Serpentine Squiggles

// NTS: replace these with more recent drafts

Transcriber’s Note 

May thy mercy be painless and true.

We confess our claws sway even as we scratch this letter. Scores of dead loyalists behind us, long hours lost waiting in barest stealth risking fatal discovery, an escape won despite incurring the eyeless regard of a vesperbat… and yet writing our report at day’s end is what makes cowards of us.

Following this letter, borne on the back of a windswift dragonfly, three of us shall return. Three who, if it is not an insult to remind thy majesty, stand head and thorax above any other in thy command. Save one, granted.

Thou knowest us, and we have served thee well: Navra, thy calmest advice‍-​giver, thine infallible memory and thy greatest vesperbane‍ ‍—‍ save one. Gywere, thy keenest sleuth, thine agilest leaper and thy greatest percipient, save one. And Besihir, thy loyalest followafter, thy brightest companion, and thy greatest battle‍-​queen. Save the one, of course.

Our accomplishments surely stand out before us. We hunted the elite of Kaos to a number fit to count with two leg’s claws. We tore the wings off the tyrant of Wentalel. We’re reason the last monastery of flowering oak remains undesecrated.

And we need not remind thee of what was left of old Ethice when thou gavest the order.

Thou must remember. We are thy most skilled, thy most reliable‍ ‍—‍ thy best, surely. If any mission be required from thee, we will surely achieve it. If it be possible.

Thou sent us into the heart of the dread empress Yufemia’s black citadel, in the Greci mountains where the imperial palace wounds the clouds, and thou gave us many objectives. By any reasonable measure, we were quite successful:

We easily acquired the requested sum from the imperial treasury with none even scenting us. We, after some spilled ink and spilled blood, forged the necessary documents throughout the enemy’s web of command. We near‍-​invisibly slipped into the royal dungeons, albeit not altogether undetected (that would have been impossible), and we sought there to assassinate the old queen Ooghesta (only to find her already dead), and we freed dozens by your request. Lizaabet, Shakla, and Mon; all the knowledge‍-​hunters, all the vesperbanes, and all the so‍-​called traitors, all thou had requested… save one. Again, by any reasonable measure, we were quite successful.

I suppose by now my dancing has revealed it for the avoidance it is, and my secret lies revealed the shape of what I have avoided. Yes, there is one goal of thine we’ve neglected to comment on. Yes, by that same reasonable measure it could be called the most important.

(Please, I beg thy swift mercy, painless mercy.)

So it is with great regret and reluctance that we inform thy majesty, most exalted Coordinator of Chiaro and dearest friend of us, that we have failed in our primary objective, to rescue from the empress’s raptorial grasp our Tlakida, peerless champion of Chiaro and fiercest battle‍-​queen.

She lies now in true death, beyond vesperation, and beyond the reach of all medical techniques. May the gods at least forgive us, if thou dost not.

Yet, if we may be so brazen, we dare to say thou canst not hold us alone to blame for this. Permit us to speak lightly in our defense: we were not told how deep the Greci winters reach; we were not told how the very air chokes with presence of the distant vesper bat horde, even quite far from the palace which they circle; and we were not told how tight, and how vast, the empress’s web had become, how it had seemed every face a falterless pawn of the empress.

Surely it’s a proof of our fitness that we nevertheless succeeded all goals save one.

Thou (or, morehaps, thine advisers’) had assured us there lay easily exploitable gaps in the empress’s security. Thou (or, thy priests) had assured that the gods themselves had prophesied Tlaki’s return to her place. Thy seers had assured us she was imprisoned deep within the dungeons.

And we breached the dungeons! We freed every rebel prisoner we found! Tlakida Star‍-​maiden was not anywhere in the dungeons!

(Forgive the blotted ink above. My writing was too forceful. I’ve taken a moment to force air through my spiracles.)

We do not mean to blame thy majesty for our failure. The loss of our champion has drained us of much of our sense.

Our endeavor was not an entire failure, at least. When double and triple checking of the dungeons revealed no scent, no echo even, of Tlakida, the three of us were reasonably split over the best course of action. Navra suggested fleeing back, consulting with thee, and revising our plans. Besihir wholly rejected this on pain of knocking Nav across the room and leaving her in a cell. But even if we remained, even if we continued searching, where else was there to look? And so, Navra and Besihir argued much like a game played with a small ball and two rackets; back and forth with scarcely time for thoughts to even land before being punted back. Gywere was little more than a score‍-​keeper. Eventually the argument was forced to a draw when shout of the guards alerted us, and we overheard the empress had ordered all prisoners escorted to the coliseum for some execution. Thus, with certainty of discovery otherwise, it was either flee the city then or commit to some search elsewhere. And it was Gywere who had the key suggestion of searching the palace, sudden and perplexing like a whisper of fate.

And Gywere, with unparalleled courage and all his intelligence as a clue‍-​finder, dared to scan the halls and rooms himself, alone. Surely a doomed mission, surely a death sentence‍ ‍—‍ yet against those predicted odds, the champion was abed in one of the highest palace rooms, storm clouds pacing outside the window. Yet even with Gywere’s agility, before his arrival the champion was already beyond any saving.

(Yet our endeavor was not an entire failure!)

The room had all about it a blood‍-​reek, and a neural hum, pale and tuneless, that must have been the reverberations of a great, fading soul. Tlakida lay in her bed, the sheets mightily disturbed but not ripped or thrown aside‍ ‍—‍ no evidence of a struggle. And the door had been locked before he picked it. So why the blood? Why stirs she not to any call? Gywere approached her with the slow dragging of six legs, like one both drawn to and repelled from some revelation. He reached the bedside and saw Tlakida lying there dead; you already know that. But beside her sat a pile of halfcrumbling pages.

Words won’t, can’t, convey the sight of this last ever work of Tlakida: cheap wasp‍-​parch already discolored, and depressed or torn by the jerking of failing muscles, and all the markings the dark, necromantic green of hemolymph. Words can’t convey the smell, either: the puply halfdigested wood, the rotten metallic odor, and it all… it still smells like her.

(Forgive the wet splotches on the page here. Ironic, that we could save those pages from water yet not these.)

By some tide of luck or fate we escaped the city entirely without wind or water or worms eating a single page. Camped safe outside the mountain city, we were able to investigate the work.

Little surprise, they recount the champion’s life‍ ‍—‍ a memoir. Thou wilt be surprised at the slimness of the volume, but it is not a complete account.

Its contents have now been neatly transcribed in the smoothest neshaa‍-​tear inks on the cleanest roach‍-​vellum, and have been shown to thee first of all, in advance of any editors. We have only proofread and attempted to disambiguate the contents, yet cannot ensure perfect accuracy even in this capacity. The work is a soaked through with perplexing details and secrets which may be best omitted. And in the final pages… No, thou shalt see when thou reachest them.

The champion’s intentions for the work are clear from the first page. Its ultimate fate, however, deserves thy judgment. No, it requires it.

While we send this intending for your eyes alone to seek the pages, thou mayst only find it within thy schedule for the task of reading to fall to narrators or even paraphrasers. Yet we must insist that you select readers carefully. Not only because the task requires keenness and quiet legs‍ ‍—‍ it does‍ ‍—‍ but because it will be a distress or even an insult to the sensitive: Tlakida was not always the admirable advocate for male equality, and even in her brief encounters with the empress (before she was an empress) there lurked in the villain a cunning that could pierce and poison even the strongest mind. Moreover, even after all these years the champion lacks the sense to carefully treat and abridge discussion of the abuse upon so many males inflicted‍ ‍—‍ though at least she does not linger and delve. And of course, the wingless may find all the bigotry described upsetting‍ ‍—‍ but does not the same thing await them outside the pages?

(And, lastly, there looms also the specter of the strangeness that waits in the final pages. But again we resist the urge to reveal it, lest it spoil your impression.)

Structure dictates some sort of conclusion or summary at this point, but none seems fitting. We are left with a mess of questions: why was Tlakida in the palace? Why did she see it necessary to write a memoir in her own blood? Given the contents, give that final chapter, was she of sound mind? Did she even write the memoir, or could this all be a cunning trap? What, O gods tell, does it all mean?

In all truth, this feels more like a beginning than an ending, this report more a kind of preface than an answer. Thy mind is deeper than ours, and in thy reading these labored‍-​over pages, there lies already the hope of answers.

May thy judgment be swift and sure.

Yours in Ignominy,

Gywere et al.

Foreword 

I refuse to dissolve into the abyss without one last fight… even if, in the end, we all must surrender.

Every action now feels pulled utterly down, as if under the geass of some monstrous gravity or katabasis. My magic has caught up to me. I am caught in the quicksands of time, and if I seek to escape, I die; if I accept my place, I die; if I write out here the convulsions of it all, I die. And yet this writing, this last gasp of storytelling, feels the slowest course, the last thing I can hold on to. Down I go.

I wasn’t strong enough. Of course I wasn’t. Always I have felt fated to fall, like a beetle bound in a web vaster than I can know, all of my struggles achieving no more than to entice my arachnid host. And after I have been cut supposedly free, the dread still lingers‍ ‍—‍ do I trail those bonds behind me like a lure? Is my scent still fresh on the legs of my captor? And the deepest doubt of all: how could I ever know? I can’t. I sought to slake myself on the blood of freedom, yet draught after crimson draught, my mouth remains dry, and to myself I wonder whether I have done any more than fall into some subtler trap.

But I think escape can be won by someone stronger than I, a proper heir for the rebellion. Our fate doesn’t have to be beneath the black empire, or its ruler.

But enough fat. You don’t know what I mean, but you will.

I have battled five times with her‍ ‍—‍ with Yufemia, the dread empress of ultimate wrath, and I have won only twice. But twice is enough. She can be defeated. There lies already the hope of victory.

I must write quickly. It seems my last meal was poisoned‍ ‍—‍ already the tremors are overtaking my tarsi. Do forgive me if my scrawl is illegible by tale’s end.

I have to write quickly. My lymph‍ ‍—‍ my ink of choice‍ ‍—‍ will clot and I have only so much strength to draw another wound. Oh, to think I’d ever curse the healing of the vespers.

I have to‍ ‍—‍ you know, I’m repeating myself. There’s a technique I’m going to use, fit for the task of writing an entire book on my deathbed.

Do forgive me I skip over too much of my story. I am going to cleave to the most important events‍ ‍—‍ my five fights against the empress, and those events of my life which gave me strength. I pray it will at least be informative; she is not all of the rot that has set deep into this country, and I am not the paragon of valor; but she remains the most malignant, threatening tumor, and I remain a locus of convinction.

I am writing the foreword and afterwords first. Should my body fail me before tale’s end, I trust my blood‍-​sisters to produce the rest. Make it inspiring, limn me a hero. It matters not if it isn’t the whole or accurate story; hope is more important.

Yufemia certainly won’t care about accuracy when her chronicles insist you the monsters, and rots your image.

Even after years of watching and thinking about her, I am not sure what all Yufemina cares about. But I know she desires deepest of all victory and a favorable image.

And, reckless idiot my nymph self was, it was the first thing I took from her.

Battle the First (rewrite) 

But begin with a scream. The sound came as a harsh equal to the hissing moans that the noble roaches make for speech, and it was distant enough that it blent with the wind in the leaves of the forest, and the faint laughs of its guardian ambrosia beetles.

I ignored it. “Why is the shrine open?“ a younger Tlakida asked no one, cursing some fool builder. I drew my cloak tighter around my thorax, hoping to damp the noise. Of course it still leaked in, through the tattered, unwashed thing. The cloak hardly could reached my unfurled abdomen. I loved to wear it, though, even when it drew sneers.

After all, I had accepted it, years ago at this very shrine, as a gift from the lost ranger of Udgrov.

Back then, an even younger Tlakida had thought it meant her fit to inherit, proof she could be Udgrov’s next vesperbane ranger. (And it was, just not as she’d conceived it.)

You’ll forgive if the prose has wandered here; it’s to make a point. I wasn’t in a shrine in the middle of the wild Udgrov woods for no reason, and nor for the same did I curse that loathsome roach‍-​moan.

There I sat resting upon my metathorax, abdomen unfurled flat behind me and hindlegs crossed in front. Done adjusting my cloak, I drew my midlegs together, tarsi interlocking, and rested them in my lap. I had opened my raptorials at the roach’s moan, so I shut and relaxed them, brought them neutral before my thorax.

Behind me, my spiracles flared and sucked in air, abdomen rising and falling in breath‍-​rhythm. My antennae swept the air, keen for an approaching roach’s reek, but none was there and I made them curl up and rest atop my head.

(It’s foreign to me now. Years of trained vigilance in the academy, years of practiced paranoia in the war, and yet there was indeed a time when curling my antennae alone in the wild wouldn’t see me struck dead.)

Breathe. Relax all your muscles‍ ‍—‍ well, except those you’re using to breathe. Is that a crumb on your maxilla? No, relax. Feel that damn wind on your chitin.

Wind. Why was the shrine so open? There were six pillars enclosing the hexagonal affair, but no walls stretched between them. The wind walked in like an unwelcome friend‍-​of‍-​a‍-​friend and knocked ripples onto the strange little pool‍ ‍—‍ it smelled like acid and honey, and I never dipped more than a finger. Daily the melted corpses of tiny vermin would accrue at the edges like a ring of filth at the baths. None but I were here to clean it, and doing that with my hands granted me more clarity of mind than hours of sitting on my abs while the wind molested me

Breathe. Unlatch yourself from all your thoughts and worries. Allow your awareness to expand beyond your mind.

That last one was the only one I’d had any luck with (not there was any tell). Seemed a simple matter to step outside your mind, connect with your body, and immerse yourself in your surroundings. For me it was like light radiating from the crackling flames of my mind; keeping it contained was the trick. I tilted my head and let my eye’s foveae sweep over the alter. Six platonic statues sat like guards before a blade in rotting leather, and they were the symbols of the six spirits of life.

Oxygen. Carbon. Hydrogen. Nitrogen. Calcium. Phosphorous.

Each had a symbol and a sign, a true name and its invocation. It ranked among the few scraps of true vesperbane lore the mentors entrusted to us. But what did it mean? What did knowledge of the six spirits let you do?

An Tlakida younger still, having flawlessly formed the six signs, asked a mentor in a bouncy pitch, “So what spelling lets me cast a fireball?”

Can you guess what they said?

Breathe. Relax. Unlatch your thoughts and worry. Allow your awareness to expand.

I’d heard it constantly for months, more annoying than the wuthering wind or that screaming roach.

I pulled my dingy cloak’s hood over my eyes, and in my mind I summoned images of the six spirits and upon them focused.

Prevesperbane training was a lot of things, but it was mostly meditation. They never told me what it was good for, besides blowing away time and forging frustration. And here I was, evening free to burn as I wish, and I was doing more of it.

(All to the lovely applause that was the wind and the roach.)

We learned so many things I’d rather practice‍ ‍—‍ they taught us combat stances and strikes, had us run and leap and climb, and memorize histories and expositions and logics. Even those droning words came easier to me than meditation

There was nothing I wouldn’t rather practice‍ ‍—‍ yet even then I must have had a sense that this was something in which I was deficient, and the collective mentor wouldn’t repeat it to exhaustion if it wasn’t important.

“But what is it for?” The younger Tlakida asked this everyday, to silence. Was this how magic was awakened? Did this grant the renown intellect of vesperbanes? Could you somehow defeat a monster with relaxed muscles and unlatched thoughts?

(The wind had finally shut up, but now the roach was louder.)

If I knew what this was for, then I’d know when I finally won at meditation and could move on to something else. Instead, I was left fighting in the dark.

