in the eyes.

“Just give me a few more days, I’ll make something happen—”

“You have one shade from tomorrow. Very generous of us. We’ll come see you again. Then, I expect, we’ll need to take you to explain this to the Chief Strategist himself.”

The other robed mantis speaks now. “Have her empty her pockets. I heard clinking.”

“Ah, are you holding out on us, Mogs?”

The gray nymph twitches her forelegs back into her pockets, produces the metal. “I was going to sell these—”

“It matters not. Our appraisal will trump anything you’d find in this backwater. Hand them over.”

The gray mantis passes them over one by one‍ ‍—‍ then stops. “The ring. There was a ring.”

She turns around just in time to see Quessa’s antennae jolt in surprise. “You! You tried to steal it from me.”

“No, I only—” But when Quessa lifts her foretarsus to show her holding the ring, it’s all the confirmation she needs.

The gray mantis leaps, back end of her half‍-​coat fluttering behind her. The yellow imago starts moving, but a mantis can cover a lot of ground in a lunge.

Rising to her feet, she looms over Quessa. She slaps her foreleg, making the nymph drop the ring. Quessa stills as the bug pinches the dirt to pick it up‍ ‍—‍ then scowls, saying, “Bet this isn’t all you tried to pull, eh? What else did you nick?”

The light gray mantis reaches out to snap open the bags Quessa carries‍ ‍—‍ the golden‍-​fluffed boy’s bag! It’s important. And the other bug is reaching into it.

Quessa grabs at the riffling hand. “Stop that.” The bigger bug swings, forcing her foreleg back. Quessa grabs again, this time with a raptorial vice. And the response now is a punch, shoving Quessa back. The hands clutch at the important bag, and the strap slide over her clothes as it’s pulled off.

Quessa lands steady on her feet. “Put that down.” It’s the last thing she says, as her labrum lifts and she feels uncertainty sliding away like old skin, each heart pulse an octopamine thrill.

Yanseno’s trained her well. She forms in the six tarsigns in two seconds.

⸢Ion Form: Stinger Strike!⸥ She feels the acidic charge in her veins, bleeding into the enervate gathering in her hand. She throws it, hitting home a heartbeat after it leaves her grasp. An extreme electrostatic charge, it’s enough to make her scream, to burn her flesh and make her antennae stand on end. And it’s enough to make her mad. The gray nymph rises, rounds on her.

And Quessa doesn’t tremble. More tarsigns‍ ‍—‍ this one took more control, for a weaker effect (she wasn’t Yanseno, she couldn’t nouproject effectively in combat.)

⸢Nouform: Psi Blast!⸥ Penumbra gathers in an aura around the black nerve that flows from her tarsus to her foe, and it strikes home, delivering disorientation, confusion.

The mantis staggers, but by this point, there’s no escape from the yellow imago coming up behind her.

“That’s enough. Yer lucky to live after trying something like that. Let’s walk on back to my office and we’ll talk what the consequence of this should be.” Then for a moment, she sets the steel in her tone aside, as she looks up to address Quessa. “You intact, darling? Good. Sorry I wasn’t able to stop that. She won’t give you more trouble now. I trust you can book the nymphs a room on your own? Right. Take care now.”

Quessa breathes. Her labrum falls to hide her mandibles, and she trembles. What have I done this time? Have I messed everythig up again?

She kneels to check the important bag, and examines its contents.

“Remind me, what were your intentions here?” Yanseno rubs a bearded palp as he regards Ooliri.

“Um, sir.”

“Why you’re here. Right now, all this fuss is about Boleheva pulling a report out of you three‍ ‍—‍ and she sure is taking her time, ain’t she?‍ ‍—‍ but that’s not why you came here. Run that by me.”

“Well…” Ooliri glances back at the two nymphs walking a ways behind them, giving them some distance. Giving each other distance, too‍ ‍—‍ Makuja and Awelah walked far enough apart a cicindela could charge between. “Between the three of us, there’s a lot of things we want to achieve, and we don’t share all of it. As a team? Well, we’re trying to find Lady Earth‍-​shaper, trying to get strong enough to stay safe, and trying to figure out just‍ ‍—‍ what’s going on.” At the last moment, Ooliri supposed Awelah might want some secrecy there.

