Preface
Where does one begin explaining the story of Ars Longa?
Do you first recount the nature of the seven celestial spheres, the interlocking prison-wheel of reincarnation defined by their orbits? No, too abstract — no tale of human life is intelligible at the scale of sun-revolving godbodies. But surely some explanation of the transliteral theory of spirits, the well-known perils of awakening from the dream of life, would be first in order? Perhaps one could at least speak of the four literate races — hominid, canid, corvid, salticid — among the innumerable oddlings and misprints that populate all the realms below the drowning moon?
Or perhaps narrative context provides the better frame. Shall we first untangle the tragedy and horror of Vylach Nerota, the nightmare painter who once bore the heavenly mandate of six spheres and a scheme to transcend transmigration entirely — until those same heavens cried out for her redaction? Do you sketch out her shadow cast upon history — the advent of the Editorium and the Censorate, twin arms of the Temple Magisterium that every ocean-spanning empire bows to?
And yet, isn’t this all supposed to be the story of Lazhiri, a human child raised by the salticid named Liret Glasswoven, hiding together in the tunnelwebs beneath the Alerfish Lake? Why not begin there?
But what do you know of the tunnelwebs if you do not know of Gallowspine, the specter of rebellion-retribution that haunts the sleep of every virulent arachnophobe? What do you know of Gallowspine if you do not know of the Venefic Tribulations and all the crushed chitin and poisoned veins from those bloody days?
Speaking of violence between spider and man of course brings us back to Vylach Nerota: in her rise, the tunnelwebs and the man-eating venefics were her only allies. Some say Nerota’s fate was sealed when she was born under the sixth sphere; some say the plight of spiders still computes justice because three in five salticids hatch under the sixth sphere. And yet, in the end, the nightmare painter was only sealed away with venefic work — the art of glassweaving inherited by Liret herself.
Why exactly are spiders so uniquely, inextricaly tied to the sixth sphere, that font of cosmic corruption? And what exactly is a venefic, and why is their spirit-weaving tantamount to atrocity? The former is a matter of transliteration and the teleology of spirit, but the later? That is a matter of the long art of enlightenment.
So perhaps there’s the answer. Where to begin? When you first open your eyes. Newly enlightened, awakened, now free of predetermined place — and the first thing you will notice is that the air stings.
Prologue
Lazhiri hardly spoke, hardly moved.
Why speak below Alerfish Lake, when it was the way of salticids to wave and feel for the strum of silk? Her mouth could sing, yes, but not as well as her fingers could play.
Those days didn’t last forever. But then why speak in the Randen City ophanage, when the disciplinarian never liked her tone, when her pronunciation brought every child to mocking laughter?
Below Alerfish Lake, Lazhiri was always too large, too heavy, too strong, too clumsy, too loud, too stinky, too warm, too hungry — altogether too human in a web full of spiders. But there was always Liret, soft pedipalps like brushes over her hair, placing the threads in a small child’s hand and then showing her the motions to twist and tie them. In tunnel-darkness, listening to that girl strum, you could mistake her for another salticid.
In Randen City, that impulse to climb, to curl up into a crouch, or to stare unblinking made her “creepy” — so why dare move, when her darting suddenness and curious groping always prompted hissed disapproval? Her teeth-bared snarls and arms-outstretched threat display instead made her look like a joke: which meant subsequent attacking of those too-close strangers, blind to the warning given, would seem all the more unprovoked. Savage. And there was no tunnel-darkness for humans — and thus no mistaking that she did not belong.
Once Lazhiri had grown too large for a salticid to carry, Liret would still wrap eight legs around her and squeeze. And years after, Liret wasn’t the only one; the girl had proven herself strong, deft with her hands, and clever with her weaving. She belonged there; she was home, she loved.
Then one day she was rescued from burning webs (smelling so much like a library ablaze, or a softly furred animal slowly immolated), and finally dressed up like a proper human, finally taught to speak like a proper human — but a year proved no amount of quiet compliance and correct answers could garner any comfort quite like the tight embrace of eight limbs, or the brush of pedipalps through her hair.
