The house was quiet. A deathly silence hung in the air. It stifled thought, and emotion… it made her wish she was anywhere but here.
Normally, the early morning sunlight streaming through the living room windows would make the room seem happy, cheerful, but not today. Today it just made it seem bleak. Like the sun rising after a night of natural disaster, only for it to reveal the true extent of the carnage.
It cast the heart of her home in stark contrasts. Light and dark. Sunlight and shadow. Life and death.
Rita walked into the room silently, having come down the stairs, and sat down on the couch. Her mother was in her chair, unlit cigarette in one hand and tear-streaked eyes that betrayed that she hadn’t slept last night.
“Turns out the woman had emotions after all,” Rita thought bitterly.
Her mother was a severe-looking woman, with high cheek bones and piercing eyes, and a way about her that screamed of self control to the point of repression.
But not today. Today her usually tightly wound bun hung loose, cascading ringlets of dark brown hair tinged with silver wreathed around her head like a funeral shroud. Strangely vulnerable.
For a while, neither of them said anything. Words felt… empty. Meaningless in the face of what had happened. Her mother hadn’t smoked since Rita had been born. Where she’d gotten the cigarette, Rita had no idea, but she knew that her mother would have sat with the unlit smoke in her hands this whole time. It’s how she dealt with things. Normally it irritated Rita when she got like this, neither smoking nor not smoking, just hovering in between, but not today. Today Rita wished she had a way to cope too.
“So…” Rita finally croaked, breaking the silence, her own throat swollen and sore from crying, “what now, Mom?”
Her mother took a deep breath, blinked, returning from whatever journey her mind had been on. Her hands shook as she carefully placed the cigarette on the coffee table, one of the rare occurrences of ‘mess’ that happened in the house. When she spoke, she did so slowly, her voice brittle. Brittle and cold. Any lingering trace of vulnerability gone.
“I suppose I will need to phone the funeral home to make arrangements. Then I will call the lawyers. They need to be notified.”
“Mom…”
“Then the insurance company. The paperwork should be in the documents cupboard…”
“Mom!”
Her mother started at her voice, her eyes seeming to shake off some of the daze as her gaze sharpened. The last five hours had been a nightmare of ambulances and hospitals, of panic and despair… and all her mother was going on about was… life! Normal stuff! Couldn’t she see that none of that mattered? Couldn’t she be a human fucking being for once in her life?
Couldn’t she see that…
“Mom… how can you be so calm? Dad’s… Mom, he’s gone.”
Rita’s voice fell away, the last words coming out as just a whisper, as if they’d been swallowed by the void in her heart.
Her dad. The warmth and the light in her life, all snuffed out. Her big, fuzzy teddy bear who’d hold her in his arms and tell her sixteen year old self that everything was going to be okay. He was just… gone. Forever.
“I understand that you’re upset, dear. But we musn’t wallow, no matter how much we would want to, “ her mother replied. “Life goes on, and so must we.”
“But… how?” Rita asked, nearly starting to cry again.
A heart attack. A fucking heart attack in the shower. For two hours the doctors had struggled to bring him back before they’d called it. Two hours of not knowing, two hours of praying and hoping and dreading. And then the doctor had come out and she’d seen the look on his face and she’d known.
The worst was the guilt. Was it her fault? Would she have heard him sooner if she hadn’t been listening to music? Could she have saved him if she’d gone immediately instead of first calling out? Should she have tried CPR?
“By getting ready for school. Come, get dressed,” her mother said, getting up and dusting herself off.
“School!?” Rita asked incredulously. “You cannot be serious!” Surely even her mother wouldn’t be that cold?
She was. “I think it’s best if you return to normality as soon as possible. Go to school, see your friends, focus on your marks. It’s the best way to move on.”
Focus on her marks?? She’d always known her mother was cold, but this was something else. She was still in shock. She’d barely slept two hours last night! Fuck her marks! But… she knew the look her mother gave her. The one that meant ‘you will do as I say, or I will make you’.
As Rita stomped angrily up the stairs to change for school, she heard her mother calling after her: “It’s what your father would have wanted!”
Rita sat upright, suddenly wide awake.
Or rather, she tried to. She got about halfway before realizing her new body didn’t quite bend that way, and flopped back onto her back.
