Black Nerve

You are Mewla Asetari. The year is 1777, and you’re hatching. You crawl out of a fat, crowded Ootheca into the vast space of the Asetari clan nursery. Five other nymphs hatch from your ootheca, your broodmates.

Uvema, Your mother isn’t there to watch your first steps, only the midwife who prayed over your ootheca these past few months. You don’t see your mother until you’re a year old. The first time you see her is at a feast whose purpose you can’t discern, in a room filled with other Asetari. Your mother addresses the whole clan. You don’t think her eyes stay on you for more than a few moments.

You’re told your name is Mewla, but the only one who ever speaks the word in the midwife who cares for you. All your older cousins address your broodmates as a whole. Not for no reason — like any Asetari brood, you and your siblings are inseperable, playing together, eating together, sleeping in a big pile.

You get about five years of childhood innocence, your midwife reading you more and more stories of vesperbane heroes and horrible monsters. Then training starts. It starts slow, all the running and wrestling and games of your playtime becoming guided and structured. Within months you and your siblings are handling toy weapons.

The first time you excel, you land a thrown knife dead center against a target none of your siblings had even managed to hit. Your trainer is impressed, something that shines even through their stiff, reserved affect. It makes you smile, wider than anything else ever has.

The next day, every one of your siblings land that same throw.

This happens several times. Every time you managed to excel, push yourself beyond what you’re siblings are capable of, they catch up to you in half the time.

It’s just how Asetari brood are, the midwife explains. Until you awaken the silver cord, you will be connected to all your siblings. They’ll learn whatever you’ve learned faster, and you’ll benefit from what they’ve learned too.

You can’t wait until you awaken your silver cord.

The first time you make trouble is at a feast, half the clan gathered. You and your siblings had been bored out of your minds, the midwife’s lessons about decorum and reservation failing to stick even with accelerated Asetari learning. So you start up and game of tag, and the lot of you are running throughout the vast dining room.

That is, until you flip over a plate, spilling food and drink all over your older sister. Hotar. You recognize her because everyone says she’s going to be the matriarch after Uvema. Whenever you see Uvema, Hotar is usually there, following after her like a shadow. Always so serious — so seeing her now, food spilled all over her fancy robes (she didn’t even cuff the over​-​long sleeves for convenience like you did)… well, it makes you laugh.

Uvema looks at you for longer than a few moments, then. Everyone does. Someone hisses something awful, and you can see the pained face of the midwife appearing, grabbing you by the foreleg to pull you out of the feast alongside your siblings.

She yells at you, though it lacks the invective you saw on the face of some of your elder cousins. All of your brood are locked in your room. You stay there until well into the next day.

Leaving the feast hadn’t freed you of the stares. Now your siblings are looking at you, staring at you, blaming you for them all being stuck here.

You sleep alone, outside the pile, that night.