The salticid weavers could do things with their silk young Lazhiri never seemed able to replicate; those threads moved like many-jointed limbs or graceful serpent. Then one day, Liret taught the girl to prick a fingertip and slick the line with blood, weaving and reweaving that same red thread until Lazhiri could feel her heart beat in the silk. And then it moved like a part of her. All her life, she’d had four limbs too few — now it felt like a missing part had at last returned to her, a wound stitched shut.
The first time the disciplinarian saw her weaving with bloodslick thread, he screamed like the child was gamely holding a lit stick of dynamite. And Lazhiri still had scars from the ensuing lesson.
Venefic witchcraft became a refrain heard so often it lost all meaning as a word, instead adopting the same dire alarm of a cordophone string popping in the tunnels.
It was wrong, all wrong. Everything the spiders taught her was wrong. And what they did teach her was but a starving fraction of what she needed to know. They never loved her, or why else would they do this to her? If she cried at their absence, it was clear derangement, or perhaps an addict’s withdrawl.
But Lazhiri was used to doing anything to find her place. She learned the humans’ words, the humans’ gestures, anything the beasts asked of her — in hopes that, at length, she’d at least feel that meager embrace of two limbs. But that would be inappropriate; she was too old the ask such things of a nanny, too young to ask it of man.
If the spiders never loved her, she thought, then the humans were no better.
So, when Lazhiri arrives as Corvane Observatory, she hardly spoke and she hardly moved.
Up a staircase cutting into the mountainside, the young woman was escorted by men in silver-trimmed acolyte robes, heads down, hands pocket-hidden. The stairs widened to a platform, revealing a campus hemmed by vine-draped stone half-walls — but within the grounds, the sight her furtive eyes catch was unexpected enough to make her gaze linger and stare.
A gaggle of young men and women, wolves and crows, some about her own age — seventeen summers — and they were smiling at her. (Or giving a wag or hop, as it were.)
Everything had changed, the world unrecognizable as if it were cast in alien light. Or seen from behind an esoteric shade, as it were. Her hands adjust unfamiliar glasses covering her eyes; with how she kept her head down, they’d slid down her nose.
Two months ago, on a spring evening now grown late and cold, two men with silver-framed sunglasses stormed into the Randen City orphanage, pushing past fleeing children and caretakers.
The disciplinarian lay dead, and more than blood was leaking from the corpse. A color-shifting mist wafted from now-limp lips.
Boots slammed onto a stone deck. Lazhiri — not pale, but hands shaking — turned to see one man wielding a sword composed of lightning wavefronts; the other, shorter and stockier, outstretched an arm whereupon clung a fiery bat.
She met their gaze with eyes that shone like the moon. The swordsman narrowed his own eyes, a frown set beneath, but the fire-bat bearer widened his, staring as if recognizing something. “Girl,” he called out, “can you see the sun?”
Lazhiri remembered the appropriate human gesture, and she nodded.
“Could you close your eyes for me? Please.” Resignation dripped from his tone. Spoken like a last ditch effort, and his fists were clenched just as tightly as the man beside him was gripping the lightning-sword. Lazhiri knew the look of someone ready to strike.
What fool would close their eyes when two dangerous men were single lunge away from having her at their (lack of) mercy? What fool would close their eyes to this sun — when Lazhiri knew as sure as her heart pumped blood that monsters and death dwelled in that dark.
How could she ever?
But she remembered what Liret — her mother, as she was instructed to deny — had once told her. Stare into the sun long enough, and you will be enlightened, she had scraped the notes into a cordophone, and then you will see nothing more.
Lazhiri had learned long ago that her mother (her human mother) had spent her life chasing enlightenment; that was what brought her to her grave.
So the daughter had asked, Would it be so bad to go blind if it meant you found enlightenment? (If it meant you wouldn’t die and leave your child in a world she didn’t belong?)
The light doesn’t destroy vision, it steals it, was the reply. You become the sun’s thrall.
Would that be so bad? Lazhiri had asked a lot of questions in those days. The sun is so pretty.
“Don’t waste your breath,” came a bark of a voice. The man with the sword is taking a slow step forward. Then another, more steady, blade raised and held now with both hands. “She’s restless, you see it. It’s just a false spirit now.”
Oh, it will be very pretty. A foreleg had patted her on the head. And then the men with black and silver eyes will kill you.