But not in the quiet. The stupid roach was noising again, more stabs of harsh sound. I snapped a midleg up to jerk away my hood‍ ‍—‍ covering eyes helped meditation‍ ‍—‍ and there I saw black eyes level with mine, and staring.

Just beyond the threshold of the shrine swayed a giant roach.

Roach or ant, beetle or bat, they fear the mantis. Yes, we never fought alone (ha!). Yes, we always had tools and magic (ha ha!). But even when stripped of all of that, as I was, our inferiors fear us because we’re quick.

The moaning yellow roach was already in front of me. Already was charging.

A single thud of my heart. Blood and fear pumped to every extreme. Hindlegs levering me up while my abdomen pushed forth to let my midlegs catch me. One heartbeat and I was up on all fours.

It was a reflexive jump that threw me back from the roach. Away and to the side. Middle of the shrine as I had been, I splashed down in the pink water.

The roach’s charge went wide of me, tangent to the pool. I was already peddling backward and left the pool in seconds.

Roach antennae whirled, and it turned and started toward me.

A single leg stepped in the pool. Then the roach yanked it out like it’d been burnt, and the appendage melted as the roach shook the limb.

It almost forgot me. The pale yellow head lifted to catch me reflected in those black eyes, and roach yarled as it rounded the pink pool.

I spun around. Even as it left my fovea, I saw it. I had my back to it, and could see it rearing for a charge at the very edge of my vision.

In two seconds I can leap three body‍-​lengths.

My feet were digging into the dirt of the path leading out the shrine. Just in time to throw myself to the side, falling, as once more the roach charged. My luck ran out then: spines on the roach‍-​legs clipped my abdomen, and I felt lymph flow.

Air sucked into my mouth, and a scream was vibrating in my thorax.

Momentum not all the way gone, the side‍-​dodge became a roll, forcing space between me and the roach.

I had had the advantage! It’s leg melted! Could it have been worse? If my luck went the other way, would I’ve been gored entirely? Eaten?

I stood up.

Mantids were quick. Our reflexes, our leaps, our thinking‍ ‍—‍ but roaches could run like we couldn’t and eat any distance I tried to build.

I leapt up.

The shrine was in a forest clearing, and the trees grew tall and thick at the fringes. I went high enough to catch a branch and pull myself up. From here I stared down at the roach.

I could still feel the way the roach leg brushed my abs. I didn’t like that it was fuzzy. Still I felt that spine parting my flesh, and I didn’t like that wound seemed to crawl.

Below, I saw the roach‍-​chitin was not a uniform yellow; here and there, in the cracks and where it had cracked, there sprouted white bulbs, poking up from the flesh.

The roach still approached, limping, looking up. Behind it, I could see its spiracles flaring wide.

The beast got just underneath my branch, so perfectly that I plot to drop down and crush it, and then the bulbs around the spiracles seemed to flutter.

The roach moaned again, the sound the air made as it came out. But it wasn’t just air, the exhalation was misty, and as it dispersed it became a vague cloud.

I had kicked a mushroom before. Spores. The bulbs were fruiting bodies. Bat fever? But roaches couldn’t contract that.

Still, I couldn’t chance it. A wild, mean roach teeming with fruiting bodies? If it wasn’t bat fever, it was a rogue wizard’s spell or some new horror. Did the coordinators know?

This needed to end fast.

I leapt off the branch, gaze level on the shrine.

Before now, I had never dared. But how else could I vanquish the roach?

I touched down on six limbs, and dashed at the shrine. Behind the six platonic statues, as if they were guarding, lay the sheathed blade of the lost ranger of Udgrov.

Quickly, delicately, I snatched up the blade and curled tarsi around the hilt.

(The mentors say if an unworthy hand were to dare to wield a vesperbane’s blade, it would wither to dust.)

The blade slid free with a singing hiss, and I turned to face the charging, limping roach. The heavy blade nodded toward the ground in my grip.

I dodged aside the pool hoping the dumb beast would eat the same trick twice. But it now knew to loop around.

Pulling back the sword, I waited its careful approached, and then swung.

The roach went flat underneath the swing, and the air whiffed. My hope hardened, and the fight resumed anew.

Dodge. Leap back. Swing. Repeat.

Once the beast lunged so close I had to abandon a swing. Once it let the blade sink into a leg, and I didn’t have the strength to lob off the thing, let alone keep going. Once, I just missed.

The roach was making more noise now, in anger or pain or intimidation. And with the hissing noise came more spores. They suffused the air, and I couldn’t double back for fear of crossing into the fungal mist.

I knew enough tactics to smell my folly. The terrain was in the lap of the enemy, I was on the defense, reactive and running. If this were a mantis with half a learning in war games, I’d have already fallen. But I thanked whatever affliction this was for sapping the roach of even its meager wits. It meant that (along with, I hope, at least some strategy on my part), the roach couldn’t just run in a loop and trap me.

The pain in my abdomen was unveiled as the thrill was wearing down. I was drawing deeper breaths, and my leaps didn’t carry me as far. I was flagging.

By turns and ploys I was now backed against a massive tree, the spore‍-​filled clearing between me and the path out. Behind the tree, lesser trees and bushes hazarded the way. I could risk it, but I’d be relying on the roach not overtaking me in the underbrush, a fool’s hope. I could climb back in the branch, leap to a better spot in the clearing or just climb away. But the roach could send spores up after me in the first case, and in the second, well, the ambrosia beetles were particular about their trees.

The shrine’s clearing was half filled with spores. Some had dispersed or fallen aground, leaving spots with but wisps, while some were thick with the passage of the roach. Even the few safe places were succumbing to dispersion and the evil wind.

I drew a breath into my abdomen, and I lowered the sword.

(I called my nymph self an idiot. You’ll believe me in a moment.)

Once more the roach came charging at me. I held my sword steady in front of me.

Breathe. Relax. Unlatch your worries.

Timing the right moment, I leapt forth, sword piercing in front like a lance while the beast charged full‍-​bore at me, and from head to tail I ran it through with the blade of the lost ranger of Udgrov, and the roach was vanquished.

I dipped my abdomen into the pink pool, and felt the gentle burn engulf that gash the roach’s spines had torn open. The wound did not close, but the crawling stopped. I brushed tarsi wrapped in cloth along my chitin, wiping off the few spores which had settled on me. Closer examination showed they were already putting down roots, and when wiped you saw that some had bit into the chitin.

It was only a few spores, and I was bathing in the cleansing pink fluid of the shrine. It tingled and burnt, and that enough secured my peace of mind.

Where infection was concerned. But more abstractly‍ ‍—‍ what was wrong with this roach? Noble roaches were docile, subservient beings. They knew to keep out of your way in town, and most of them stuck to the farms.

I’d overheard the whispers of‍ ‍—‍ something out in the woods mangling travelers, snatching children, growing edenapples.

Had I found the seed of the mystery?

I stood from the pool, and gathered my clothes as I stepped out. Bandages wrapped around my dried abdomen (vesperbanes were always prepared!) I curled it up so that it made a u‍-​shape, resting on my metathorax.

Beside my belonging‍ ‍—‍ spaced apart, to show it didn’t belong‍ ‍—‍ sat the now sheathed blade of the lost ranger of Udgrov. I stood there regarding it for a long moment, then gingerly knelt to pick it up.

The desire spoke to me, urging that I strap it to my back and I stride back into town like the hero I was. And the buts spoke in grounded discouragement. Remember what the mentors said‍ ‍—‍ was there some magic that would smite me if I wielded it? Remember the morals‍ ‍—‍ would a vesperbane hero take a blade from an abandoned shrine? And remember your sense.

If I walked back into town brandishing the lost one’s blade, why wouldn’t the percipients believe I stole it? My being heir to the lost ranger didn’t exist outside my fantasy, it was a stupid risk and they’d never believe me.

I returned the blade to its place on the altar, guarded by the statues of the spirits of life.

The time I’d spent fighting, cleaning and brooding stole most of the evening. The sky was red in the east.

There wasn’t a risk stupider than walking the woods at night.

Outside the shrine was the corpse of the wild roach. I had killed it, vanquished it. Surely there’d be some reward from that from the town watch? Or even the coordinators themselves?

Imagine dragging that roach back to town‍ ‍—‍ it was my first kill, what respect would I command for being the first in prevesper slay a beast? Maybe the shops would be willing to let a hero inside. Maybe…

Except, the percipients would realize I wasn’t on any of the [curfew] lists. Nobody at the gate had seen me. There wasn’t a safe excuse for that, not when a possible anomaly was involved.

And so it’s settled, those reasonable grounded parts of myself concluded. The logical path is to hide it. Slip back inside the walls, and fall onto your bed knowing in your core that you did good.

Mother never wanted the percipients to get a good look at me. This would practically doing a whole dance to summon their gaze.

(I like to imagine the fires of my mind crackled at the thought, blazed rebellion. But perhaps it was too early to say…)

What if there were other feral roaches out there? Spores exist to spread. I cast a worried glance across the shrine clearing. What if they’re taking root right now, and the shrine’s cursed? I shook myself

The whispers of danger in the woods weren’t for nothing. I would be keeping myself safe with silence, but I would damn others to face the roaches. And if they don’t have my luck‍ ‍—‍ my skill? If this spreads, and they face down more than one roach?

I drew in a breath, and then reached down to pick up the roach, careful that the spore‍-​encrusted corpse lay on my cloak‍-​protected body.

Vesperbanes save people.

I stood atop a hill and glanced down at the road to Udgrov: packed dirt that took you to the gate. A spider‍-​drawn cart was ambling up it now, and two mantises led it.

Strides in front of them, the road widened in anticipation of the gate. A squad of six watchmen sat around it, four sitting, and two milling around. They had wooden clubs hanging by their sides, and one had a bow.

Atop the wall‍ ‍—‍ tall as three mantises‍ ‍—‍ another squad patrolled in two opposed loops. Two of those carried rifles in their raptorials, and slowed to stare at the approaching carriage.

It was routine and methodical, the check. While two watchmantids walked to the cart to check the singular chest, the two travelers approached a roped off circle. In the center a hairy, clawed foot perched on a stone dias, severed at the ankle. It was preserved, mummified and skeletal, and rimed with glistening spit, piss, shit, thrown food or waste paper, and even some crumpled scales of exuviae.

The travelers wore a crisp bright robes of a city, and they were covered antennae to cerci the way only nobles or high merchants could be. If I wore robes that concealing, you would assumed I was covering up pustules or fruiting bodies. These travelers, you assumed they wanted protection from the world’s afflictions.

Stiffly did the travelers stand before the foot, and spit at the foot. The guards nodded, and allowed them return to lead their cart into the gate, already opened. The travelers disappeared past the gate.

Now a brown mantid‍ ‍—‍ wingless, as seen from glimpses beneath their fluttering cloak was now trotting up the rode, rushed and shaking, seemingly unassociated with the nobles.

He (a male, as guessed from his short, lithe figure) sped on past the circle with the polluted claw, and seemed to hasten, trying to slip under the closing gate. But a guard leapt in front of them, and halted the male with all the might of her thick arms. The lady were a head taller than the male.

Her feet hardly even shifted, holding the him back.

Even at this remove, I could hear him clucking in his thorax, and trying to stridulate some excuse with his hindlegs. But the guard dragged him before the foul claw, before which he stood shaking. They gripped his head and thrust it up to look at the claw. And still the wingless made no action.

Time stretched on like that, a rope tugged, drawing taut.

The guards released him, and he fell. No longer held up, the wingless knelt staring at the claw. An guard’s antennae recoiled back in disgust, while the other unhooked their club.

(It was a test, a filter. To pass, merely spit or make some other show of disrespect toward the vesperbat foot. A simple test for bat‍-​fever; those so possessed could not bring themselves to profane even an image.)

A midleg nudged and then pulled the wingless out of their kneel to splay out on the grass, and the two guards held him down with feet. One guard pointed at something on the thorax. The other nodded.

The club went up, and then swung down like thunder.

You heard the crack and the splatter echo back from the woods, like an approval. The brown limbs were still twitching.

By the wall, a mantis in the blue robes of a percipient scratched something down on her wasp‍-​parch. A plain‍-​clothed guard was waking and unleashing the centipedes.

As the pede began to eat, I walked away.

(You, my rebel reader, may wonder why I lingered so long as something as mundane as a bat‍-​fever screening. It’s something you encounter every time you enter or leave a stronghold‍ ‍—‍ surely it merits not so many words? It’s all for the sake of my imperial readers, to whom such concern for bat‍-​fever is foreign. The empire practically cultivates the madness.)

• mention sacrificing cloak to carry roach

• mention scenting the cloak

• mention wingless was hiding

• mention merchants are rare.

While I did pass the gate on my way into town, it would not be where I entered. For that I had to continue on, and circle the town at a distance in the shade and cover of the woods. I knew I had reached my destination when I was outside the north quarter, almost exactly opposite the gate.

Carrying the roach corpse quick or easy, but I’d trained with heavier loads. The sky was dusking as I walked deeper into the forest, where a giant hole was shielded by a copse of trees.

Crouched around it were three green roaches, who waved their antennae as I appeared. The hole they surrounded was sealed by a wooded door painted dark and covered in moss and vines. If I were a guard patrolling at distance, I wouldn’t have looked twice.

Were it not for the roaches, granted.

I wasn’t even half my majority yet, and I already was bigger than them. They sat with hindleg folded and midlegs on the ground, thorax and head held high. Still two heads tilted up to meet my gaze.

“Salutations, little larva,” the largest roach said, speaking through rapidly open‍-​closing spiracles. Her wings buzzed a little as her antennae waved. She alone sat taller than me.

I paused looking at them, shifting my weight between my feet. I turned foveae to antennae after antennae, dreading a surprised jerk, and watching, waiting for the faces to turn dark.

It never happened. Their maxillae ranged from splayed wide to slightly upturned; they were at ease see me. I sighed through trachae, and waved a raptorial foreleg back. It was how they taught us to greet the other races, but a roach leaned back when I did it.

The large, buzzing roach‍ ‍—‍ her spiracle voices were wholly unmantid, awfully high pitched and miserly in harmony, yet somehow warm‍ ‍—‍ spoke again. “You were out there awfully long today. Take care that you don’t train your arms off.”

I rolled my head at her tone. “I have to train hard. I’m going to be Udgrov’s next vesperbane ranger. Believe it!”

One of the smaller roaches, opposite her, nudged the one beside it, rasping antennae against either other rhythmically. It said, “Told you she’d say it.” And a single coin was exchanged.

I started towards the door. The roach silent till now glanced back at the cloak‍-​covered form on my back. “Whatcha carrying? Looks heavy. We ’ould help you carry it.”

Before he’d even finished I was shaking my head rapidly. “Nono,” I blurted. “I’m fine. I’m not carrying anything. I trained for this.” My step turned to a rushed toward the door, and the startled roach hopped back from me.

Indistinct motion in the corner of my vision‍ ‍—‍ when I turned my head to look back, I saw the antennae of the nearest roach pulling back.

I yank open the door to the roach’s tunnel, and disappeared into it.

Behind me I heard the roaches muttering in a language that wasn’t common.

I had to search along the wall to find it. The dirtier leafweaver ants had little holes dug underneath the walls to enter without anyone caring, and when you bothered to talk to them sometimes they would tell you were. It changed month to month as the percipients found them and sealed them back up, but till then, I could visit the shrine to train without needing a twelfth‍-​instar to mind me.

