Eifre Quest

She loathed that vesperbanes wore masks.

It was probably a fiend. Maybe a wretch, but they felt powerful enough – in that dreadful, getawaygetawaygetaway sense trained vesperbanes inspired‍ ‍—‍ to be a fiend. Or was it arrogance to think Wentalel would staff a fiend for something this routine, for pawns this undistinguished? She would have looked closer, but she didn’t want to be near them.

She watched the bane kick a nymph in front, grunting, “Keep moving.” The pawns were all walking in a line, double or triple file, but this nymph had made them lag to a halt.

Was that worth kicking them, a nymph, though?

She hated that vesperbanes wore masks. What expression curdled there underneath? Was it cruel indifference, or crueler pleasure? The impulse had to be an evil one‍ ‍—‍ no other motivation could lead to such an act – but there were evils that could be fixed, and evils that should be purged.

“You’re doing it again,” the nymph beside her murmured. She had bright purple and green chitin, and she gave a forgiving palp‍-​smile when the other nymph quirked a confused antennae. “The ‘I will burn everything down and cast me a throne from the ashes’ look. You’re doing again.” In response, the other nymph only looked unimpressed, so she continued, “The deal was you’d act like less of an obvious villain, remember? I guess you would need the reminder, huh?”

“But maybe I should burn everything down,” she said, touching the metal in her robe pocket. “I have a flint lighter. If you’d be kind enough to pour the oil…?”

“I’m not going to join your revolution, Emmie.”

“But when they write the history books, wouldn’t you want to be remembered on the correct side?”

Rheni puffed up her abdomen and pushed a deep gust of air out of her throats, half‍-​hum and half‍-​sigh. “What are you even revolting about?” The tone was made of both exasperation and indulgence‍ ‍—‍ her will must be weakening! The other nymph would get through to her at this rate!

“This unjust, and suboptimal system, of course. Isn’t it obvious?”

Rheni glanced in front of them. The pawns ahead were getting moving again, a procession of big‍-​eyed nymphs in plain robes just like them, and the two of them again followed. Rheni said, “As far as I can see, you’re just scowling at a vesperbane doing their job.”

“A warden,” she spat. She had seen the antennae‍-​band before all the pawns had fallen into lines‍ ‍—‍ four swirls like symbolic hurricanes, which meant this bane was somewhere in Navera’s chain of command, of the Windborne Stronghold. “Why would they be here?” she asked.

“To keep us safe. It’s the purpose of all wardens.” A perfect answer, sure to get a passing mark and a smile from the instructors. Rewarding – not that the other nymph would know what it’s like.

“It’s a waste of a vesperbane. Given power over flesh and earth, and it’s used just to kill? Why, instead of building houses, growing food, healing the sick?”

“You already won this argument, remember,” Rheni said. “You convinced me, and I said I’d be a stewart instead of a warden.”

“Yes, but why even have wardens?”

“But who else is going to stop defects?”

She looked at the nymph‍-​kicker. “Are they stopping defects? What, do they think one of us is going to turn into a joyous mother to‍-​night?”

“Don’t say that name.”

She only twirled her antennae dismissively.

It was a moment of silence but for the footfalls of the nymphs and the heavier falls of their guide somewhere behind. “What would you even call it?” Rheni said. “This third revolution of yours. The Re‍-​realignment?”

“The dealignment, clearly,” came a high voice. “A vesperbane thinking themselves fit to rule could only be a step backwards.”

“Having someone sensible in charge of the world would be a step forward, vesperbane or not. Have you seen the state of the heartlands?”

Rheni, beside her, gave a strangled contortion of palps. Her antennae stretched out toward her, pleading, concerned.

Then she placed the voice, and turned to see the sour face of the guide. A nymph on the cusp of teneral, they had pale cyan chitin and the dark eyes of a long‍-​trained vesperbane. Thick robes shelled them, but parted around their thorax, making a show of their only accessory: by braided hyphae‍-​roots hung their all‍-​important necklace, its centerpiece a gnarled and runic core‍ ‍—‍ it was the harusign.

They were staring down at her with a frown, judgment underwriting every hair of their palps. No mask spared her the sight.

Maybe she shouldn’t set ablaze the temper of the haruspex who would make her a full bane tonight‍ ‍—‍ but should she be afraid of a little judgment? No, not when she could find its match just walking around with her forehead bare.

Were they talking? She could only feel her heart beat in her auricles.

“– better than the syndics? You are nymph trained to nurse the vespers. Syndics have been trained to coordinate society. You would not be sensible, no more than you should expect yourself more sensible than the stonelifter sculpting a house. Your attempt would topple over.” The haruspex leaned in for emphasis, dark eyes wavering, subtly rippling in their pigmentation.

She returned the gaze, and quirked her palps. “Why would it topple over? It’s just laying bricks on top of bricks. They won’t fall if there’s something beneath to support them‍ ‍—‍ do you think I’m too stupid to notice that?”

There was a hard scrape, either wordless or some curse not fit for nymphly tympana. “Impossible nymph, foolish! I pray you give the care of your vespers even an ounce more respect, until the instars make you one quarter wise.” Their foreleg moved. “Here. Take this and speak no word further to me.”

