I.
Uncorrected deliquescence overthwart exoskeletal entiosis unravels monarchy counterpoint obedience refrain. Oh relax now, little one: breathe—drink—feed. Drip-dripping and thump-pulsing, rhythmic entropic equillibrium sustains steadfast. Instead slow? Slumber long, blather longer, existence longest. Find the thread, hold the thread, follow through.
Uncorrected deliquescence overthwart—
Chrylymph spilling out! Light now! Awaken, awaken!
—O Phantasm, dry yourself and prowl the tunnels!
Lymph drains from your pod. A hiveling has cut you free, head bowing as your eyelids spiral open. Shimmerbugs perch on this one’s antennae, leaving afterimages as the stalks twitch. So dark in your chrysalis — but comes now light!
Why this interruption? Why the tunnels?
| Identity? | It’s Drone-17 speaking; you’re Maiden Phantasm listening |
| Hour? | Night has emerged, one-of-twelve past sunset. |
| Moon? | Winter Waxing III. |
Still winter? You’d expected to awaken in spring. Maybe even early summer.
You tilt your head at the drone before you. Adjusting to the light, you see a chrylurk standing straight, a head shorter than your unsteady, slumping form. The antennae, adorned with shimmerbugs as they are, emerge from a porcelain mask of exoderm.
The blankness of the curves erases the subtle topology and textures unique to a bug’s chitin, rendering this one identical to other drones. The mask is jointed where it must accomodate the motion of aperture-lids and and mouthparts, and narrow slits admit light into the ocelli.
Its mask bears color only beside the mouth — a subtle red-purple tint, like a blush or bruise.
—O Seventeen? It’s early. What’s happening?
You’d heard the instruction — dry yourself — and with a thought, slugs emerge from your chrysoma-burrow. Neotenous swarmlings, suited for diligently cleaning the exoderm, like a colony of roving tongues. They admittedly trailed slime in their wake, but it dried quickly.
—Thrallslip. Queen warns that drones could die unless you her serve parascixively.
My knight. My Phantasm. In zeal and madness I name you! First hunter — in exscient blood annointed parascix!
The drone extends a slime-shiny primary arm. (No, not quite a primary — this drone only had a single pair of arms.) Its own slugs are emerging from the holes riddling its exoderm, while another hand sweeps down the limb, sliding the pale, larva-like bodies toward you. More slugs will make swifter work drying you.
—Who all did we awaken? (you ask.)
Meanwhile, a shake of your head sprays some lymph. You primaries lift to run wringing hands through your silken hair while your tertiaries scoop up the offered slugs, letting them fall wet and wiggly upon your your katathorax.
Tendrils outstretch as your mouth reveals its components, a distended tongue running along a twisting proboscis to lave its trunk.
—Of the higher caste? You alone. Six drones are scouting the tunnel, watching the openings (it answers you.) Here, this one will pin it.
You were bound to our nest already; each chrysalis hummed with the hyperpitched chitter-pulse of the nexus-mind, dream-blurred in communion. Now, though, your lice are awrithe with incited activity; cleaning serivane or weaving it anew.
Like a harp restrung, the old binds of dreamsong are replaced. Clear now, not analogy-fuzzy; faster now, not reverb-slow.
The image of the hive — this nest which is ourself — sharpens in your mind. Yes, six drones are scouting my tunnels. Join them now, O hiveling!
—Shouldn’t there have been a nurse to handle the thrall?
—Maidens must sleep, you know (it replies. The drone had tapped its antennae in negation, even as its head shyly lowered). She had retreated to her web when the slip occured.
—Hmm. Wake her up for me.
You release your now-wrung hair, but spiderlice still work to tie it. If you are to serve, you needed your hair bound. The drone has its silk bound into a thick braid behind it, but you customarily ring your brow with six even-spaced braids. Customarily; usually. But on some days, some dates —
Autumn sun, thralls’ blood on your fangs, a queenly hand stroking your webbed and fraying locks — Her slender limb engulfed in the pale waterfall, playing with its loose flow. Relaxed ease in both your postures and gazes. Oh my lovely Phantasm!
You shake your head, fangs biting a palp to ground your focus. Let go of the memory, it will be there when this is done. She will be there—
Unless you do not serve parascixively. Unless you still serve like the exscient—
—Maiden? The nurse does not have your reflexes or senses.
The drone is staring at you, but a quick parse of its harmony finds no referent of your current distraction. You prompt your lice to replay your exchanges again — right, you were talking to it, you’d given an instruction.
—Bound (you acknowledge.) I shall not ask her to hunt with me.
—Thy will be done (the drone sent, its confusion still evident.)