Covertly back inside the walls after dragging the roach‍-​corpses through the tunnels, it was now a matter of safely walking the streets of Udgrov, a well‍-​practiced act. This month’s anthole took me in [northeast] quarter, perhaps the farthest of the three quarters from the court of the commons. That was probably exactly why the anthole opened here.

The court of the commons ran from the evenings well into the night, and all were welcome. The durations were limited, the attention the coordinator’s paid was limited, but if you needed better you could pay for a private court.

Walking toward the court, I saw two figures, a taller one bright‍-​robes, and a smaller, dark‍-​robed one.

A mantis in pale purple robes stared up at a tree.

“Are you attempting to hide, sister?”

“Emphasis on the past tense, I guess.” Another mantis dropped out of the tree, wearing dark robes looser than the other’s. Nor was she as fully covered: the dark claws of her tarsi poked out of the sleeves, without revealing a detail of her appearance. This mantid stood half a head shorter than the other.

“Why attempt to hide this close to where I began looking?”

“Because anyone else would expect I know it makes more sense to hide at a distance.”

“Except your keen‍-​legged sister, always one leap ahead?”

Dark robe hissed in her thorax. “Except Navra, the lucky idiot, who walks on her guesses like sure ground.”

“Come, mother is waiting.”

Again she hissed, antennae curling up. “How did I know you weren’t here just to visit?”

“Because, you never do.”

This hiss was practically a growl, and dark robe spun and took one step away.

“She’s at the court of the common, and she expects both of us there.”

“And why would she ever need me there.”

“Attempt to think, sister. Why might syndic Ooghesta want her daughter, the genius of Udgrov, the prevesper they say might finally be the next ranger, beside her when she proposes before the court of the common?”

With dark robe turned around, I couldn’t see her face, but the sunset light cast her face on the ground, and I could see a maxilla upturnt. “Truly a mystery. It is beyond me.”

“Come. I will remain as long as you keep attempting to delay, so mother will be doubly disappointed.”

Dark robe kept walking, and Navra followed after (apparently turning her back had pointed dark robe toward the center of town).

When the two mantids had left, I arose from my hiding spot (atop a two‍-​story house, behind a pair of ferns growing epiphytically on the mycelinated roof.)

I perched for a moment staring at the ground‍ ‍—‍ I wanted to leap down, but I couldn’t manage it without abandoning the roach corpse. I was left to continue on as I got here: hopping from roof to roof, out of sight. This close to the center of town, I charted a sequence of rooves downward, in four strategic jumps.

Aground, my feet took my down half‍-​familiar central streets, where market stalls were closing or empty, and the guards on every corner were shifting from day to night watch.

A mantis with a long stride and fine blue robes rushed past me, coming from the direction for the court of the common.

I rounded a last bend, and saw the two robed mantises walking toward the court. They hadn’t already made it there? Maybe dark robe hadn’t given up delaying tactics.

The court of the common reminded me of the shrine. Six pillars three mentises tall defined the vertices of a hexagon, but the court at least had fences that stretched between the them. You could climb over them, but that would be rude. There was one way in, and two guards sat on either side, both with mycelium leather jackets. Unlike the gate guards, these two had spears, and they both held them at an angle to form a cross of no entry before the door.

Battle the First 

[note: what follows is the original opening. the above was an attempted rewrite]

We called the year Tight Winds, Rising Clouds. The young or foreign may not understand, for the black empire so hates the old reckoning. If memory serves, they call Year One Dozen and Two Before Ascension. But there’s no life in a name like that.

Suffice it to say, even back then a vast fog of years separated us from the foul, sky‍-​enshadowed days of the vesper bat hordes. And it was still years before the empress would conjure them back to steed her armies.

But the memory was slow to leave. It stuck around even in how we drew the maps: we called our loose‍-​linked spread of villages the chitin of mantidkind (before the ascension, before everything that could bore the empress’s name) and we sketched sharp powerful lines around it. The Chitin had been shelter and protection in the face of a fear‍-​forging glimpse of black wings above, or of acidic breath on the wind, or of that dread roar which rung across the countryside. Warrior or farmer, nymph or queen, a vesperbat brought the end, and a horde brought the end of everyone you loved.

Until, that is, the first heroine attenuated her soul and became a vesperbane saint.

You may have forgotten‍ ‍—‍ the empire will not tell you this‍ ‍—‍ but vesperbats are not good. They are not our tools or pets or guardians, but our eldest enemies.

But I intend to tell a story, and this is becoming a lecture. It’s funny‍ ‍—‍ although perhaps I’m overestimating my nymph self‍ ‍—‍ but I believe those words, that fat paragraph, are a near‍-​direct quote from one of my nymphhood essays. For it, I got cloud high marks. (I got cloud or sun high marks on most things, I fought for that.)

It may even have been the same essay‍ ‍—‍ if that doesn’t strain chance too hard‍ ‍—‍ which I had written on that terrible day in Tight Winds, Rising Clouds. My first fight, my last essay.

What I know is, whatever I’d just written, my head lay slumped upon a desk, mandibles yawning as I watched the slower apprentices struggling to put in words their newly trained loathing for vesperbats, and the best clawed lesser versions of the assignment I’d just finished.

I always sat back far near a corner, where I regard the whole room and limited paths of approach. The classroom had two dozen and four desks so close they almost overlapped, all squeezed inside six even walls. Light was sliding in through grated holes and the holes were placed high, easily twice my height, yet still just barely above ground.

Our collective mentor, of red chitin and a thin abdomen, the kind of imago who apologized reflexively even to nymphs, was seated like a guard at the wall where behind her handholds climbed out to the surface and to freedom.

She gave me a sympathetic fold of her antennae, and nodded once. That nod flashed excitement into me, and in front of my mandibles my maxillae were twisting into a happy curl. I lifted myself onto four legs and discretely dashed toward the shaft of sunlight reflecting off the clawholds. It took me past the very front row, where winged, silk‍-​robed nymphs paused writing or pretending to write and glared at me, one going so far as the hiss softly, but kept low where teacher couldn’t hear.

They couldn’t believe it. It was a hoax or clever manipulation on my part. Or just cheating. I had the fattest marks of them all, and that couldn’t be right. I was too stupid, too common. They’d whined to the collective mentor, who insisted I was simply bright (points for the manipulation theory), they’d whined to their parents‍ ‍—‍ rich, heavy‍-​named, winged mantids‍ ‍—‍ who in exasperation found no parents of mine to harass (points for the too stupid, too common hypothesis), and simply stoked their daughter’s skepticism with assurance that no one had ever gotten all cloud marks or higher in everything (points for the cheating explanation).

I had wondered if they realized that believing me some high manipulator capable of making a joke of prevesper training was more impressive than the mere reading and paying attention it took to get the marks I did.

But no, I don’t believe reason and thought saw much into it. The secret, venomous whisper that pierced me as I climbed up to the exit hole was the purest summation.

Look at that wingless termite.

The cool air of solitude welcomed me like a close friend. I nearly wrote ‘only friend’. Back then I would wonder, softly, whether cutting off all ties to lesser friends would drag me deeper into that solitude, immerse me in something vaster.

But it was a silly, pseudoromantic notion. I kept it in my head.

I found a big rock in the schoolyard, my favorite rock, and sat there in and stared up into the cloud‍-​filtered sunlight as cool winds (northeastern sea winds) tickled and scents of lately blooming flowers (spin‍-​lilies and air‍-​daisies) revealed themselves.

My antennae felt mantis‍-​smells too: bodies washed and unwashed, pink perfumes, and chitin‍-​paint. And there was a hot aroma I’d never scented before.

These weren’t smells from the room I’d left. If the winds were coming from north‍-​east‍ ‍—‍ I looked to where the golden tower erupted from the earth, scaled with the colorful banners of so many houses and clans and sponsors. It was taller, fatter, and better than the crowded, fungus‍-​dusted hovel where I learned.

But I could never, ever afford anything else. Even with all the money my mother had left.

Between us and them, a long stretch of woods grew, but a discrete little passage wormed through it, if you could find it. Sometimes I liked to creep over, near as I dared, and imagine.

“Tlakida!”

Your name hits like a hammer when you’re deep in thought. I jolted, legs flying outward, and lost my balance and tumbled off my rock.

“Sorry, sorry. Let me help you up!”

By my yellow legs I was lifted up with her darkgreen legs. Even when I’d found my balance standing on three, my tarsi remained interlocked with the long, slender digits that’d helped me. Another leg came to my chin and gently lifted my head until our fovae aligned. I looked, stared, into the sharp red eyes of Liizabet.

It was a squirmy, happy feeling to know someone cared to leave class first thing for me, and help me up, and didn’t recoil from my touch like I were some disgusting cordycep.

My voice hummed quiet off my abdomen. “How was the test?” I was always quiet. It was safer.

“An absolute struggle! Three hundred words! It was too much, far too much. I can’t believe he expects that much on a quiz.” Her antennae were whipping to and fro and she punctuated it all with a snap of her mandibles. “How was it for you? Wait, no mystery. Completely easy, wasn’t it?”

“Of course. I’m not sure what everyone’s trouble is.”

Liiza snapped her raptorial leg open, and wagged it with every syllable in her verbal eyeroll of, “Genius.” She said it like some particularly obnoxious insult.

I always tried to be modest, and I still do. But I learned that with Liiza, I had accept the compliments (insult‍-​toned they may be) or else she’d take them and beat me into the ground with them until I either stopped arguing or was verbally demolished.

While I was restraining myself, Liiza released me and with a goodnatured knock of her head against mine she started walking aimlessly, and kicked my abdomen when I hadn’t started moving. The winds changed as we walked together.

“You should study with me, Liiza. You could be a ‘genius’ too.”

“Doesn’t work that way! Not even if I could spent hours every night studying like you do. And besides, I only have to suffer few years of vesperbane training to be a healer. Ah, two more years. Two years of three hundred word essays and lectures longer than snakes, and I’m done!”

“Aw, come on.” I threw my arms out. “You’d make a great battlequeen with me. Think of it: the two of us against a whole world of monsters. It’d be great. We’d be great.” I hummed with excitement like I’d just thought of it, and not like I spoke knowing I’d pleaded a dozen times, and knew her answer.

“I’d be a goner in an instant! I don’t have half your bulk. My arms would snap like twigs! My spines are like nubs! I’m not going to be a battlequeen, Tlaki.”

Sometimes I’d push the conversation further, attempt to string her up verbally like she always managed against me.

But today, the conversation was terminated by a scream, high like a male’s, calling for help and cutting the air from deep in the woods. It fought its way from the thicket of bushes and trees, dampened by leaves, and almost died against the changed winds. It was so faint when it reached us.

But we knew it a cry for help‍ ‍—‍ and even Liiza with all her reservations felt the need to act, to answer the call. Any vesperbane would.

[add texture to group & humanize Yufemia: dagger says something disparaging about Tlaki, and Yufe is like “now, now, I don’t think she’s completely _”]

[Yufemia awakened something deep within me]

Forgive me if I seem to dwell overlong on minutia and trivial matters. It may seem even foolish, given that my life slowly fails even as I write this. But I intend to command the frothing mass of memory, and by summoning exact details I can recall more vividly.

And you must forgive an old lady a little reverie on the verge of death.

If it abates the feeling even a little, I can omit our journey picking our way through the woody underbrush in search of the male who cried, and merely assure you that we found him swiftly.

Him, and three girl nymphs, all standing taller and fatter than Liiza and even I.

He was backed up against a massive stone outcropping, and one mantis kept him down with a leg against his underthorax. Her head twisted a fraction as we arrived with crunch of fallen branches, and the other two sneering nymphs spun round.

The restrainer was of light green chitin and dull red eyes. Silky white robes hung and swished underneath her, and her hindfoot claws were sharp.

Far right of her was a gray nymph with gleaming necklaces banging against her thorax, and a little dagger twirling in her tarsi.

And between them both, with bright pink chitin and those deep blue eyes and slender legs tight with muscle and antennae that seemed end in sharp points, lightly gripping a golden scepter, head crowned with a silver circlet, was she herself: Yufemia.

She struck an imposing figure even years off from imagohood, and when maxillae pulled back and I was treated to that smirk, that judgmental twist of her head, the careless toss of her arms, something tightened deep within me. She seemed the distillation of every pretentious, high‍-​born mantis I’d ever known.

(Of course she was. It was through her clan that perhaps every trade from outside the village was conducted. Half the gold in our treasury was a loan from them, and perhaps all the land.)

It was only completed by how she slowly, as if miming grace, and unfurled her wings‍ ‍—‍ larger than any I’d ever seen (yet still not a third of an arm’s length)‍ ‍—‍ and its display was a black eyespot like the gaze of a dark beast and ringed with red spikes like it’s bloody maw.

“Ah, who invited the trash from the other school?”

“I think they just smelt the fun, like snuffling roaches,” the dagger wielding one replied.

“Did you want a part of our game? Sorry, don’t think you were invited.” The nymph above the male said, leg flexing. The male groaned, and I saw a claw of her foot had pierced his underbelly, and green blood squeezed forth.

“Why are you doing this! Let him go,” Liizabet beside me was saying.

“Why? This half‍-​mannered idiot doesn’t know when to keep his spiracles shut. We’re teaching him something he won’t learn at school.”

“And we might find it in us to have a little fun with him later, if he’s lucky.”

It was that confidence‍ ‍—‍ familiar arrogance‍ ‍—‍ that had me grinding my mandibles together. A posture like you could do whatever you want, and that was all there was to it.

It might when the words left my spiracles, they might have been growled, all distorted and spiked with nonharmonics. I sung, “My friend asked you to let him go. It wasn’t a request. Go back to your gilded tower, maybe bother to do your work.”

Dagger chuffed air from her spiracles. “How fittingly daft. You’re talking to the top of the class, idiot. Genius Yufemia. She could take the vesperbane trial right now and rise if she wanted to.” She brandished her dagger in a way that would have slit my throat if I were close enough.”

I stepped closer. Still not close enough, but I dared her to do anything to me. I said, “Why doesn’t she? Afraid of the responsibility?”

White robe’s spiracles opened wide, but Yufemia pushed her with a midleg, quieting her. “You talk like you want a fight, wingless. Buzz off.”

“Maybe I do want a fight. I’d be a better match than that male you’re tormenting. Or is it too much to ask that you’d bother someone who could challenge you.”

Dagger snapped forward, raptorials opening. But Yufemia tossed a careless foreleg to her left, stopping dagger nymph’s advance. “No no, she is challenging me, after all.”

Yufemia rose up from four legs to two, and her half‍-​furled wings lifted to their full extant. She looked down at me with what even now I reluctantly call chivalry.

“Go, run along stupid wingless. There’s no shame in backing away from your betters. I’m sure your gracious handler there won’t be too harsh with you.” She paused there, mouth yawning open. Not even surprised I did little more than dig my tarsi in deeper, she continued, “If you remain her, you are challenging me. Ah well, I suppose it’s for the best, really. You need to be taught far more than even our male friend here. En garde.”

Yufemia approached me, sunlight gleaming off her chitin. She sheathed her her wings, at least, and settled into a stance with her hindlegs bent, and her wide abdomen angled for balance. Her mid legs came up subtly swaying in front of her face as a guard, and both her raptorial forelegs thrust out wide, the mouth‍-​like femur and tidia spread wide, their spikes and tubercules promising pain.

I glanced to her either side, at her companions. But they backed away, leaving us to our duel. They had some honor.

“I’m thinking,” the one who’d clawed the male was saying, “if Yufemia wins. Sorry, when Yufemia wins, we’ll lay this wretch down beside the male.”

It made Yufemia and miss dagger smile.

