As Talia fell onto her bed in exhaustion she nearly jolted out of her skin as something yelped and squirmed underneath her. The young woman just barely managed to avoid thumping to the floor by grabbing onto the frame of her bunk.
All she got for her troubles was a ruined undershirt, some scratches down her back and a lightly growling puddle of fur winking in and out of existence on her pillow.
Talia had never been more appreciative of the soundproof curtains.
The kitten glared at her, its shimmering fur puffed up into a poofy ball that spasmed erratically in and out of sight. Betrayal shone in its baleful orange-yellow eyes.
Talia was tired. Tired, and frustrated and achy with manaburn and done with the day.
“Well how was I supposed to know you were there when you’re constantly invisible, you little shit?” she hissed at the creature.
Its growling went up a notch and it began anxiously kneading her pillow.
The woman and feline stared each other down, neither willing to budge.
Tiny ripping sounds intensified as the frazzled kitten’s curved claws punctured her pillow.
Talia took a deep breath.
You killed its mother. It doesn’t know any better. Don’t wring the poor thing’s neck. Don’t do it. You can fix the pillow. It’s ooookkk.
Huffing in irritation, Talia decided to be the adult in the room. Not a grand feat, considering her opponent was a—at best— months-old kitten.
“Can I have my pillow back?” she whispered, wishing dearly that she had the use of her psionics.
When no answer came—because how would it— Talia’s hand slowly crept forwards to grab it out from under the feline. The closer her hand the more the little furball growled. Once the surprise and fear faded, it was pretty cute.
Changing tacks, Talia pulled her hand back. The vibrating growl dimmed. Just as slowly, maintaining eye contact, she reached down by her feet to pull open her drawer, where she kept her jerky stash. The kitten’s ears immediately perked up.
Smart little bugger. Still remembers where the snacks are. Wonder how it’s been getting food before now…
The young woman suppressed a chuckle at the image of an irate Copperpike stomping through the storage wagon in search of an invisible stowaway. Though considering the scratch marks on her drawer handle, anything not stored in a bag was probably safe.
Breaking off a small piece of dried meat, Talia held it up for the cub to inspect. No need to risk more damage to her bedding, after all. The poofiness of the whelp’s fur receded somewhat as it stuck its snout into the air for a sniff. Clearly recognizing the salty treat, it let out a pitiful, nearly soundless yip.
Oh, so now you’re all cute and hungry. Figures. Guess the way to any being’s heart is through their stomach, after all.
In an attempt to entice the critter into getting off her pillow, Talia tossed it the small piece that she’d been brandishing and kept the rest well in sight. Hopefully, her meaning was clear: ‘there’s more if you behave.’
With a shadow of the predatory grace that it would grow into, the kitten swiped the jerky out of the air. The cub inhaled it, and it disappeared momentarily as it fed, before reappearing with another pitiful yip.
Raising an eyebrow, Talia tossed a slightly larger piece just shy of the kitten’s reach. It hadn’t even touched the bedding before the mirage lynx leapt from its perch, snatched it out of the air, and dashed back to its new nest, fading from view.
Chewing sounds resounded from the depression on Talia’s pillow.
Gods dammit.
When the kitten phased back into view, Talia glared at it. For a moment she swore that it gave her a smug look in response.
Stupid cat. Fine, you want to play it like that? I can play.
With deliberate slowness, Talia raised the jerky to her mouth and ripped off a piece, chewing vindictively and maintaining eye contact. The cat’s eye widened comically as it watched its prize disappear piece by excruciating piece into Talia’s mouth. It mewled, laying its head in its paws and bunching up its haunches.
Once she was done, Talia patted her belly and pulled out another piece of jerky, which she put on the bed at arm’s reach to her left, in full view of the hungry kitten, far enough that it would have to get off its roost.
Even without her psionics, Talia could feel the hesitation from the tiny creature. Stay on the pillow? The warm, safe, oh-so-scratchable pillow? Or approach the big human, the scary human, for food?
In the end, it proved to be a creature after Talia’s own heart, and succumbed to the needs of its stomach, padding forward gently, stumbling as it almost fell onto its side.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Talia froze with a jerky stick halfway to her mouth, not daring to move, simply watching as the little lynx made its way toward its target with single-minded determination. It only seemed to realize at the last second just how close it was to Talia, going completely still with a heart-melting eep, before disappearing from view.
The young woman bemusedly watched the depression in the bedding inch closer to the jerky.
Yesss that’s it, just a little closer. Closer…closer…
Both of them made their moves at the same time.
Talia dashed for her pillow, settling herself firmly on it while simultaneously being careful not crush the kitten, who leapt on the piece of jerky and dragged it off to the opposite corner to chew on.
The pair stared each other down for a while after the whelp was done eating, both satisfied with their superiority at having gotten what they wanted. The little whelp eep’d again, clearly unsatiated.
Talia rolled her eyes.
“Fine,” she whispered, “but this is the last one. After this, I’m going to bed.”
She fished around in her sack of meat for a large piece, which she tossed in the mirage lynx’s general vicinity.
She fell asleep to the sounds of tearing meat and tiny snapping jaws. And right as dreams whisked her from the waking world, she thought she heard the subtle beginnings of a purr.