With all the unease of one glancing away from a threat or target, she looked to what was offered.

Any pawn could identify the vespermala, a thing like both rind and nut and neither: that theca or chrysalis in which the vespers waited for a host.

She glanced behind her to see the nymphs behind her gingerly holding onto other mala‍ ‍—‍ the haruspex walked up the line, handing them out while they marched to the pharmacium.

The cyan bane was already walking away, and she looked to Rheni, who held her own with two tarsi. “It’s really happening, isn’t it?”

She nodded, and started walking with pawns coming up behind her. In one tarsus she held her mala, tossing it once to feel its weight and distribution. It was dense.

The haruspex reached into a bag for the next malum, tearing off a label – nametag?‍ ‍—‍ affixed to each mala with a kind of cleanly detaching wax. As no other pawn was hot off an argument, each took their malum with worshipful care.

A lack of motion jerks her gaze back. The pawn immediately in front of her had such a singular focus on their new malum, even with the line coming up from behind, that he failed to move quite when she thought he would.

She had to arrest herself mid‍-​step to avoid colliding‍ ‍—‍ the sudden jerk loosening her grasp of that heavy weight.

Her vespermala flew from her grip.

Its impact on the stone of the hall made a loud crack that resonated throughout the space.

“You dare!”

The haruspex had whirled to stare at her, eyes deeply pigmented like a hunter watching prey in the night. Suffusing the air, she felt that dreadful intensity that wreathed every vesperbane.

She ducked, quickly jumping forward, tarsus grasping for the mala, all her legs low to the ground like some roach.

The intense moment passed. Pawns started walking again, palps brushing whispered conversation.

Retrieved, she turned the mala in her tarsus. She found a dent and shatter line where it hit the stone.

“Oh no,” Rheni said, following her gaze.

The other nymph had sucked in a breath she didn’t feel up to releasing.

Rheni looked between the cracked mala and her own, held tighter in her two foretarsus.

“Emmie, here.”

The purple nymph holds out her own, and tugged on the other.

“Really?”

Rheni half‍-​smiled, and it was done. They walked closer side by side after that.

Their destination was dark.

The pharmacium was dank like a swamp, humid and hot for no reason. It spawled like a cave, a network of halls that met and branched and along their length, and they curved inward for little dark alcoves. The alcoves were staggered, alternating. Each pawn was directed to one, and in here, you couldn’t see any other.

She’d watched Rheni break off for her own alcove, and now she was alone.

The other nymph puffed up her abdomen and sighed out. Anticipation still had her bouncing.

It was time to meet the vespers.

She lay on her abdomen, legs curling up beside her. She held her forelegs close, sat the mala softly on the ground in front of her.

She breathed, but her mind wasn’t on the breathing. She couldn’t, as the mentors asked, breathe in the air of this world and find peace. She couldn’t ground herself in the moment and relax. So, eyes paling, she cast her mind to another visage. An alteration of the meditation ritual she’d told no one about‍ ‍—‍ the only way she could enter that state the neuroprojectors deemed trance‍-​like enough.

She imagined another world. A world with no wardens, where no one looked at her forehead and then looked at her, where sensible mantids had rooted out all the evil ones. A world without hierophants or haruspices, just knowledge‍-​hunters and mind‍-​nesters.

The bed of her thoughts quivered, and she felt near to that state where an hour could pass in between gyrations of her mind. Close enough.

The voice of the haruspex rang throughout the pharmacium, dripping with that solemnity and proclamation that undermined the peace of mind she had just cultivated.

But she held onto the image which wavered in her mind, and tried to ignore the words, sifting for the real instructions, waiting for when they could begin.

“Hark, O vespers, hear our plea…”

---

She dreams without memory.

---

Afterward, her mind did not feel very different. Her body, though…

She’d been sick before, with molds or yeasts; she’d eaten prey that left heaviness and churning in her stomach. She once found a strange bottle in one of father’s drawers‍ ‍—‍ a drug, she’d learned later‍ ‍—‍ she’d drunk it and felt… sensations spreading through her body.

Through her hemolymph.

She hadn’t heard the haruspex call out for them to do anything next. But she’d swallowed the mala; and she’d felt it settle beyond her stomach. She sat and meditated until she felt pain and then numbness that might’ve been a vesper emerging, building its crypt.

Nothing was left for her to do.

So why not stand up?

She did.

How was Rheni doing? Maybe they could compare notes. They could talk about what they could do now that they weren’t pawns anymore. Nymphs, they could just sit next to each other, hold tarsi or something. So long as she didn’t have to spend another moment alone in this humid silence with nothing to do.

She’d watched Rheni break away and go to her alcove, so she snuck along the halls of the pharmacium, remembering the way.

Then there was a mantis‍ ‍—‍ a bane?‍ ‍—‍ approaching Rheni’s alcove.

Why were they here?

If they saw her‍ ‍—‍ when they saw her, this was a bane‍ ‍—‍ they’d ask her to leave. They’d yell at her for leaving her alcove.

They already could. May as well not have this be for nothing, right?

