Eifre Quest

You do not go unnoticed. If you’re close enough to see the crowd in the schoolyard, it means, even fascinated by the vesperbanes, everyone can see you approaching without turning their heads. Still, some do. Remna glances over and smiles, a boy with long antennae regards you with a pinched, confused expression, and a fifth instar girl with white and green chitin glances over for one moment. Her antennae curl up and palps curve downward like fangs. It’s one moment, then she looks away – throughout, you don’t meet her eyes.

The decision‍ ‍—‍ go or stay‍ ‍—‍ isn’t helped by the eyes and attention entangling you and drawing you in. But really, were you ever not going to find out whatever these vesperbanes were telling everyone else? Sure, they were mean and don’t seem very good at their job, but they do the job, which alone elevates their words over the usual mentors.

And if you didn’t find out now, you don’t trust anyone else to remember it well enough to relay it accurately.

“–bats and mantids, and in theory shoggoths but that’s more of a scary story. I… we don’t know why none of the other kinds can, it might be biology or the vespers just don’t want to.” The vesperbane with green chitin is the one speaking, her voice losing focus and trailing off as you arrive, a distraction.

Wesk had saved you a seat‍ ‍—‍ or at least, had enough free space around her. The almost‍-​sixth instar nymph is about half again as big as anyone else, and with her beside you, you’re obscured from about half the other nymphs.

The two of you aren’t quite on smiling terms, but she does give you a nod. The arrangement the two of you went was something like, whenever you did athletic team exercises, the two of you try to end up on the same team‍ ‍—‍ Wesk being enough of an asset to make up for how little you could offer in any activity‍ ‍—‍ in return, you have far more patience answering her questions than anyone else.

Inserting yourself into the rapt crowd doesn’t decrease the number of glances your way. They still come, and pair themselves with light, quiet stridulations like gossip. You imagine it couldn’t be a secret that your mom had rounded up half the town in the search for you last night.

You ignore them. You look to the front. Green had leaned over to consult with one of the mentors‍ ‍—‍ to make sure you belong?

You mirror her, and lean to consult with Wesk, asking what’s going on.

“The banes came here from the city to fight termites! And the mentors got them to spend the morning here, and tell us what it’s like to be a vesperbane and answer all our questions.”

“What was the last question?” You piece together context from the bit you heard. “Why other species can’t become vesperbanes?”

“Yeah. How’d you know?”

The vesperbanes were speaking again. Red, this time. “Hey, settle it. If you’re going to talk instead of listen, we can get back to our mission instead.”

There’s quiet, and where there isn’t quiet, there’s other nymphs jabbing each other to quit it.

“Are there any other questions?” Green asks.

You look, and Shimare isn’t standing with them‍ ‍—‍ she’s in the shade beneath an awning, reading and occasionally shuffling the pages she is reading.

The nymphs with questions (surprisingly not all of them‍ ‍—‍ had that many questions already been answered?) show it by making a display of the eyespots on the inside of their raptorials.

You consider trying to ask a pointed question about renegades, or maybe that’s a bad idea. You do want to get their help, after all.

“You, with the red chitin.”

“I um… well, my aunt tries to make me stop coming here whenever I go see her. But I don’t know… why do some mantids hate vesperbanes? Aren’t they heroes?”

Green glances at Red, antennae flexing. It’s Red who speaks first. “You know, there’s a story our teacher told us when we asked something like that. Should we tell them?” She smiles. “I think we should.”

Green frowns, hesitant, but it seems to be all the prompting she needs. She starts, “The short way to put it, it’s a story about mantids a long time ago. A long time‍ ‍—‍ before the bats. A lady owned a farm that fed a village, but then there’s a drought, and then a plague that cripples her farms’ roaches, and then a horde of reaver ants sweep through and raid their grain silos and livestock… it’s a real bad year. And it starts to look like she’s not going to be able feed the village.”

Red asks the obvious question. “So what does she do?”

“Searching for a solution, she dares to venture out into the woods, which are…”‍ ‍—‍ Green pauses, eyes drifting towards the horizon. “Actually, this far south, you probably know what the woods are like. This long ago, before the ambrosia isolation pact, the woods were even more unkempt‍ ‍—‍ trees melting into each other, blight galls growing like weeds. So this lady ventures into the woods, and shadows dance at the edge of her vision, weevils keeping just out of sight, their breaths and beatings wings like a chorus of laughs. She’s lost in those woods, hopelessly hounded and herded by those shadows, till one weevil has the mercy to appear before her.”