A dream. It had been nothing but a dream. A dream of a memory that didn’t actually belong to her. She pulled off her blanket, yawned and stretched until she felt her joints pop, her legs curling and uncurling as she worked the stiffness out of them.
She’d figured out a somewhat comfortable way to sleep on the single bed in her room. It involved swiveling all of her legs to point downwards, towards the foot of the bed as far as they could and letting the tips hang over the edge, sticking out from under the blanket. It meant she woke up with stiff legs and cold feet, but it was still the most comfortable sleep she’d had in days. She’d tried sleeping on her stomach, hugging her pillow, but her legs just didn’t quite fit that way. They kept wanting to stick up past her head and seeing giant, hairy spider legs next to your face whenever you opened your eyes was not conducive to a good night’s rest.
As per usual after waking up, she quickly dove into her mind-space, the white, featureless place in her head where Alice was.
There was no change that Rita could see, either for better or for worse. She’d hoped that with a bit more time, Alice would start to ‘fill out’ again, but there was no such luck. Alice looked the same, ghastly, open rips in her form the same as they were before.
When she returned to the conscious world shortly afterwards, she finally performed the complicated process of rolling off the bed and onto her feet. Then she scuttled over to peek out the window through her curtains.
Hmm. The Nightmare’s misty boundary blocked most of the view, which was expected, but the sun was already high in the sky… because that’s where it always was. Right.
She rubbed her face, trying to get rid of the last dregs of her horrible memory-dream and wake up properly. For the umpteenth time, she wished that her room had an en-suite bathroom, or even just a bowl of water so that she could wash the sleep out of her eyes.
Or even a cup of coffee, for that matter.
Her mind drifted back to the dream. God, how much she’d come to hate the words “It’s what your father would have wanted,” in the subsequent years. She was really glad it wasn’t her shit to deal with anymore. That was Earth Rita’s problem now.
She wondered how Earth-Rita was doing. Was she happy? Had she hooked up with Cute Guy? Or had she ruined that relationship through insecurity and neediness like she’d ruined all of her others since… since…
Rita shook her head. It wasn’t her trauma. It shouldn’t affect her, and yet it did. How annoying was that? Stupid Tree. Couldn’t it have grabbed memories from someone a little bit more sane?
She grabbed her tronic from the bedside table and strapped it to her arm with the spider silk armband lying next to it.
She’d made it herself, just a few days ago, a simple band of flattened silk wrapped around itself a couple of times with a little bit of very carefully applied glue so that it wasn’t sticky against her skin. It was crude and looked a bit like something was nesting on her arm, but she didn’t care too much. Honestly, she was just surprised it was still intact.
Then she picked up the other article of clothing she’d made and held it up in front of her face, trying to decide if she felt brave enough to wear it outside her room.
It was a simple silk chest wrapping. Almost a corset, but not quite. Basically, the same as her armband, just bigger.
After she’d discarded her bra, Rita had found it necessary to replace it with some cloth wrappings to prevent any discomfort from moving around on skittering legs. Unfortunately, the rough linen cloth that Justine had managed to scrounge up for her had chafed like hell over some of her most sensitive parts. She didn’t know whether the women here were just tough as nails or whether none of them had simply been willing to share any of their softer and no doubt more expensive material.
So she’d made do. Her spider silk was certainly a lot softer and gentler than anything else she had access to, especially after she’d experimented with the consistency a little, and because any remaining bits of exposed glue had dried while she’d been sleeping, it was only very mildly sticky.
But it had one serious problem. It had technically come out of her butt.
She knew she was being silly. That it was probably far cleaner than the sleeping shirt that she was wearing, and that it was certainly cleaner than the gore-encrusted clothes she’d worn out in the Nightmare. Plus, she was already wearing an armband from the same source anyway. But still, something about putting it on her chest bothered her. It was like the difference between touching a dirty nappy and rubbing it all over your face.
She picked up the strip of linen she’d been using as a chest wrapping the past few days and felt the fabric between her fingers.
Yeah, she’d felt smoother cheese graters. Fuck squeamishness, butt-silk it was. She was going to have to get over her hangups at some point, anyway.
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Rita slipped off her shirt, pulled the silk over her head and wiggled inside. Oof, she’d underestimated her size just a teensy bit, but that was probably for the best. If it had been too loose it would have been useless. Besides, spider silk had a bit of stretch to it. She moved her torso and arms around, testing the range of motion. It was actually quite comfortable!