She darted forward to the alcove, to wave, maybe stride out a word or two before they –

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw it and turned and saw it more. She looked at Rheni. A heartrate spike, a foreleg unsteady, she grasped for the lighter in her pocket, and she clicked it, hoping the light would banish the image. But this only rendered it.

The pharmakon rites, the mentors had always said, were a test, an evaluation. No one has a right to the vespers’ gift. We throw ourselves at their mercy, beg their judgment, and it remains their choice to grant us power, or to find us wanting.

There were many forms and papers every pawn had to sign, so many inquiries where they asked for steadfast commitment or to leave if one’s will was wanting.

Even on this final day, the march to the pharmacium, haruspex had accepted only those for whom no fear or doubt remained in their hearts.

After all of that, she still hadn’t been scared, she hadn’t even been worried. After all of that, it still didn’t feel quite real.

Death never did.

She was looking at what remained of Rheni.

The white caps bursting from her chitin, the hairs too long, too thin to be setae, the dust drifting off.

The bane had likewise focused on the sight. She saw they have tools – knives, surgical implements. “Are–are you going to try to save…?”

“Yes,” they said.

The tone was flat, only the pretense of hope‍ ‍—‍ and she shared that. Only the pretense.

She was looking at Rheni, seeing that life turned into a body.

She was still seeing that body as they pulled her away.

And she can still see her dead in that dark hall.

And Maune still sees that nymph, impaled from within by alien judgment.

No.

She breathes. She flushes her eyes. She looks. Maune is seeing a nymph who is hale and healthy. She is looking at Eifre. Eifre would not be found wanting, neither would she sacrifice herself‍ ‍—‍ Eifre would not be lost to pharmakon.

Maune’s studied all she was allowed to access on the topic and then some, since that day.

The mystics claim that pharmakon is the wages of transgression. A wrathful smiting of those that would misuse the vespers’ abilities (but wardens spilling blood in endless war games was not misuse, no), or as a scourge to flay mantids’ backs for the transigence we’ve inflicted upon them. Our firstborns consumed one by one until we’ve reached parity through loss, until we truly understand their pain.

Idiots. It’s certainly a story a mantid would like to tell, product of minds born in the jungle, inclined to dominance hierarchies and intimidation displays.

The failings of both strains of thought, really. The old orthodoxy had wished for mantid dominance over vespers‍ ‍—‍ and the supposed revolutionaries instead merely wish to exult vespers over mantids.

Gods. That’s how they thought of them.

More like nymphs. They know not what they do, not truly. There’s no real malice or design at the core of the vesper, a realization Maune continually finds as startling as the revelation that all of nature was protracted blind flailing. All of this suffering, and the villain at fault was not evil, but stupid?

Or like leeches. The thought came to her like a whisper, a shadow she’d let into her mind. But no, she couldn’t accept that, entertain it for a moment. She couldn’t throw away all her work in disgust at the death stained every part of the system. Any means for the greatest end, she tells herself.

Because she ultimately wasn’t beholden to the vespers, not even if she wanted power and control. The very whisper in her mind was a product of that freedom‍ ‍—‍ because it wasn’t her thought. But she refuses it again.

Because if she gave in to metanoia, if she rejected the vespers as the voice would ask, she would never find the power to sear the rot, cauterize the scars of this world. She’d never burn everything down, as Rheni had put it so long ago, so like last words.

Maune shakes her head. She couldn’t save Shatalek if she left to frolic with the weevils.

---

There are too many ghosts in this room. Eifre lies on a rest, where Maune put her after she fell off her feet.

She picks the girl up now. Maune will have to calm down, and she can’t do that sitting in this room with her. So she carries the nymph. Where’s somewhere comfortable to lay her? Her bed?

Eifre lies there now, and Maune tucks a cover over her. A moment, and then she takes a spray bottle from her dresser, a floral fume, and sprays it to clear the air.

She steps back out of the room and takes a deep breath.

Maune needed her thoughts off pharmakon. What was a lighter topic? Ah, the coming destruction of Shatalek.

Tulip‍-​agar. It’s a medium for bacterial cultivation, a special substrate for each special strain. Honeyblack alchemy was its own peculiar discipline, different again from hylocultivation or vesper manifestation, or that haemonecromacy they’d inherited from the bats.

Tulip‍-​agar. She’d studied the correspondences, knew each agar medium was sensitive to certain enervate emission spectra. But could this just be the sealed arcology? Termites had done all manner of esoteric things with enervate, and perhaps this was just a false positive.

It’d be a hell of a coincidence, if the storm had nothing to do with the mound.

The mound. For all her dire warnings‍ ‍—‍ for all they were right, and of course she’d be right‍ ‍—‍ she had seen the arcology as an opportunity. Problem was, she wasn’t the only one.

Navera will bully the province’s council into exclusion, and granting the jurisdiction to send in some wretches with sticky tarsi. Nav is a blackbane pushing the limits of phase diffusion, and of course she’d be eager to study some lost termite insight on the matter.

It wouldn’t just be wretches either. Vindicators, maybe even percipients – their proxies, rather. They’d all be poking around, looking for things, instead of doing their damn jobs.

