“Where were you?” Vespa was waiting for me when I returned to my room. I’d resolved to kill her from the moment I stepped in, and yet as soon as I heard her voice, my resolve faltered. Did I really have it in me to kill her? I mean, sure, I’d always found her to be an annoyance. Always buzzing in my ear with nonsense. But to kill her... oh right. She’d asked me something. I had to respond.

“Sorry, I got lost.” No. Bad Quinn. You could do better than that.

“Lost? You know your way back to your room.”

“I... I mean. I was wandering around. Getting myself lost. Figuratively.” At the same time, what was I so afraid of? She was just an insect. And she’d already made clear her intentions. She wanted to erase me, to make me disappear within the endless dream of my symbiotic body. She was my enemy.

“You are hiding something.” She landed on my neck. The puff of air and tiny claws felt hostile now. What was she doing? I resisted the urge to brush her away. I had to wait until a good moment. “Is something wrong with you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You are not acting normally.” As if she was one to talk! Second by second, I felt my body tingling in discomfort. Her footsteps, the brush of her mandibles, the soft buzzing of her wings. The hypnotic cadence of her words. The fact that she never used contractions. Everything was weird an alien. How had I ever gotten used to this... this thing crawling around on me? “Do not worry, Quinn. Just relax. Be honest with me.” Her voice droned on and on, the whine penetrating my eardrums and worming its way into my brain. I felt drowsy. She was...

She was already getting to work.

“I’m fine!” I asserted, more for my own sake than for her. The voice cleared away the droning and snapped me out of the building trance. “Just leave me alone.”

“Quinn, I am your symbiote. I am your friend. I am here to help you. I am here to help you be the Angel you were meant to be. I do not want to hurt you.”

“You don’t want to. But you will, won’t you?”

She said nothing.

“You were trying to make me lose myself, weren’t you? To make me go completely feral, absorbed into my Imago’s instincts and relinquishing all shreds of my humanity.”

She still said nothing. Her footsteps traced a path from my shoulders to my nape. The place where she’d stung me. Where all of this had begun. But why?

“What are you doing?” Still no response. “Vespa, tell me what you are doing now.”

I slapped the back of my neck. Too late. Pain shot through my spine like lightning, radiating through every neuron in my body, I fell to my knees. With a few more slaps, I managed to dislodge Vespa, and she clattered to the ground, but the damage was done. Already, though, the world around me was spinning. My whole body was shaking. The spot behind my neck felt like it was on fire, molten needles stabbing through the skin, and sending jolts of pain through my entire nervous system. I could feel the venom working its way through my system, eating away at me from the inside. Gritting my teeth, I tried to scan the ground for her. I needed to stop her before she could start attacking again.

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And then it began. The strain on my muscles and nerves activated something deep inside. Something primal called my name, a voice ringing from the depths of my subconscious. Then another. And a third. A chorus of voices and instincts whispering, saying, yelling, screaming at me to transform.

“You hear it, do you not?” said Vespa.

“What are you doing?”

She ignored my words. “You hear the sound of the multitude. The anthem of your ancestors. The call to heed, to join us, to become a true Angel, to take on your destiny. A call to wage the war our kind has waged for five hundred thousand millennia.”

It was time. Time to transform. Time to become so much more than a mere human, time to unlock the potential sealed deep inside. Time to cast away that fragile, fallible human consciousness and become a perfect agent, a brilliant sword against our demonic adversaries. The pull was intoxicating and overwhelming, ten times as strong as it had been that night. It was just so clear. So right. So good. And yet....

“How can it be good to leave Russula to die like that?”

“So it is about her,” Vespa mused. “Fear not. She is an Angel. She acknowledged the risk and accepted it. It is only your inability to respect her choice that has led you here. Do not disrupt the plan. There is a time and place for this.”

“I don’t care.” My words chased the voices away momentarily, and in the void, all that filled the space was pain. The pain of Vespa’s venom eating its way through my body, melting delicate muscle and nerve tissue. It hurt so much, even compared to the torment of transforming into my Imago. But I did my best to fight through, even as the voices returned with a vengeance, whispering again. If only I transformed. The pain would go away. The suffering. The need to think. The uncertainty. The pull was so strong that my fingers and toes began to morph on their own, pale sheets of membrane glossing over the skin and melting away the human features inside. I had to will them back to normal. I knew that if I did transform here and now, I would never transform back.

I could still hear Vespa buzzing somewhere near me. I swivelled my head, trying desperately to find her. Through my swirling surroundings, I made out her orange-and-black silhouette crawling on the ground. My head pounding, my body aching, I reached out to try and crush her. But my hand only collided against the hard floor. Vespa had taken flight again.

“Do not struggle any longer, Quinn. It will be alright.” She buzzed tantalizingly out of reach. Even lifting my arms felt like a herculean effort, now. There was no way I’d kill her. My strength was leaving me. “Your weakness will wash away, Quinn. Simply accept it.” The chorus in my head grew louder and louder again. Vespa’s venom had melted away the last vestiges of my resolve. How had Melody done this? How had it been so easy for her?

Perhaps I’d be able to get help? I tried to scramble across the ground, using all of my strength to reach the door and tap ineffectually against it. It barely made any noise. Melody and Faith and Grace would come sooner or later, I supposed. Until then, all I could do was resist the urge to give in. To let the venom make me waste away rather than surrender and be healed. I felt like a hollowed-out shell, too tired to move. Barely able to breathe. And then Vespa landed on me again. The tiny claws on her legs felt like knives cutting into my skin. Her body thrummed, her stinger ready to deliver the final blow and overwhelm my resolve.

A flash. I only had the time to notice it in the corner of my eye before the shining blade passed inches from my face, slicing the hornet in two and passing clear to the wall, where it smashed into the stone and clattered onto the ground. It was smooth and shiny, a two-pronged dagger with a plain black handle.

“How dare you!” Vespa’s scream burned itself into the air.

The broken halves bounced on the ground, righting themselves and scurrying out of view. And with them, the voices hushed, though I still heard them tickling at the edges of my subconscious mind. But the physical effects of the venom had still taking their toll. I heard footsteps. I couldn’t move though. Before I blacked out, I heard a familiar voice.

“Woah, there Quinn. Are you alright, kiddo?”