One nymph interrupts here. “What do weevils look like?”

“Night had fallen at this point, so she doesn’t get a good look at it,” is Green’s way of dodging the question. “Weevils can only speak by making you eat the fruit of a fungus that makes you babbling mad, making you dream while awake, giving all light a smell and every sound a color. By comparison to that, it makes the buzzing of weevil wings makes sense. So this one weevil makes the lady eat the mushrooms, and it speaks to her. The lady babbles forth her problems to the weevil, and it proposes that it can solve their problems.

“ ‘What are you willing to give?’ the weevil asks. And the lady replies ‘Anything. My husband, my kids, the village‍ ‍—‍ they have to eat. I’ll do anything so that they can eat.’ The weevil laughs, and it tells her the secret to solving her problem, and disappears. With this knowledge, the lady runs back to town, her eyes dilated black from the mushrooms, and the other weevils laugh and leave her alone enough to finally escape the forest. She reaches her house before she reaches the village, and in her excitement, exclaims the solution to her husband. He then turns into a tree.”

Green pauses there, eyes roaming as if savoring the gasps and confused murmurs. “A little sapling, but it grows fast, the way they say weevil magic does to plants. She’s as surprised and taken aback by this as you are, and decides this is another waking dream of weevil’s mushrooms. So she goes to sleep. And in the morning, she rouses to find the tree her husband became is still there, now far bigger than their house. It’s grown flowers and fruit now. The lady herself can do nothing but stare, but when one of her children picks a fruit, they find it tough and greasy and delicious. And there’s enough fruit on all the boughs to feed the entire town.”

Red’s palps draw into a big grin as he looks over the bewildered nymphs. “That’s it. That’s the story our teacher told us.”

“How does that answer the question at all!”

“If we explained that, it wouldn’t be authentic to the experience of our teacher telling it. He has this way of telling you things and watching you react like it’s a test, and you fail if you don’t act like it somehow makes sense.”

“But,” Green starts, “because we’re better than our teacher, in this regard, we’ll try to explain. By now, you’ve surely learned what it means to be a hero, right? A hero is one who sacrifices. The good for the better, the one for the many, a hero pays the price, whatever struggle and strain needed to keep her protectorate safe. The story illustrates this with the husband, I think. I believe the husband is the same as a vesperbane‍ ‍—‍ he was transformed into something else so the village could survive. There are people who think vesperbanes are less mantid, because of their union with the vespers. But despite this, because vesperbanes fight monsters, heal the sick, and build our cities, the Pantheca endures.”

“Look at this way,” Red cuts in. “Your parents might not like it when their little nymphs go off to Wentalel to get transformed into powerful vesperbanes. But I say it’s what makes you a hero. And besides, if you live here, enjoying the benefits of there being vesperbanes, without doing your part to help there be more vesperbanes, isn’t that the definition of being a defect?”

“But to return to the question we’re supposed to be answering,” Green says, “we think it’s that simple. Vesperbanes make sacrifices mantids are uncomfortable with. Especially among the religious, becoming a vesperbane is viewed as a corrupting transformation. They say a soul united with the vespers can never be reborn in the welkin, and call that deprival of eternal life murder, and conclude that vesperbanes kill by simply existing.”

“It’s all very complicated, but it’s all nonsense. Especially if you’ve ever met a vindicator. Assholes, all of them.”

Green makes a sort of coughing sound in their trachea.

“Oh yeah, nymphs,” she says, an antenna falling. “It’s a word you’ll learn when you’re older.”

“Are there other questions?”

You keep glancing to Shimare, and decide you’ll ask her for help after this is over.

---

Red is answering a question (“Why don’t vesperbanes rule the world?”) with an analogy to mantis‍-​fungus‍-​aphid (which sounds a lot like a weird foreign version of mantis‍-​fungus‍-​ant), when an interruption comes as the beating of chitinous wings. Above, a dark form darts down to land on the foreleg of the Green mantis. It’s a bee, black thoracic fuzz pressed down to a more aerodynamic form. It puffs out after landing, making the bug appear rounder. The bee bounces and points at paper tied to a leg.

A messenger bee. Green gently unties the paper and unfolds it, meanwhile rubbing the bee’s head with a dactyl. “Good girl.”