No stones to throw for her though. Because if her apocryphal history held true‍ ‍—‍ and would she be wrong?‍ ‍—‍ she suspected they were dealing with something special, even for termite mounds.

She’d delved through Wentalel history, the vanquishing of its bat lord, and then came here, had the honor of corresponding with a reincarnated weevil elder who’d lived at the time.

The legend offered one actionable assertion. A prophecy in the flesh, inscribed on a bat’s heart, then split into four pieces, with four orders given: Take one quarter and grant it as a reward for the sisters who’d ripped it out. Take one quarter and trust it to the wisest of weevils. Take one quarter and give it as a consolation to the dragons. And take the last and cast it into the blackest pit you can find.

And what pit was blacker than a termite arcology with a broken seal?

---

“Was that you, earlier?”

A shadow waited for Maune outside of her cabin. A weevil, a black mass engulfed in the leaves of a tree, shifts as winds tossed the leaves, like it’s afraid of the light. She saw their eyes clearly, watching her.

Maune isn’t yet at the point where she could tell the beetles apart by the feel of their neuroprojections. But did the differences matter, or were they all just masks for the ambrosia, like so many crawling fingers?

The weevil is quick out of the tree, and darting overland until it rested in the shadows of her porch. Shadows could move faster than objects.

“Don’t like me peeking behind the curtain like that, huh?”

Maune starts walking. Politely, she doesn’t look at her company.

“Did it tell you were I was going?” The witch speaks aloud, she thinks, for her own sake‍ ‍—‍ doubtless the weevil doesn’t need it. They’re good at just knowing things. Or acting like they knew things. There is a difference between the two, and she really wished it mattered.

Her attention falls down to her bag, and how heavy it feels. Not her own thought, but it flows gracefully enough this is something known only intellectually.

Her bag feels heavy because there was something within she didn’t put there. Another maddening offering, for sure. The weevils didn’t care for her analysis, the distinctions she wanted to draw. Not their preferred mode of engagement. Instead…

But she couldn’t hope for her research to ever be taken seriously if she simply frolicked with weevils, partook of their madness.

Maune casts her foveae to a dark shadow, waiting for a rejoiner. Was it the shadow that held the weevil, or had she guessed wrongly? This skill, that stealth with the reflexivity of breathing, is so well developed among all of them she wondered at its origin. Won from endless games of hide and seek as nymphs?

She is barely not a nymph herself, and she’s had her own protracted bout of hiding. Luring off hounds and oozes with trapped scents, running sleepless to stay ahead of her own wanted papers, a year spent putting all the distance she could between her and the strongholds while the hunters came month after month‍ ‍—‍ then stopped. She is free now, safe in the ambrosia.

Shimare. Yet here they came again.

Maune is a defector.

The line of thought stopped there, and she’d gotten so caught up in it. Graceful, she thinks again.

Because those weren’t her thoughts, were they?

“That was your reply, little shadow?” Maune says, casting her eyes up to the sky, stars poking out between lines and celestial flows of enervate. “No one will take my research seriously anyway‍ ‍—‍ because I’m a defect.”

The weevil had a point. A defect could never get a monograph published. When the hunters finally got her head, they’d sooner burn her notes than study them.

“You failed to consider one thing.” Maune smirks, and wonders if Rheni would still say she had the look of a villain. “The state of the board has changed; a new piece is in play. Yes, I’ll never get a book in the stewartry archives.” She pauses there, dramatic, because weevils love drama. “But a young knowledge‍-​hunter finds new prey by extending the master’s trails.”

Cryptic. She let the black beetles chew on that for a bit. But perhaps it was too obvious‍ ‍—‍ who else could the ‘new piece’ be?

“The next move, of course, is to make sure she gets stewartry countenance. Or I’ll have to suffer you weevils being right one more time.”

The humming sound must be the equivalent of a laugh. It’s growing quieter‍ ‍—‍ the weevil slinking off?

She looks around, eyes flushing.

Had the weevil been messing with her sense of time, of place?

The ambrosia witch finds herself at the edge of Shatalek, but has she really been walking for that long?

One step, and she leave the dense, overcrossing roots that were the floor of the ambrosia, adorned with lichen and spiderpaw fungi. Numbly through the soles of her baneleather sandals, she feels the hard bark and rich soil give way to the moss of the plains.

Her melanpili tingled as step by step, the umbral hum beneath her diminuted. So much of what the ambrosia did was out of sight, underground.

Maune loathed that she could never know the ambrosia except through proxies, through masks.

Her attention falls to her bag and that added weight once again, this time of her own will. Doubtless it was the mushrooms she’d been offered and refused again and again. It’s always a possibility… but fungal delirium wasn’t knowledge.

The hemotechnic shakes her head, and runs enervate through the soles of her sandals. Teeth at the front dug into the dirt, while the enervate pulse repelled the ground below, adding extra force to each of her strides.

She boosted toward Shatalek with a vesperbane’s speed.

The countryside was stealth in the dark of the night; Inferna shone in waning. But Shatalek wasn’t as dark as it should have been. Bugs with torches marched through the streets.