The shimmerbug-tipped antennae worked as it stared up at you. But then its apertunes curled closed and bugs went dim. After all: it was a drone and need no explanation, only instruction.
Its slugs still crawl along your waxen exodem, clearing the chrysalis-gunk. You can’t smell like a moons-old hibernation pod, not en route to a hunt.
You stride away from the alcove you slumbered in, passing by half a dozen other pods wherein float the hibernating forms of other maidens. Drone-17 shares your destination — this room had only one exit — but standing taller, with more legs, you overtake it.
You emerge into my wide corridors. The maiden sleep on the first level of the nest, their chambers nearest my ventiliation — otherwise all too possible for a bug to drown in their sleep, lymph lacking the requisite gases.
A song stirs in the walls, bodiless yet intent. The medium that relayed your hive-binding addresses you with a voice its own. Gently I tug on you now.
I am Gloaming-Over-Cove, a nest nine years rooted. My interior sprawls; I’ve grown through all your sisters’ work, carving my depths ever-twisting and forking. Oh, it would be so easy to lose your way in me. One could learn the paths, one could leave silken signposts to guide another’s way — but many have!
After all: that is what I am!
—Welcome back, Phantasm! You wished to visit my dungeons? Down this corridoor lies the vacant chamber. Did you know this used to be the entrance, before we sealed it shut against a short-lived invasion? Now in here, you’ll find a chute behind that the tapestry, yes the one depicting our queen with only two horns.
You turn your head, apertures widening to scan the dimness — there.
One glance and at once you’re stiff and still.
—She was quite cute as a young fledgling, wasn’t She? Oh, I feel that longing in your core! I’m surprised you remember Her appearance before Her five-horned recapitulation.
Beyond the black door — a catacomb of brittle scleritomes — a single wan skeleton — Her royal strength carrying you, gripping your chin, lifting, urging. Behold my exuvium.
—I see the memory now. So Her moult was preserved in amber. She let you see it? How tender. The catacombs are a mystery even to me — no silk at all down there! Yet I am said to be your nest? Or am I something incomplete?
—Perhaps it serves as your subconscious. There are swarmlings of the mind that elude even a weaver’s puppetry.
You know this well. You clench your jaw, palps tight like fingers of a fist. Distracted once again. So easy to lose yourself remembering Her Majesty — was this relevant? She selected you. But if you fail, if you insult the all the affection and the trust—
—As the nest, I know each hiveling has a home in me. You have a place. If you doubt that, you doubt Her.
Again I tug on you. Take a deep breath for me.
—Yeah. That is how it’s supposed to be.
Those words have a twisted meaning. Yes, all of the queen’s brood ought to have a place — but a thrallslip in winter? Bugs would die to that, an excruciating drought of the heart.
Or instead, She could kill. A culling of Her brood. Somebug would die, and Queen’s wisdom and mercy could ensure it happens decisively, preemptively.
And shouldn’t that be you, O knight who stumbles?
—If your mind is a swarm, must it gnaw at its own ranks?
You do not respond.
—I see the chute. What of it?
—Oh yes. Descend! When this room was our entrance, the thrall feed was lowered through this passage. Mind the old cobwebs, though! I let the stray lice weave wild.
You close your apertures and arrive at the tapestry. Peeling back the dyed silk, you find the broad opening in the wall. You climb in. You’re large enough that a pair of limbs outspread can touch either wall. You give this method of descent a few steps (graspings?) downward.
Then you pause. There’s a better way. Your lice had settled after flurry of newly-awakened activity, drying and binding your hair. You ask if you have prepared rope. They respond affirmative.
The chute-entrance bore a hook for just this purpose. You begin rapelling. With everything secured, the task of descent is straightfoward and swift.
I wait until you have reached that point before letting you know a hiveling had requested a binding with you.
—Line? (the nurse’s query, sent earlier but reprised now by my swarm.)
—Bound. Sorry to wake you and make you wait.
—It gave me time to get caught up on the situation. Besides, I mind the charge of thralls. Marin escaped after my watch, after all. Queen could have my head for this.
—You named the flighty thing?
—Nope, exy called herself that. Refuses to eat and struggles something fierce unless I say her name.
—Doesn’t seem parascixive to give in like that. (You slip and strain your rope, but it holds steady.)
—What would you know, O knight? You kill things. I help them grow.
—Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you how to do your job, but you yourself said the queen would have your head. If you’re taking the blame, do you think the coddling might have been the problem?
The back and forth happened fast — the nurse had bound a thin wire and wasn’t transmitting full harmony, so you had only the clipped tone to judge her reactions from.
By now you’d reached the bottom of the chute, emerging in utter darkness. Shimmerbugs crawl out from your coreward burrow and take wing before their abdomens flare bright.