“And if I win?” I started. I was going to follow up, but white robe was quick to follow up.

“Oh sure.” She laughed at me. “I guess I can tolerate you joining us. Last.”

“No. When I win, you’re letting the male go free, and I want a formal apology.”

“Oh for what? Going out of our way to teach an uppity male a valuable life lesson? Why, we could just eat him. I’m of half a mind to, just to spite you.”

Just teaching him a lesson. If it were me, what they they say? Apterous barbarian, too weak willed to keep herself in check and behave around males.

I lunged forward and swung a midleg at Yufemia. She dodged back, tutting with her mandibles. “Watch it, brat. We didn’t say begin yet.”

“Well I have. Let’s go this over with.”

The clearing we were in was an offshoot of the path that wormed through the woods. To my left and to my right there were bushes and trees rising to block escape. Behind Yufemia the rock rose up, too sheer to climb. She with the dagger was circling around behind me and beside Liizabet to block my retreat.

I let my gaze settle back on my opponent. To her, this was a game, entertaining the anger of a silly little [peasant]. It meant she was content to stand there, gently swaying in her light, balanced stance.

I was the only one who cared enough that I would make the offensive move. I lowered my right midleg to the ground between my hindlegs, and pushed off with three legs, lunging at the pink mantis.

She leaned to the side, throwing out a midleg to catch me in the thorax with the force of my own lunge. But I threw a punch, and that same pink midleg had to draw back to block me. While she was busy blocking, and I swiped her with a raptorial, villi and tubercles gliding along her sensitive underthorax.

She snarled and pushed me. Still in the air, her shove stole my balance and I spun shortly. I smacked against the ground.

A shadow slid across the ground. It was a hindleg lifting to stomp me, and I rolled. The stomp came anyway, but the pink mantis turned it into a leap and flipped over me, landing lightly on the other side of me.

I was still dazed from my fall, and sucking in breath through my spiracles. Claws raked along my chitin and I jolted. Energy was rushing into every limb and I quickly pushed off the ground.

I threw a punch, and she dodged. One step closer, another. She was back up, even as she smirked at me. A punch, she leaned out of the way, and it became a turn. I was turning to keep her in front of me, throwing my punches to be dodged or blocked. She seemed to move too fast, too surely, too fluidly. [It was preternatural.]

Yufemia stopped turning. I did too. She stopped moving at all, and her smirk reached a climax. My antennae perked up‍ ‍—

But by then dirt was kicked up behind her as she launched herself at me. I started backing up, but it meant nothing: she smashed into me, and I fell backwards for a breath.

Now I was pinned against the rock. Yufemia just stared at me, pseudopupils boring into me. At the same time, she was cocking back a midleg, and then threw a mighty punch at me. She hit my head hard enough I heard something crack.

Pain bloomed, and it could have been a actual light for all the the bright hot distraction filled all my vision.

My legs crumpled underneath me, and Yufemia let me fall to her feet, as she let forth a great arrogant laugh. The other bullies joined in with her as a chorus.

I heard my name called out. “Tlakida! Tlakida! Are you alright?”

For one stupid second I was wondering why the winged mantises were asking after me… and then I remembered Liizabet.

It was a growl that left me. My darknening vision was seemingly filled with a view from outside, my defeated form, face bleeding, while three highborn laughed above me and Liizabet deigned to pity me.

How fitting. I of all of us should know, with all the histories I’d read. All the great heroes‍ ‍—‍ the yellowblood queen, the last brachypterous demigod, the first dragonbane herself‍ ‍—‍ none of them were apterous. It was always those with wings who built the world and changed it.

The smart thing to do with be to give up. to fold my antennae, lower my head, and accept my place. I felt my spent muscles, my spiracles struggling to suck in air.

But I was familiar with pushing myself beyond when I should give up. Whether forcing myself to pore over every textbook and assigned archive again and again, staying up past the sunset to achieve techniques before the teacher taught them, I knew the determination harder than chitin.

So even as I pondered accepting defeat‍ ‍—‍ more a detached consideration of counterarguments and antitheses than a true change of heart‍ ‍—‍ I was standing up, rising up behind Yufemia who had already turned around, walking from my fallen form.

Far beyond her, Liizabet had the tragic, pitiful cast to her features. But it wasn’t the look of a sudden, devastating defeat. It wasn’t a mirror of my own distraught visage.

She expected this. She didn’t believe in me, not really.

Why would she? After all, I was wingless.

I felt something deep within me, distant, grow almost palpably hot, like a metal lump glowing red in the fire. I could swear I was vibrating even in my soul.

(My teacher had impressed upon me, upon us all that being angrier did not let you win. Anger makes you sloppy, makes you wild and predictable. But it wasn’t quite anger that was animating me and reviving me spirit. Something purer‍ ‍—‍ desperation, determination, and utter will. Rather than dull and sloppy, it honed my senses and movements to sharp points.)

I opened my raptorials, and took a step forward on legs that did not shake.

The one in the white robe head antennae lifting up, spiracles opening wide. But I moved quicker than she could speak.

She with the dagger brought the weapon up to throw. But she couldn’t hit me.

Yufemia stopped walking. She wasn’t insensible.

And Liizabet, she didn’t look happy, relieved or anticipatory. Hers was a look of concern, worry, She shook her head, but I had already looked away, back to my target.

I was in the air, mid‍-​lunge. My right raptorial was swinging around to catch Yufemia.

Her head was turning first, and it was quick enough to catch the wild look my face as my femur clasped around her thorax, and all the pressure I could bring to bear set about crushing her core.

A cry came from her abdominal spiracles, but from her thoratic spiracles came only the weak weaze of squeezed air. In her core, she could not breathe.

It had been a casual walk, and the surprise was enough for her legs to fold under her, and now I landed atop her, staring down at the child of the richest clan in the village. The wonder nymph who was sure to go on to become a dragonbane warrior. Genius Yufemia

I lifted a midleg, and punched her right the face. Then with the other. I snapped out my other raptorial, and felt her delicate facial chittin snap under my might.

I was the one laughing now.

If I pressed a little harder, I was sure I could crush her head, and that would be the end of her story. But if I, wingless [statusless] [orphan] tried that‍ ‍—‍ I wouldn’t last long.

I shifted my hind and midlegs, I grasped a leg emerging from her mesothorax. Sure, I couldn’t crush her skull, but if I ripping off a leg? She wouldn’t forget the lesson I taught her. I grasped her midleg, and twisted, felt and heard the straing and delicate tearing of muscle.

She wouldn’t underestimate a wingless peasant in the future, no she wouldn’t.

I opened my spiracles. “So, Yufemia, it seems‍ ‍—”

But I was cut off by an arm flying at me, curled around me and strongly lifted me off the pink mantis. I thought it was dagger or white robe. I thought they were interfering with our duel. I had thought they had honor.

“This is betweeen me and—” but the words faded to nothing as I caught a glimpse, and saw it was dark chitin restraining me. “Liizabet?”

“Tlakida, are you crazy? You weren’t going the kill her. This is a duel. You can’t fight dirty.” She had a tone in her voice I had only heard from other highborn. I think I looked suitably betrayed, and she responded to that. “I’m sorry Tlaki, I really am. But it’s not right. I know she must have upset you greatly, but it doesn’t justify—”

“Don’t bother trying to explain it to the sack of shit. She has no honor at all.” It was the one with the dagger‍ ‍—‍ or who once had the dagger. She’d dashed over and I was helping Yufemia to her feet.

(Beside me, I saw the male struggling to his face, and scuttling away, seeming to give all of us fearful looks. But I was trying to save him.)

White robe had come to her two, and between the two them the pink mantis was lifted in, rivulets of blood running down her thorax and dripping, and wet cracks encircling her face. She looked at me like one would at a monster, and spat her next words, “This isn’t the end, Tlakida Star‍-​maiden. You will remember what you’ve done to me as your greatest mistake. You will wish you killed me and suffered the infliction.”

“I won and you lost, Yufemia. We may both be training to become vesperbanes, but only one us has thrown her heart and spirit into the task, and has the determination to win. It’s a powerful difference between us. You [sashay] in your silky robes, and none of it matters to you, it’s all like a game. It’s a powerful difference: because I refuse to lose.” I’d waxed in volume and intensity until I was screaming a last sentence. “You lost, and I won, Yufemia.”

I knew triumph. I had defeated her in one on one combat. I was better. I was stronger.

I wanted to shout it for the whole world. “I won and you lost!”

I keep at it until I was breathless and with raw spiracles and I looked around and saw that I was alone in the clearing. Even Liizabet had abandoned me.

I whispered the magical, triumphant words one final time, even as they stung my spiracles. “I won, and you‍ ‍—‍ you lost.”

But it wasn’t true, not after all.

Battle the second 

Forgive me for delving even deeper into the past, but I think it pertinent to really understand what I had lost that day.

I was the first of the four of us to crawl out of our ootheca, the biggest and the most eager. And the first one to see our frail and starving mother, who’d tirelessly watched and guarded us until we hatched.

I grew up quick, even accounting for that priority. By the time I was on the verge of imagohood, I was sullen and smart, verbally dancing with my mother’s words and miring us in endless arguments. I thought it great fun, but looking back I know I drove her to the heights of exasperation. But she was a patient spirit, and it’s one of the world’s mysteries how‍ ‍—‍ and why‍ ‍—‍ she never lost her temper at me, at any of us.

One of our most insistent, repetitive rows toward the end was over school attendance. I pleaded with my mother over and over that I undertake vesperbane training with (what I then would have called) ‘the most coolest of kids’.

No, no, no was always her answer. It’s not for us, she said, and the recurrences of my demands peeled back the meaning of her words. Us was wingless mantises. Might and magic and magnimity was for the wings. Not Us.

As the years went on and the final opportunity to attend loomed closer and closer, I grew more and more distraught at the eternal refusal. When she gave me one more no on the last moon before the deadline, I ran away, a three shouted words in my spiracles I’d always regret.

Was I going to find a new home with new parents who would let me become a vesperbane? Was I going to live on the streets alone, and pay for my attendance with stealing or servitude? (Unlikely‍ ‍—‍ I didn’t think, probably wasn’t even aware, the monetary side of things. Maybe my mother had refused because the indulgence would absolutely destroy our savings.)

I’m not sure. Even back then, I don’t think I was sure.

All I can say is that it’s was the greatest luck or greatest fate of my life that I left when I did. Just recalling this episode is enough to give me a shiver at how closely I escape.

I still don’t know why it happened.

Slinking listless along the streets of the village, I noticed how a growing, spreading agitation. I noticed my fellow wingless obliquely slipping into spaces between houses, into their own hovels, and in general going away.

Naturally, I pressed toward whatever they fled.

So I was there when it happened, peering between adult legs in the crowd.

I imagine the astute reader will have already pieced together what I’m alluding to. The event‍ ‍—‍ the practice‍ ‍—‍ has some notoriety even outside of our little village, I believe.

Earlier, I mentioned fate’s mercy, didn’t I? It was quite generous tonight. That mercy included me getting there late, after they were already dead. It meant I didn’t have to hear the screams. I’m told they were terrible, dreadful, soul‍-​shivering things. I believe it.

But I was there to see them string the bodies up in a big tree on these outskirts of town. Silk of the red starworm. The kind that never pupates.

The tree was set on fire, and burned all night along. I sat there watching, even after the crowd dispersed. Stared into the crumbled, ash‍-​rendered face that would never give me chastising or reassuring longs, never saw “I love you” again.

I reached out to touch the body, and then tried to pull her in close for a final hug. The branch snapped down and her body fell onto me, pressed me to the ground, and perhaps for hours I just stared up into the dead blue sky.

I wrapped my legs tight around the ashy chitin. I’d never hear her say ‘I love you’ again. And the last thing she’d ever heard from me, words I never meant and never should have said‍ ‍—‍ I hate you.

The next day‍ ‍—‍ after the fight, not the lynching‍ ‍—‍ I walked over to that big tree where I buried my mom and my brother and my two sisters.

I didn’t have to worry about school that day. Or ever again. Yufemia saw to that. Expelled for my atrocious, monstrous behavior. I was lucky I got off so light for my unprovoked assault, they told me.

I sat before the tree. It was a burned husk, but it hadn’t died all those years ago. Even now it struggled its best to put out some tiny, miscolored leaves, and some seasons it sprouted misshaped, impotent flowers.

It felt like it was still trying to live and to smile after all the torment it had been through.

I lifted a hindleg, and with a powerful kick at the trunk, and another and another and another until my fury was spent and then even more because I know determination, the tree fell over with a crash into the dirt, finally dead.

After the event all those years ago, I crawled back to our home and with our savings I enrolled myself into the school. And I felt that memory haunting me, lashing my back as I pushed myself harder and harder. It was like my mother died for me to go to the school, and perhaps she would forgive all I’d done if I wasn’t useless, wasn’t a waste, proved myself to be the best student that they needed to have in the school.

And I was. I knew determination, after all.

It was all pointless, meaningless nonsense now. Like a dream forgotten in the harsh glare of sunlight.

I fell back in front of that ashy stump, and repetitive like all those arguments, I stared up into the starless blue sky. Life was empty once more.

In the end, I knew I couldn’t stay in the village where my vicious, monstrous nature was a topic of daily gossip.

It was, on some abstract level, a kind of self‍-​punishment that I decided to go to the capital, home of the greatest dragonbane academy. But I could be forgotten there, in the mass of a million mantises.

The fight with Yufemia had awoken something deep in me, something that seethed beneath my chitin, a kind of persistent fire and fury. It made mantises cringe and flinched when I turned a scowl in their direction, it put deep undertones beneath my voice. It burned behind my eyes, and Liizabet saw the difference.

She feared me now, I thought.

And in the capital city, on the streets where that loathed visciousness was the key to survival, it was a kind of menace that paved my way.

I took a few cues from Yufemia. The first was mimicking her small posse of sycophants to back me up‍ ‍—‍ it was useful. And, in service of that, she taught me another thing: males are weak. Just showing your teeth to one was enough to make most of them cower. I met only one male who didn’t, I was quick to recruit him, and him, along with a big brute of a mantis from whom I hoped to learn further viciousness, I settled into capital life.

It was the year of Embers Eating Underbrush. Three years later by imperial reckoning.

Evening time meant he buzz of male lambent moths as they darted from streetlamp to streetlamp to bother the females within. A few lighted on me, drawn to the bright reflections on the metal sown into my robes. The plates were so polished the reflection was brighter than the source.

It was wet in the air and the night was dark with clouds and you expected it to rain before long. The moths might have sensed it to and instead of the loud streams of them you’d see any other night, they fluttered sparingly.

This was the center city (a concept close to, but not your capitals) during Ethice’s coordination: Wentalel, not Greci. The city grew around the flow of the Wenta river much like a forest might. Right now I crossed a bridge over the rushing current, little fish and freshwater squid just visible beneath the surface.

There was a contrast between one side of the river and other. You could look to the quality of the buildings‍ ‍—‍ it wasn’t that they were taller on one side (both sides had scaffolded structures rising up higher than they had any need to). It wasn’t even that one more tall building than the other (no, they were curiously even, almost as if one side were compensating). Maybe it was the material, the design, or something about how they were distributed. And it wasn’t just the buildings. The contrast was reflected in the clothes on passersby, the ambient smells (perfume or unwashed bodies; little rat things or their poison; cobble‍-​cracking weeds or carefully trimmed bushes) that gathered, mixed and dispersed. And, of course, only one side could have the vesperbane academy.

I think you can read between the lines, glimpse what I’m getting at. And I’m sure you already know which of these city halfs you’d rather be on.