Yanseno nods. “And about none of that means staying in Wisterun, does it? ’Specially since the so‍-​called Earth‍-​shaper is long gone. A shame.” The nod turns to a shaken head.

“Well, is there a reason you want us to stay, sir?”

“Ha. I don’t care if you slam the door on your way out. Still, Quessa’s my responsibility, get it? And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, since you’ve only known her for a day. Although, you have spent the night with her—”

“Um.”

A good‍-​natured click. “The love stuff is all teasing, just so I don’t got you worried. I know that’s none of your interest just yet. You don’t even got the equipment to do anything.”

“W‍-​what.”

“Anyway, what I’m saying is‍ ‍—‍ does Quessa seem happy to you? She tries, but I’m an umbracog. She isn’t as easy to read as most, because‍ ‍—‍ doesn’t matter. Point is, you make her smile. Guess I just want to say‍ ‍—‍ I appreciate that. While it lasts, ha.”

“It could last,” comes a low murmur of a voice. Awelah, coming up behind Yanseno from the other side. “You could teach me to cast Umbra Body Projection again. I’d stick around for that.” (Ooliri catches Makuja shooting her one of the red nymph’s scarily neutral looks.)

“And just why would I do that?”

Awelah stops walking, palps lifting up.

“Don’t got time to do charity work, even for someone of as noble inbreeding as yourself. Sorry your folks aren’t still around to hand you techniques. They had an obligation to you, but I don’t.”

The street they walk is empty but for themselves, and a trash beetle darting from an alley between houses. The thing pauses to look at them. When it hears Awelah’s scrape of frustration, it’s gone in an instant, dropping its discarded fruit skin.

“It’s not about charity. I don’t want a teacher because I deserve one, I need them to set right a certain injustice, and destroy those who committed it.”

“Personal vengeance, then. Sure, maybe you aren’t just an entitled clan brat, but so what? Afraid I still don’t have inclination to help you along your personal quest.”

Awelah stops walking. She reaches out with a foreleg, catching Yanseno’s shoulder and pulls him aound to face her. The maverick glances at the hand touching him, as if deciding among a dozen ways to kill it.

She says, “You don’t care that a vesperbane could slaughter a clan and suffer nothing for it? This isn’t about vengeance, it’s justice.”

Yanseno takes Awelah’s hand, squeezes enough that something pops, and lets it fall. He holds her gaze for one second, then flicks an antennae as if forgetting it. “Nothing?” he says. “Do you even know what vesperbane you’re talking about? Do you know that Windhold isn’t running their own investigation, sending their own hunters after them? Have you thought this plan one step farther than your antennae reach?”

Awelah looks away, embarrassment (for her plan, for her action) flushing her compound eyes.

“Do I care?” He lets the question hang. “Quite frankly, no. Hate that it happened, but this is the heartlands, kid. The Pantheca of All Kinds United. We get a tragedy every damn shade. You either stop caring about them all, or you take a stand again and again as the tide grinds you away.”

“The only law in the heartlands,” Aweah murmurs, as if quoting something. “You want me to become just like her.”

“You think you’re different?” Yanseno smirks. “You don’t care that wrong was done, you care that it happened to you. I could just as well turn your question around: do you care about all the little tragedies? Would you stop to set something aright, not for your sake, but for justice?”

“I’m not heartless.”

“Easy to say that, it’s the right thing to say.”

“If it were true,” Awelah starts. “If I proved it to you… Would you train me then?”

“Ha. As if I wanted another brat to take care of.” Yanseno turns around.

Awelah stands there a moment. All that, when he never would have listened? Mandibles click together as if trying to bite. “What do you do that’s so important?”

“For your sake, I’ll refrain from the obvious quip.” Yanseno walking at the led, takes a turn that cuts off Ooliri in the process. (The gray nymph steps back, apologizes) Yanseno is pointing out a looming tower. “Almost there. But you asked what I do? Already answered that, didn’t I? First thing I told you was I’m a maverick investigator. Peculiar shit out in this countryside.”

“What’s there to investigate in a town this small?”