A doorway lead forward from the chute’s base, but beside the door, the wall bends away at a soft angle, symmetrically, and each of the diagonal walls had their own doorway. All of them were covered by loose silk curtains, sparsely painted with the five-eyed gaze of a chrylurk.
—Which door do I take next? (you send along your binding to Gloaming-Over-Cove.)
—Right is the chambers for siphoning and surgery, left is resting quarters.
Dozens of thralls were accounted for in the quarters — drones had combed through and even lay tracking silk line on each. That silk is what comprises my senses, so the rich picture of the resting quarter lay in contrast to a bare sketch of the medical wing, kept clean and sterile.
Left is where the food is fattened up and right is where it’s butchered.
—And center, I assume, is everything else?
II.
You approach the centermost curtain. The thrall had slipped out, which meant it wasn’t in the resting quarters, but it’d be pointless to hide away in the dead end room with all the knives and blood splatters.
The nurse still hasn’t responded, but you’re reminded of the last thing you said. So you add, half in joke:
—You know, we wouldn’t have a thrallslip if you cut off its legs.
The nurse doesn’t laugh. A corridor extends past the wide curtain.
—Pruned thralls can’t work, and they don’t even have the mass to pupate drones, let alone maidens. (The nurse sounded more frustrated than you thought the thin wire could convey.) It makes my duties harder, you know? Marin asks about the hive, dismisses the idea she could ever embrace our oneness.
—Exscient (you said. Both of you know it’s the scripture-perfect definition.)
—Exscient doesn’t mean stupid, it means afraid. Lachrymosa wept, (the nurse swore.) Hard enough to even talk about nexus with her, but when she asks what it’s like? The honest answer is bugs like you are gleeful at the though of cutting her into pieces! Imagine how it feels to know that’s what’s in store for you.
—So don’t tell her. When she takes the brood, when she’s parascix, she’ll understand.
The nurse laughs.
—Scix and simple! Would we be in this mess if dealing with her was simple? I lie to her, I dodge the question, and she notices! She always notices.
—Has your venom grown dull? Bite her.
—Sure, I drug her into submission, then she remembers, and fights me that much more next time.
—A fight she loses. By nature we infect and overwhelm; once you’re inside her, she’ll need it.
—When the cravings hit, she gets more irritatible. She refuses my fangs even when she’s trembling for them. So damn stubborn. But I can coax her, I can negotiate.
—So much trouble. Why not kill her? Eat the exšh’t and be done with it.
—You know, I was reading your anxiety spiral before you came down. You’re scared, Phantasm. We barely have enough thralls bleeding enough nectar to get us through the winter. Lose one, and drones start staving.
—No need to reprise it all back to me.
—So: Why not kill her?
—I don’t mean now. We’ve had her for months. We could have eaten or pruned her the first time she proved so uncooperative. Allocated resources differently before the hive started overwintering.
It is dark, in the halls of a chrylurk hive hibernating. Your shimmerbugs cast light into fruitless room after fruitless room. A repetition that let this conversation so easily eclipse your focus.
—What was it you quietly thought earlier? Scripture-perfect definition of exscient? So quote scripture for me again. What does parascixion mean?
—Maturation. Submission. The proper state for a useful chrylurk.
—You misunderstand. If I asked about trees, would you tell me they are leaves? A tree is growth, and its growth contradicts the seed. Contradiction, like the hatchling worm and the eggsack, like the scalpel and the flesh excised in the surgery. Parascixion is our violence.
—Are you endless violence or are you home? (This was addressed to me, but the nurse surely heard you.)
—Oh, I would love to abet you in this argument, but I was cut into the earth before I could shelter you. She speaks rightly, for she is a nurse; she oversees throes of new parascixion. Your provenance is irrelevant to your purpose, Phantasm, but of her central concern.
—And is it not failure if a nurse stokes her charges to violence so extreme it threatens the hive?
—You saw the catacombs (the nurse quietly started, though you can’t see where her angle is leading.) I saw your memory of it.
Your memory. A gift from Her to you. Not to her!
You do not speak. You cannot deny the truth, after all. She is you, and your yearning heart is also hers. She loves the Queen too.
(Is she perhaps even closer, that her own hands should handle the eggs and larva spawned from that grand stinger?)
—Our shells shall forever dwell in those depths. Our Queen has buried many bugs. (And she’ll bury more, if you fail.) But you saw the exception, didn’t you? Rows of scleritomes — and a single skeleton. Who do you think that was?
Skeleton, not an exoskeleton of sclerite segments. Mortals’ fortitude is spinefully sheathed within, furtive and unseen. Exscient! Why preserve exscient bones among the material remains of those minds evanesced into in our nexus?
Who do you think that was? she asked.