What fool would close their eyes to enlightenment? As sure as heart pumped blood, Lazhirri knew she would be nothing in the dark.
But she was well acquainted with spilling her own blood — well-acquainted with the dark, where she could seem like any other spider. Well-acquainted with being nothing.
So Lazhiri closed her eyes.
And once-steady steps faltered anew.
The swordsman grunted. “It doesn’t mean she won’t stir restless the next time she opens her third. She has blood on her hands. Let’s end this now!”
“I think this is the heavens’ mandate,” the other countered. “Look at her eyes — those aren’t tears, they’re black. If that isn’t an axiom… I want to hear her side of the story. I want to give her a chance.”
For all that Lazhiri had grown more terse over the years, now, with her life on the line, her story came babbling out in a flood.
Liret had a sister, Makawa, adopted mother to the hundreds of spiders that called Alerfish home. Severe, plucking strings like cracked whips. The first thing young Lazhiri had known about her was that her silk had strangled enough humans she’d had to stop collecting the skulls. The first silk lines that defined Alerfish had been spun of her spinneret.
The day she was resued from her home, Lazhiri’d seen too many salticids in a death curl. Liret had escaped — that spider could never be seen unless she willed it. (Maybe she’d still be alive today, if she hadn’t needed to find her little Lazhiri in Randen. That’s how they caught her.)
That luck must’ve ran in the brood: Makawa, too, escaped her web burning. When she came, Lazhiri recognized her work, like a hare recognizing a howl — the one spider she wouldn’t smile to see. She knew Makawa’s silk was always beaded with water droplets; she seemed able to weave fluid itself as if it were fabric. (Like Liret, Makawa had known the trick of slicking thread with blood — only she was fain to use it in far more liberal quantities.)
That day, Lazhiri thought she saw a ghost — Makawa first revealed herself with a transparent puppet of silk and water. A fragile thing, the venefic needed a more durable vessel animate. If Lazhiri had any gratitude at all, if she wanted to atone for the ruin she brought to Alerfish. Which is to say: Makawa demanded an accomplice in procuring her a body. A living body.
(The men paled in unison, the swordsman taking a step back. “False possession,” fire-bat holder mouthed more than said.)
If there was anything that merited being called venefic witchcraft, it was the reduction of a human to a spider’s puppet. (In Randen, Lazhiri was told over and over that it was all the spiders had wanted her for.)
Who would she pick to be the victim? Lazhiri said Makawa had to choose for her. She picked the disciplinarian.
“But I… couldn’t stand it.”
Where the swordsman had backed up, his partner had approached, and now was close enough to pat the girl on the shoulder. “You stopper her. You did the right thing.”
Lazhiri looked up to the man, his eyes inscrutable behind silver-rimmed sunglasses. Her own eyes, no longer glowing like the moon, still had black streaking from their corners, like tears of ink.
She’d told that story over and over and over as weeks went on.
The chance that man spoke of involved two months of examination, a short trial (every day of which let her have no night’s rest — she’d last seen her mother in a courtroom), and finally, an acolyte bowing to present her a pair of sunglasses with silver frames.
Now Lazhiri was a dreamscribe novice, to be trained in the Corvane Observatory.
Lazhiri had ridden in a carriage for the first time in her life — a carriage! She wore robes now rather than rags — this was no tailored silk, but at least it didn’t itch. And now she walked onto the bricked path toward Corvane. She expected a sight akin to another orphanage, iron bars on the windows, but here she saw stained glass.
And people were looking at her with that curled-lip expression — so rare, so impossible to fully understand. Here, now, she’d reached her limit with the mysteries.
“Why are you all doing that?” She’d at least restrained herself from hissing.
“Doing what?” answered a girl. Black hair with strands of blue, a pale face made paler with powder. Around her neck and collar, a scarf lay just so to present an ornate circular emblem that meant nothing at all to Lazhiri.
“Smiling.” Were they planning something at her expense? It was common enough. Then Lazhiri paused. Voice quieter, though no less suspicious: “Is it because I look silly? Am I doing something wrong?”
A pinched expression. She’d have called it a cringe if it held any of the reproach she was used to. Their eyes were all obscured behind dark glass, so she couldn’t be sure, but the glass wasn’t entirely opaque. It was just readable enough to make her doubt herself.