Slipping on a reasonably clean shirt over top of her silk underwear, she skittered over to the door of her room and knocked. She wasn’t going to go out wearing nothing but spider silk. She wasn’t quite that brave.
In four days, despite the mist around the Nightmare Tree returning to where it had always been, there had been no episodes of sudden, unexplained rage, giving Rita hope that she’d finally beat that nonsense. Still, she’d remained a pseudo-prisoner just in case. Rather safe than sorry, after all.
Justine had been assigned to be her semi-permanent bodyguard-slash-prison warden and had temporarily moved into the room next door to hers. She’d been a friendly, if slightly creepy companion.
They’d established a sort of system where Rita got locked into her room when she wanted to sleep and knocked on the door to let Justine know that she was up and wanted to come out. But today there was no response to her knocking. Either Justine was still asleep herself or was just off somewhere else, possibly making use of the communal lavatory at the end of the corridor. Rita sighed, tried knocking once more, then settled down on the thin, threadbare carpet on the floor to wait. There was nothing else to do.
Theirs wasn’t a particularly good system, but it had worked okay for them up to this point.
In the end, Rita didn’t have to wait long before there was the sound of a key turning in her lock and the door swung open. It wasn’t Justine who peered inside, however, but Gora.
“Hey, good morning,” she greeted with a smile and a rumbling voice. “Join me for breakfast?”
“Hi Gora,” Rita replied, giving her a small wave. “I think I’m supposed to wait for Justine. She said Duncan wanted her with me at all times.”
“Nah, that was before,” Gora said, waving her newly healed arm dismissively. “Duncan didn’t want the two of us alone together, but it’s fine now.”
Rita raised an inquisitive eyebrow but got to her feet and followed Gora anyway.
Why would Duncan not want them alone together? Did he suspect some kind of… fraternization? Eww. Not that she had anything against Gora specifically, she just didn’t swing that way.
Even if the two metre demon looked more masculine than most of the guys she’d dated.
At her insistence, they stopped at the toilets before heading down the stairs to the food hall. On the way, she noticed Justine’s door was still closed. Apparently, she was still sleeping. She must have stayed up late.
Rita had spent most of her time during the past four day alternating between sleeping and groggily wandering downstairs alongside Justine to stuff her face with whatever food was on offer in the food hall. Meals only came twice a day, but the Delvers Guild apparently made sure their members ate well. Plus, they were free, so hey, whatever.
She’d also checked in with Samual once or twice. He was still in the medical ward, chained to his bed to stop him wandering off, much to his chagrin. Apparently the one time they’d let him off he’d promptly started working on repairing his armour, so the doctor had insisted they bring him right back until he managed to rest.
As for the other delvers… well… it turned out that most of them hadn’t known that she was a Nightmare Spawn, initially. The friendly curiousity that she’d been greeted with initially had mostly been due to them thinking she was some exotic transfer from a faraway Guild, and not the newest horror to crawl from the metaphorical stinking pits of the Nightmare. As the word had spread, a goodly proportion of them had shifted their attitude from appreciative interest to suspicious wariness, especially as they’d discovered she was effectively a prisoner.
Perhaps, in hindsight, having herself locked up had not been the best way to convince people she could be trusted.
Still, none of them actively tried to hurt her, and as long as that remained the case, she was happy with the state of affairs.
“Why did Duncan not want us alone together?” Rita eventually asked as she and Gora fell into the stream of other delvers heading down the stairs for breakfast.
“I think he thought you’d fucked with my mind somehow,” Gora said casually, making Rita stumble over a step despite a plethora of legs.
“I thought we were past all that nonsense, but okay,” Rita asked, shivering a little. It seemed Duncan still didn’t trust her all that much, either. “So what changed?”
“A Delver Mage who could do a mind scan arrived at the Outpost yesterday. Him, Duncan and a couple others ambushed me while I was sleeping and rooted around in my head a bit,” Gora remarked with remarkable calm. “I think they’re happy now.”
Rita froze mid-step, forcing everyone behind her to come to a sudden halt. Even if her legs didn’t take up the entire width of the stairwell, nobody seemed to want to pass that close to her. “They did what? Gora, that is not okay! They can’t just… mindrape you like that!”