What were the possibilities? A festival? A lynching? Response to an attack‍ ‍—‍ had the storm come already?

Maune watches for a moment, sees the spiraling pattern. A search pattern. Searching for…

Ah, Eifre.

Tlista has some influence in the town, doesn’t she?

But she’s the witch of the ambrosia woods. If the weevils were good for nothing else, she could do stealth.

Slip in through the shadows between torch‍-​bearing search parties. Climb atop a building, abuse her vesperbane techniques to leap from roof to roof, with lunges that felt like flying.

Maune doesn’t know where Eifre lives. But she doesn’t need to risk asking a townsbug‍ ‍—‍ and incur the suspicion of anyone not recognized in a small village. Mantids and roaches are out all around looking for Eifre, and a certain imago missing a leg sat at the epicenter of it all, sitting outside a house‍ ‍—‍ just in case Eifre came back on her own.

She’s found Tlista.

This solves one problem and leaves her with another dilemma. Because Maune takes one look at that face, and hears the last words they’d exchanged.

“It took the flourishing scourge less than three.”

Tlista thought she was just another stupid nymph chasing stupid dreams. Just like them. Had it been silly to think the poison‍-​blooded fiend would be any different?

She sees those trimmed palps, and remembers the expression they’d made, the disgust Tlista had for seeing her most innovative work.

“They call it the path of erosion for a reason, Maune.”

As if she knew anything of what it was like to be a renegade, deciding whether you or your vespers went hungry, weighing whether sustaining yourself with black market ’mala was worth the risk.

Tlista was just another winged darling who faced the world at her leisure‍ ‍—‍ she’d retired rather than start making the hard choices. And she thought to judge someone who would‍ ‍—‍ who wasn’t content to hide away in a safe village while the world suffered?

“Do you really think they’re worth clinging to so tightly, at this cost?”

But she payed no mind to the costs they already payed. She wouldn’t apply her same logic to the status quo, because of course that’s the natural state of things.

Was becoming a vesperbane worth it, at the cost of Rheni? She asks herself this often. If she thought like Tlista, the answer would be no – but would Tlista even reflect on this in the first place?

No, Tlista would run away. She retired.

And they call me the defector? Maune laughs quietly, and startles herself by how shaky the sound is, palps trembling.

It’s a low sound, nonetheless. Up on the roof, houses away from Tlista, she needn’t to worry for drawing attention.

She lunges twice more, getting closer to Tlista.

She can see the simple approach. She could see herself doing exactly what Eifre had asked‍ ‍—‍ go down there, explain to Tlista what they were doing.

But she stares at the red imago, and feels her mandibles clench. She can remember that condescending tone, that look of pity or worse. Would she have to face that again?

Maune couldn’t do it.

The renegade sighs, and brings her tarsi together in the seal of focus. Enervate flows into the ’celia lining her dactyls, and Maune flips through a sequence of tarsigns, instructions for the vespers to help her direct the flow of enervate.

She stares at Tlista, projecting out tentative lines of enervate, measuring distances, drawing a connection across the distance. It’s so much easier with a stationary target.

Sympathy lock complete. A ball of enervate had formed in her tarsus, and through it, Maune could feel the subtle hum of neural enervate in sympathy, across the distance. The reactions of amalgam molecules in Tlista’s brain released tiny bits of enervation, the way an acid’s dissolution released heat.

Enervate affected enervate‍ ‍—‍ simply catalyze or inhibit the reactions of neurotransmitters, and you affected the brain’s firing patterns.

The weevils, after all, are good for something other than stealth. She wouldn’t have gotten this much immediate experience with neuroprojection in the Stewartry.

Maune finds something suitable on the roof‍ ‍—‍ a brick? leftover from construction?‍ ‍—‍ and tosses it out into the night. She hears it crack against the bark of a tree, so she knows Tlista does too.

And then her neurospell takes effect. It wasn’t hard to find the primitive part of the brain that dealt with fear. Let it be a less inhibited than usual…

A trained vesperbane would respond to fear in one way, after all.

Tlista jerked her head toward the brick‍ ‍—‍ Maune’s enervate‍-​laden tarsus jerks in sympathy.

She pulls back, and makes a tarsign to cancel her projection. When Tlista stands up and cautiously starts off the investigate, there is no hard sympathetic pull. There’s a reason neuroprojection works better on stationary targets.

But for her own sake, she doesn’t break the connection entirely. She leaves a tiny thread of sympathy, no more than grams of force, so she could feel it when Tlista moves.

Tlista wouldn’t be gone long‍ ‍—‍ she’d find the brick, and perhaps write it off. Maune couldn’t ensure more than that. The witch had spiked her fear a little, but neuroprojection had to be subtle‍ ‍—‍ too much, and the brain would recognize the foreign intrusion, flush its neurotransmitters to remove the influence.

Maune lands silently, thanks to another technique with enervate in her sandals. Swiftly, she’s moving towards to porch, and from her bag grabs a paper and a stick of charcoal.

Eifre had asked her to tell Tlista, but this was just as well, wasn’t it? Perhaps she’d tell the kid her mom wasn’t home when she went. She jerks through the words‍ ‍—‍ terse, sparing no letters for politeness.