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The next few days of travel passed uneventfully. In comparison to the rest of the trip, of course. Blight devils weren’t a problem, as Zaric or Osra would shunt overgrown fungus from the trail by removing the thin layer of stone the ghostcaps clung to and pushing it soundlessly over the edge.
Talia spent most of the time cycling—once the three-day bout of manaburn finally passed— designing the second iteration of her wand, and befriending the nameless kitten, whom she was fairly certain was male. The pair weren’t quite friendly yet, but they had drawn a tentative truce. Talia fed him jerky and the occasional dried mushroom, and he avoided soiling or ripping at her bedding. She didn’t even want to know where the kit did his business. It was very likely that someone’s cupboard or drawer was being used as an impromptu cat shit heap, as Talia couldn’t imagine the mirage lynx being immune or even resistant to brilliant ghostcap spores. However or wherever it was happening, it wasn’t stinking up the cabin, so it wasn’t Talia’s problem.
Every once in a while, between bouts of cycling and designing the Infiniwand Mk. II Talia would glance at the cupboard that held her books and tell herself it was time to finally pick up Mage Madness or the technical book on matrix cores. Every time she did, something came up, or she told herself that she’d do it later. A niggling thought in the back of her mind told her that she was avoiding an obvious problem. Her talks with the healer only confirmed that in some way, reading the books only made the issue more real, despite the very real boon that they represented. Recognizing the problem did little to correct her behaviour though, and so the books remained untouched.
For now.
Talia did have a scare when one of the waste burner enchantments engraved into boxes under the wagons managed to get damaged enough to the point of almost casting sparks into the air. Probably a result of rocky terrain and low visibility. The work of cleaning out the tank from the water closet of wagon four was…uniquely unpleasant. However, being coated in shit for the second time she could remember in her life paled in comparison to finding out the hard way if ghostcap spores were a volatile substance.
Morale was at an all-time low for a while, cramped quarters and long periods of confinement dulling everyone’s moods. The cries for Torval to allow them to walk alongside the wagons got louder and louder until eventually, they died out entirely.
Talia only lamented that it had taken another maddened delver succumbing to the dangers of the Chasm for it to happen. The beastkin’s death was mercifully silent. Lazarus theorized that he’d collapsed and begun frothing at the mouth, spasming erratically until he choked to death on his clicker. They only noticed when one of the wagon drivers had to stop the drakes from taking bites out of the corpse as they passed.
While the crew were mostly silent after that. A cursory investigation of their mental states—she promised herself it was a one-off—told Talia that it wouldn’t last. Thankfully, the forward scouts had reported that the spore cloud seemed to be thinning. The cheer at the news had been palpable, even without her psionic net cast over the troop. The mess became livelier, and even the stoic officers seemed relieved.
In a command staff meeting, Calisto confided her shock that only two had died on the way. The stern chronicler admitted that she and the delvemaster had expected the death toll to be much higher. Which, of course, heralded the next hurdle on their journey.
Damned chronicler, tempting the gods like that. As if this whole ordeal hasn’t been hard enough.
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They heard the insectile scuttling two days after they’d left the spore cloud and its dazzling bioluminescent fungi behind. The clack of chitin on stone, and the repetitious clicking of mandibles echoed off the walls of the midway stretch of the Chasm of the Lost, interspersed with the occasional, short-lived bestial shriek of pain.
On the fourth day, they began running into webs. From tiny things draped in corners and crevices like hung laundry set out to dry, to the beginnings of a chasm-spanning weave of abstract geometry like the work of a mad loom worker turned architect. On the fifth day, the caravan passed a thread of webbing—if it could be called that—a metre wide and only growing thicker as it stretched towards the opposite wall.
The webs were spun, one and all, of sharp, shimmering gold. Or so it seemed. The reality was much darker and infinitely more worrisome.
Crescian spider silk.
Stronger than steel cable and thinner than a hair at its thinnest, the deadly webbing was said to be able to bisect a running, unarmoured sapient off their momentum alone.
If morale had been low before, it plunged to rock bottom. If silence could mutter curses and cast oaths, then the silence of the crew was damning Torval’s ancestors and descendants to every hell there was, down to the seventh generation going each way.
Talia had known of the creatures. Their silk, when properly treated, was prized in medical circles for stitching and even certain types of gauze, for those obscenely wealthy enough to afford it. It was so valued mostly because it melted away without the need for removal after a year or so inside the body.
What she hadn’t known was that once upon a time, a nest of the creatures had resided in the upper levels of the Maw.
According to one veteran delver, a grizzled old man who simply went by ‘Grif’, running into the nest lightly armed and unprepared had been considered a popular form of suicide among dishonoured legion officers and soldiers. Also according to Grif, it had taken over ten years of failures and hundreds of casualties before the Legion had been able to eradicate the territorial arachnids. Once more according to Grif, whom Talia had noted liked to talk in the mess—a lot— if the nest was on their side of the chasm, then the whole expedition was fucked. He’d used much more colourful language, but the sentiment was the same
Once the news was confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt, Torval slowed the pace to a crawl, and immediately called an officer’s meeting.
The mood in the officer's wagon was grim when Talia arrived.