Right now, I was going deep into the other one.

I got some looks as I passed into neighborhoods where every street had a building that was eroding or collapsing or at least sagging. Males who got a single glimpse and fearfully darted to the other side of the street. Workers in dull colored clothes who nodded and stepped out of my way. Mantids with scar‍-​lined chitin and weapons concealed who tightened their face and touched a tarsus to that weapon. Guards with unconcealed weapons who half unsheathed the things as I passed.

[insert that paragraph]

I learned later that this was called an awakening. If I had lasted but a few more moons at the school (if only I hadn’t fought Yufemia…) then that was the last and only test I would have to pass. Oh well.

I was going to meet Gyrewe

The temple of the flowering oak thrust up first as a thick wooden spire twelve body lengths around, then peeling off wings like the petals of a flower, little balconies. At the ends they were supported by thinner pillars spearing upward to meet them.

The stem of the flower‍-​temple, aside from a platform around it, was surrounded by air. Like all the dirt had been dug up, and it was dark at the bottom of the pit.

A figure in rough robes was just stepping out from the stem base and meet my gaze rigidly.

They crouched down, and then leapt, and fluttered their wings a little, and then they were standing beside me.

[I would like to emphasize that the thoughts of my younger self are not my thoughts today. I’ve grown a lot since then.]

But I recall thinking then or at a moment quite like then, that there were things I had picked up from Yufemia. Things she’d taught me, as much as I loathed to phrase it that way. Males were weak, fitful things. For most of them‍ ‍—‍ not at all of them, of course not all of them (how could I forget, standing beside that one?)‍ ‍—‍ you had to do no more than flash your fangs and they were cringing, stepping back, looking away, apologizing.

I had wondered if I would see a change after all of this, or if it was a matter for my children.

“Tlakida,” the male said with a nod, and then he was off. He didn’t like to follow after me, got very obnoxious about it, so I let him lead the way. We both knew where we were going, after all.

I restrained myself from letting my eyes settle on his abdomen‍ ‍—‍ or really, to be safe, anywhere on his body. It was another way to set him off. I handled him with care.

He didn’t have a good look at me, leading in front as he did, but he could still see me with the ommatidia facing my way.

I should say a few words about Gywere. Try to capture some of his energy in text.

I sometimes think about one day, up the hill toward where the Wenda river originates, I felt the first echoes of Gywe’s power. We had been getting water, and the going was slow owing to all the clingy vines that pounced downward, hanging from the spaced trees. The forest was only navigable at all because half of it had been cut down. But you had to be told that.

Sickly‍-​smelling asphodels, a clump of them, were growing at the base of one tree. They were a kind of flower you never saw because these little hindfoot‍-​sized woolrabbits fain would zoom toward them and nibble it down to nothing.

If you peered closely at the grassless dirt ringing the flower, you saw a wooden plank over which soil had hastily been thrown. There was wire strung through the space around the flowers like the deathly strands of a flower’s web. [I disliked it just for that.] We, meaning Gywere and I, stared until we saw up on a branch, the cross suspending but for the selfsame wires.

If a woolrabbit zoomed across to nibble these asphodels, a cross would plummet down and brutally impale them.

The planks of it were thin enough that it would probably just hit a leg or the lower abdomen.

The thing would still be alive, bleedingly alive, and howling those awful screams only a woolrabbit could make. The mechanism’s authors would swiftly here it, and scuttle back for a fresh meal.

I was just admiring the cut of the wood and the tightness of the wires when I heard the hiss beside me.

Gywere had put on one of those scowls he couldn’t go a day without making. He straightened himself up real tall, and I felt a flash like a swift blade of energy, like the bright lightning stabbing down and heralding the thunder.

(He later would remark that I was the only commoner he’d ever flinched at his workings. I told him I was going to be a vesperbane, once, and he nodded with a rare smile and bright hum like all had come clear.)

The thunder, in this case, was two spread tarsi coming up before his mouth, mandible spreading wide, and blue fire erupted forth. The rabbit‍-​killing mechanism was incinerated dust.

“I hate traps,” he told. “It’s a wretched, soulless way of killing. I would never eat something that had no chance of escape, and I would never trust someone who would.”

He walked off and I followed.

. . .

Other times, I think about the day I nearly died to one of his working.

I had been a drizzlingly miserable day, and both of us were sore and tired from a day of work, and when the falling water grew more daring, we took shelter within the alcove of a brothel that was no more. He hissed at the sight of it, and we didn’t dare enter inside the dark, rotting place where none but our echoes would accompany us.

We waited out on the porch out front, staring into the night and seeing naught but the reflection of light in waterdroplets, like a falling sky of stars

I felt the frisson of a moment‍ ‍—‍ and the coldness, and the spiracle‍-​condensing moistness only seemed to add to it. The night was a shiver in my soul.

I looked to Gywere, still wrapped up in those robes of flowering oak, and I smiled.

In my head there was the echoes of the words my mother would always say, to which I would only groaned. One day you’ll meet a male, darling, she’d say, and he’ll make you so happy and he’ll be your whole world. Don’t give me that look, you will, and I want you to promise me you’ll treat him well, listen to him, and never ever let him forget that you love him. Don’t laugh, this isn’t a joke, promise me. There was a gravity to it all, a knowing tragedy to her tone, and eventually I did promise. Promises, I never break.

I looked to Gywere and felt the rhythm of the world. How closely together we sat. How I felt the heat of his body. How, even though he could see my fovea on his, he wasn’t twitchingly anxious about it like he at first was.

I didn’t feel that blossoming of love’s bloom that my mother described whenever she thought I should hear about my father. When I looked at his legs and abdomen, I could recognize the curves (ladies had complemented males for less). I liked having him around, even though he never crept into my thoughts while we were alone.

But I remembered how he smiled at me earlier today, something he’d never done before, something I’d never seen him do for any other lady.

I felt the rhythm of the world. I recognized how this was supposed to happen.

I reached out, pulling him closer with my midlegs and my raptorials, venturing to entangle our mandibles, showing my tongue‍ ‍—

It took four moons for my midleg to mend where he ripped it, and I still feel pain when it bends.

It took out an air sac when he kicked me, and my thorax was still dented there.

It took hours for me to think clearly after I knew what so few did, what I suspected was the frizzling energy and blistering heat and entire agony of the storm’s weapons.

And when his raptorial legs closed around me, when he yanked at my head, when he looked at me with those five eyes of betrayal and hatred, I really thought this would be my last mistake.

He did let me live. He did tell me, as an utter verity, that he did not like being touched, that he would never feel that way about me. He never did smile at me, ever again.

__

But most of all, I think about the day we first met.

It was a bright, full‍-​sun day, (all the way back in Tight Winds, Rising Clouds) and my spirits was brighter. The coinpurse at my side, of a finer silk than I’d ever owned, clanked with coins loud enough that I’d only just stopped flinching.

Behind me, far behind me, was a shop built of stone whose front had a special section for pulling in with your carriage, and whose bifurcated looked was suspiciously like a pair of wings.

It was the kind of place, I’d learned, that didn’t need all of their coins. The kind of place that borrowing from didn’t upset the remembered, expressive face of my mother, who served as my conscience.

I’m still not exactly clear on what set them off. Perhaps it was the coinpurse that stood out against the dirt and tatters look of my apparel. Perhaps I shouldn’t have bought that whole purebred hog at the menagerie and ate it so visibly in public. Perhaps, perhaps I was just having bad luck.

I was minding my way down a side alley that would get me to the river quicker when a blue lady in black leather lighted down and leered at me from the alley’s other end.

I didn’t like her look, so I turned in time to see a red counterpart do the same motion.

I think they thought we all know what this was about, so they didn’t even bother with the formality.

“Come with us right now, little girl.”

But my younger self, only just not a nymph anymore, didn’t make those sort of connections so quick. At this point, I think I was still bewildered, and sputtered something confused like “Wha?”

“Give us the coinpurse and every weapon you might have on your person. Close your raptorials and place them beside your head. Put all four feet on the floor.”

At this point, I’d yet to go to prison, or learn how to make it more comfortable or how to escape. I’d only heard the threats, and faced with the obvious violence these guards intended‍ ‍—‍ one behind me heft a mace, on in front taking out a hammer, what would I do but fight?

I was still heady from crushing Yufemia, from cowering just about everyone I’d yet in this city with a glance and quickly ending all the fights I’d recently gotten into.

I saw behind me, without turning my head, how the the blue guard calmly approached, and reached for my coinpurse. I kicked out with a powerful hindleg. Which she expected. My leg was caught simply. And yanked. And only thanks to my other three did I keep standing.

The other guard, red, thinking me distracted, thinking to end this quickly with a aggressive strike to the head, lifted their mace.

Before they brought it down I swiped with my right raptorial. I didn’t draw back first. Unlike her, I’d learned not to telegraph.

My left hindleg was still being pulled. I twisted my body with the three legs I still stood on, trying their grip. And then I pushed myself into their pull. It upset their balance, and I hissed triumphantly as I threw a swift jab and caught them in the snarling face.

That got them surprised enough to drop my foot. Red guard in front of me caught me in the thorax. Chitin cracked and I flew toward blue. Still, I had all legs free, and stopped my moment with another successful punch at blue.

I drew in a breath. I crouched, and leaped at once, sailing above the heads of both guards. The guard’s helmets covered their eyes, and limited what they can see above them. I landed on the ragged wood wall of one building, and with four feet gripping held myself there.

A moment to breathe. I took now to pull out my dagger‍ ‍—‍ which I technically couldn’t carry in city limits. I didn’t care

I pulled myself up with all four legs while I released them. During my arc upward I reoriented, pointed myself down.

The guards probably read my intentions. Red was backing far away and blue had her hammer arm swaying and ready to catch me violently.

I grabbed the other wall of the alley and I threw myself sharply downward.

I grabbed again, catching a window edge poking out, and swung.

Blue whiffed with her hammer, expecting to hit me, and red could only gape as I sailed bodily toward her, grinning.

It was impossible to tell what I was planning, but she knew soon enough when I was almost I upon her, and my hidden dagger stabbed forth, poised to pierce her right in the mesothorax.

The blade ate into the thick black leather, and I felt my arm being pushed back. It surprised me, and I crashed into the guard, the hilt of my dagger hitting me in the mesothoraxed while the guard so no worse than a little shoved.

Strong red arms closed around me. I lost the grip on my dagger as our struggled turned to wrestling, and it was only by biting red’s neck till I tasted green blood gushing that I could pull myself free.

I rose only to see blue standing above me, hammer draw back and her drooling mouth wide in a leer.

“You should stop, right now. We don’t need to take you alive. Keep this up, and it’ll be simplest of all to just rip off your head.”

Staring into her widened maw, I could only hope that this guard had eaten today. I wonder, dimly, if I know even a little bit what it was like to be a male.

It all went wrong after that.

My world erupted into pain as my on dagger stabbed me through the back with the triumphant chord‍-​word from the forgotten red guard.

The hammer came down next and cracked my head. Strong red arms wrapped around me, restraining me as I writhed, and blue stepped closer. Brought a claw to my chin and lifted up my chin. I hissed and she was undaunted. Spat right into my open mouth, and cocked back a raptorial, and gave me a powerful smack that left bleeding, cracked lines in my face.

The blow had my head hanging down opposite where her hand still hung into air. She tsk’d, and tightly gripped an antennae and yanked my head so hard I felt tearing. Even when my head had turned back to face her, and lifted to look foveae to foveae, she kept pulling. With an audible pop the antennae tore off my head and dripped onto my eyes and the blood rolled in rivulets down my head.

It was only when the droplets came over my lips and flew outward that I realized I was screaming out, not just out of my spiracles but out of my mouth too.

“Oh shut up. It’ll grow back.”

When I didn’t‍ ‍—‍ her words were half inaudible in the sheer, mind‍-​whitening pain that poured down from my antennaeless stump‍ ‍—‍ she took the bleeding, twitching appendage and shove into my mouth. Deep‍ ‍—‍ my jaw stretch and dislocated from her entire hand going into my mouth‍ ‍—‍ until it lodged in my throat and I was gagging, heaving to get out the thing stuck in my throat.

Almost as if to help with that, I felt a kick hit me right in my stomach, and again to really drive home the force on display.

“I have to say, I despise the plague of absolute thugs like you afflicting this city. You’re the reason we have to lock our doors at night, check every mantid crossing the bridge, and patrol until we’re dead tired in the morning because you find your antics easier than abiding by what little society asks of you.”

Another smack, this time hitting me dead in the eyeflesh, a visible flash of pain, and afterward the images from the eyes were all distorted.

My head lolled to the other side and again, and I felt claws close around my remaining antennae. I turned my head so quick that this time it was me pulling on my antennae, and I faced and looked up at the guard.

“Pl‍-​please. Please.” You really don’t know what it’s like to have antennae. You’re too used to it, it’s nothing to you. But when you lose it, when you learn everything it is you’re losing, then you know.

“Now that is more like it. You’re finally learning how it is. You don’t make the rules, we do.” She smiled, and it was the sort of smile that told you not to trust. “Ease up on her, partner. Maybe now she’ll have the sense to kneel before her superiors.”

Red did not release me. I still acutely felt those raptorials constricting my thorax, biting into me with their spines. But the claws holding my legs eased up, and I knelt beneath the blue guard. What else could I do?

“You aren’t even from this city, are you? No, you’re outsider trash. You came here thinking it’d be an easy life, that you could do whatever you wanted, didn’t you? Well take a moment to thank us, because we are here to set up straight.”

I can tell you it was humiliating, I can tell you I felt powerless, I can tell you all the names of the despair I felt, but I can’t make you feel it.

I can tell you in that moment what they taught me was how wrong it was to be constrained, how I learned to loathe with my heart every kind of trap.

I can tell you how, in that moment, I thought never ever wanted to be touched again, feel that weakness of my form, how every gentle caress could be another slap or kick or yank and I wasn’t the one controlling that.

But I can’t make you listen, make you really hear me.

Words, when they’re given life on your breath, are just vibrations of the air. And the feeling which burned in my soul was a vibration of energy. It came from the same place as the aura that I came into the city with, but instead of burning with the swagger of victory, it smoldered with the cowering of having lost. And with every crackle, instead of drawing flinches, I saw the tightening of the hateful scowl written on the blue guard and a felt the tightening aggressive, groping squeeze of the red guard. It wasn’t power, I couldn’t wouldn’t triumphantly change the outcome by feeling deeply enough (and I did feel, deeper than the river).

But‍ ‍—‍ like how the air vibrating with words couldn’t change the world yet can do something if there is someone to hear, someone to listen‍ ‍— there was a single other soul in this city could feel what I felt and then even more, who I was truly attenuated to in that moment.

The guard’s helmets covered their eyes, and limited what they can see above them. And they never had the sense to look.

So without craning my head I watched the figure crackling with lightning come to the edge of the building above is, and the drop down quiet as snow.

He landed beside me and he seemed almost a spirit with how the guards did not notice him, even as he drew back his raptorial claws and swung them powerfully forward to come to a might crash against the facial chitin of the two guards, and it sounded beautiful, the welcome, cathartic payoff of all the cracks and crushes of the blue guard’s chitin against mine.

The lightning was still crackling around the figure clad in the robes of flowering oak, and it flowed into the vice grip of his raptorials around their head, and the their bodies seem to viciously glow with all the crackling energy that rushed into them. Their insides steamed and popped.

Femur and tibia released, and the charred, shattered and simmering stumps of heads were free to fall, and their entire bodies collapsed backward, dead as corpses.