Maune can take notes quickly; she was stewartry trained. When she makes the move to leave though, she felts a tiny sympathic tug‍ ‍—‍ the imago returning.

The witch starts to run, charcoal still in her tarsus, held tightly, dirtying the chitin.

Tlista yells something‍ ‍—‍ Maune isn’t listening‍ ‍—‍ but doesn’t pursue. Found the note?

A dark cloak flutters behind her as she runs, and her sandals kick up dirt.

How quickly would Tlista realize it’s her?

Maune looks left and then right, then jumps a few meters up to climb onto a roof‍ ‍—‍ leaving no doubt.

Pausing for a moment, she opens her bag to slip the crushed charcoal back in a case, and feels the sown leaves enclosing the weevil’s gift. Dismissive curiosity gets her to grab it.

Her claws tear open the the leaves, revealing thin stalked, wide‍-​capped mushrooms. Flecks of violet dot the fruiting bodies. Her antennae straighten in surprise. Not what she thought.

This wasn’t an offering of ambrosia‍ ‍—‍ no, she recognized the cultivar. Violet crown. The effect would be more lucidity than delirium. It’d introduce special amalgams to her brain. Umbraswitches, whose response to environmental enervate was intentional, rather than a exploited side‍-​effected.

In particular, this strain shared a response spectra with tulip‍-​agar.

She’d misjudged the game the ambrosia was playing, then. Consuming this wouldn’t compromise her faculties. She doesn’t have room not to accept then, does she? So she did.

The vesperbane kept moving, relying on muscle more than enervate repulsion‍ ‍—‍ the activity would increase her heartrate, leading to more hemolymph flowing to her stomach, quickening her digestion. It’s still something that takes several minutes‍ ‍—‍ but a hemotechnic has a better handle on her biology.

She jogs to to edge of Shatalek, dodging the occasional imago wandering about. One catches sight of her‍ ‍—‍ but Tlista already knew, and would she keep it to herself? No reason to trust Maune’s secrets were safe with her.

The violet crown takes effect. The mantis breathes in deep, filling her throats. She shakes her head, the chemicals which slipped through the blood‍-​brain barrier being deduced more than the felt.

Like being under the effect of a graceless neuroprojection, one she couldn’t dispel.

One thing her familiarity with neurospells grants her? Finer control. The mushroom doesn’t need to have unpredictable systemic effects on her when she can cast a projection on herself, and control its dispersal. She confines the psychoactive amalgams to a region of her visual cortex, and over the course of minutes, the hallucinations settle into something coherent.

Violet crown is sensitive to the same spectra as crushed tulip fermented in agar. The bees cultured tulip‍-​agar, and they saw a storm coming. (She still wondered why the word ‘storm’‍ ‍—‍ poor translation on the bees’ part? A concept close enough to suffice, all its connotations meaningless rather than significant?)

With her violet crown‍-​augmented senses, Maune sees something.

The witch makes a tarsign, and punctuates it by piercing her soft flesh with a claw‍ ‍—‍ thus, her next sign directs red ichor, rather than black nerve.

Her wretched raptorials, her myxokora, begin to stir.

Maune singles out the source of her more‍-​than‍-​hallucination, and she goes on the hunt.

Line of sight is pretty good in the plains, but the land still offers gentle hills enemies could hide behind with enough distance. Maune runs, the bloody slickness of her wretched raptorials feeling cool in the moving night air.

She runs against the eastern wind, which was good‍ ‍—‍ they wouldn’t smell her, and they are awfully good sleuths. The signature came from behind a hill, so she veers southwest, toward the ambrosia woods, aiming to circle around. She probably had better sight (few bugs saw better than a mantis). A dozen enervate‍-​boosted impacts of her stride, and she has a visual.

The vesperbane stops.

Her wretched raptorials slacken, falling to her side, and she curls her palps in thought.

Seven figures crawled in the distances. Six legs, big heads, elbowed antennae. Their mandibles tightly grasped enevate‍-​dark spears and clubs.

The bees said tulip‍-​agar. The ambrosia gave her violet crown. She’d hoped it was an artifact of the mound, some false positive. It wasn’t.

Reaver ants.

The witch was prepared to fight them‍ ‍—‍ Maune, a vesperbane, could stand against a natural creature, any sort short of a bat or a cicada, and only need to worry about how long it’d take. Only another vesperbane or worse posed a true threat, really.

A natural creature, that is. Seven reavers, ready for war as all reavers are? Maune knew she’d have trouble healing the wounds those moonforged blades would leave. She didn’t have long range attacks. She was never a warden, she didn’t excel at battle.

She thought of Reva.

Even if she could win against seven ants, she’d take some hits. She’d need to heal‍ ‍—‍ and Reva needed to heal. It’d be selfish to eat resources that should go to the bird.

And that fool still hasn’t gotten back from his mission‍ ‍—‍ without him, myxogerm was that much harder to get a hold of.

She could ask sister Sahratnah…

But back to the issue at hand. Seven reaver ants. Heading toward the ambrosia.