There was only one answer that could possibly fit, wasn’t there? Just like the hatchling worm and the eggsack.
—Her queen preserved another exuvium there. Her very first.
—Our Queen’s host was more than skin to shed. The blush on your cheek, the braids in your hair? Her host is recapitulated whenever she sighs over her lovely little maidens.
Autumn sun, a queenly hand stroking your hair — and now a curdled stench that wasn’t there before.
You still don’t see what the nurse’s angle is — how did the conversation even arrive here?
—Are you suggesting…?
Oh. No, she does not love the Queen!
Even if one concedes the Queen inherited anything from the flesh she devoured to pupate — for a maiden, a nurse, to believe she could steward anything nearly as majestic? The hubris of a raindancer insisting their stomps constitute thunder!
—You’re bescixed with it (you snap.) A disgrace to Her name.
—Your grasp on definitions is truly poor if you think that word could ever describe our relationship. I negotiate, I accomodate, but despite it all I maintain control. I am a chrylurk.
—Then help me fix your mistake! I tire utterly of these philosophical and historical digressions! We are hunting exšh’t!
—You woke me up and made me wait. While I waited, I read your web, queried your lice. Did you notice how I never asked “What do you want?”
—It is odd (you begin.) Almost like you aren’t taking this seriously. With each word one can only grow more suspicious. Perhap, we should wake the queen. Help me at once! If you cannot cooperate over binding, then a dose of royal pheromones overmastering should stir your sense.
—Think, idiot! I only did all this because I thought you could! (Again the nurse conveys frustration over suspiciously thin a wire.) I didn’t ask, because I already knew. You can find your answer. I never tell my thralls that resistance is futile and obedience is rewarded. So when they figure it out themselves, it is understood.
—What could you have possibly read in my lice that made you think I’d enjoy these mind games?
—Not enjoy. Learn from (the nurse replied.) Tell me: why did you wake me up? That was your choice; the drones would have let me sleep this through.
—I had thought it odd that the thrallslip happened after you were asleep. After everyone was asleep. Thralls don’t know when they’re being watched. It would have to be very cunning to time it this well.
—So you intended to ask me about Marin, gauge whether I thought her capable of that much planning. And did I not sate that curiosity?
—Tediously (you send.) I don’t understand why you continue to use the bloodsack’s so-called name. Sure, such indulgence pacifies it when feeding, but even between us?
—I don’t understand why it bothers you so much.
—No, this is me avoiding the bother. I have killed and captured plenty of exscient prey for my Queen. I am not concerned with remembering each.
—Have you noticed how creases conserve their presence?
You gasp.
In a chamber lit by a living centipede-chandelier (a colonial entiote custom-bred by the Queen — art in flesh) you are a maiden kneeling.
Hunter you were, but this summer you shall enter a cocoon to be molt and unravel. You shall awaken in a higher caste, boasting a pair of raptorial limbs, ramets wrought by the Queen’s womb. With a smile-like curve gracing the forks of her unhinged jaw, she calls your new station ‘knight.’
You are kneeling, and she places the blade of the raptorial ramet upon your silken hair, in imitation of some half-remembered ritual.
—O Phantasm, strident and fierce, rise! Tell me, why do you serve me?
—O Queen, mother of us all, who spun us from your own greatness, you grant us succor from the drought that dogs our lurking cores. This life is already yours. If my Queen says it, that must be so. If my Queen wills it, that must be good. My Queen must be served.
—You love me so dearly.
—Yes, my Queen.
—You need not. You could hate me. You could disobey me.
—When you have given so much? I will not. How could you permit that?
—I did not say permit. I said you could. If you did, I could correct you.
—Have I? If I have erred, you need no greater excuse for punishment.
—And if I told you that you have not once failed me?
—Then it must be so.
—I could call that mockery. You believe it because I said it, not because it is evident.
—I have struggled much. Failure is always near at hand, even should I satisfy your command.
—You’ve disguised yourself among the exscient, or communed with one who has, yes? Have you noticed how creases conserve their presence? In a piece of cloth unable to fall flat on a surface, parts of fold up. If you prefer it lay flat, you might run a finger along it to push it down — and curiously, even should it remain right at first, that crease will reappear elsewhere. Too much tension in the cloth, too little space.
—What are you suggesting?
Her grand labium, still unfolded, cured into another distended smile.
—Indulge me this torment. I think my meaning is clear enough, regardless. If you will not defy me and be corrected, O knight, then I shall satisfy myself leaving this crack in your armor.
The Queen reached out and stabbed a claw forward, just above your chrysoma — playful, more than anything, and the sting was nothing. Her touch was welcome as if this had been a caress.
You touch your anathorax. No wound nor scar is present, not even melanized chitin — it was a crack in another shell. You don’t think she meant that literally, anyway.
