To say that the officer’s meeting had been…tense…was an understatement.

Nobody brought up the notion of turning back—they all knew the stakes now— but the thought had clearly been on everyone’s minds. Backpedalling through the ghostcap fields to find another way had been suggested and then struck down as an option just as quickly. They’d survived the journey once already. Tempting fate again seemed…unwise.

The scouts had reported no deviating tunnels large enough for the wagons, and the map table agreed, so leaving the Chasm some other way was out. Off the table, some might even say.

After nearly an hour of pointless deliberation, a silence had befallen them. Torval’s sigh had said everything there was to say. The expedition would have to press on.

Once the doubts had been quelled, Darkclaw and Calisto had listed out all they knew about Crescian Spiders.

Apparently, each nest was run by a matriarch—the oldest of the brood and mother or grandmother however many times removed of every Crescian in the nest’s territory. Given that the arachnids never stopped growing, they would know her when—if—they saw her. Talia got the sense that seeing the beast probably meant bad things for their survival. Something about the faraway look in Darkclaw’s eyes as he said it, or the way Calisto’s bony fingers clamped tight the edge of the table at the mere possibility.

Their best hope was that the majority of the nest lay on the opposite side of the Chasm. From the webbing, it was clear that they could get across, but their odds would be much better if they were just crossing the spiders’ hunting grounds as opposed to the nest proper.

If it came to a fight, then fire was their best option. Which said a lot.

Unrestrained fire in the Under was a dangerous thing. It fouled the air, drew attention, and in small enough spaces, large flames could cook the unwary in their own skin. Calisto’s bestiary implied that Crescian silk set aflame would burn long and cold. If the expedition lingered, the smoke and heat would kill them before the spiders did.

If it came to that, when it came to that, as Torval’s eyes implied, the expedition would have to be incredibly careful. Preferably well on their way. Definitely on the move.

Either way, it would be a running battle. The arachnids rarely strayed far from their homes. The caravan would have to seriously anger the spiders for them to give chase further into the Chasm.

Small mercies.

Unfortunately, that was where the mercy ended. They’d come up with a plan of action: running battle with fire as both a deterrent and a last resort. Zaric and the forward scouts would range out and clear the path of as many webs as they could.

The rest was up to Talia.

Apart from a pair of wands that belonged to one of the elven delvers, the caravan’s only ready access to fire was a few spark trinkets, good for lighting a cookfire and not much else.

Torval wanted at least half the fighters to be equipped with offensive flame. Which meant arcanistry. Which meant Talia had work to do.

On top of that, the delvemaster had pulled her aside while the rest of the officers left to prepare and asked her if her mindsense would allow her to scout the far side of the Chasm. He had reasoned that if she sensed a larger gathering of beasts on one side or the other, it would tell them which side the nest was on.

Talia read between the lines.

Is this or isn’t this a suicide mission?

Though she wasn’t sure if she would be able to reach that far, she’d agreed to try.

And so, Talia sat on the edge of the ridge, legs crossed, and eyes closed.

Imagery would be key here, otherwise, her mindsense would drain her of mana faster than a keg at a delver rave. Luckily, she’d been honing her Will for nearly a week straight, and the repetition had to be good for something. Right?

Instead of the web that she usually drew, Talia attempted to focus her mindsense in a single direction. Hopefully, that would save her some mana. She also half engaged her senselocks. The young psion didn’t need precision, just a general sense of how many minds were where. Torval had implied that she couldn’t miss the nest if she ‘saw’ it.

With an effort of Will, Talia pushed her mindsense into a single tendril of psionic intent. She held it like that for a while, getting used to the new shape. It was an odd sensation. Like what she’d imagine it would feel like to go from having full vision to only seeing from one eye. Through a crack in the wall. A really thick wall. Without any light to see by. And a bad case of farsightedness to top it off.

Nonetheless, once she’d gotten used to the sensation, she willed the tendril forward, across the Chasm. The strange new shape of her sense did its job though, reducing her mana usage to a slim trickle from her Core, while still giving her a jist of what minds lay around her. Hopefully, it would be enough when she got across the divide.

If she made it there. Low mana consumption or not, the Chasm of the Lost was wide.

At least I can just follow the webs.

Eyes still screwed shut, Talia frowned.

What?

Her progress stopped as her mind reeled at the realization. Usually, her surroundings were an indistinguishable grey in her mindsense. The only way she was able to orient herself was through a combination of the placement of living minds and her own knowledge of her environment. Yet, in her mind’s eye, the Crescian silk glowed.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

As if lit by an internal radiance.

Entranced, Talia pushed her Will toward what for all the world looked like gossamer threads of thought trapped in inanimate matter. The moorings of a mind stretched across an endless abyss of black and grey.

In the back of her mind, Talia remembered a discussion she and Darkclaw had had. About light in the Under, and the terrifying creatures that used it as a lure.

Anything that used light in a world of darkness was by necessity unafraid. A predator. It was why delvers kept to the endless black in all they did. They had no illusions that they weren’t prey.

The odd parallel registered too late.

Before Talia even had a chance to consider why Crescian silk would be visible to her mindsense, her control over the tendril of mindsense had been usurped. Her mind was inexorably pulled into the glowing weave and down into a mess of sensations that hovered just beyond sapient understanding.

All at once, the young psion went from being in control to being controlled. Her mana gushed from her Core like pulses of arterial flow. For all that she tried to stop the bleeding, her hands were too weak to apply any pressure to the wound.

She could only hope that whatever had pulled her in would let her go before manaburn hit. Before the pull drove her insane.

If the sensations didn’t do it first.

There was hunger. Yes. Hunger. Of a bestial kind. Of the gnawing of marrow against vicious mandibles. And the crack of chitin against chitin in a cannibalistic dance of need.