“Heard of the lakehead incident? No of course, you just got here. But you’d probably hear whisper of it if you spent five more minutes here. Not much else to talk about. But the short of it, fisher’s wife drowned. Since someone died, there’s the question of liability‍ ‍—‍ vesperbanes are supposed to protect, after all. Council wants me to find that it’s Boleheva’s fault, and thus deduct their stewartry dues, while Boleheva wants me to find that it’s outside her domain. I’m getting paid either way, so I don’t got to worry about conflict o’ interest. Well, unless Boleheva or the council all keel over dead.” Then Yanseno stops walking. “But anyway, we’re here. Take a moment to admire the arches and pillars. Helps if you imagine you don’t have ten more impressive buildings back where you’re from. That’s my tip. Actually, take more than a moment, since we’re gonna be waiting here for Bole and her roachservant.”

“Can’t we wait inside? Wouldn’t mind stepping out of this mud,” Awelah says.

“Insist and you shall attain‍ ‍—‍ don’t take that as a general lesson, though.” Yanseno takes one step forward then frowns. “But there’s someone else here.” He looks up. “You’re made. Show yourself.”

From behind one of the stonebrick pillars, a tall tiercel of white shell steps out, ribbons trailing behind him.

“You aren’t quite Boleheva,” he says. Then his eyes shift off Yanseno, to Team Duskborn. “But you… you’re Ooncerta’s son. And you’re from Bloodhold. And you…” He’s looking at Awelah. “Are you trying to flee Duskroot? What an opportunity!” He steeples his hands, smiling as he steps forward.

Awaiting the Unexpected

A Stifling Protection

How many bugs could a direhound kill?

Ooliri‍ ‍—‍ Ooliri of all people‍ ‍—‍ was able to knock down one of Unodha’s dogs with his baton. He had his brother’s help, sure, but then it took one stab from Firha to finish the thing. (If his recounting is right, that is, but would Ooliri have embellished killing something?) Awelah shakes her head. So, Unodha’s dogs had to be something a town could defend itself from without needing vesperbanes’ help, right? The danger of direhounds is that they come in packs, anyway. There’s only one left, now.

Yet she had watched that very hound undergo that same muscle‍-​crawling enlargement its master could provoke‍ ‍—‍ all on its own. Something Makuja had thought was impossible without a spell, Unodha’s own spell. Was that direhound casting a spell on its own? But it’s impossible for a direhound to be host to the vespers, wield the vespertine arts. Impossible for any direbeast.

But not a myxogoth.

Awelah tightens for a moment, remembers where her spear is. That was impossible right? Just an obscure myth? Maybe Unodha dying had disrupted whatever hold she had, sent her spell into misbehaving. Awelah breathes in, abdomen rising.

Did it matter? Myxogoth or miscast, what would Awelah do?

Yanseno insinuated Awelah was selfish‍ ‍—‍ willing to enact personal justice and nothing more. He had to be wrong, and she had to show him that.

How many bugs could a direhound kill? Awelah wondered. Now, she asks a better question: how many bugs can I save by acting?

Awelah drops from her perch in Boleheva’s office, feet sinking into the carpet. Carpet, and this town hall has dirt floors. No layer of grime dwells in between the cloth fibers, nor discolors its red and light gray pattern. Well, except for the dirt Awelah’s sandals are tracking now. She looks up, where a red roach is waiting at the threshold. Her large maxillae are crossed.

“Finished your fascination with the floor? You’ve been sitting there far too long. It’s time to go.”

Awelah nods, mind far from the floors or the roach secretary. What would she say to Ooliri, to Makuja, in order for them to act alongside her?

“Be a dear and tell your friends to get lost with you while I close up. It’ll save me some breath.” Ruby closes the door.

Reaching the two other members of Team Duskborn means walking past Yanseno. Right now, he’s calling over to Mogs:

“Look,” he says. “I’m not gonna be your minder. I’m letting you off the hook, just get back here tomorrow, right?” Yanseno balances the black glass of his sensor ball on one dactyl, another dactyl grazing it, spinning the orb. “Remember: I’m a sensor, so it’s not a question of whether I’ll find you, it’s how much of my time you waste. And I charge by the hour.”

The pale nymph walks on past. Ooliri is beside the maverick, but Makuja is perching by the door. If Awelah can get the red nymph on her side, Ooliri will come along too.

Or truly, she didn’t even need to go far. Ooliri stands and starts trailing after Awelah just as she passes.

“Do you know what’s going on?”

Awelah waits until Makuja is in hearshot of her low murmur. The red nymph’s head turns, auricles flaring.