“Don’t be so melodramatic. It was hardly that bad,” Gora sighed and rolled her eyes. “A couple of fancy magic words, some pretty lights and a slightly fuzzy feeling behind my eyes for a few minutes and it was over. They just had to make sure you hadn’t altered my emotions or took control of my mind or anything.”
“What? How would I even do that?” Rita exclaimed.
“Over in the Three Hills Nightmare,” an older Delver with thick sideburns that was stuck behind her on the stairwell interrupted, “there’s this little white worm. Crawls into your ear when you sleep outside of Campfires. Nests in your brain and takes over your body. Nasty little thing. Hard to get back out without the right magic. You never sleep outside a Campfire in Three Hills.”
“There you go. Brain worms,” Gora stated calmly, as if the old delver hadn’t just revealed that a horror movie plot was a real thing here.
“Are you being serious?” Rita turned and asked the older delver, ashen faced. “How long do they take? Do I need to get myself checked?”
“Heh, don’t worry. Grailmane Nightmare doesn’t have em,” he replied easily.
Then, just as Rita and Gora started moving again he spoke up again.
“Yet.”
The eating hall was a large, high-ceilinged chamber in the lowest levels of Triskellion Outpost. Two thick, stone pillars in the middle of the room seemed to fuse smoothly with the floor and ceiling, making them look like cave stalagmites rather than man-made pillars. Between them was a fire pit that was sometimes lit to cook whole pigs or sheep.
It looked like a smoke hazard until you noticed the vents set discretely into the ceiling far above. It likely exhausted out into the courtyard in the middle of Triskellion, to rise up through the outpost’s central ‘chimney’.
Set along the edges of the chamber were lines of stone tables with long, stone benches next to them, all seemingly grown out of the rock itself. The walls were decorated with various skins, furs and trophies, all presumably taken from various creatures inhabiting the local Nightmare next door. She’d even recognized a particularly furry looking pelt as having originally belonged to a teether.
“Gora, what did the old guy mean ‘yet’?” Rita asked quietly as they stepped inside and headed for the table loaded with food in the middle. Meals were usually buffet style, with a combination of food types to cater for everyone, whether they were having breakfast or dinner. It wasn’t particularly extravagant food, but the delicious smell of scrambled eggs made Rita’s mouth water.
“Sometimes, Nightmare Spawn ‘spread’ to other Nightmares, or so I’ve heard. Or a specific gimmick gets copied from one Nightmare to another, but in a different form,” Gora replied as she grabbed a plate from the stack. “Like, the Masked and their freaky hivemind thing. I heard one of the other Nightmares originally had these stubby dog-things with bone masks that hunted in perfectly coordinated packs. Then, a couple of years later, bam. Masked.
“So, eventually this Nightmare will have freaky brainworms too?” Rita asked.
“Nah, it’s not like every monster gets copied, or we’d spend a lot more time studying the stuff from the other Nightmares. As it is, I barely know what’s out there, beyond rumours. It’s really rare for it to happen. Old Erik is just a paranoid, cynical old bastard. I wouldn’t pay much attention to him. Oooh, they have those little sausages I love!”
Rita quietly resolved even harder never to set foot in any Nightmare ever again.
After collecting their plates of food, they found Zaxier and Bob sitting at one of the tables, finishing the last of their meals.
“Hey guys! How are you doing?” Rita exclaimed happily, leaning over to give Bob a hug as he struggled to climb out of the bench.
“Hello, Miss Rita. Hello, Miss Gora,” Bob greeted them politely. “We’ve already eaten but my Ma says that it’s not polite to get up while other people are still busy.”
“Your mother is quite correct, sit back down, Boy,” Zaxier grinned up from where he was sitting on top of the table, his tail wrapped around him. “And greetings to my fellow travelers. Please, come seat yourself at our table. Bob, move over to give our guide some space.”
Seating was a bit tricky. Gora was slightly too large for the benches and had to sit sideways with only one leg between bench and table, despite them having clearly been designed with larger folk in mind. For Rita, if she tried sitting on a bench she either had to sit sideways, taking up the entire one side of the table, which wasn’t very comfortable anyway, or she blocked the entire aisle where people were supposed to walk with her humongous rear.
Instead, she sat on the ground at the end of the table where there were no benches, squeezing herself in between one table and the next. The two delvers sitting at that table elected to get up and leave, muttering among themselves.