Were they scouts? No matter.

Maune brought tarsi together in the seal of focus, and ran through a quick trio of tarsigns. Stationary targets were so much easier. She starts moving, and tries for a sympathy lock.

It was easier when the targets weren’t so far away, too. Distance, motion, it made it so hard to be precise.

Good thing she didn’t need precision for this.

Maune burns her enervate, powered a neurospell of a sort she’d never learn from the weevils. Graceless, it broke the central dogma of neuroprojection: that was better to be subtle, unnoticed. Try something too direct, too counter to the brain’s normal flow, and it’d be detected. The brain would flush its umbral amalgams.

She wants that. Because the amalgams aren’t there for the neuroprojector’s convenience. They served a purpose in cognition, evolved for a reason.

A brain with disrupted umbral activity wasn’t functioning normally – confusion, a sort of fugue state. She wanted that.

Because line of sight is pretty good in the plains, and these ants were going toward the ambrosia woods.

She’d be spotted, if they were in their right mind. With training, a crude disruption like this could be recovered from‍ ‍—‍ but would a roving gang of ants have that training?

Maune starts from the back, hoping this would let her get through all of them without being detected. The ants walked in file, and as minutes passed, the ants slowed one by one, antennae working in slow, sudden bewilderment.

Maune finishes, and starts toward the woods, angling southeast, away from the ants.

Something’s wrong. More than the speed with which they recovered‍ ‍—‍ the minutes she’d invested in casting bought at best dozens of seconds – she’d felt it even as she casted the projections.

These ants’ brains are different, more than arthropod.

Her musing stops, the interruption a clicking sound that carries in the night.

The vesperbane had been spotted.

Ants run faster than mantids.

Maune quit angling away from the ants, and started directly south, a beeline to the woods. She had better stamina than a unvespered might might, thanks to the blood, but enervate‍-​boosted speed is getting dangerous. Her umbracelia isn’t used to this kind of strain.

In pursuit, she doesn’t have time to cast another neurospell. She didn’t have time to cast anything, because she wasn’t a warden, and didn’t have practice flickering through strings of tarsigns or speedily molding enervate the way a real fighter might.

But she’d already everted her wretched raptorials.

The dark red ants closed in on her even as she neared the edge of the woods. Despite the dim infernal light, Maune could make out the bits of metal hammered into legs. The spiked mandibles that’d be vicious even if they didn’t hold an implement to extent their range.

Maune stops, spinning in place as the line of ants advanced.

She breathes in. Combat was something she analyzed, planned out, rather than coming intuitively, reflexively. She rehearsed the rhythm of this next move in her head, tarsidactyls flexing anticipation in her sandals. One, two, she repeats. She crouches.

One. She bursts painfully forward with blood feeling thick in her legs, saturated enervate pushing her high. The witch flies at the reaver.

She calculates that a front flip through the air positions her better than fighting her momentum to angle her legs right.

Her legs dig into the dirt in front of the ant. Her myxokora fly forward, liquid blood and muscle hungry for more viscera.

She can’t avoid getting a spear run through the thorax. She wonders if that buzzing sound the reaver’s palps scrape is some triumphant call to their fellows.

The penetration is mutual; her two tentacles dig into the ant’s chitin, and her forelegs reach down to grab the front legs.

Everything’s happening so fast that this is just the first second.

Two. She bursts backward, her landing having transitioned right into another crouch. Her hold on the ant is secure at four points. The bug is helpless as she pulls.

This time the landing leaves her near where she’d kicked up dirt by spinning.

She wishes all that had been the hard part, but it’s only the most precise, the part she could and needed to rehearse.

Three. Maune takes the ant in her grasp, and she throws her.

More accurately, she pushes her really hard, into the air.

The arc is too pathetic to do anything impressive, like skewer the ant on another ant’s spear. Instead, the ant merely hits the ground hard in front of another, and starts to roll.

The other ant trips multiple times, all her legs knocked from under her. The reavers weren’t so stupid as to chase after her in file‍ ‍—‍ they’d fanned out‍ ‍—‍ but at least one ant is behind her.

Even when the other ant tries to get out of the way, she bumps into another beside her.

The result is something of a pile up, and she’s counting on the ants caring enough about each other to stop for the one she’d just attacked, check her and help her up.

But maybe they were too far gone. Maune is running through some tarsigns as she turns and runs off, more sensory than projection. She’d felt it earlier.

The brains are different, more fungal than arthropod.

Sable cap.

If any bug she encountered was going to have a case of cordyceps, she wasn’t surprised it’d be a reaver.

Did the ambrosia know, or was she their way of finding out? Maybe it’d tell her.

She’s made it to the edge of the woods. The ants can still chase her, but she is safe here.

---

“Has that fool come back yet?” She’d waited for him for hours before needing to go meet Eifre‍ ‍—‍ what happened? She had wondered, and now the presence of the reavers gives her an entirely unwelcome possible explanation.

“The vale has rested in peace since you left, Madam chimera. I welcome your return; may I offer you a fruit this night?” The moth speaks with some vibrating organ deeper than its gullet‍ ‍—‍ it reminded her of mammals. He didn’t speak Panthecan, but years had made her familiar with the moth’s language.