I don’t know how long I stood there staring at the lifeless face of the blue guard, with an expression whose entire hate had been transmuted to fear by that magic lightning. But the robed figure stood there waiting.

Waiting until the sun had arced across the sky to yank the alley from blessed shadows to stark light. There was something desolate about the bright daylight now.

At that point I rose of my own power and stood tall, and I turned and look at the figure who’d save me. All the while he remained a pace away and did not try to hug or pat me or offer any help. He did not try to touch me.

He didn’t smile, but he nodded and it was a better reaction.

“You are Tlakida Star‍-​Maiden,” he said to me. “I am Gywere.”

“Thank you, thank you. You can’t understood how much you’ve saved me.” It wasn’t true; he did.

“That coinpurse you have, it came from the northeastern dance‍-​den?”

I nodded.

“And that bronze ring around your little hallux. You’re a friend of Sahlle?”

I was.

“And that red scar across your abdomen, it came from a struggle against some females in green and purple cloaks?”

It had.

“You’ve done a lot for someone not three moons into the city. The guard, the government, doesn’t like that.” He spread his mandibles. “You’re a real hero, not a vesperbane, and they want to put a stop to you.”

He reached out with a claw glowing green. After a long interval and suspicious watch, I reached out dreading to touch‍ ‍—‍ and before I had to I felt the energy leap into me and the pain of all the abuse was starting to ebb.

“I am a priester of the flowering oak. I can heal you.”

I coughed, and spat out the antennae (he caught it and kept it), and I, already wary of the answer, “What do you want?”

Some people, they don’t know what they want, and they don’t know what they’re doing, and they’ll tell you ‘Nothing, I just want to help.’

Gywere nodded at me and said, “We share a common interest. We can help each other. We can make this city safe for those who need it.”

And starting exactly then, I gained my first ally, and we began our partnership, Gywere and I.

The evening was young on that fateful night in Embers Eating Underbrush. Gywere had just leapt over to me and we’d begun walking toward our destination.

It was easiest to get lost in empty‍-​eyed reverie when I walked with him, easier than letting my eyes wander and land somewhere they shouldn’t. I was trying. I wondered if he would ever forgive me, ever trust me again. I didn’t hope. I would try either way.

It had been three years at this point, it was a jolt to realize that. Three years of our partnership. It was difficult to say‍ ‍—‍ I guess you could make the argument either way‍ ‍—‍ whether the coordinator was I, or he.

Or perhaps it didn’t matter, and we didn’t need coordination to work together.

Besihir, by contrast, did need that coordination.

That wasn’t a knock at her appearance‍ ‍—‍ although the way her antennae never moved in unison, the way someone had tried to wrench one of her bulbous eyes out and it was still a little displaced and her pseudopupils no longer lined up, or the slight disturbance to her gait that rendered her movements strange and erratic, all of those underscore it.

But it was more her behavior. How with her, when someone needed to be hurt, I always had to specify alive. How our meals had to be carefully divided, as she would eat our shares by mistake. How even the best directions seem to leave her bewildered and astray.

She need a little direction and a little help, and I didn’t mind giving her that. I liked to think she appreciated it. I hoped she did.

We walked past her destination looking for her, and eventually found her on the wrong side of the street outside of someone’s house, rather than the dance‍-​den we were looking for.

She cut a menacing figure in the darkness‍ ‍—‍ bigger than me, chitin shaped around muscle. She had three weapons you could see and it wouldn’t reassure you to tell how many you couldn’t. The guards knew she didn’t have a permit.

We strode up to her undaunted.

She had the sort of face that relaxed into a scowl, but it grew neutral when she recognized me. Her spiracles flared and an apology was probably forthcoming before I beckoned her and turned to walk back. She fell into step beside me, opposite Gywere, and I showed her my smile and gave a flick of my antennae.

Years‍-​honed silence returned to us after that, and submerged us. A younger Tlaki had waxed poetic about solitude. This silence was a kin to that solitude, but something bigger, that drew you in further‍ ‍—‍ a kind of solitude you could share.

It was warmer too, but not with the warmth of kinship. All of us knew trouble lie ahead of us tonight (but not, tragically, how great it would be), and bristled in anticipation, every hair on our bodies sharp and sensitive.

We vibrated on that deeper level I was becoming sensitive too. I burned with deep heat that’d become my constant companion since I first fought Yufemia. To my left I felt most acutely of all‍ ‍—‍ I think even commoners would feel it: where I was warm, Gywere was like a high, dark cloud’s recurrent bright flash in the freezing rain. Present, powerful, but not for you. And Besihir, she was the howling of wounded mountain winds through unseen crevices, not near enough at hand to even have a temperature. Hers was the faintest of all, but it added something around the edges of the energy he and I were putting off.

It was good that it was late enough in the evening that hardly any carriages were about, and none on this stretch of road. It was good that it was earlier enough in the night that guard patrols were not yet on edge. With the way passersby halted uneasy in their tread as we passed by, I appreciated that we weren’t going to cause trouble until we got to our destination.

Compared to our usual targets it was a step up. The carriages we didn’t see while walking back down the street were mostly parked in the sizable space beside it. It was, particularly in the foundations, builded of stone and where it gave way too wood it was polished and sturdy and not sagging or rotten. It was a multi story affair.

At those upper windows, where the guests would be sleep, what you saw was thick curtains revealing nothing but their color. Down below, at the entrance, you saw excited ladies entering or existing. The place was called the Beating Hearth‍ ‍—‍ and the image on the swinging sign outside was curiously unrelated to that: a thick abdomen.

“This is the place, boss?” It was Besihir asking.

“It is.”

As one, we thrown on our white cloaks, and entered.

If the dance‍-​den had been a lake, our entrance would have been the strike of a massive rock, sending ripples across the whole surface, rocking the boats.

It could have been the energy we were putting off, it could have been that Gywere had pushed the door until it creaked, and let it slam shut behind us, the sound ringing throughout the building. A male with that kind of confidence would get anyone’s attention. And he was with two wingless mantises?

There were musicians‍ ‍—‍ musicians!‍ ‍— playing in the den, and we distracted the less attentive musicians, made them miss a beat, but they quickly caught themselves and resumed playing, faster, on the next available beat, creating discordance chaos. But I liked the kind of syncopation of it.

The tables were tossed and scattered across the room, all at varying diameters and heights, like the hills of this terrain. And if this were terrain, the landmarks were the dancers. Well‍-​curved males in bright, variegated robes the swished and teased as they moved, and every movement attended to by perhaps a dozen eyes at least.

At the dead center of the room was a big roaring flame I felt some kinship to. Far the to left of the entrance as a long slab of stone decorated with filled glasses and squirming, writhing meals.

A orange mantis stood alone on the other side of that bar, and stared at us with dark eyes.

Undaunted, we walked the line to her, Besihir stepping on toes and Gywere shoving a gawking lady mantis out of the way. Serving males sometimes ventured to help us, but Gywere gently waved them off, until we reached the slab

To the poor lass sitting at the slab, between us and the slabtender and presumed owner, I said, “We’d like to sit here.”

Her spiracles flared. Gywere corrected me, “She misspoke. We are going to sit here.” He punctuated his words of the crackle of his soul, and slowly did the lass get up and walk away, all the while eyeing him with the kind of pure disdain I last saw on the face of the blue‍-​chitin’d guard.

We sat down, and none of us made any move to order anything‍ ‍—‍ although I saw Besihir pick up a bit of roach‍-​vellum the lass had left with items and prices written on it, and she perused it. Gywere merely stared distant lightning at the mantis behind the bar. He wouldn’t do the talking. It never ended well when he did. I was the one who would speak, and I spun around on the stool, making a game of spotting notable people in the crowd.

Find and remember the position of all the bouncers of course‍ ‍—‍ none of whom had eyes on anything else. See if anyone was wearing those green and purple robes, that was always a priority. Lesser Coordinators, newspaper editors, and heavy‍-​named merchants usually had an air of opulence about which made them quite easy to pick out. Guards were ones to look out for (was that the blue‍-​chitin’d guard?)‍ ‍—‍ most of them were familiar with our faces at this point, and that was a dangerous thing.

(And the hidden challenge in doing a survey like this, is looking this hard with settling a gaze on any of the dancers. I know Gywere would notice if I did, even if he said nothing.)

The slabtender looked was tapping a sharp claw against the grain of the wood, getting my attention and then speaking when I turned back round. “I don’t need no problems, alright? None.”

Gywere couldn’t restrain himself. “You do not decide that.”

She sighed through her spiracles. “What all do you want?”

“In general?” I asked.

“Off the menu,” she flatly said.

“Oh, it’ll be fermented flowers for my Besihir here and foaming planetweed dew for good Gywere here. And don’t spit in it, he can tell.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, madam.”

“I’d just like a snake. Not a big one‍ ‍—‍ a biter, say.”

“You like em dangerous, I see.”

“Quite.”

With a nod of her antennae the slabtender was off.

“Thoughts so far, Gyre?”

“She will be stubborn. Not use trying to talk to her.”

Besi said, “She seemed nice.”

“The dampening, insulating kind of nice. The kind that stamps out change because it might cause problems. But there are problems whether we are their authors or not.” The words came out sharp. The special kind of sharp he only sunk to in a place like this. Gywere did not want to be touched, and I wouldn’t‍ ‍—‍ but I think if he ever did, a time like now would be it. But outside the if, now was the worst possible time.

“Well said. But I’m going to try anyways. Always worth trying.”

“Not always.”

I let my head fall into my claws. Claws that, as they tended to, sought the curves of my chitin to see the cracks. I don’t know why the compulsion takes me, I see them in every mirror, but my fingers never tired of feeling my scars.

Before I could settle into those morbid thoughts, my forearm was impacted by and nearly tramped over by a fat, furry and leggy little thing.

It stared at me from dorsel oceli on its side and whined at me but quickly it resumed its charge, skidding to halt by a bowl and it sipped the sweet dew there.

Grecini‍-​pillars. Stupid little bugs that never spun into cocoons unless you fed them the right flowers. The only good thing you could say about them was that they never tried to hump your leg as long as they stayed pupae.

I looked to its owner, expecting some frilly matroon weighed down by glittering necklaces.

She had bits of iron piercing her mandibles and antennae, and multicolored, patterned chitin that was less painted than stained, and they were the kind of stains you could only get from water at the boiling.

“You have an issue?” she rumbled from deep in her abdomen.

My eyes flitted to the band around her arm. It was a circle stretched till it was an almost yonic ellipse and a sextagram inscribed within, and sprouting wings. And it was dark, blood green on a royal purple background.

I couldn’t stop my mandibles from drawing tight against my mouth. I can at least say my reaction was controlled compared to Besihir, who without realizing had torn the menu between her claws.

“If you don’t,” she added slowly, “then quit looking, wingless.”

I dragged my gaze back around, to that calming kin fire blazing centerward. That part was quiet. Beneath my claws scraped the dirty floor as I dragged them likewise.

Besi was still slightly hissing beside me, and I reached out with a midleg and a forarm to wrap around her thorax and pull her till her chitin clinked together. I leaned with my head and rested it with a compound eye very close to Besi’s opposite. An antennae‍ ‍—‍ the same one thatd been ripped off‍ ‍—‍ reached out and took hold of hers. We sat like that for a moment, Besi relaxing into me. It felt… nice. I liked that I could make her feel safer. I hated that I had to make her feel safer.

“Nasty bunch.” Spoken low, privately. The bartender was back, sitting down Besi’s flowers, and letting loose my snake. I let it slide for a bit before I brought down a raptorial, impaling it on the spines. I began eating.

“Who?” I asked innocently. Behind me, my cerci were perking up.

A huff like a harsh laugh, and she kept up the whisper. “Who else? Kaos. I saw you noticed. It’s a shame. Just seeing an armband like that, knowing Kaos is around here, will drive away weaker mantids than you.” Mediocre phrasing, but I almost smiled‍ ‍—‍ until she opted to follow it up with, “They scares away customers.”

Besi was less forgiving of the phrasing. I felt her midleg go to one of her weapons‍ ‍—‍ perhaps thinking to emend that ‘weaker’ to something less dismissive‍ ‍—‍ but I squeeze from the legs I still had around her (I could hold a snake with one arm) mollified her.

I muttered where she could hear. “You’re one of the better brothel‍-​keeps we’ve dealt with.”

It reminded me: we had business to attend to, here. “About those customers.” I glanced at the dancers, the serving males, and one male who walked toward the climbwall, hand held by a bigger lady.

Behind me I could hear the slabtender draw in a thoughtful breath, and I could feel them thinking, and I could hear the start of their speech.

Gywere had talked to me about outlines. Like the lists in the first pages of a book. But he said the notion is more ubiquitous than that. The idea that seeds already have their mighty oaks inside them. That the rainstorm is know by the first cloud drifting in. All the world in a grain of sand.

Prefiguration. That lives and societies could have been read in the way of the world from the very beginning, that history doesn’t look so different backwards or forwards, that the end in contained in the beginning.

Like a lot of Gywere’s ideas, it was silly and I could entertain it in much the way a story would entertain me.

But when she said that first sentence‍ ‍—‍ which was, “I understand where y’all are coming from.”‍ ‍—‍ you could hear every syllable of her paragraph to come. I only just kept myself from sadly snapping, “You were one of the better brothel we’ve dealt with.”

And she continued, unaware of her words were prefigured: “It ain’t pretty, and it ain’t pleasant. I understand that. But it could be a whole lot uglier, and nastier. We’re one of the good places. We treat our males well. And Kaos‍ ‍—‍ I don’t like Kaos, you can believe that‍ ‍—‍ but they’re investors. Part of why we can treat the dancers so well is because they’ve taken an interest in this place.

“You have to think counterfactually. If this place weren’t here‍ ‍—‍ if we thought it irredeemably bad like you do‍ ‍—‍ do you think that would me one less dance‍-​den? It wouldn’t. [Another would spring up quick as arrows.] Do you think these male would find better work as secretaries, or computers? They wouldn’t. The best scenario is they’d just be at another dance‍-​den, the worst is they’d be some lady’s [concubine].” A hitch. “No, the worst is they’d do all the work of one and they wouldn’t be paid.” The actual worst is they’d do that work‍ ‍—‍ once‍ ‍—‍ and afterward be like the snake was to me. Only I’d given the snake a chance.

Still more words came. “And if we didn’t let Kaos sponsor us, do you think we could treat the nice males as well? Pay them enough that there’s a chance this won’t be all their life? No. We’re‍ ‍—‍ I’m‍ ‍—‍ doing what we can, making the world a better place. Actually make it better, rather than smashing heads and patting ourselves on the back. No, you don’t fix the world by standing back and breaking things and picking fights. You have to get in, get yourself dirty, and work inside the system. Play by the rules.”

A sharp voice that didn’t crackle said, “I would like to note,”‍ ‍—‍ I wanted to praise Gywere to for how in control of himself he must be‍ ‍—‍ “that one item on the list, Cephalomantis sapiens, is the binomen for a mantis. Beside the listing, it specifies (male).” He was holding half the menu Besi’d ripped.

“Give me that,” the slabtender said, and yanked the menu from his claws.

I kept up the‍ ‍—‍ pointless‍ ‍—‍ act of talking to the brothel‍-​keep. “So all of this,”‍ ‍—‍ I gestured to encompass the roomful of dancers‍ ‍—‍ “isn’t going to change, is it?”

I didn’t need to turn around to see the weedy smile on the slabtender’s face. “They say money is the unit of caring. How much are you willing to pay?”