Rita chose to believe that it was a coincidence. That they’d just happened to finish eating, just as she sat down.
“You look much better, Bob,” Gora greeted before digging into the mountain of food that she’d piled onto her plate.
“Yup! The doctor was a really nice. He gave me a candy,” Bob replied with a wide, gap-toothed smile. His face looked almost completely healed from where the piece of rock had struck it, with nothing but some minor swelling in his cheek and a few yellowish-brown marks on his jaw. Unfortunately, no amount of healing was going to replace his missing tooth.
“That’s a pretty quick recovery, I think,” Rita remarked between bites.
“Indeed. The miracles of modern magical medicine,” Zaxier replied. “We are both much better, thank you. There is a reason I dislike resorting to the kind of magic that I did without proper preparation, and it is not just Bob’s unfortunate inexperience with the correct casting positions. The backlash is quite something else. But how are you two doing? We haven’t seen Rita since we came out of the medical ward. I heard that you had been imprisoned?”
“Uh, voluntarily imprisoned,” Rita clarified, swallowing down a bite of delicious, fluffy scrambled egg. “You know, for everyone’s safety. Especially mine.”
She actually hadn’t seen any of the other members of the group, other than Gora, at all during the past few days. Then again, she’d been in her room, sleeping, most of the time.
“Yes, Gora told me about your little… ‘anger issues’,” Zaxier remarked, his tail flicking to and fro behind him. “You feel no urge to attack right now?”
Rita shook her head, still chewing. “Nope. Not in the slightest. I think I might really be too far away from the Tree or something. You have no idea how relieved I am.”
“I see. I must admit, you look far healthier than you did during our expedition,” Zaxier said. “Cleaner too.”
“You’d be surprised what a bath and three days of sleep can do,” Rita replied, smiling.
They continued making idle chatter in between bites of food until Rita spotted someone familiar determinedly making his way over to them from across the room.
“Samual!” she exclaimed, leaping to her feet and startling the two closest tables of delvers into momentarily reaching for the weapons at their belt.
She glanced around at the angry looks she was receiving before awkwardly sitting back down.
“Greetings,” was all Samual said when he reached their table, before taking a seat next to Rita.
“Hey man. Good to see they finally let you out,” Gora grinned, pieces of sausage sticking out between her teeth.
“Where’s your food?” Rita asked, looking puzzled at Samual’s empty hands.
“I will eat later. Are you unharmed?” he asked Rita.
“Yep!” she replied. “I finally managed to get some proper sleep and now I’m right as rain!”
“And ready to kill us all,” one of the delvers from the next table over remarked just loud enough for them to hear.
Just like with all of the other snide remarks that had been made just barely within earshot over the past few days, Rita chose to believe that it had been part of a conversation that she’d missed some context of and that it had nothing to do with her. That any applicability to what she had just said was pure coincidence.
Samual, apparently, had made no such decision.
The expression on his face never even changed as he casually stood up and walked over to the three delvers, who turned to face him as he approached. Rita hadn’t even noticed that he hadn’t just gone to get food until the man who’d made the remark spoke up.
“Eh? You…”
That was as far as he got before Samual grabbed the back of the man’s head and slammed it into the table with enough force that the sudden, loud crack could be heard even through the hubbub of conversation. The entire room fell silent as the poor man who’d just had his head bashed slowly slid onto the floor, unconscious.
Calmly, as if nothing had happened, Samual turned around and walked back to their table, taking his previous seat. Their entire group just stared at him, frozen in shock.
“Why the hell did you just do that?” Rita hissed at him while trying to make herself as small as possible.
“It was necessary to ensure your safety,” he remarked neutrally, his voice uncomfortably loud in the silence of the room.
“Look around, Samual! Does it look like I’m safer!?”
Samual glanced around the room, taking in the twenty pairs of eyes staring at him silently with expressions ranging from stunned shock to barely contained rage.
“I see,” he said and got to his feet.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began before Rita could stop him, “the spider is under my protection. If you attempt to harm her, I will break you. That is all.”
Rita stared at him with wide eyes as he casually sat back down. Then she looked over at the collection of very proficient killers that Samual had just picked a fight with. What the fuck had he just…
“Huh,” Gora rumbled, lowering her fork back into her plate and wiping her mouth. “Guess it was about time we started heading on to Grailmane anyway.”