Regardless of expression, that woman was saying, “No, no, you’re fine! Is everything alright? We just wanted to give you a warm welcome!”
“Oh.” Still Lazhiri didn’t uncross her arms. “Alright.”
“What’s your name? Mine’s Inata.”
“Lazhiri.” Eight years, and she still needed to bite back adding Glassweaver — Liret’s title. That memory bit her in turn, still aching.
“You’re from Randen, right? My cousin runs the guard there! Here, do you want me to show you around the campus?”
Lazhiri remembered the appropriate human gesture, and nodded.
Her eyes remain fixed on the smile, which did not leave those glossy lips. The new student peered as if it were a puzzle to unravel. Half her life spent craving something other than dismissal and disgust, and now, here at last, she just doesn’t understand why.
Lazhiri adjusted the silver-framed sunglasses that still sat awkwardly on her nose. Was it as simple as that? She wore the glasses, she had “the mandate”, for all that no one had stopped to expain in full. She was to be a dreamscribe now, just like her mother — slayer of false spirits, seeker of truth and enlightenment.
Stepping toward the still-smiling girl, Lazhiri’s eyes cast around — she’d been scolded for staring enough times — so she found safety in examining the placard which bore the title Corvane Observatory. An Magisterium-sanctioned institution, beneath the title lay their signature quote, the high promise of the Editorium:
When all lies are redacted, truth will stand untouched.
Lazhiri’s still-crossed arms squeezed tighter. Nothing could banish this thought: that with every word and gesture (which were but words in another form), she would pick wrong.
When all lies are redacted, what would remain of Lazhiri?
“So, what do you do?”
Viewed from Lazhiri’s peripheral, she looked like a normal girl. Blonde hair, thickly built, bandages wrapping her hands. When seen through the lens of a dreamscribe’s reading glasses, though, you saw the ears of the wolf atop her head, fur at the fringes of her face, claws tipping fingers tipped with round pads.
She saw Lazhiri’s eyes widen at glimpsing her head on; the girl — the wolf? — laughed at the reaction, and didn’t explain. “Name is Awonalir En’Mero the second, but call me Mero.” She winked. “Hasn’t been a season since you woke your ax, right? What’s it do?”
Lazhiri kept her arms guarded as she walked, and only curling further in on herself. “What? How did you…?”
“You’re blinking and stumbling like a wet lil fawn. You’ve got the robes but any fool can tell you don’t know the first thing about the long art. So you came here the short way, woke up an axiom, a lil gift from a past life. Most of us did. So, what’s it do? You’ve got us in suspense now.”
Ah. The reason I’m here.
Lazhiri pulled her sunglasses off her face, folding them up with one hand, and — like on the day this all began — she close her eyes. Her other hand held one of the last things she’d been given: a leather-bound notebook, thick with pages she could run her hands along all day long.
Seeing her closed her eyes, that’s where everyone was looking. And, at the corner of her lids, by now they all would have seen it. Maybe a few had caught a glimpse already, thinking it was misapplied makeup or a trick of the shadow, but Lazhiri brushed aside the frame of her hair and this it left no doubt.
Black like a tattoo, yet darker, as if the pigment stole the light. Lines were sprawled across her skin like gaps in already dark flesh. Even as they watched, the lines crawled, waving in an unseen wind, dragged at Lazhiri’s will but not by any muscle flexed.
If her body moved at all, it was the tense negation of a flinch or shiver. Because she felt these black marks, and all the more keenly whenever they moved. Like lines of ants marching across her skin. Or that cousin of ants, wasps, each tracing a stinger to draw a new mark.
Never in a single straight line to the target. Lazhiri had seen enough webs, spun enough webs, to dream of these threads woven symbolic. (Even if she hadn’t dared touch a needle in years.) Caught in an inescapable spiderweb, and she could do nothing to control the flourishes, only direct the web to extend out in a direction of her choosing.
Lazhiri couldn’t even bring herself to read the words written in the lines — her eyes teared up whenever she tried.
“Aha! So this is your apparition?”
Lazhiri raised an eyebrow. No one had explained what that was, but she’d heard the word spoken enough times. She remembered the human gesture, and nodded.