The bee has little bands strapped to its little legs, and symbols are woven into it, but the seem incomplete or too pale to be discernible. (You know why: the scrolls said bees had eyes that could see colors that are purpler than purple, and so bees could write in invisible ink only they could see. They couldn’t talk, though, and had worse hearing, so they aren’t better than mantids.)

Green tilts the page so that Red can look at it. Then, addressing the crowd. “We got a message from our teacher. We need to get going. Thanks for listening, everyone. Perhaps one day we’ll meet again, as vesperbanes.”

If the three vesperbanes are leaving, that poses a problem. You glance again to Shimare, and bite a palp in thought. Well, could you make things worse by trying?

You slip out from the rows and dart around the edges of the schoolyard. Even as a mentor’s gaze is landing on you with antennae extending straight, you’re calling out the name of the bane standing up.

“Shimare!”

It’s that moment of unexpected knowledge that gives the mentors and other nymphs pause. You see recognition on the faces of Red and Green, but they’re intent on leaving, in the middle of hopping the fence instead of walking out along the perimeter of the crowd.

Shimare looks around before lowering her eyes to see you. “Oh, it’s the nymph.”

“What were you reading, lady vesperbane?”

“Sorry, but I don’t –” she starts, but it’s not the question she was expecting, and cuts herself off. “Notes. My notes. And I’m not a lady yet.”

You glance over as if you could making anything out from the folded pages held in her tarsus. “What are they notes on?”

“Inhabitants of the southern reaches.” For a moment, she would leave it at that, but she anticipates more questions. “If you must know, I’m concerned about that–” she jabs a dactyl at a hill on the horizon, where you see nothing at all. “I’ve seen phase‍-​aberrated light reflected or emitted, and I’m reviewing the mission brief and my research into the region to enumerate the possibilities.”

You nod. “My mom says caution is what keeps vesperbanes alive. What are the possibilities in your notes?”

She seems to ease her frown at the implied compliment, and doesn’t mind talking about her notes. “Other than the things that are possibilities anywhere? Renegades, crepuscules, blood plagues, world‍-​scars, and common roadside bandits? This far south, there’s the weevils, or perhaps side‍-​effect of the termite mound, or reavers, or something I don’t even have notes on. That last one gets more of the probability mass than you’re think. But really, I just don’t have enough data to say. Just the aberration.”

“What does phase‍-​aberrated mean? Does it have to do with your… clan abilities?”

“Yes. Our eyes are sensitive to light with a low, nonzero phase index, where your eyes can only see light at ground phase.”

You take another look at where the vesperbane pointed. “But I thought your branch didn’t have long range eyesight?”

She sighs. “The difference is –” A sudden stop. “No, I shouldn’t be explaining clan secrets to civilians. What did you want, nymph?”

You glance behind you, where Red and Green are walking away‍ ‍—‍ they do look back for Shimare, but they aren’t waiting, and she isn’t in a hurry to go after them. Maybe it wasn’t an emergency, then?

“My friend is missing.” Shimare looks to her teammates. “She was with me last night, in the woods.” That brings her attention back to you. “We both made it back to town, but then she doesn’t show up here today and I wonder why. I want to find her and make sure she’s okay, and you…”

“You want my magic eyes to see where she is for you,” she concludes, flatly.

“Can you do that?”

Shimare curls up her antennae, palps tightening. But then her antennae bounce (slight, like she’s used to not making her reactions evident), and she says, “Alright, fine. Take me somewhere to look. After that, I’ve got to get back to my team.”

You know where Yikki lives, at least, so you make for the exit to the schoolyard. Perhaps it’s that she’s a vesperbane, and a mysteriously quiet, unknown quantity or that‍ ‍—‍ or maybe some recognize her clan affiliation. Either way, no one tries to stops or interrupt you leaving with the bane. One mentor does start toward the pair of you, but a gesture from Shimare stops them. It’s a shocking sight, seeing a nymph boss around an imago. You wonder if the vesperbane’s really have authority over the mentors, or they’re just as confused about the hierarchy as you are.

“Am I keeping you from something important?” you ask. You stare at the other mantis, as a way to keep from looking back at all the gazing nymphs behind you, some of them waving for your attention.

Where the other two vesperbanes had an outfit that looked like baneleather armor, Shimare’s garb looks more like robes. The sleeves are shorten to the point of almost not being there‍ ‍—‍ and well, it is warm out here.