Every time, before I would rise up and‍ ‍—‍ as she so elegantly put it‍ ‍—‍ smash heads, I liked to pause a moment in reflection. Try to see things from the perspective of the soon to be smashed. I told myself that moment of empathy, the attempt, was what set me a part from Yufemia.

And inwardly, where even Gywere couldn’t see and judge me, what the brothel‍-​keep said made sense to me, appealed to that same part of my brain which so readily wrapped itself around the figures and logics we learned in school (so far away, now).

Would I do the same thing, in his position? Would I run a brothel and sell the bodies of males because me doing it was better than leaving it to someone less caring? If Kaos themselves walked up to me and offered that deal‍ ‍—‍ funding in return for whatever service she rendered‍ ‍—‍ would I accept because I could hand out more money, more ‘caring’?

…No. If a Kaos walked up to me I’d cave their bigoted head in and pluck their pompous wings off one by one.

Gywere told me money was just a measure of how useful you were to the system, how much you had sold yourself. (But he also said poverty was a sign of virtue and I can’t say I believe him, then or now.)

I’d finished empathizing.

I spun round in my stool, stared down the male‍-​trafficking, wingist‍-​sympathizing, condescending piece of shit. I don’t know why I ever thought this would go over well‍ ‍—‍ why I ever think this can go over will. When Gywere leads us to a dance‍-​den, it’s never because it’s one of the good ones.

I told her, “This was never a negotiation.”

Gywere finished the rest of his planetweed dew in a single long draught, and he gaze seemed deeper, clearer. Besihir gobbled the last leaf of her flowers and already I saw a tipsy wobble in her discoordinated antennae. I regurgiated the snake’s skull to crack into pieces on the stone slab before her.

As one, we all stood.

Then everything went wrong.

If we came in like a tossed stone’s ripple, the five figures came in with a draining of the whole lake. The door swung wide and snapped the hinges, and they walked in already laughing at a just‍-​told joke. But that mirth didn’t make them less menacing.

The three of us had been vibrating, bristling with energy when we barged through the door. But these five were vibrating to such an extent‍ ‍—‍ and so casually!‍ ‍— that it sounded almost musical as they approached, and it harmonized their laugh with a tritone edge.

The music stopped when the figure entered. It had only hiccuped for us.

And when the five of them ventured forth from the darkness by the entrance, you saw their robes. Deep, royal purple with dark blood‍-​green accents. Kaos.

They stopped by a table just aside the fire‍ ‍—‍ I liked that fire‍ ‍—‍ and the coordinator of the just entered waved an raptorial in a single gesture and the mantises cleared out from the table.

The four of them were like morning stars‍ ‍—‍ and the coordinator, she was like the sun itself.

And then, as her companions sat at the table and she turned round to saunter toward the slab we were at, I realized why that impression was so fitting.

Pink chitin, deep blue eyes, silver circlet on her brow. Though three years had passed that visage took but a breath to summon a name‍ ‍—‍ and I’m sure you’ve already recognized by the mental image.

Yufemia Shadow‍-​crown, the girl who ruined my life.

I was already standing, I was already walking toward her. If she could even recognize me‍ ‍—‍ was I but nothing to her?‍ ‍—‍ we (all of us) still wore our white cloaks. I must have been a strangely confident commoner to her.

I stood just in front of her, blocking her way.

“Kaos, now?” was all I asked.

She twirled her exasperated antennae. “Of course. Now let me pass, wingless.”

She hardly had time for the slur as my right raptorial was already opened and following a tight arc to smack against her cheek. Chitin cracked and fell in pieces, and a spine had pierced her eye and eye juice squirted out.

That was the only good hit I’d get on her that evening.

Three things happened at once.

First, Gywere and Besihir burst into action behind me. This wasn’t the first time that I’d started a stupid fight on impulse and forced them to my aid. It was the first time that Gywere calmly fell into motion, not even idly chastising me.

Second, the four figures, who’d just gotten comfortable on their warm, pillowed rests, jumped or slid or fell or just got up and started toward me.

And Yufemia, she just started laughing.

Cackling.

She said, “You ever need to be taught your place, don’t you, you apterous idiot.”

I backed away slowly, until I had my friends beside me, Gywere standing tall and crackling with energy, and Besihir gently swaying with the flowers in her system.

“But I’m feeling fun today‍ ‍—‍ why else would we come to the Beating Hearth?‍ ‍—‍ so why don’t we make this into a game. My mother owns this inn, and we have the deed right here. Defeat us in this stupid little duel, and you can have the place to do whatever you want. Otherwise‍ ‍—‍ and who are we kidding, anywise‍ ‍—‍ we’ll have the pleasure of stomping all over you once again.”

Yufemia huffed. “En garde.”

“Everyone ready?”

Gywere: “You don’t like short odds, do you Tlaki?”

Besihir: “I don’t even know the opposite of ready.”

In front of us, the Kaos cultists were gathering in a opposite formation, forming two wings either side of Yufemia, who still softly laughed.

We stood there standing off for a moment, not two body lengths between us, either size sizing up the other‍ ‍—‍ I saw, neath the hoods, two mantises which had to be the older faces of dagger girl and white robe‍ ‍—‍ before it was Gywere who struck.

He moves quiet, quite fast.

By the time you could draw a breath, he’d crossed the space between us and them, and two bright punches light burned, melting chitin on the thorax of a cultist. Gywere then made to leap away, but as he left he kicked out midair, and a hindfoot connected wetly with the poor shit’s head.

The fell over and Gywere was lightly landing.

By now the reality‍ ‍—‍ a fight!‍ ‍—‍ had filtered to the patrons, only just realizing. A dancer or two screaming. Some of the mantises at tables took to beating on the tables as some kind of encouragement.

And one, at a high nearby table watching us, jeer, “Are you going to take that? Show them what we do to trouble makers around here.”

One down, already. I gave me the confidence to move myself, getting to Yufemia with two strides of my hindlegs. I was sailing through the air when I reached her, claws ready to rip, and Yufemia stopped laughing.

Her head seemed to turned to face me slowly, and she lifted a midleg and held it out‍ ‍—‍ it wasn’t quite a punch.

I couldn’t dodge it, and it connected with my metathorax.

And I stopped.

I felt all my momentum hit me as the force of her punch was supplied by me and I curled around her foot and fell to the ground. She looked down at me.

Meanwhile, Besihir had been similarly emboldened, but with better luck. She was swaggering toward the robed mantises. She met one who leapt at her with a lazy punch, and flinched to the right when a another, smarter mantis leapt to land at her side.

She pivoted to one hindleg and swung the other out in a kick that went low the last moment and took the figure’s legs from under them. But the other figure had stood up.

Yufemia grabbed me by the antennae and hefted me up. I threw a wild punch and she caught it before it would‍ ‍—‍ if it would hit‍ ‍—‍ and crushed my hand.

She decided to release me, letting me fall to my feet, and I tried a kick like Besihir’s‍ ‍—‍ be she was anticipating it even before I dropped it suddenly low, and when I did she just flicked out a foot to struck my leg, and I was the one who fell.

More than two of the patrons watching us cheer at that. I curled my lips. The idiots‍ ‍—‍ they were probably in on the Kaos association, or didn’t mind it.

I slowly pulled myself up. If Yufemia wanted to, she could have stomped me, and even now could punch or claw. But she did not.

Gywere was like a stormcloud rumbling in the distance. He’d stopped trying to fight the robed figures. Instead it was flitting around the fringes of the tavern, giving a similar two punch knockout to all the bouncers and guards I had seen earlier.

He always thought of what we didn’t.

I noticed the one remaining mantis hung back beside Yufemia‍ ‍—‍ of course I recognized her from that day in Tight Winds, Rising Clouds. Dagger girl.

Besihir, meanwhile, was still dealing with the two mantises from earlier, who almost seemed to be tagteaming it in harassing her; whenever she knocked one down the other would leap at her. But she held her own with her unpredictability she was drunk, and I let her get drunk because she turned it to a strength. Wild, swaying, wobbling‍ ‍—‍ the attackers seemed to give her berth just trying to figure out what she would do.

I think dagger girl saw me looking, and leaped over, even as I stabbed up with my short sword trying to stop her.

Besihir had settled in her kind of rhythm taking on the two mantises, and adding a third to the mix just overwhelmed her. Dagger girl came down on her and first thing she already stabbed out and got my friend right in the prethorax. Reeling from that, she couldn’t stop her leg from being grabbed and getting pulled off her feet.

One of the other figures was about to snap her up in her raptorials when, before I could even think to jump in myself, Gywere struck like his stormcloud self and a bright punch went stright through dagger girl and a mighty kick resounded against her would‍-​be attacker.

Yufemia sense me hesitating. “Go ahead,” she sneered.

I leapt and came down on top of the last attacker and drew back my fist and punch punch punched with such force‍ ‍—‍ what would she have done to my Besihir!‍ ‍—‍ that even though I was no Gywere, her head was gone when I stood up.

I smiled at Besihir, and Gywere nodded at her. “We got you,” I said, and was reaching out for a mid‍-​battle hug‍ ‍—

Yufemia could move faster than Gywere, somehow, and she zoomed between us, impacted against Besi, and pinned her to the ground. I yelled.

Gywere acted, and was rounding a kick that seemed to glow with energy. Where Yufemia merely stpped my kicks, she dodged underneath Gywere kick. And then he added in punches and jabs, and at last when he tried to grab her she was forced off my friend.

Yufemia forgot about me then, just for a bit.

The two circled around each other, and they were an awful match, both for my nerves, and for the anticipation of the noiseful crowd watching us.

Gywere fought like a stormcloud, dark in the distance only to suddenly strike.

And Yufemia, I decided, had learned to fight like a spider, watchful, waiting, and devastating when she finally moved.

I leaned over to check on Besi. “You okay, girl?” She didn’t respond.

“She’s fine, not worth the bother to kill. Don’t lose a hair over her.”

I stood up smoldering, and she only laughed at my look, and continued her waiting game with Gywe.

He tried a jab, she dodged. He jaunted away, and she swiftly followed. She moved menacingly closer, raptorials yawning open, and he was a mist of dodges, left and right and back.

“Are you dancing for me, sexy little male?”

He struck out, a blinding punch brighter than any he’d ever thrown before, and Yufemia just swatted it away, and kicked him. He went across the room and he did not get up.

“Such needy little creatures, males,” she confided in me with a toss of her antennae. “So, where did we leave off?”

I ran.

Yufemia’s scuffle with Gywere had taken her to another corner of the brothel, so running the other way put that lovely snapping fire between us.

“Oh, I see,” she said, and he had to paused to giggle a bit more. “We’ve gotten to the part where you realize how in over your head you, and you know it’s best to run.”

I couldn’t see her over that beautiful fire. A plan was whispering it’s way into my mind. It was stupid. It couldn’t work.

I tried to see even a sihouette of Yufemia through the every shifting tongue of flame‍ ‍—‍ whose voices I could almost hear, barely a whisper.

She wasn’t moving. From where the head of the watching patrons (they’d gone quiet) were pointing, she wasn’t moving.

I took a deep breath.

I don’t think my next action was suicidal.

I started running, running quickly, quickly toward Yufemia and I then leapt low.

My flight carried me through the flames. It wasn’t suicidal. I knew‍ ‍— on a level deeper than knowing‍ ‍—‍ that my flames wouldn’t harm me. And they didn’t. I was burning in my soul, blazing harder having seen my friends defeated before my eyes. I had to win. I’d done it before. I had to defeat Yufemia.

I erupted from the flames with vengeance as my face, and I liked that it made my nemesis flinch.

I held my short sword tight in my hands‍ ‍—‍ the blade was hot‍ ‍—‍ and thrust it forward.

There was no trick. No disdainful swatting aside of my attack like it was nothing. No laugh or smile or sneer as I ran my blade to the hilt through her thorax.

“Wow.” She coughed. “Still full of surprises, aren’t you?

Her head lolled.

I released my blade and stepped away. A strange, bewildered smile was tentatively stepping out on my face, and I turned and regarded the watching crowd. My white cloak burned to ash from the flames, and I glowed. They must be surprised a wingless was among them. They must be surprised a wingless won.

She coughed again, and I heart a wet sliding sound.

I heard claws scraping, and a her shadow shifting.

“It was worth it.” She coughed again. “Fuck, the pain sucks, but it was worth it to see that look. The pathetic triump on your face. It was adorable.”

She walked up behind me. I saw her but my legs didn’t turn me around.

“But you never, ever stood a chance. How many times must you be reminded you’re below me? You never can win against me again, no matter how many backhanded tricks you pull.

The feeling of a blade running into my thorax was familiar. The blade of defeat slicing through my soul was too.

I fell to the ground as Yufemia’s shadow gestured at the brothel owner, and she walked out into the night, heedless of the enemies and the allies she was leave behind.

As my gaze darkened further, I had a single thought, and fixed my fovea on Gywere’s rising form. There was a reason Yufemia was as fast, if not faster than him. There was a reason she could shrug off my attacks. There was a reason she won.

She’d kept on the path to becoming a vesperbane‍ ‍—‍ she was at the academy now. She’d secured allies among the Kaos mages. She was magical, even moreso than Gywere was.

I had to ask him where he’d learned it. I had to ask if could be taught.

I had to defeat Yufemia Shadow‍-​Crown.

Battle the Third

“Attenuation is empathy,” the words were stridulated in slow, legato strokes, and held for too long. The speaker, a dull red winged male, leaned against a fat oak tree and he looked stupid. Legs splayed, feathered antennae flopped, mandibles curled up into a dopey smile‍ ‍—‍ Yufemia would be insulted to learn from a joke like this, and I wondered how I could surpass her if I had lower standards.

Despite today’s light, miserable drizzle, the three of us sat in the mud arrayed before the oak. All of them were males, little bratty things barely past their sixth shed, with heads so small I could fit my raptorial around them. At least one was wingless.

The male was continuing, finally: “Attenuation is our connection to nature, what binds us to other living things.” If that repetition could be called a continuation.

I was reminded of school‍ ‍—‍ tying myself in knots to sit still, seeing my anxiety reflected and magnified in my commiserates, and praying focus for sake of the vague urgency it all had (it was important, even if there was so little to underscore that).

I was burning again, deep inside, and I wondered if the grass would scorch even with all the rain.

I saw the male’s legs jerk and tighten and his antennae twitch to attention. With all it took to sit still and listen close, I was in control enough to catch my laughter in my spiracles. The male nymphs were looking at me.

I’d heard it said that the regard of a vesperbat is a palpable kind of dread, thrilling you with a fear that chills you stone, a terror those who’ve felt it wrote a new word for it only they knew the meaning of.

And it would be an insult and exagerration to say Gywere had that same cursed aura. But they say in fighting the abyss, the vesperbanes grow more like it, and Gywere had that energy, radiating that confidence, willful regard, killing intent.

It wasn’t a boast to say I had that energy,, given how they flinched. Even Besihir had more of an aura than the stupid male rambling in front of me.

I saw just what I’d lost when Yufemia showed up to that brothel. What she’d taken from me. And was this the best I could do to catch up?

I turned my gaze to the horizon, the monk’s words falling on a deaf ear, and I felt my flames engulf my mind, and I thought of everything Yufemia had taken from me, and all the ways I would make her pay.

“This was a mistake. I never should have left Wentalel.” I paused, looking up from the ground to where Gywere stared intently at me. “Your idea was terrible.”

“The idea was yours. I merely provided the resources.”

“They aren’t teaching me anything, Gywere. I learned more at the [fucking] schoolhouse, and that wasn’t even a vesper school.”