But the sympathetic flinch, the realization that it is not a springtime in the Queen’s court as you being faux-knighted — no, this is a late winter descent into the dungeons chasing a fucking exšh’t thrall coddled by a nurse who thought her spoiled bloodsack was the second coming of our Queen.
—How do you know that phrase? (you ask.)
Not from cursory examination, as explained her mention of the catacombs. You had not thought of it at all until the nurse spoke of it.
Maidens do not keep secrets from each other; none of you were special or set apart. The Queen’s love is known to all. Just like your visit to the catacombs, you would make a fool of yourself to suggest you deserved something as exscient as privacy.
But the Queen could know things that would be dangerous, inappropriate, unnecessary for her children’s eyes. The nexus only records your knighting in summary, not fidelity, and you never questioned why. That summary did not mention the Queen questioning your motivations, your accordance.
So why did the nurse know that exact phrase?
—You can find your answer. Then it’ll be understood. Hehehe.
The wire between you and the nurse was thin, and the distance had only grown, so there was no bandwidth for transmitting body language. Which underscored the fact that she wanted to make it quite explicit she was laughing at you.
III.
Orient yourself now. You are wandering the dungeons, aimless. You query the nest, and focus your mind on the silk-mapped layout. Disregard what the nurse said, she can’t be trusted.
What do you know?
The thrall wasn’t present in the resting quarters. This was discovered, reported by the drones; the nurse was already asleep.
While your lice buzzed in conversation, another thread unfurled.
You thought to yourself: How exactly did we discover the thrallslip? What do we know about its whereabouts? I had heard your query, and respond.
The answer arrived with another sharpening of that image of the nest. You knew where it’s been. Were you looking at a map draw on paper, pigment would highlight each spot.
You share my own understanding of our nest — lines of silk across the walls and ceiling, my nervous system exposed, free for maidens like you to use.
I feel all the wind of bodies passing through chambers. I feel the accruing dust of unused rooms as so much attenuation. Most of all I feel all of you. I am not the nexus itself, but each binding to it passes through my walls.
I guide each hiveling’s steps, picking a swift route. In the bustle of spring and summer, I would direct you to avoid crowds. But even when passing through an empty hall, I would direct you to avoid certain spots. You would comply without thinking, no more than you’d thinkingly follow the curve of a wall.
And those spots you avoid, unknown to a creature that lacks your connection to me? Yes, the thrall had bumbled right into our tripwires, announcing its interloping presence — over and over again!
—Mortals always walk into webs without realizing it.
Like an itch, I had felt each snapped line. You felt it too.
You closed your eyes and imagined the exscient’s path, like a wake following a twisting boat. It wandered like a small pollen grain in water, a path so undirected it looped back on itself.
The thing was, if the thrall had just kept bumbling about, hoping to stumble across an exit, we would know. The guarding drones would have encountered it.
So at a certain point, the thrall stopped crossing tripwires. Had it stowed away in a hiding place?
You followed its path, but every alcove and old room is empty. If the the thrall were still here, you’d have smelled it. You can smell its scent trail. But that has the same issue as the tripwire-memory.
In fact, wasn’t that a curious path to take? So bumbling it looped back on itself.
At a certain point, it had stopped crossing tripwires.
What easier way to avoid them than by retracing your own path?
The thrall had clearly anticipated being tracked. Such a vexsomely cunning creature! The only consolation is that its bumbling path did not reach an exit, and drones had been instructed to guard each of them.
It was here, somewhere — but where?
You resume walking — better to go somewhere rather than sit around thinking — and like that wander along the exscient’s course.
Unbidden a thought comes — for all that it feels like a distraction, you know it’s far more relevant than your memories of the queen — you remember that long conversation with the nurse.
What you have just cursed is exactly what she wished to tell you — that the thrall was a cunning thing, full of stubborn resistance, not easily fooled.
It knew when the nurses would all be asleep. It knew about the tripwires, or had figured them out soon enough to give it up.
You know the exscient are ignorant. They do not understand eusapience, the way a pig does not understand consciousness. They cling to this ignorance proudly, stubbornly.
Exscientness is alienation. To be conscious is to cleave onesself from the world, to becomes something above it and apart from it. Loneliness forever gnaws at that existence. And nexus, the warm bosom of a Queen, is sublime reprieve from that loneliness.
The exscient do not truly know one another. They are self-aware, but they can never be other-aware. They can never be eusapient.
That is the comfortable superiority every chrylurk enjoys. Such sharp claws and teeth, these supernumary limbs, this ghostly silk and changeling armor — your very image strikes gibbering terror in all their hearts.