“Oh, nothing pressing. Want to hear a secret?” You nod instantly. Shimare looks away. “After we agreed to do this, the others had the idea that we would get a bee to deliver a blank piece of paper at a set time, sparing us from spending the whole morning here.”

“That sounds, hm,” you start. Then you just curl up your antennae and say, “If I had people looking up to me, I think I wouldn’t walk away.”

“We came here for a mission, and weren’t expecting to need to give inspiring speeches to civilians.” She leans her head down, closer to you. “And there’s an angle to this you’re missing. This wasn’t our idea. It was our teacher’s. Remember the story? He loves his tests. Spend long enough under him, and it’ll feel like he’s grading you on everything, even when he doesn’t tell you so. Especially when.”

How would he grade skipping out on the test, then? Or maybe their teacher likes that sort of thing. Your mother tends to smile when you find an unexpected way around a puzzle.

The two of you walk along the dirt streets of Shatalek. Some of the imagos recognize you, and give a worried double take. Not because you should be in training‍ ‍—‍ nymphs only had to go if their parents made them‍ ‍—‍ but because of your company.

Shimare has white chitin with swirls of color, and compound eyes that are even stranger riot of color. Above all, the Plains Southern antennae‍-​band glinted in sunlight. It sits flat against her head, in a way that looks like it ought to crush her ocelli.

You watch her for moments, deciding how to phrase the question. “Do you like your teammates?”

She pauses in stride‍ ‍—‍ for just a moment‍ ‍—‍ and directs a gaze to you with a quirked palp. Then, “Oh. You saw me sitting apart and think you deduced something? But I’m no defect. Like any honorable servant of the Pantheca’s wardens, my teammates are mine to protect and be protected by. They are the constant element I can trust on missions.”

You tap a dactyl against your labrum. “What about off mission? Are you friends?”

“Are we near your friend’s house?”

You bite a palp, pouting, but say, “Yeah. It’s right over there.”

It’s a squat house of little wood and mostly imported banestone. In the yard, there’s a banetouched locust‍-​leaf bush, and you don’t like how the branches look like legs or the leaves like wings. You also don’t like that it sometimes grows eyes or antennae on its shoots instead of leaf‍-​wings, at least until the family’s roaches trim them.

“Don’t look so queasy. It looks like fine ichor work,” Shimare says.

“Why would anyone want a tree like that?”

“The syndics grant tax credits for adopting alternative photovores. They likely thought it would pay off, and it likely did.”

You nod, feigning understanding. You’ve tried to look up scrolls that talked about “taxes”, but they were hard to read and not all had been translated into Pantheca common.

On the porch, there’s a perch that swings and you’re not supposed to swing on it, and the table hosts an in‍-​progress board for one of the war‍-​games Tlista plays with the guards. You weren’t allowed back for a week when you tried to play with the pieces.

You know the outside of this house well‍ ‍—‍ just the outside, because you’ve never been allowed inside.

Beside you, the Brismati bane is contorting her dactyls in complex patterns‍ ‍—‍ is that how banes talk to vespers?

Shimare moves her headband. Instead of ocelli‍ ‍—‍ the small simple eyes of insects‍ ‍—‍ she has two slits. As one, the soft flesh around the slits peels back, the cuticle wrinkling as it is pressed together. This reveals two pale orbs sunken into the bane’s head. Red lines snake across the orbs, engorged, raised against the surface, like branching worms. A kind of mucus covers the thing, and starts dripping slowly out like clear honey. There’s green disks in the center of the orbs, where the spheres bulge slightly. Curved lines on the disks widen as the light touches them.

“Wait, are those the Brismati eyes? I thought…” You glance at the multicolored compound eyes.

“Common misconception. Like any ancient enough technique, the Red Eyes are derived from vesperbat biology, and mammalian eyes are highly divergent from the compound eyes of arthropods. Our ocelli are a more viable starting point.” She smirks. “And it catches some of our more ignorant enemies by surprise.”

“Vesperbats have eyes?”

“They have the genes for them, which is what matters,” she says, deflectingly. “Anyway, what does your friend look like?”

“She has bright pink chitin, light green eyes…”

“Any thecamates?”

“Yes. But Oona has darker chitin, and Eron’s a boy.”

“Got it.” More complex tarsi contortions. Shimare opens her tegmina, and their interior looks shiny. The movement of her tarsi stops, and she holds one sign. Glowing blue liquid pours over the surface of her wings. On her eyes (the weird ones) the same liquid is present, crawling through blue lines similar to the red.

