Chapter 4

What? It’s not a visceral surprise, the way the scream was, or the mysterious sounds from the woods were. It’s a more cerebral shock, which takes a moment for your mind to realize.

The instinct is to clench tighter with your raptorials, in a grip that would certainly crush the avian. But you easily wrestle down the urge, and release the bird.

It’s just ‍— you have no idea what’s going on. You err with caution.

The bird flutters down to the ground, and doesn’t flee. You flare wide your raptorials, revealing the menacing eyespots at their center. In full threat display, you stare down the bird.

You wonder what some magnanimous story‍-scroll hero would do. Pointing your antennae at the bird, you say, “Taste mercy, knave! I have spared you for now, pledge to serve me and it shall continue!” You’re glad no one is around to hear this.

Except the bird. But can it even understand you? It’s just a bird, surely.

In response, you swear the insolent thing shakes its head! The temptation exists to swipe deftly with your raptorial and take off it’s head ‍— but you always had excellent composure. Think. You almost recognize the species of bird ‍— some manner of crow? You once read a story with a crow trained to repeat vapid phrases. If this is such a crow, then someone trained it. And if you’re to turn the situation to your advantage, as a clever, cunning heroine would, you ought to spare the crow even after this insolence. Whoever owns the crow will appreciate it, and you’ll thus have their good will.

While you muse, the bird has turned away from you, and hopped further down the path. It croaks “Help!” again and it lifts a wing and ‍— is it pointing?

The bird slowly ambles up the path. If you were to make a wild, dramatic guess, the bird wants you to follow, as ridiculous as that sounds. You have no choice but to follow, honestly. You’re here to see who screamed and why, and that entails following the path anyway. You could bushwack your way through the wild of the woods… but there’s courting danger, and then there’s begging for it.

Already the woods are more dynamic than the plains. Back toward the village, hills are slow, polite things that take a few hundred strides to gather any height. But even as you walk the wooden path, the ground beside it rises up sharply to act almost as a wall enclosing half the path. Looking farther out, there are little mounds and prominences everywhere, as well as depressions and gullies like the beds of forgotten rills.

You see a damselfly flit the air, and a dirt hole tended by lesser beetles digs into the path‍-wall farther down.

Still the crow struts on, and you follow, feeling increasingly absurd and bemused. The both of you reach a fork in the road. A path sharply left leading to an area lousy with fallen, crumbling trees and dead foilage. A path center, slightly rightward, which inclines upward, and sees the trees thin.

But the crow chooses (chooses, you repeat in disbelief) the rightmost path, deeper into the ambrosia woods.

You’ve almost eased off your guard, your mind relishing the chance to puzzle at the mystery of the talking crow instead of contending with and worrying about the gross danger you’re in.

But a sudden motion punishes that slack! You see in the corner of your vision (which is almost exactly behind you, with your wide compound eyes) a deeper shadow by the path‍-wall, darker than even the occluded blackness under the fallen logs ‍— inappropriately dark. This compels you to turn and take it in ‍— and as you give more thought to it, you remember its limp formlessness, as if it were cast by a puddle in the branches above. The image makes no sense.

And maybe it was just your imagining, because there’s nothing when you turn around. With your fovea regarding it, you can see now, at the edge of where the black puddle was, there is a thin crack in the hard dirt.

The bird stands strides ahead of you now, and you turn to dash after it. But the thing has stopped suddenly, so much that you almost step on it! You catch yourself, and, antennae writhing, a harsh growl on your spiracles, you see the bird has turned to look at the path‍-wall.

There’s a mantis slumped there, in a concave bit of wall you hadn’t seen. She’s covered in black robes, and in the darkness, it’s almost enough for you to miss the green hemolymph stains. But the odor gives it all away: coppery, putrid, almost smelling of pain. There’s wounds under her robes, nasty, deep wounds. But she’s awake, barely stirring as you arrive.

You meet her dark blue face, and her maxillae twitch.

Below, from her abdomen, through coughs, she speaks: “Hey… hey kid.”

Afterword

Apocrypha Given

Is there more than once species of empersoned mantis? Is there more than one species of mantis, at all? are there any creatures which are to them like chimps are to us?

Your father taught you that there are two kinds of mantids in the world; the ordinary folk like you or your friends, and the wingless mantids. People don’t talk very much about wingless mantids, even when a sunny nymph like yourself was the one asking.

But you had gotten answers at night, as your father lays you down in your bed and comforts you with bedtime conversations, his mind tired and inattentive after a long day. Bedtime conversations they were, because any attempt of his at bedtimes stories ran aground on your mountain of questions until the tenor was more philosophical than narrative.

They say long ago wingless mantids involved themselves in a great evil. Whether they perpetrated it, or were just complicit in it your father couldn’t say. But the price for that evil was that their wings were shorn off as a warning for the rest of us.