Then there was kinship. Bonds that broke and bent and mended and grew. A twisted family born of survival and surpassing one’s mother. Of broods left to fend for themselves, to prove their mettle, to hunt and chase and weave. And oh, the weaves they wove, the scintillating the glowing the beauty the shimmer the—

Then, underneath, a deep, abiding patience. A waiting. Of memories passed through song and egg and twisting Weave. Intricate patterns woven into story and history and truth.

The weave told the tale of the Surface. Of dim thought. Of loneliness and thought so dim it wasn’t much more than instinct. Until the tale changed and it told of the day—

The word-sensation-feeling that followed meant nothing to Talia, too alien for her to grasp. Too many complexities that escaped her. But as she beheld the most beautiful work of art she’d ever seen, tears ran silently down her cheeks. It was the history of a people written in a transcendent tongue so alien she could only grasp desperately at the scraps of it. Thirsty for the knowledge it held, for the revelation, for the meaning behind the gaping black hole that tore—

It told a history of rise and fall to and from obscurity. Of saviours taken from them, torn from them, by a Scream. The significance was unmistakable, even if the meaning eluded her.

Talia wept tears of hot gold.

The Crescians had been offered greatness once. Purpose. Then it had been taken away by a cruel twist of fate. By an Evil, unknowable, of which they had only heard storied from the— there was that word again.

The lament seared at Talia’s mind. They had been left unfinished. A mix of wild and more. Enlightened and feral.

Only by the grace of—

Again, that word, the one that tasted of burning fire and blue too bright to look at, of a time when thread had met wood and grass. It felt like the brush of promise on her skin. The twang of it sounded like destiny and rang of loss.

As she fell deeper and deeper into the Weave, it dawned on her that every member of the nest was connected to varying degrees. Each and every arachnid played some part in the grand tapestry of living history, leashed to the grand web of consciousness that spread across the chasm. Big small, sapient or simply sentient, each participated in their own, insignificantly meaningful way, though none greater than the Matriarch herself.

The great arachnid sat in the center of the web, like the locus of some unfathomably large geometric equation whose meaning lay beyond Talia’s ken.

A relic of memory passed down through millennia, one that smelled of age and glory.

Distantly, through drying tears, Talia gasped at the complexity of the creature’s mind, the brightest she’d ever seen. Her breath ripped through her so tightly that it numbed her fingers.

It. Was. Beautiful.

It made the piddling thoughts of sapients look like flickering candles next to it.

The glow of the web belonged to every Crescian, but in truth, it was Hers.

Horror tried to slip in through the cracks in Talia’s rapture as she realized where the pull of the web was leading her.

Talia felt the weight of age settle on her, crush her, as the Matriarch graced her with but a sliver of attention. The young woman dared not think, sensing the patient sorrow twitch from casual perusal to peaked curiosity.

Suddenly, it wasn’t just a sliver of attention, but the full span of that terrifyingly ancient mind weighing down on her thoughts.

In an instant, the dizzying vastness of the Weave disappeared. No. It wasn’t gone. Just hidden, shrouded behind a Will that dwarfed Talia’s own as she might dwarf a worm or an insect.

Despite the certainty that it would have driven her mad, the young mage slumped where she sat. A sharp pang of loss rippled through her like the tear of stone through the flesh of her breast, scraping across her ribs like a gentle caress.

A voice gibbered in the back of her mind, begging for just another glimpse, just—

one

more

look.

P l E a S e e e

Pleeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaasssssssseeeeeee.

Then She Spoke.

Hush now, little starwalker. What you glimpsed is not for the likes of fledglings.

Her Voice echoed and overlapped in a sibilant chorus, permeating Talia’s mind in a soothing balm until the unnatural longing quelled.

The young woman knew she should be afraid, knew she should be struggling against the manufactured calm, but…

What does it matter anyway? If she wants me dead, wants us dead, then nothing will stop her.

Her only worry—and even that was a distant concern—was for the gush of mana from her Core, pulsing in weak, stuttering heartbeats.

It took Talia a moment to realize that the hissing in her mind was laughter.

Ah, to be young again. Have no fear, little starwalker, I mean you no harm at present, and your arca will last until our meeting is done.

A chill came over the young woman as the Matriarch reached across the bond, through the kilometres of webbing that separated them, and into her.

Suddenly, the flood of mana escaping her in a torrent slowed to a trickle before…tying itself off? Whatever the arachnid had done, the draw on the young mage’s mana had fallen to such low levels as to be negligible. The thrill of fear that should have shivered down Talia’s spine was conspicuously absent as she realized that the Matriarch hadn’t just done something to her Core.

No.

She’d reached into Talia’s head and implanted a new Image. A web of thought and intent so foreign and complex that the young woman wasn’t even sure how it had fit into her mind.

Yet she felt no fear, only calm. Comfort. Like the mother’s embrace she could only just barely remember the warmth of.

Tsk. How far you have fallen, little starwalker.

Somehow, Her thoughts conveyed a sigh.

Like us all, I suppose. Though I must say I much prefer our plight to yours. To have been made in Their image, only to be reduced to this. Oh, the lament. The cruelty.

The Matriarch paused.

Ah. But you don’t even know. That explains much. Tsk. Time is short, and there is much I would say. It has been... so long. But your companions will worry if I keep you too long. Come. Let me tell you a story, as I fix what I can of your brokenness.

Before Talia could even ask a question, or indeed have time for one to sprout in her mind, the Weave was back. Muted, partially hidden. But also clearer, easier to understand.

Around her, the young mage felt the rush of mana like a great breath, and then the bare leftovers of perception she had left faded.