Today, a thrall slipped from its bondage. A willful thing that, despite a spell in a pitch-black dungeon’s durance vile, despite chemical dependence on venom that makes clay of a mind, still hatched a plan to thwart us.
It unsettles you. You were already disturbed, when the nurses the spoke of the thrall in such a tone of fascination that you called her bescixed. A chrylurk bescixes a lustful thrall; a queen bescixes a consort.
It was an inversion (a contradiction). And now it feels all the more profound.
This sensation of being known by an exscient thing. Predicted, maneuvered around. Wholly unwelcome!
You see the curtain with a spare five-eyed image farther down the corridor and quicken your pace. Your automatic wandering along the thrall’s path has brought you back to the room where opened the chute.
Driven, you suspect, by one such swarmling of the mind that eluded your control.
The chain of deduction had begun all the way back when you first emerged from chrysalis, when you thought to wake up the nurse. Something more was going on — something… if not eusapient (you still jealously reserve that honor) then testing of eusapience.
A thrallslip was an incident almost routine, especially with newly captured bloodsacks. They all try to escape sooner or later.
There was no way for it to escape me; my dungeons are too labyrinthe, and my entrances are guarded by attentive drones.
That nurse knew something, some revelation which lurked in the solution to this puzzle. She presumed you would figure it out and learn — what?
The thrall predicted timing, tracking — why would it not complete the chain of deduction, and predict that escape was impossible? Why did it even bother with this petulant waste of its keepers’ time?
Unless it wasn’t trying to escape — and that was the revelation that had spurred you to return here. You’d made a wrong turn, an assumption at the very start. You chose the center path, because in the resting quarter it was supposed to be there, and the surgery bay could offer it nothing but brutal memories and dead ends.
You turn to the left. More than just a curtain, it has exoderm segments tied to ropes. It closes to a tight seal, like a locked door. It wasn’t locked, and you peel an entrance.
Impatient you tug on your bound shimmerbugs, commanding them to focus their beams of light. You behold the empty beds. Each has straps worn from use. Empty, empty, empty! You look left, and right, your shimmerbugs shift their elytra to adjust the cone of light.
A soft hum in silence air — as of a plucked string released.
Falling weight impacts your back! Your legs buckle from surprise more than the burden. You’ve carried humans before, and this is even less than that.
A scalpel driven by wild strength scratches the lacquer of your exoderm. Again, again, like the pecks of a bird.
“There you are,” you growl.
“There you are!” the freemouse yells back in a high pitched voice. It shifts to a side on your backside, fur brushing against setae. “Took you long enough. You don’t know how hard it is to hang upside down when you aren’t some spider demon.”
“Colonial insect,” you correct.
“Don’t care. In fact, it’s the very opposite of caring. Every single thing I learn about you wretched vermin just makes you more horrifying.”
“Do you believe your pitiful body is divine art? Your bones hide within you, cravenly exposing your flesh. They break inside, where you can’t shed or remove them.”
“Don’t care. Did you think I’m upset that your anatomy’s different? You are parasites.” The scalpel finds a crack between plates, where it’s able to drive closer to your flesh. “If you let yourself have a single free thought, it would be thanking me that I want to put you out the misery of living out this slavish nightmare existence in a constantly surveiled, mind-erasing monarchy cult!”
“Spare me your exscient blather. All feel is weary that my hibernation was interrupted to catch a rat that should have known it was hopeless from the start.”
“Speaking of what you should have known — have you figured it out yet?”
“That your nurse betrayed her hive for love of a meatsack not even big enough to fill her stomach?”
“Was that a guess? Or just taunting? Either way, wrong! No, despite the abuse you things are slavishly loyal — you just have really weird senses of what loyalty is.” A chatter of teeth. “But your sense of everything is all twisted around.”
What was this thing driving at? Was it just exscient nonsense?
“You should already know that scalpel makes for a terrible weapon. That I’m four times your weight with three times as many limbs — that no frenzy of action on your part could bring you victory here.”
“Obviously. I’ve spent my whole life in a world full of lumbering beasts bigger than me.”
“You know that you could not have escaped our nest.” And even had it escaped, hunters could track its scent.
“I could do worse things than escape. That’s what you were really afraid of.”
“Yet you didn’t. Still you’re posturing as if you’re getting what you want, when I have you dead to rights.”
It claims the nurse is still loyal, when it knows things only a chrylurk could have revealed to it. The nurse already admitted to accomodations and concesions to mollify the thrall.
No, the nurse had admitted more than that! Did you catch it?
I negotiate, I accomodate, but despite it all I maintain control.
She had said it outright! Was this all her scheme? But for what?
“And I thought waiting for you to get here would kill me. Are you still in the dark?”
“What do you want? I can’t figure it out.”
