Wisps and Pawns
Black nerve had engulfed this land, borne on lunge-quick winds, and held it with a spine-tight grasp. Long like the dying, cold like the death. Three nights conjoined, stretching on and on, never broken by dawn.
A torrent of black wisps were falling still from the enervate-choked sky, eroding the earth with each silent impact. These wisps stuck to everything. Chasing each other, congealing into greater wisps, then vanishing where they fell, becoming no more than shadows — as if they had no mass, no substance.
Not all of the enervate fell: malevolent mist was suffocating the air while high above, inconstant scintillation-flashes illumed the sky, like rifts to unseen heavens. Glimpsed once, then stolen away.
In those brief flashes, the light hinted at a skeletal land of crags and gorges: hills that slumped toward mountains and the rivers carved by their runoff. What road persisted was a thing of winding compromise, eked and scarcely maintained, a narrow path onward.
A lone figure stumbled through the dark, four legs faltering. Like water against wax, the wisps slid off a thick cloak so heavy it would never wave in the wind. Atop one distant mountain behind, the horizonward scintillation silhouetted the ruins.
This could only have been a journey of many miles, each one of them urgent, as written in the wheezing abdomen-heaves, the aching, trembling muscles.
Beneath the cloak lay a dusting of ash. It still smelled like family.
The mantis, she walked alone. In this light-starved scene, however, one couldn’t see for sure, couldn’t banish impressions that this dance of shadows was not all lifeless — but if that massacre had left other survivors, the refugee would’ve known. She’d have surely known.
When a small wisp slipped seekingly under the cloak, her spiracles vented a hiss of pain. When a large wisp fell a few paces ahead, she stumbled as if tripped or tugged forward.
The wisps felt hungry, voids sucking at the world, pulling in matter just as they pulled at wisps. Squeezing the air, and compressing the dirt. The dark things absorbed sound, and it left the procession oddly silent :– you cannot even hear her desperate footsteps.
So the refugee flinched when cutting through the quiet came a half-muted cry. No mistaking the direction: there could be no echo, no sound reflection in a wispfall.
She looked around, a dewdrop lens rolling across the facets of her compound eyes, legs shifting into a fast trot. Following the cry brought her under a tree’s shelter.
Glowing bulbs lined the tree branches, flickering as if the scintillation-flashes had been caged and bound, warding away the black wisps. Not many trees stood in the countryside; fewer still lived. The refugee kept looking, palps bending into frown, mandibles tight.
The mantis shivered. Not all fear, not all weakness :– the wispfall had brought cold, the enervate sucking heat like everything else. Her cloak held, but the chill laced the very air. Sapping on all sides.
A breath blew out of her, and the thrill of urgency faded.
Then a stridulation-call brought it right back.
“One little scream out here can make a hero out of any fool, can’t it?” Palps scraped together, resonating in a young, small thorax.
Another mantis was stepping forward, compound eyes pigment-dark, antennae curled into spirals. This one had no cloak, just heavy cloth, brigandine with metal studs. Armor for a battle, one that already looked lost. The cloth appeared torn and melted :– casaulties of the wispfall.
“What brought you out in this evil weather? No place for a bug to be at all. Unless…” Mouthparts parted for one moment, curling into a smug curves. “…you had no other place to be. Refugee, arentcha? Fleeing the crush?” A dangerous tenor inflected the voice. Beneath the palps, hairs grew together like little spikes, little fangs.
The refugee’s foreleg reached into her cloak.
“You should have had the sense to stay and die like the rest.”
Then the speaker lunged forward, raptorials wide open, spikes deadly :– but the refugee dodged. A near thing, and their target backed away several paces. But against a mantis, fain to leap? Still a dangerous place to be. Further sidesteps put treetrunk-safety between the two.
The attacker was circling around now, head moving from side to side, straining to make out where the refugee had gone. Wisp-wet darkness made them two shadows fighting.
The refugee retrieved her quarry from her cloak, and unfolded it in quick, practiced motions. So much training, so many drills :– she could do it without seeing, she could do it without thinking.
She couldn’t do it without the click of parts securing together, though; the tree’s shelter freeing them from the torrent of wisps also freed them from the muting of sound.
Another lunge, and another dodge. But there would be no third. Now, her weapon was 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. No master, no mission, nothing.” A moment shifting to steady stance. “And if you’re 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 wondered if those words were for her, or themselves. As she readied herself, she plotted. The speaker made no attempt at a lunge, wary now of whatever had been retrieved from the cloak. But she didn’t even need it to be that easy.
The refugee’s reply came abrupt :– she leapt forward, a midleg’s tarsus punching out. The punch met empty space. But she was turning even as she landed.
Then, as the speaker settled to a stop, skidding from dodge-momentum, they died.
Most fights didn’t last long. It only took one mistake to get a spearhead run through your gullet, right into your head. They fell for a feint, fell right into her trap.