This lasts a second, then her inner hindwings open in front of the first, darkening the light to invisibility like a filter.

At the same time, you swear you see a blue light everywhere in your vision, as if permeating everything. It lasts a moment, and then is gone.

Shimare points her wings at the house, and the direction the eye disks point at changes.

“I see a pink imago… signs of nymph habitation‍ ‍—‍ why do your friends live in a basement?” But no, no nymphs here.” She closes her wings, and brings the flesh‍-​flaps over the mucus‍-​coated eyes. “I imagine you want to keep looking? I can spend a few more minutes on this. Where to next?”

“We should ask if the imago knows where Yikki is.” The bane shrugs.

You knock, and recognize the face that opens the door.

Yikki’s father is a male of round palps and chitin painted dark in ways that emphasize the curves of his face. He has a way of making his antennae fall at the sides of his face that makes him always look a little sad, but it also means you never miss how finely groomed they are.

His tone is stern. “Yikki cannot play today.”

“I know. But,”‍ ‍—‍ you weigh the wisdom of revealing your bane‍-​gotten information, and just say,‍ ‍—‍ “is she here? Where is she?”

His mandibles tighten with a click. “No, you can’t see her. She can’t play today.”

You close your raptorials, but don’t frown. You have excellent composure. “Could you check that she’s here? I’m worried.”

“Keep your worries to yourself and your defect of a mother.”

He’s closing the door on you, and for a moment you have the chance to put your tarsus there to stop it. But Yikki’s father seem intent on not being helpful, and he might just try to crush your foot.

You back away to your bane companion, your deferred frown finally opening like a rotten‍-​smelling flower the slugflies prefer.

“That was useless. If I hadn’t gotten your help, I would have had to believe him! Why! Isn’t he concerned about Yikki? Hasn’t he noticed she’s gone?”

“It could be he knows, and the idea of not knowing where she is is too embarrassing to admit. She’ll turn up on her own, or they’ll find her, and till then it’s best no one knows.”

“That’s silly. How will people help, if no one knows?”

“Have you never turned down help or refused it?” Shimare asks, tone bending up.

It’s hard not to think of yesterday, when you could have gotten an imago’s help with Maune. And thinking of that leads you to remember…

“Before we go anywhere else, we should tell my mom what we’re doing. It seems like something’s up now, and she made me promise not to go off doing things on my own again.”

“You aren’t on your own, technically. Nor do we know anything’s wrong – could just be the nymph’s with her mother.”

“My mom might have a better idea where to look, though.”

“Sure. You’re the client,” Shimare says, shrugging and waiting for your direction.

Was she viewing this as a mission? Ha, you hired a vesperbane! Though really, you’d rather be on the other end of this.

The path back to your house is quite familiar. The unpleasant glances from the townsfolk continue. Is it just as the two banes said? Civillians uncomfortable at the sacrifice, thinking banes less mantid? Or maybe it’s the heroic debt vesperbanes aiding the town would incur. But that just mean the Stewartry would conscript more mantids to repay it‍ ‍—‍ increasing the chances of it being you! Though the tributes tend to be closer to teneral…

“Another thing,” Shimare starts, gettting your attention. “I noticed that ring on your finger. What is it? It’s imbued, in case you didn’t know. The aberration reminds me of the trees in the woods.”

You look around to see who could hear (everyone’s keeping their distance) and lightly scrape, “A weevil gave it to me.”

“A weevil? And you choose to keep it? Remember the story? Do you want to turn into a tree?”

“I thought turning into a tree was a good thing, like being a vesperbane.”

“Yeah, but…” she stops. “Even if you believe the myths about the time before the bats, mantids have moved beyond needing the help of the weevils. We have our own gifts, our own power. There’s an isolation pact for a reason. It’s best they keep to themselves. Maybe this termite business is a sign we shouldn’t even have towns this far south.” She shrugs. “But I guess that’s not your call. Still, I think you should throw away the ring.”

You never wanted to stay in Shatalek, but the implication that it shouldn’t exist stays on your mind.

You change the subject. “Yikki’s father called Tlista a defect, but if she was, why would your team listen to her? And wouldn’t she be punished?”

Shimare shrugs her forelegs. “I think he means it metaphorically. Some view it as appropriate that a vesperbane should die in the line of duty, and retirement is cowardice, depriving the Pantheca of its due. You’ll find it’s mostly those who aren’t giving the Pantheca its due who feel this way, of course.”