“The direhound is back,” Awelah says. “We need to finish it.”

“You say we, but you mean me,” Makuja says.

“I can still use my spear.”

Ooliri turns to her at that, maxillae opening, His palps ghost his file, perhaps considering avenues of objection‍ ‍—‍ you shouldn’t be using your spear, he could say, or we shouldn’t be doing something so dangerous. But Ooliri takes a different approach: “We shouldn’t do it alone. There are other vesperbanes here.” Then he stops. “Would Boleheva even need our help? Is‍ ‍—‍ is this what she left to do? Then it doesn’t seem like she wants us to—”

“It’s our fault,” Awelah says. “We brought it here. It—”

She doesn’t get a chance to finish, because Yanseno has stopped his conversation with Mogs, and in a single stride, crossed the distance to stand behind Awelah.

“What was that?” he asks.

“It’s following us,” Awelah finishes, her voice not raising nor her dictation quickening, as if in defiance of Yanseno’s intimidation. “Hunting us. If we go out there, it’ll seek us instead of the bees. We can save them.”

“You’re very important, aren’t you?”

Awelah scowls.

“Look, everything you said might be true. Might explain some things. But you forgot what I said this morning. Mother anteater means father anteater. I watched Boleheva read the letter. She wasn’t thinking about a direhound, she was thinking about a direanter.”

Direbeast is all she said, Awelah recalls with a spike of embarrassment. Awelah taps her palps, but no response materializes.

“Then we shall not be getting in her way,” Makuja says. “Boleheva can hunt the anteater, and we can find Vilja.”

Find, Awelah notes. Not hunt, not kill, not even stop.

“You aren’t getting in her way, yeah.” Yanseno says. “You’ve got a room at the inn, and I’m taking you there.”

“Why do you care,” Awelah says. “Let us take out the direhound. If you think we can do it, we get rid of a problem. If you think we can’t… that also gets rid of a problem, doesn’t it?” There’s an edge that creeps into her voice.

“I gave you the wrong impression, didn’t I?” He shakes his head. “I don’t care about every tragedy I see. Takes a hard heart. But I’m not heartless. I’m not going to let a couple of fresh fevered kids throw themselves at the world when you‍ ‍—‍ literally!‍ ‍—‍ can’t cast a spell to save your life.”

“So come with us, then,” Makuja says. “They can be the bait, and you and I will be the teeth of the trap.”

“I don’t work for free. Right now, the extent of the problem is some howls in the air at night. Direhound hasn’t attacked anyone besides yourself, and you say it’s got a special grudge against you. There’s easier prey in those woods, and I think the dog will do the smart thing, at least till it catches a whiff of you. Boleheva will be back tomorrow, and there’s nothing breathing down our necks to do something tonight. Relax a little‍ ‍—‍ would think you three would be anxious for beds after shades stuck in the wild.”

Yanseno starts toward the door. Behind him, Awelah is mumbling. (Her voice is quiet, but can he hear anyway?) “Does someone have to die before you’ll do anything?”

Ooliri climbs down the trap door. The tavern, with a shuttered look from shafts of sunlight, has a bug sitting at almost every table. The whole room seems to pause when the vesperbanes enter, heads turning, voices quieting. The mood is… expectant. Do they think we’ll do something?

The quiet means they hear the distant patter of steps, see a green nymph climbing up from downstairs. With timing that perfect… Ooliri frowns.

“Did she know when we’d arrive?”

In front of him, Yanseno glances back to reveal a quirked palp. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Nouspell?”

Yan clicks mandibles, then nods. “No need to answer if you’re quick enough to figure it out yourself, ha.”

The pale nymph is beside Ooliri. “You said you could read minds,” Awelah says. “Does that mean you know that‍ ‍—‍ know what I’m thinking?”

Yanseno points at a spinner ant. That one is draped in cloth, colorful stands woven across the surface of the cloth, but it’s… hugging? kissing? It’s touching another ant, and there’s no convenient sheet to read off of. “Way the myweft is woven means something. Can you tell me what it says?”

“No.”

“But you can see it, can’t you? Make out the different strands and symbols? Why not tell me what it means?”

“I don’t understand antscript.”

“Every mind is its own language,” Yanseno concludes. “Being a connectique means being a code breaker for a script with no translator. I’m not bad at it, give me a few sessions and I could answer your question‍ ‍—‍ but like I keep saying, I charge by the hour.”