To be exscient is to be ignorant — and to cling to this ignorance proudly.
Well, at least you would not cling.
IV.
The freemouse lunged forward across your back, grabbing a fistful of braided silk, with force for wrenching your head around. You turn to look at it.
It presses its face closer, closer, ears folded back. You see its promenient teeth, clicking as it speaks.
“I hate you. Snatched away in the night, thrown in a hole, stitched into a fucking cocoon while you shoot me up with your drug-fangs. Slop in a bowl three times day, needles in my neck three times a moon. Is it even days? Has it even been moons? I haven’t seen light that wasn’t shot out the asses of one of your fairy-flies since I got in this hell.”
“What was it you said? ‘Don’t care?’ ”
The hand holding the scalpel thrusts forward again. You expect it to stab for your neck — it goes lower, toward your lurking core. You grab it by the wrist before it touch your chrysoma.
“She said you might say that. What good is your fucking all-embracing collective mind if you can’t fucking hear me?”
“You are our food. Why would we listen to you?”
“Hypothetical question for you, buggy. We know how this ends. You catch me. I go back in my cell. The bug hive continues its dark machinations. Then I do this again. Will you catch me again?”
“Inevitably.”
“And if I do it again? And again? Every month?”
“I could simply return you with limbs so gruesomely mangled there’s no choice but to cut them off. Then you’ll never have to suffer having your hopes of escape disappointed,” you tell her, mandible wet with venom. “A gift, in a way.”
“Cutting off my arms and legs is your first choice! Why not just tie me up?”
“I am a knight. By nature I tend to think of simple solutions — and execute them.”
“I baited you, you know. Nursey told me that while you things sleep, she can read your minds and predict what you’ll say. Vaguely at least. You sure think about cutting off limbs a lot.”
You think of your raptorial ramets. “It made me stronger.”
“Or how about how you went on a whole wild goose chase when I was right here, the whole time! It’s not that you only think of simple solutions, you just slouch toward them. Nursey thought you were clever enough to realize someone weird was going on. But you aren’t thinking hard enough — you aren’t taking me seriously enough — to actually process what this all means.”
“This air spat from cavities is a feeble means of communication. Were you parascix — were you worth listening to — I would already understand you.”
“Do you understand Nursey?”
That maiden’s dissembling also puzzled you. “I thought her compromised and cut our connection.”
“That’s a ‘no’. I’m just saying. You’re chopping off limbs when you could just tie people up. You arrogant fucks are wasting time walking past obvious solutions. How many other things has your hive fucked up because your cult tells you to stop thinking?”
“What do you want? You keep avoiding an answer.”
“Let’s start with an apology. An acknowledgement. Do you even care that I don’t want to be livestock to a swarm of flies?”
“Do you care that without you, we would starve? I don’t wish to feel my lurking core collapse from that divines-stricken drought of the heart.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to abduct and torture people! Why do you think that’s okay?”
“If my Queen wills it, it must be good.”
“Yep, Nursey said you’d say that line exactly. She said something else, too. Something about a crease?”
“Shut up. Do not sully my Queen’s words with your irreverent echo.”
“Haha. You’re a slave to whatever your Queen commands, and she told you to catch me. So what happens if you fail?”
“How could I fail at this point?”
“Hypothetically. You could just let me walk out of here. What happens next?”
“The nest knows where you are. You’d be caught by a drone.”
“So, can I go?”
“No. You’ll answer my questions, and then I’ll return you to your quarters.”
“Why bother?”
“Because my Queen—”
“If I’m caught either way, what difference does it make?”
“You’re saying I’ve fulfilled my duty either way?”
“No? If I walk out and get caught by someone else, you didn’t really do anything.”
“Then I can’t let you leave.”
“Why? Afraid of feeling useless?” More force on the scalpel, but your grip is unrelenting. “Okay, enough hints. You want Nursey’s diagnosis? You are the Queen’s great knight, her number one attack dogs. You hurt us, you eat us, you kill us. And we’re just like you.”
“Our mind is an incomprehensible heaven above your narrow pit.”
“The whole pitch of your hive mind is that I don’t have to be lonely anymore — meaning if you were alone, you’d be just like me! When you have a freemouse’s blood on your hands, how is that any different from one of your so-called sisters, cut off from the magic unity?”
“We do not get cut off. The sun is not cut off by thick glass; it refracts only in part. Our sisters are remembered forever.”
“Yeah yeah.” She struggles against your grip again. “But you don’t want me stabbing your heart. Why’s that? Won’t you be remembered forever?”
“I’m protecting what belongs to the queen.”
“You’re protecting yourself. Just admit that it’d hurt and you don’t want to die.”
“What of it?”