“Tlista stopped being a vesperbane so she could lay me.”

“Sounds like your friend’s father said you should have never hatched.” She’s smiling as she says this, but you don’t think it’s something to smile about.

You pass a few sights walking through Shatalek. There’s a kind of beetle with a small head and big mandibles they keep in herds at the ranch, and you’re not sure what it’s doing in town, munching on a bush. In one yard, you see what looks like a litter of baby roaches playing in the shadow of a big tree. One yard includes an extensive garden, filled with the kind of gargantuan flowers the bees cultivate. They are too large to be pollinated by snailflies, and you recall a scroll mentioning it’s hard to even accomplish it without the tools the bees make themselves. The smaller of the flowers are the size of your head.

A garden like this requires bees to tend it, and you see them at work as you pass, about six of them in total.

One worker bee flies over, lighting down beside you on the road, eyes seeming pointed toward you. The bee has the leg‍-​bands you saw on the messenger, but this one is moreso covered in small pockets and strapped bags as workers often are. She hops on onto your tarsus, and you’re startled enough to let her, her own small tarsus grabbing onto the weevil’s wood ring. She touches it for a moment, then releases.

The bee hops off your tarsus, and begins making gestures with its legs, but you shake your head. You don’t understand waggle‍-​dance. The bee then points off into the distance, and you have a decent idea where. There is an apiary on the edge of town, near where the houses stop clustering and turn to farms.

The bee points at the ring, and then points toward the apiary again. Bring the ring to the apiary?

“Buzz off,” Shimare says. “We’re busy.”

The bee pulls back its antennae, and returns to the flowers.

“It seemed interested in my ring.”

“I told you you should get rid of it.”

“Yes, but I wonder what attracted the bee.”

She shrugs. “Bees were servants of the weevils before they ever allied themselves with mantids. Unsurprising there’d still be an affinity.”

---

The two of you are almost at your house, and you point this out.

“I’m going to see if your mother’s even home,” Shimare says in reply. “You said it’s the big house? I see Tlista saved up her stipends.”

Her Brismati eyes open, wings spread, Shimare looks up at your house for a moment. Then her compound eyes darken with pigment. She looks away, lowering both her gazes, as if she could look through the ground and into your cellar. Which she can, and probably is. She’s moving palps to start saying something. Then the sound of a door opening catches both your attentions.

“Uh, hi madam Tlista.”

Your mother’s out and walking over toward you.

She extends antennae toward Shimare, frowning. “You need to work on your control, girl. Defeats the point of spying, I think, if your target can tell a Brismati’s looking.”

“We weren’t spying, ma’am.”

Tlista lifts one antenna, and glances from the bane to you then back.

“Well? Tell me what non‍-​spying purpose you intended with looking into my house without permission.”

“We were looking for you, and it’d save time to not knock if we knew you weren’t here.”

She hums. “An answer that directly raises another question is obviously incomplete.” She looks back her daughter, focusing attention on you. “What new mess have you thrust yourself into?”

“Yikki’s gone, and we need to find her!”

“No,” Shimare says. “We already have.”

“Oh?” Tlista asks.

Shimare nods at her. “You are aware my clan can see through solid objects?” Shimare watches her with a meaningful expression, and Tlista seems unimpressed by this revelation, and the imago continues waiting for an answer. “Oh. Well, uh, naturally I can easily see where she is. Finding her won’t be trouble, I mean. But your daughter wanted to come and get your approval before she went off with a vesperbane to track down her friend, even if it’d be a simple matter, and I’m entertaining her.” Why does Shimare sound like she’s stumbling over her words?

Your mother smiles. “That, I appreciate.” She pats your head, and directs an evaluating glance at Shimare. “How long have you been learning under him?”

“A little over a year now, madam.”

“Hm. Long enough. I trust you’re been drained of enough of the foolishness that fills wretches. Yes, you have my consent to attend my daughter today.”

Shimare’s face now grows tight, as if she’s thinking deeply.

It seems you’re done here, and about to leave, so you ask your mother something you remembered. “Did you find father’s quilting board?”

“Hm? Oh, no, we haven’t had a chance to go looking for it.”

That lights up Shimare’s face, jolting her out of the thinking fugue. “Oh, a quilting board? I saw that. If you don’t mind, I could grab it for you. It’s looks to be out the of the way, a pretty hard to find spot.”