There are a few wingless mantids in Shatalek, and they tend the farms along with the noble roaches — one of them even cleans the tavern. They don’t speak much, although they flinch less when you walk by than for any of the imagos.

Whether there’s more races of mantids in the world the normal and wingless, you aren’t sure. You know mantids come in a wide variety of colors, from your reddish-yellow, to your friend Yikki’s pastel pink, to the black of Hervanium Clan mantids. Sometimes, you’ve wondered if Vesperbane Clan mantids are races of their own. You’ve twice seen them pass as travelers through the tavern. One had what could have been moss growing all over her chitin, and another had four limbs too many! (More often than that you’ve seen vesperbanes at a distance — but imagos don’t like to let you near them.)

And there are creatures less than mantis. Like the awful feral stickmen you’ve seen illustrations of — smaller, inferior bugs who prey savagely in the forest. You’ve heard some keep them as pets, but you don’t know who would want the things.

And you know from your studies that knowledge-hunters have named the praying mantis Cephalomantis sapiens. Once, at glance, you saw the term Cephalomantis apteroid appear, in a scroll the scriptorium did not let you borrow.

Is mantis society a dictatorship?

You’ve asked, and there’s no one ‘in charge’ of Shatalek the way mother is in charge of the family. There’s a syndicate of farmers, led by coordinators who handle trade with the world outside of Shatalek, and you’ve heard them mutter over half-empty glasses about taxes and rulings from the councils. There’s a syndic who represents Shatalek to the prefecture. Sometimes stern-faced, fancy-robed mantids ride in on cicindela-back and ask to speak to the coordinators, or the scriptorium master, or Tlista’s guard.

All you know is they come from a place called Wentalel, or on some bad years, a place called Greci.

are there any other sapients?

It took you a long time to figure out how to properly ask this question. “Are there any other kinds of people?” didn’t work — ‘people’ synonyms with ‘mantis’ for most, so asking this only yielded terse assertions about the wingless.

When you learned to hunt, you also learned one of the big divides in the world was between the edible and the inedible. Mantids stand elevated from the vulgar creatures of the world, and all of them — beetles, ants, wolves, apes, bats — can be eaten, though one may not want to. The one exception is mantids — cannibalism is contrary to the ancestors’ teachings, and any who would practice such is no mantid, but a beast. You asked if there were other exceptions, and there were none.

Great. New facts (interesting ones, even), but you were no closer to answering your question. One day, you explored out by the the farms where the chorus roaches toil. One roach, strolling between fields, nodded at you, and said a hello.

It startled and you ran all the way back home. But it revealed the proper approach to the question:

“Are there any other creatures that talk? Or communicate?”

And your mother (for that day she was there) replied there are many. There are the chorus roaches, masters of agriculture and husbandry, who we taught to speak, and who have accepted our protection for services rendered.

The spinners ants and gestaltes bees alone are inept, and lack speech in their spiracles, but they conglomerate into autonomous hives whose cunning we learned to reckon. They are thought (perhaps by conjecture, or interpretation) to serve some queen, of like we have never been allowed to meet. They have dispatched learnèd workers as liasons, and arrangements have been made by interpreting bodily motions and pheromones, but they remain baffling servants.

And then your mother’s voice grew distant. She’s heard mention of velvet hornet nests, or vast spider webs traded with. Some adventurers, returning mad with terror, have told of termite-made things that spoke with a voice from nightmares.

There are no vesperbats in the heartland. But once there were, and once they ruled. Only the ichorbats, a mindless shadow of their kind, remain.

And of course, there are stranger, one-off creatures existing half in rumor. Magical spirits? Clever Vesperbane constructs? Vast spells gone awry? It is easier to tell what exists in the heartland than what does not.

Oh, and a few claim some intelligence in the weevils of ambrosia. But no, they have never tried to communicate.

Your mother waves you away after that, telling you to go to your room or go back outside, and stop bothering her with questions.

Suggestions Received

We should ask the woman if she can still stand, or walk, what feels hurt, whether she thinks she’s mortally wounded or how much time she has left before she’s beyond the help of medicine, and we should consider whether we’re strong enough (with our feeble physicals, unlikely) to help her get to town, or else whether we have enough time to go and get someone to help.

attempt to light a signal fire
also maybe look if there are any identifying marks on her robe

We don’t forget anything important, so hopefully our education will have included some basic heraldry

ask what happend, attempt to help, if you arent able to rescue her alone call for other people to help you

Do make an effort to help, on the condition that the brain first tries to place anything out of the ordinary with this woman. Does she have any markings or paraphernalia of unusual provenance? If, for example, she’s got ritual implements, then she might be some crazy vesper-aspirant thing. Could be that she’s carrying something else that will speak louder than words about why she’s here. TLDR: stabilize if possible, then run a perceptive compound eye over her to get a feel for her story.