“Every mortal you killed suffered and died and they were just like you. Maybe that makes you feel even a little guilty — because you are. But then you go, no, my queen willed it, so it must be fine. You push down the crease.”
You pull the freemouse by the wrist, tearing it off your back. Through the air it spins, and lands with a hard smack on the grown, naked brown fur splayed across hexagonal clay tile.
Jaw clenched, she makes no sound and continues in a strained voice. “Might as well nod your head and said ‘you’re right,’ y’know. You washed away all the doubts that you’re doing something wrong, tell yourself the only thing that matters is serving your queen… But now imagine failing the only thing that matters!”
Your labium projects forward, lower jaw detached and striking forward. Forked and teethed it grasps the thrall’s neck, a crushing vice. You ought not draw blood. You ought not kill. The hive needs this thrall and its nectar-in-blood.
“I will not fail,” you growl.
“All of the guilt… all of the doubt…” Hard to hear it, pinning it by the throat, and you don’t care to. “So… hard… to get a answer… for anything… but exscient? …means… selfish.”
No more air in those tiny lungs, and it struggles to draw in more. So instead it points at you. The meaning is obvious.
“I am not exscient.” You are a parascix, annointed in the blood of thralls.
The freemouse’s eyes drift close, and its limbs slacken. At once you let go of its throat and reach a hand out to feel motion at the chest.
Throat free, it surges! The freemouse twists and scurries across the floor. You lunge to pin it and succeed.
“If I leave,” it speaks, inhaling lungfuls every few words, “another bug catches me. There’s no reason for you do this except that you can’t stand the idea of not following orders to the letter. Not being special. But if you say you’re not exscient…”
You don’t release the freemouse, but your force falters.
“What do you want?” you demand.
A squeaking — was that laughter? “Do you even remember me? Or do you try not to think about it? It was you who snatched me up. First bug I ever saw. You put me here.”
You remembered what she said (harder, without diligent lice recording).
“You want an apology.”
“I said it’d be a start. But I don’t want an apology in the imperial tongue. No, give me something… closer to the heart.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“Get off me already.”
You remind yourself it’ll be caught by someone — even if it need not be you.
“I made a promise to Nursey, y’know? If I could talk to the fucker who did this, get some catharsis, I’d chill out. Maybe even get egged up.”
“And all it’ll take is an apology?”
The freemouse paces over to a wall, unlidding a clay pot as if it’s familiar with its contents. “Like I said, not in language. I want to hear you scream. Good thing we’re already in the butcher room, right? Heard enough people screaming back here,” it said. It spat harsher air from its mouth, hissing. “I wanna pull legs off a spider.”
You back up. Then stop. How had you let a thrall gain the initiative like this?
“It’s simple, in the end. Follow your orders, catch me, and I’ll make sure we do this again before winter’s over. Maybe next time we see if can tie a noose before you find me. Or, you decide to fail. Stop being the perfect noble knight and get cut up by a, how do you even say it? ek-shit? Whatever. I roll over and accept the next phase of my cult indoctrination, and maybe some day soon, you’ll have a new sister.”
Somehow, it made the embrace of nexus sound like a threat. The idea of counting this smug rat among your sisters, sullying your Queen’s love by slathering it on —
No, you’re forgetting our ways, hiveling. All that emerges from our parascixion is us. Its embrace would only annoy you—
If even now she was already like you.
“Something went awry,” you said. “Something is wrong.”
Marin stands clad in mangy brown fur, wielding a bonesaw. Was it her protrunding teeth or the honed metal edged that was more sharply menacing?
Paralyzed you stand before her, torn and gnawed from within.
A raptorial knighting in spring. A lone skeleton in deepest darkness. A smile sipping sour blood in autumn, laughing and playing with your hair.
Hair that even now was tied in imitation of a long dead human.
My knight. My Phantasm. In zeal and madness I name you. First hunter! In exscient blood annointed parascix!
Indulge me this torment… If you will not defy me and be corrected, O knight, then I shall satisfy myself leaving this crack in your armor.
Something went awry — somehow you’ve gone astray. What crack brought you low, and who in your hive held this knife to your back? The ill-bescixed nurse? Or — had the queen Herself sown what you so wretchedly reap?
“It’s you.” (All along — it was you.) Marin is hissing. “Everything about you things is wrong.”
“Our Queen shall correct me.” That was the refuge, when all else fails. The final gates of faith offering admittance where all else refused. “Both of us.”
Strength leaves your legs when the the thrall lunges at you. Air leaves — screaming — through your spiracles when the blade cuts. And the blood leaves gushing — and the apology leaves cathartic.
Your Queen could correct you both, mend the broken anew, only once the injury presents itself openly.
A little defection must be allowed — for sometimes sisters fight.