Tlista looks at her. “…Sure. I’ll trust you in my house. Don’t make me regret that. I’ll go tell him, I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear.”

Shimare sighs quietly behind her, and starts in after the red imago. She discreetly gestures for you to follow.

You do, and it’s… unsettling, to follow a stranger navigating your house without asking for directions. She goes for the door to the cellar, leading you down its steep ramp. The door is shut behind you.

It’s dark, and the blue glow of her forewings is the only guide. It seems the bane had never turned off the glow after first pointing her eyes at your house.

“What’s going on, Shimare?”

“We got lucky. Or well, you got lucky. I assume you don’t want Tlista to know your friend is hiding down in your basement?”

The voice is light. “Eifre? A weird blue light woke me up‍ ‍—‍ is that a vesperbane?”

“Yikki!” You take a step into the darkness, before you realize you don’t quite know where she is.

(The pieces are clicking together. You don’t forget what’s important, and now you know what’s important. Tlista leaving early, the door being unlocked? The cellar keys being missing?)

Shimare’s scolding you. “Quiet, or you’ll ruin what I tried to save you,” she scratches.

“What?”

“When I said I know where Yikki is, and then said I could see through walls, I had assumed Tlista knew who was in her house.”

“But she didn’t, and you had to play it off as something you saw elsewhere, or would soon see?” you say. Shimare nods. “Me mentioning the quilting board was perfect, then? …Is it really down here?”

“Yes. Not hard to find, though, that was a lie. Maybe he just didn’t look here.”

“He lost the key. Thought it was locked?”

“I didn’t lock it,” the high voice of the third mantis says. “I thought it would be suspicious if the keys went missing and the door was locked.”

Yikki had drawn closer now. She looked just woken up: setae clumped, not combed, an a bit of drool on her mandibles.

“Who would get suspicious of lost keys?”

Simultaneously, you say, “Mother might,” and Yikki says, “A former vesperbane who was really good.”

“So,” Shimare starts, “why pick there to hide, of all places?”

“Why were you hiding at all?” you add.

“I’m hiding because my parents grounded me to my room after last night and said they wouldn’t let me go to prevesper if this was how it was gonna make me act. So I stayed up until they were asleep and ran away. Eifre’s my friend and her door was unlocked. So I came here to finally got to sleep and tonight I was gonna tell her to let me stay here and keep this a secret like our secret vesperbane adventures.” Then, realizing who she was talking to, “Um, can you keep this‍ ‍—‍ —‍ and that‍ ‍—‍ a secret too?”

“Sure, kid. Mission objective,” she said, like another might said ‘I promise.’ “I don’t see why you wouldn’t just ask, though. Before moving into someone’s house.”

“Tlista is cool, but she’s still an imago. Besides, if you ask, you don’t get it unless they say yes. If you just do it, they might find out and get mad later, but then they might forgive you and let you do it anyway. It’s clearly the better choice.”

Shimare sighs. “I’m never letting myself be hired by nymphs.”

“But you won’t tell her, right?” Yikki asks, pleading on her palps.

Shimare steps between the two of you. “Give her time to decide, alright? I want to talk to her myself, anyway.”

Yikki’s hissing and displaying her eyespots at the bane’s now‍-​turned back. If she sees this (she probably does), she ignores it as the vesperbane pulls you back up to the ground floor.

First, she looks around to see if Tlista is around, but your mother is still upstairs with your father.

“One thing about your friend, which might affect your decision.” Shimare is talking, not meeting your eyes. “At her house, I saw barred windows, doors locked from the outside. Could have been her room or one of her siblings. Just, might affect your decision.”

You frown.

“But I don’t want to talk about your friend. I want to talk about you. Us. I think… You seem to get things in a way those other nymphs don’t. I get the impression you aren’t learning much at prevespers?”

“I’ve read all the scrolls they teach from.”

Shimare smirks. And she says, “How would you like to learn in the field? Tlista gave her consent for me to attend to you‍ ‍—‍ not specifically just to find Yikki. So I say I have her blessing to‍ ‍—‍ perhaps, teacher willing‍ ‍—‍ bring you along and show you a few of the not‍-​dangerous parts of a mission. I can’t imagine you’ll say no.”

The vesperbane wretch Brismati Shimare watches you with two gazes – with those bright, colorful compound eyes, and with those bloody, alien orbs. You wonder which is a truer glimpse into her mind.