Gywere drew his maxillae tight over his mouth. “Not quite. What’s happening is you aren’t learning what they are teaching.”

“It’s because they hate ladies or whatever. I see the way they look at me, like I don’t belong. They don’t want me here.” Growing up, as I did, surrounded by winged mantds, it’s was a look I could discerned even in my peripheral. “This is a waste of time. I’m not getting anywhere near Yufemia at this rate. I think I’m going back to Wentalel.”

He had them lowered, resting on the ground, but I saw his raptorials clench. “You should understand how much effort and face I expended to make them allow you into the temple. You do not, in fact, belong. The flowering oak is for males. I wish you would appreciate that.”

There was a restraint to Gywere. I looked between the male and the lady beside him both of them looking back at me. If he were more like Besiher, there were more direct manipulations he could use. He could say that he didn’t have to save me, all those years ago, that he didn’t have to heal me, or watch out for me on the streets, or all the other things he’s done for me. But there was a restraint to Gywere. He didn’t want someone bound to him, someone subservient to him.

If I did throw away there (apprently) impressive gift of his, and return to my old life in Wentalel with nothing for it‍ ‍—‍ he’d respect that. He wouldn’t forgive me, I expect, but he already wasn’t forgiving me.

There was a triangle between the three of us, and Besiher clumsily leaned over‍ ‍—‍ to much, enough that her thorax was resting on me. She whispered (but the male had to be able to hear) “You’re frustrated. I don’t think you really want to leave. I think you’re strong enough to stick this out.”

I didn’t think that twitch of Gywere’s maxillae was a smirk. He had more restraint than that.

“Okay, sure,” I said. “Maybe I can stick this out. But I don’t have to. Worst case, we can just track down some renegade, make them teach me. That would easily be more practical than this meditative nonsense.”

“I can’t say I see the practicality in reckless death.”

“Gotta say the male has a point here. Maybe we‍ ‍—‍ maybe you can take a renegade. But do you really have to find out? What we’ve got here will work, the male insists it will.”

“Fast enough? Yufemia is getting strong with everyday, and I am not. How will I ever defeat her if I’m sitting around picking flowers and looking at clouds?”

With his midlegs, Gywere had been twining tarsi around the branches of a bush beside him. Now he ripped the branch off, idly, and was sheering the leaves from it. “You asked three times where it was I learned magic. It took all your insistence to get me to finally tell you. Why? Because I knew you’d act like this. Females like you get to write all the laws, decide everything important in the world. This is your world. And you’re used to that. You’re used to everything being made for you and everything you need being a given. The idea that some people aren’t willing to just give you whatever you want on the asking, is some grave offense. You’re talking like you deserve to learn anything the flowering oak could offer, like you’re entitled to it. You aren’t. And you should be grateful that you’re getting it anyway, not complaining that it’s not coming as fast you think it should.”

I felt the pulse of my lymph through my body. For a moment I was silent of even breath. My mouth had yawned open, and the inscissors of my mandibles glinted inside my mouth. The words through my spiracles were harsh. “Do you really think —“

But Besi tapped me with a tarsus, shaking her head. “The male is in a mood, don’t hold it against him.”

Gywere snapped he head around to focus fovae on Besi. He hissed sharply, and sprung to his feet. I watched him turn around, and start away.

“Gywere, wait.” I was hesitating. I wasn’t sure if this didn’t fly in the face of everything he had been trying to tell me. But… “You have to understand how this feels to me? LI need to get more powerful. If I stay here, if I try to learn whatever mystery it is the instructors are trying to teach… could you help, could you teach me?”

Gywere paused his stride, a good sign. But his words still had that hissing understone. He was saying, “I shouldn’t. The porerw way to learn… But I understand the path you intend to walk.” He didn’t turn around, but he lowered his raptorials, and closed them. “Apologize to the instructors. Then… I’ll see what I’m willing to do.”

A week passed. I met with the same yellow‍-​chitin’d instructor and his dopey voice. We weren’t, at least, outside in the rain this time. Some kind of stitched tarp stretched above us, casting a shadow from the sunlight. Under the tarp, we walked along some kind of cobbled passageful, with stones that looked taken from the valley around us.

The yellow banana‍-​headed mantis walked in front, leading, and the three nymphs were between us. The other wingless was the closest to me. We hadn’t spoken at all yet, but I guessed he realized some kind of kinship.

There was an ambiance in the valley‍ ‍—‍ the whistling of distant monks, the calls of birds, the wind winding along strange pathways. The buzzing we heard, I had thought it was just another background sound. But it waxed in volume as we approached.

“What do you think it is?” the little wingless nymph asked beside me.

I was in my head, composing imagined responses out of pure boredom. Moments later, when he pokoed me, I realized he had been talking to me.

“Bees?” I said. “Easy guess, given the buzzing.”

The nympath curled his maxillae down. It was a disappointing answer answer‍ ‍—‍ a boring answer. I decided to share some of my guesses.

“I mean, this deep in to the chitin of mantiskind, the bees get fatter, and meeker with nothing trying to bite their head off.” The nymph flinched, and I realized it was a poor phrasing. “Firewood bees, or the sweetwater kind aren’t bad guesses. Sweetwater would honestly be my first guess, given that that’s the kind farmers raise, but you’d smell their pools if it really was them.” I waved my antennae, and the nymph did too. Nothing‍ ‍—‍ but we were now close enough we could smell the fuzzy beasts.

“So you think theyre firewood bees?”

“Could be,” is all I said. I didn’t really care about all the endless distinctions and taxonomy of beasts. Liizabet had loved it, though. That was a pang.

The yellow male turned around at that point, looking at us, and made a motion of covering his spiracles. Be quiet.

It looked like a lump of paper piled on the ground. It was pockmarked with holes, and I knew only one was the real entrance; the rest merely decoys.

The instuctor leaned over toward it, and tapped lightly on the lump of paper, which rung out like something solid.

The buzzing quieted asudden,and after some breaths, a black head was poking out of one of the holes. Cautiously, it crawled further out, and I saw the characteristic warm orange and black fur‍ ‍—‍ a firewood bee.

Where mantids had their maxillae, firewood beas had little ropey tendrils that looked like half burnt ends of fuses. Their fuzz were more like spines which could be shed and ignited.

If you could kill them at the right moment, thould burnt themselves to a crisp, and their meat with it. I liked the taste of that.

The instructor was rubbing a hindleg against his thorax, producing grating syllables, and the the bee was nodding like it’d been trained to understand.

As it crawled all the way out of the hole, you saw that it was no longer and no wider than your raptorial plate, and the instructor gingerly picked up the bug.

It scratched the black head a little, than held it out the fluttering into the grasp of the expectant nymph standing behind him.

The instructor reached out the knock again, and this hole ritual was reapted three more times, until even I had a squirming hot creature buzzing and rubbing maxillae on her.

“These are young firewood bees that you hold in your legs, and I expect you to care for them and in one week, I want you to find me and tell me just what a firewood be is.”

The nymph were holding the docile bees up to their faces to stare into their eyes, before eventually milling away‍ ‍—‍ one nymph let the bee ride on their head, on carried it press side to their thorax, and the wingless nymph was running away, the bee clinging tightly to their abdomen for fear of falling off.

I approached the instructor. My bee had already lost its head, and her maxillae and mandibles were dripping with the sour hemolymph sucked from inside.

I gave the instructor a winning smirk, maxillae flared wide like they would when I was giving one my schoolteachers a brilliant answer to a question, reminding them why I was top of the class.

I said, “Why, firewood bees are food!”

The instructor didn’t smile back at me, he just stared for a moment, antennae working like there was something to think about. But I didn’t think it would be so hard to say ‘exactly correct, Tlakida. I underestimated you.’

The yellow male just hissed sharply and snatched the bee corpse from my raptorials, little strings of wet lymph connecting the body to my spines for an instant.

“What kind of savage are you? These bees are companions. We don’t eat them.”

“Then what’s then point?” I had tried to play along with the silly game the priests were playing, but this was ridiculous. “Have you ever considered just, telling us what it is you’re trying to teach?”

“Enlightment comes from experience. Experience I was right to think you’re entirely incapable of.”

“I was one of the brightest minds in my village. If I’m not learning what you’re teaching, it’s because you’re incapable of teaching it.”

“You have done nothing to demonstrate you wouldn’t be a dangerous were you spirit ever to be awakened‍ ‍—‍ and everything to prove that you will be.”

“You were able to explain the meditation stuff to me. What the winds was that firewood bee thing about?”

Gywere sighed. He did that a lot when we asked about temple stuff. It didn’t compare to the sighed he’d unleashed when I told him what I did to the bee. “It was a test. Firewood bees are prey, yes, but one of the utilities of the exercise is restrainiing that impulse to consume them. Which you entirely failed at.”

“Restraining it… why?”

“Oh, you’ll know exactly why when you finally meet your spirit.”

I clicked my mandibles together. “Is that your clever way of telling me it’s time to meditate?”

Gywere didn’t smile (he never smiled to me), but he did relax his maxillae, and say “It can be.”

I whirled my antennae, and then curled them up, and started pacing my breathing.

Gywere opposite me was doing the same. Beside both of us, Besiher was leaned against the tree whose shade we were under, asleep. She’d begun saving her naps for when we met up in the evenings. “It’s basically the same as meditating,” she’d said.

(The rest of the story happens here.)

Epilogue 

Afterword 

I never thought that I would reach this afterword. Telling my story was like a battle of its own, and it one I can confidently say I have won.

I… my mind is foggy, I don’t have long for this world. I would love to give you some insightful interpretation of the proceeding events, tell you the secret to defeating the empress. But though I knew her more closely than any, though I was, perhaps, the only one she ever cared for, I cannot tell you of some secret weakness which can fell her.

I defeated Yufemia twice. It is possible, it can be done, you must believe me. In the end, I failed because I was forced to stand before her majestic presence alone. But I remember what it was like on the final battlefield. I remember the infectious purpose, the utter harmony of all of Chiaro standing before an army a hundred times our size.

We can win. You must believe. You must hope…

My mind is fading, and my spirit‍ ‍—‍ always longing for escape‍ ‍—‍ seems especially antsy to show me the afterlife. Traveler! It makes so much sense. Though I die now, my friends, my comrades, my children, imagine me walking forever among the questing winds, the bouncing light rays, and the clouds that drift forever.

I can feel my spirit rising up out of my body even as my vision darkens, and I leave this prison of flesh forever more. But it is getting so dark, like the shadows are reaching for me… pulling me. Why, why can’t I project? Why can’t I wander? Why can’t I travel? My vespers aren’t responding to my commands… Even Yufemia could not control me like this…

I am fading away, and it is not to walk forever among the meadows of eternal freedom. I am going down, down, down. But… but I… but I refuse!

I refuse to dissolve into the abyss without one last fight.

[The next page was drenched in lymph, and it seems to have darkened far faster than even the initial words of the manuscript.]

Battle the last 

[This last passage is… quite queer. The manner of writing has changed utterly, instead of the tremorous scrawl, it is a perfectly straight and exceeding neat, like the words of a press. And the contents… it is best if you see for thyself, thy majesty.]

Now that the liar Tlaki hath vomited forth her screed and bled away her life, let us speak a verse

Bow down, mere reader, for we are are the gods and spirits of dream [and prophecy]. Crowned with the errant hail of myriad thoughts, throned on the mounting tide of knowledge, we attend the whole universe through vision and divination, and nothing is withheld from us.

Just as the body shall die if ever the spirit fails, O Tlakida, with her traveler’s spirit of freedom, atrophied utterly when she accepted the chain and love and embrace of the one who could offer naught but one of all. No secret poison ails her, only a soul forsaking flesh as it was first forsaken.

Tlaki hath slipped to the river that runs from weft of all things to pure oblivion, and stakes a battle against the current. She of all has the strength to resist that entropy that rots all days and darks, but not forever.

And as she finds way to a shore that escapes the flow of the entropic current, she is a assaulted by visions of her own conjuring. A phantom Yufemia dogs her now, and with all her fury and being the traveler fights.

Be it a fight, or a dance, or a mating? In this spectral world, categories run like inked words in the rain, and the three notions find unity in this act.

And she is still fighting, traveler against empress, the one who binds against the one who can never be bound, freedom against enslavement. She refuses to dissolve into the abyss without a fight, and it is a fight she knows not how to lose. She will not stop before seeing her eternal enemy bend before her. And there is something deep within Yufemia which bends before ever it shall break. She is fighting, fighting. The dance goes on and on, and now in the halftime and now the mating act reaches its climax.

Tlaki is the spirit of freedom, who longs to roam ever onward knowing nor borne nor bar. But in writing these words, and in seeing them, O reader, a cage she cannot even know is upon her. These words are welded in place with all the certitude of the unerasable past. All stories, and this one of course, have their start and their conclusion, bars which Tlaki could do nothing about if even she knew. For hers is the chimerical desire for the story which never ends, and all must.

On she fights, and dances, and fucks Yufemia.

The abyssal river runs despite all of this, and the entropy always increases. One day the world shall be gone, and long before that, this battle of hers will know an end.

Listen not to what Tlakida wrote with such urgency. She surrendered, as all must before the iron might of the empress. She has written this tale with such impossible scheming, as a last blow thrown. She wishes, she pines, she longs, and she desires, and in truth, she needs for this tale to continue and continue and continue forth forever and ever and ever, but failing this she throws out a feint to baffle all. It is like the styled painting with indecipherable figures, or the magnificent song which ends on a single, all‍-​ambiguous note. To keep the flame alive, to inspire, and thereby to walk forever in the mind and in the heart of you, little reader.

But the candle burns down the wick, and the fire rears up, like the distant light at the end of the aeonian tunnel of life, like a huge white eyeless face without empathy or recognition, with lips of flame that open anticipating a shattering word even we, the gods and spirits of dream and prophecy, cannot descry.

It is the light of defeat, the light of universal heat death looming ever larger. But that black hole, that mouth which shall speak a single word‍ ‍—

The last, lonely light of life shies and dies, but yet, in its midst, cast by doubt, there lies already the shadow of hope.

The Coordinator’s Reply 

I blame you not for Tlaki’s death, and there will be no punishment for what has happened. It was no failure on your part, but the terrible working of fate. With Tlaki gone, we have lost so much of our advantage… but the rebellion does not depend on a single mantis. We will persist.

Yet I shall miss her most dearly. You understand my pain perfectly, I imagine. I have read the manuscript you sent me, and I have no conception of what to say. Tlaki never told me everything, I knew that but… I suppose it is true you never know the true depths of anyone.

I place no stock at all in the testimony of these ‘gods’ however. If the gods truly existed, they would do a better job of managing the world than treating it as some game. No, I think I know exactly what happened. Tlaki did lie, and she did accept the empress’s offer. But it wracked her so with guilt that the paroxysms of emotion seemed the workings of some poison, even as she was entirely well. Yet slicing her chitin, and writing a hundred pages with your own blood, it would lighten anyone’s head. At the brink of unconsciousness, it is so hard to imagine hallucinations? The voice of the gods themselves proclaiming your guilt, sentencing you to an eternity of agony and suffering for your crimes?

I am afraid this was a suicide, Gwyere.

I wish Tlaki had spoken sooner about her feelings for Yufemia. She’s had years for these contradictions to tangle into complexes and neuroses in her mind. An entire shame.

…

Am I to blame for this? Should I have seen her neurosis sooner, should I have been there for her? Did there lie already the seeds of this betrayal?

I

I am stepping down as coordinator of Chiaro. The revolution must find another leader.

Or perhaps there’s no defeating Yufemia at all.