Awelah breathes out at that.

“Still, don’t need any special insight to know you plan on sneaking out tonight, right?”

The green nymph has crossed the distance, stands before the maverick with a smile now giving way to puzzlement. “Why’s that?” Quessa asks.

“Awelah still wants to risk her life against a direhound for no good reason, and I haven’t prevailed sense on her.”

She glances at the pale nymph and gives her a smile. “That sounds heroic!”

“Not if it’s ineffective and unnecessary,” Yanseno says.

Quessa tilts her head. “What if I helped?”

A sigh, almost completely muffled by his trenchcoat. “Not you too.”

The green nymph frowns, but before she can reply, her gaze lowers, looking past the imago. At the entrance he stepped through a moment ago, a new bug is at their heels. Quessa smiles.

“Bites Water, was it?” says the maverick. Looking back at the girl, he says, “This one was asking about you earlier.”

“Right,” she says. “There’s something you can help me with, in fact! But,”‍ ‍—‍ she looks at Awelah‍ ‍—‍ “I should probably show you your room? They didn’t have one with more than two beds, so there’s a cot—”

“Not it,” Awelah says.

“Nor I,” Makuja says.

They both look to Ooliri, his golden antennae twisting. “Can we rotate, at least?”

Yanseno, having lost interest in the conversation or seizing the opportunity to ditch the nymphs, has stepped over towards the bar where a dirt‍-​red mantis glances up. “Looks like I’ll need something with energy,” he starts.

After that, Ooliri turns to see the green nymph waving to him‍ ‍—‍ she and the other girls have slowly started walking, and the ant steps along with antennae working. They advance and there’s silence, at least until they reach the ramp, and then Quessa is whispering.

“I can maybe help you three sneak out, if you still want to. But if we do this… I can’t tell you the plan.”

“Why not?”

“Yanseno can’t read my mind, and I’ll know if he tries. It’s safer! Also, I can be cool and mysterious. All the strongest vesperbanes have secrets,” she says.

“So we just have to trust that you mean it and you’re not just going to tell him behind our backs.”

“He’s not your dad. If he finds out, he’ll stop you, and he’s already stopping you, so what’s the worry? He isn’t going to ground you if you get caught.”

“But will he ground you?” Ooliri asks.

They turn down a bend in the tunnels beneath the inn, passing by doorways‍ ‍—‍ one is open just a crack. Quessa keeps moving in the lead. “Maybe. But if we pull this off, won’t he be proud? I think he can’t be too mad if we take down a direhound. You will be able to take it down, right?”

Ooliri frowns, antennae folding unsure, and to his surprise, Makuja mirrored his uncertainty. She gave no obvious tell (of course she wouldn’t), her antennae still and her eyes steady. But her hands closed into fists and she gives no answer.

Awelah says, “Of course. You have that spell you used to paralyze the anteater, right?

Quessa stops walking, but it’s because they’ve reached their room. She opens the door, then passes off the key.

She glances to the One Who Bites Water, who has been following in the very back, a little awkwardly. “Wait out here, okay?”

The ant chirps, walking forward and poking the green nymph with an antenna. The chirps continue into a stream as this one bends feelers back to point at the sheet. Because this one is facing Quessa, they can’t read what’s said. Quessa is nodding. For the benefit of the other nymphs‍ ‍—‍ Ooliri’s palps are about to buzz with questions, she explains, “The ant librarian invited me to speak with them. I think that’s significant? Though it’s unclear if it’s a friendly visit, or business.” She shakes her head. “But that’s not important right now. C’mon, I’ll show you the room.”

The hinges creak as their door opens. The interior is bright with the blue glow of Ngini’s light‍ ‍—‍ a Stewartry standard. Not surprising that a vesperbane could buy it. But what did the other patrons use for light? Ooliri wonders. Torches? Lanterns? Would smoke be an issue? Or maybe there are more slits for sunlight.

“I left your bags inside, but… there’s something important I’m forgetting.”

Ooliri gives them a once over. “Well, you didn’t lose any of the bags? So it’s not that.”

“Why is that one open?” Makuja says.

“Mogs attacked you,” Awelah says as the red nymph pads over to the bags sitting on a crooked table.

“Master’s blood is gone,” Makuja announces.