The refugee panted, abdomen rising and falling behind her. Raptorial spines had locked the spear’s wire-grille, and now released it, letting the weapon fall. Dropped on shadow-soaked ground, it made no sound.
The excitement was over, thrill fading. Instead of collapsing outright, the refugee’s forelegs catch her, even as the two pairs of legs holding her up gave out. Her strength waned with the thrill. Could she even stand back up? It had been three nights.
She looked at the body, at the pawn she just killed.
We do what we have to, even when it’s ugly.
Her mouthparts tightened. It had been three nights — she counted them by her sleep, but could she even trust that, when no dawn could pierce the inscrutable dark heavens above?
It’s what vesperbanes are about, right?
Cannibalism was… distasteful :– but it had been three nights. The refugee was lucky to escape at all. She had nothing but this seminerve-dark cloak on her back and the spear.
And the knowledge. The knowledge of just who was responsible.
She gave the dead pawn one more look, and her mandibles parted.
Beneath the tree slept the refugee, fitful with nightmares. When she was awoken, purple pigment surged into pale eyes, and she saw light bursting from the horizon, a cavalry at last arriving. Those long-withheld sunrays revealed a heartlands sky.
The firmament crawled with shadowy lines and undulating dark waves, emanating from the waxing fullness of the black moon Tenebra like blood from a deep, cosmic wound. Dawn had arrived, a cavalry come, but the night might have already won.
The refugee stood and resumed her trek across the countryside. In dawn’s light, with no fear of wispfall, she threw back the hood of her cloak, expanding her peripheral sight to the comfort of near a full circle.
Her eyes were still large on her face, proportions of an eighth instar nymph. On her face lines of dark purple streaked white chitin. These lines crossed each other, shaped like stars.
Her features might have been pretty once, but now she was dirty with ash. Above, once cleanly trimmed-antennae now grow wild, setae unmaintained. She ran three pulvilli-fingers through dark locks as she marched on through the land. The path meandered around mounds and boulders — small fortune that the uneven packed dirt lay as flat as it did.
Moss and ferns clung all around. They lay 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. Crows were watching, perched on the prominences, 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 wound between taller, steeper hills. No crows perched on them, and a few longicorn beetles scurried away from her. The refugee worked her antennae into uncertain loops, the setae flaring up :– she was just the slightest bit on edge. A vesperbane would be alarmed, prepared; this nymph was still taken by surprise.
A diamantis lunged from behind a blind curve. Clad in the same wisp-liqued brigandine, this one grasped blades in their raptorials.
Slash! One good hit struck her thorax but couldn’t cut her cloak.
She hopped back to size up her foe. The daylight left it clear that the pawn was a nymph: green-shelled and scant instars older than the refugee.
With this moment afforded by distance, her spear was half-unfolded. Already her foe charged forward, so she threw it at the ground before them.
This distraction bought another moment :– that was when the refugee rushed in. She grabbed one blade-bearing foreleg in a raptorial vise. Squeezed and dug in with her spines until they dropped that blade.
But the pawn had only been taken off-guard, not cowed. No hesitation in slashing with the blade in their free foreleg. She had no room to avoid it. Her wrist was cut as it reached to hold secure that foreleg.
So she swept her leg underneath them, using her hold to shove the pawn to the ground. She grabbed the spear with the tarsus of her midleg, and pressed it at the diamantid’s gullet. A faint crack and hemolymph was beading by the tip.
“Why?” the refugee demanded. “Who sent you?” Her palps rubbing together gave a soft stridulating buzz. The sound came ragged-edged from days of disuse.
“It’s orders,” said the pawn. “Just orders. Kill everything — every bane, pawn and especially every clan bug — that crawled out of Duskroot. ’swhat we were hired to do.”
She stared at them for a moment, and pushed her spear closer, sinking it just barely deeper into the shell before stopping. Then she said, “You failed. Get out of here.” The spear was removed. She stood up.
The pawn rose. And then they were lunging at her for another attack. The refugee sustained another cut.
“My master won’t accept failure.” They punched with a foreleg, and she caught it. “So I cannot fail.”
She had no choice, did she?
It only took one more misstep to bring this to an end. They were speared through the thorax, severing their dorsal nerve. She ripped away pieces of their cloth armor, digging till she found any fabric not blackened by wisps, taking it to loop around her injuries and hold back the bleeding.
The only thing she could do was keep moving, march further on. The more distance she put between herself and Duskroot, the safer she would be. Behind her, those mountaintop ruins stand, already pale from the distance.
Duskroot in ashes.
Sun midway across the sky, the refugee trod a packed dirt road as it swerved near a creek of darkened water. Down its banks, another nymph squatted. A small thing, six or seven instars, picking at little plants in the mud while fishes swam away. Dark red chitin with black spots. The refugee must have spotted the nymph first; she hasn’t been seen yet, no more than a peripheral blur.
Readying her spear with a click, she leapt down onto the bank, rushing up to the nymph to pin them. Holding the little bug one twitch away from death, she asked: “Why should I let you live?”