Now having reached her neckline, the marks crawled off her skin, staining now the pale fabric of her new robes. Spiralling across the arm of her robes, the target she’d imposed upon them was toward the leather-bound tome in her other hand. Once the marks touched the leather, then her grip shifted.
Her hand lay flat on top of the book. Touching it still (she had to) but only touching it. She didn’t hold it — nothing did.
Yet it did not fall.
“Neat, you can hold things up? Can you make it float on its own?”
“No.” Silence, and she realized they might be expected more than that. “I cannot let go, cannot move without it, unless I retract.” The line would stay unbroken as she moved it — with one exception.
“Is that all it does?”
Did she want to show anyone the truth?
But that sounded almost like disappointment in her tone, and so soon after she and the others had been all smiles and interest.
Yes, she did.
“I can also erase them,” Lazhiri said.
“Oh? And what happens when you erase them?”
Lazhiri opened her eyes, and looked across the ground, before stopping when she spotted a flower with a bright yellow-winged butterfly perched upon it, tongue extended to lap at its nectar.
Her other hand, not locked to the tome, reached for the pen clipped to the flap. One moment, she held it like a dart, then she threw. Her aim was true.
The pen pierced one of the butterfly’s wings, and the flower-petal behind, pinning it there. She hopped over to the flower in a single bound, plucking up the bug.
Held wriggling in the palm of her hand, now the black marks extended once more, and quickly darkened the bright yellow wings. The struggling bug hopped on her hand, broken wings unable to lift it. But — unlike the leather tome — it could break contact with her skin. This was the exception.
Lazhiri glanced up from her prey, at the watching faces and curious eyes — already they frowned at this display. The first girl who spoke, Inata, had covered her mouth, though the blonde, Mero, was all grinning interest.
Another moment for the cold question — did she really want to show them? But she’d come too far to stop now.
Lazhiri erased the black marks. Now even the other wing was coming to pieces, falling apart like shattered crystal. Legs death-curled up, and panicked antennae went utterly still.
“Ah, so it lets you… cut away anything? Pry objects apart precisely?”
“No,” Lazhiri said. Paused, considered her next words, then: “Not objects. Only living things. My ‘axiom’, you called it? It lets me kill things.”
They weren’t smiling, of course. Some at the fringes took a step back, though Mero’s mouth hung open for a single heartbeat before falling back into a smirk.
“Ah, I see,” she said. Even without reading glasses, you saw the sharp canines. “Not planning on hitting us with that, right? Does it even work on people?”
“Bigger things take more marks. I haven’t tested it on humans.” She paused. “No, they had me test it once, and never again. A single mark erased, the length of a finger. I’m told it was… agonizing. They could not heal it.”
That made someone — a boy — take a step back from her. “Spiritual damage?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“If those marks are an apparition… Which is just an illusion, a manifestation of your spirit.” He raised his hands, his palms became blue with a metal sheen. “They can rewrite the apparent nature of yourself or the things you touch. Mine — name’s Padan, by the way — suits me up in armor me. Mero has claws like daggers. And Inata’s family all get fairy wings. So like. Axioms augment and protect you. But from the sound of it, yours… lets you destroy the spirits of others?”
“Is that…” Lazhiri took a step back. The black marks, responding to her concern, snapped back, hiding themselves under her robes. “Am I…?”
The boy shook his hand. “No, it must be the heavenly will. Somehow. It’s why you’re here, right? The headmaster wouldn’t have brought you here if there was something wrong with what you do. Every star in the sky traces its own path to enlightenment, as the say.”
He made that expression again — that smile — but Lazhiri couldn’t find the will to return it. There was no mistaking the hesitation, the subtle flinch from all as the implications sunk in.
Spirits couldn’t reach the stars above without passing through the orbit of Hellmare. Lazhiri had been told all her life that she’d be drowning in the moon’s waters for centuries unless she found her way back to the right path.
Liars drowned, killers drowned, venefics drowned — but the blackest, sunless depths were reserved for those who interfered with the transmigration of another. Improper burial… spider puppets…
Or the mutilation of the essential spirit.
There won’t be much enlightenment to be found in waters that deep, Lazhiri thought.