From the look in her eye, how deftly her fingers close the bag as she’s not looking, head snapping around with speed to track Quessa’s anxious steps backward‍ ‍—‍ her hands are empty, but there didn’t need to be knifes there for the threat to be present.

“I don’t think Quessa is at fault,” Ooliri says, interposing himself between Quessa and Makuja. “It must have been chaotic, stressful and happened so fast Boleheva would have taken her away before Quessa could say anything. Right?”

Quessa gives the nod of one petrified. Her palps don’t move, like she can’t bring herself to say anything. She raises her tarsi, starts making signs.

Makuja starts forward at this, but Ooliri lifts his bandaged arm to block her. He shakes his head at the frowning nymph. Ooliri recognized the signs, the aura flowing toward her head.

Awelah interjects, then, “She said she forgot something important. Sounds like she would have told us if she had remembered.”

“It doesn’t add up. She’s taught by Yanseno, who forgets what he wants to forget.”

“I’m still learning! I’m just not as advanced as I should be, please believe me! I’m… trying.”

Makuja frowns. Quessa cringes inward at the expression, so she turns her frown toward Awelah. “You propose Mogs took it. Yet what use would she have for fiend blood?”

“I’ll help you get it back! I promise.”

“Start by helping us hunt the direhound,” Awelah says. “You were telling us what you brought to the table. There’s that stunning spell‍ ‍—‍ anything else? Can you read minds like that maverick claims he can?”

“I don’t really know anything about nouprojection, sorry.” (Ooliri quirks an antenna, but no one is looking at him.) “Yanseno says people will trust me more if I keep it that way.”

“Well, you can’t do much with direbeast’s heads anyway. They don’t have nous like bugs do.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Awelah waves. “Anything else?”

“I could… get some supplies? Yanseno has a lot of them. But… I need a plan. So… could you tell me about this direhound? What exactly are we going to heroically slay?”

Awelah and Makuja start talking at the same time. They stop, look at each other, and Ooliri takes that moment to begin. Quessa smiles at him.

Quessa left them to go consult with Bites Water in her room. She returned half an hour later, said nothing about the plan, only carrying them plates of food Yanseno had ordered for them. Honeyloaf, hippo meat, bitter‍-​skinned tubers and fungal sacs dripping with slim. It was about as much food as a growing nymph would eat in one day, not one meal. But they are vesperbanes‍ ‍—‍ the vespers had to eat, too.

So, while Team Duskborn waited to hear anything substantive from their accomplice, Makuja perched on the edge of her bed, eyes pale, antennae drooped, and breathing regular. Each inhale drew air into her air sacs, as the breath flows through the branching throats that lined her body.

Makuja’s thoughts are like a river, flowing yet no boat navigated across the waters. Only a natural course.

Her heart beats, not faster, but slower and slower. She feels the weight of food in her gut as it melts bit by bit‍ ‍—‍ how much had bat blood already warped it? Thanks to it, she knew, her digestion is faster, more efficient as it turned food into more energy. Faster, efficient, but its most important adaptations were not for her sake.

Makuja slowly bends her tarsi into signs which are not the signs of nervecasting nor the signs of bloodletting. It belongs to the third vespertine art: rootnursing.

Master had taught her arete‍-​binding so long ago. The first step is relinquishing a portion of the meal just consumed, and granting it to your guests. These signs she made now are an invitation to begin.

Once accepted, formation begins. Now, her heartbeat accelerates as the vespers call upon the metabolism of red ichor to fuel the ritual.

Simultaneously required is a process that is only analogous to breathing, but identical to the ritual which renewed her enervate after depletion: beta condensation, in which the umbra diffused within the air is drawn into her core as if by invisible inhalation. Tarsigns unfold, and her coils shape themselves, vibrating with sparse dustings from her enervate stores, and she feels the coldness come. Just like dew from a cloud collector.

⸢Vesper Form: Arete‍-​binding!⸥

It is the marriage of life and death, even as evening marries day and night. The vital warmth of bat blood and the deathly chill of black nerve, unified and intermixed, the reaction yielding dense fat held within the vesper’s roots. Arete, the fuel of a bane’s every spell.

Makuja takes a deep breathing once more, and begins the signs anew, starting a second casting. She doesn’t even get a chance to finish the first step.

Quessa’s knock is loud and hurried.