Maune gingerly steps closer to the bug and takes the offering‍ ‍—‍ a red citrus looking redder in the light. In between flickers of flame, his fuzz contrasts, revealing purple and blue shades. Blue is a good color.

“Sure. Do you need oil? I’ve got some in my bag.” The blue mantis keeps a little on her, for their sake.

“That would be most radiant of you,” he replies, but punctuates the utterance with a cry of alarm. “Madam, your thorax is dripping!”

Maune smiles. “That means it’s working.” She’d had time to work on the spear wound as she’d sped through the forest. As expected, the amalgam metal had all but fried the hyphae filling her body cavities. Repairing her meridians would take longer, but the wound itself had crawled close (or a near semblance thereof). For now, she let it breathe; later, she’d cover it with a bandage or tallow.

“What dread weapon has done this?” The moth leans their lamp‍-​staff over, illuminating her.

“The reavers tried their best.” Maune shrugs, as if her standing there finished the thought. “Speaking of, though, I suppose I’ll have to see my landlord about this.”

The moth makes a scratchy, offended sound. “You mean to speak of the guardian spirit of this blessed forest?”

Maune twists her antennae at the flattery. You’d think he owed his life to it or something.

“Walk with me?” she asks. “My thoughts have been… not the kindest to me, tonight.”

“If you would carry?”

“You may have gotten too big for me…” But the moth is climbing up her leg, and nestling between her two forelegs. She is a vesperbane, so she supposed she could handle the weight. “How considerate of my battle‍-​wounds,” she grouses.

“Is it not, ah, working?”

Maune twists her antennae, palps somewhere between a smile and a grimace. She grabs the moth’s lamp‍-​staff with a tarsus, and uses it to light her way.

Each step comes slowly, lightly. Her umbracelia weren’t used to the strain, and all that enervate boosting bit her now. Her feet ache from scars only partial dissolution could leave.

They walked not to the cabin, but to a fringe of the vale nearly unnavigable for the density of trees.

Not mere saplings, either, but big trees, old ones, with trunks thick enough to compare to the rooms of some houses. The weevils have bored into them, weaving a multiaboreal galleries. Mantis and moth stagger in, feeling like intruders in this special site.

The ambrosia left a particular texture on the wood it devoured.

The tunnels and bore‍-​holes through which they pass yawn empty of all inhabitants, the weevils skittish as ever, and the unattended livings gave their passing a liminal edge.

Rather than a gallery, a clearing sat as their destination, all the trees gathered around it like a fortress wall. The woods thin here suddenly, and gave chords woven of thin branches free of leaves or even twigs. They stretched like filaments of a therid’s web, and connecting the trees to what lay in the center of the clearing.

This clearing smells of burning incense, adorned with leaf‍-​banners painted with dyes made from the rarest flowers. No sound met them but a crackling.

A fire burns here, forever, and it serves to heat a weevil artifact wrought of iron to the point that it glowed. The metal curls in a fractal of lines and whorls like imitations of roots‍ ‍—‍ like, of course, the tangled workings that littered the limbs of the woods’ trees. This is the origin and exalted peak of that form.

Entomologists, in now‍-​censored texts written on the culture of weevils, liked to call these things shrines. And how tempting the notion is – the moth in her arms wriggled free to kneel supplicant before the glowing metal. All the regard that was given to the ambrosia, and why not suppose the weevils thought it some sort of deity?

It surprises some, that there are mantids who call themselves nullifidian. In a world where bats, beetles, and bugs of all kind practice this or that magical art‍ ‍—‍ when souls and spirits are tangible things, how did some find a reason to rail against mysticism, as if it weren’t married indiscernibly close to fact?

Whenever Maune comes to visit the ambrosia shrine, she thinks of her mother.

That mantis, made of cracked and blackened chitin, could trace their lineage all the way back, through all the wars and pogroms, to the first wingless mantids who rebelled against the bats. And she told her daughter their stories. Before Aromethia, our bats were our whole world. We witnessed their generosity and their wrath, and we worshiped them, because they were gods.

And then we killed our gods.

To live was to be free, and so every lord and master, every slave‍-​maker and of course every god, was nothing more than a kind of dying.

Even the most simplified history recounts how the first vesperbanes announced that there were no gods above‍ ‍—‍ whether it’s to be cast as heroic or blasphemous. Those that truly understand know that it wasn’t an assertion; it was an aspiration.

“Madam chimera, are you thinking odious threats at the guardian of your home again? Is that… is that wise?” The moth had startled at the look on her face, and long acquaintance had told him what it meant.

Maune smiles, and looks from the twitchy moth to the hot iron locus.

“I don’t think a being as elevated as the ambrosia is capable of feeling threatened by a mortal like me. I’m sure it finds this all deeply amusing. Think of it as a joke between us.”

The moth curls up his antennae (or the best he can manage, with how thick and long the setae were), and Maune doesn’t think he’s convinced.

“Come on, let’s see what cryptic bullshit this fungus‍-​brain has to say.”

Maune steps to the shrine, and makes a seal of focus.