Through the door, they hear, “Yanseno wants to see you, now.”

Awelah gets the door, because Ooliri is just now looking from his book. At the threshold, Quessa is bouncing from foot to foot. “I promise this isn’t part of the plan. I don’t know what’s going on.”

Awelah folds her raptorials closed. As Quessa turns to leave, the pale nymph gives one look backward. “Coming?”

Makuja is already on her feet, and is second out of the room. She wonders if she’s imagining some disappointment as the enervate from her aborted ritual is withdrawn from her coils.

“There the demons are! What foulness have you come to wreak upon this town? Don’t think your utter mischief has gone unnoticed.”

A loathsomely familiar pointy hat is present when they ascend the ramp. She’s jabbing a foreleg in their direction as if Yanseno were not already looking right at them.

Makauja calculates if she could throw a knife and knock the hat clean off. If something’s securing it, perhaps it’d take a fair amount of force.

“Look, give them a chance to speak,” they hear the maverick say as they cross over the distancce. “Do they even know what you’re accusing them of?”

“They must know very well! That something this unseemly has occurred the very day we suffered a doubling of your number is evidence as clear as crystal! I won’t be taken as a fool.”

“Since she’s not explaining,” he starts, “I’ll get you up to speed. There’s been a break‍-​in‍ ‍—‍ vandals struck at the church, trashed the place, and… remind me, was anything stolen?”

“I would have to check and thoroughly. I came as soon as I saw‍ ‍—‍ lest this trial go quiet and these miscreants evade capture.”

“Right, so that’s the story. The Wisterun Church of Blue Welkin‍ ‍—‍ which, I remind, is all the way on the other end of northside‍ ‍—‍ was vandalized. Do any of you know anything about that?”

“You’re asking them?” Tempit says, throwing up forelegs. “Do you not have percipient training? I was led to believe you did. So seize the confessions from their minds.”

“I’m watching them right now. Utter bafflement is all I see.” He looks to the green nymph standing to the side. “What about you, Quessa? Is this what you get up to when I’m not looking?”

“No, sir, of course not!”

“Right. These aren’t who you’re looking for, sorry to disappoint, madam. I’m afraid you’ll need to keep looking for a reason to get rid of them.”

“Can you not apprehend them until we’ve established the truth?”

“Sorry, but they’re not even suspects. Tell me, did you look for footprints, ask around for witnesses, anything? That’s where you’ll want to start.”

“You’re the much‍-​vaunted investigator we’re paying so much. On behalf of Wisterun I bid you to find the ones responsible.”

Yanseno looks between the nymphs and the hierophant.

Behind Makuja, Ooliri makes his way forward with a finger raised as if to add something.

“Drop it, kid. Don’t think you’ll make anything better, no matter what you could say.”

Ooliri droops.

Addressing the rest of them, Yanseno says, “Look, don’t go anywhere while I’m gone, okay? As you can see, you’re making trouble for me without even doing anything.”

As Tempit leads him off, she speaks with the tone, if not the volume, of a mutter. “Boleheva will regret what he’s brought today.”

Imagos gone, three eyes turn toward Quessa.

“I wasn’t lying! I really had nothing to do with this. The plan I hatched with Bites Water was for that one to convince the ant librarian to come and personally ask for our presence‍ ‍—‍ that’s how I thought we’d get past Yanseno. The ants are grateful, but they wouldn’t commit crimes for me.”

“I believe you,” Ooliri says.

“Do you have any idea who would break into the church? Would a church even be locked?”

“Why assume anyone did? Perhaps she vandalized it herself to frame us.”

“That seems, well, like a lot of trouble for something that wouldn’t work.”

“Yeah,” Quessa says. “Yanseno would see right through it.”

“Doesn’t matter. We were all here in the tavern, so it has nothing to do with us, right?” Awelah says, and the rest of team duskborn nods. “So, what’s our next step?”

Quessa taps her palps together for a moment, then answers, “Bites Water told me about a passage through the tunnels of hillside that will let us get out without being seen at the gate.”

“Right, so if we don’t find the direhound, we can get back here and no one will know we left.”

Outside, night has fallen. Four nymphs depart, to brave the wilds of the heartlands, and no one else will know where they are.

Twilight for the Sky Below

To Trap Your Hunter

A Murderous Misdirection