The Matriarch’s story wasn’t so much told as it was shown.

No, experienced. Lived, even.

From a dozen points of view drawn from a hundred points in time, She poured the story into Talia’s mind until she thought her head would burst from it. Until the line between what was hers and what was Hers blurred at the seams and she couldn’t tell what was real anymore.

Distantly, she remembered feeling her body slump. A thrill of panic thrummed through her as she recalled how close to the edge of the Chasm she’d been.

And then nothing mattered.

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For an instant, Talia thought she was dreaming again. Then she heard Her Voice.

For millennia, before we even knew what years were, there was nothing. We survived— we hunted, fed and bred. Matriarch followed Matriarch in a cycle broken only by competing broods. Oh, the wars we fought. The battles won and lost.

The clash of chitin on chitin, the rip and tear of legs and mandibles, the slashing of eyes. Legions of sterile, mindless males brought to bear in a display of supremacy. From rocky peaks to dappled groves, Crescians had fought each other since time immemorial for the right to live and foster their broods.

All on the Surface.

Under a sky speckled at times with a thousand, million glowing specks, when it wasn’t dominated by the gargantuan, glowing orbs that chased each other across it.

Stars. Those are stars. And those are the moons, the memories told her.

The Matriarch’s echoing voice pulled Talia from her wonder.

The Weave, from a time before it was The Weave, and still only a web among others— though still one that Crescians fought, killed and died to leave their mark on— calls this time the Dim Epoch. An era of beastlike instinct and primal need.

Even the need to ask questions was absent from Talia’s thoughts as she was dragged deeper into the story.

For a time, she was a gatherer. A runt of a female, tasked with rooting through the moist soil of the undergrowth for mushrooms and fungi. Grubs. The occasional small mammal. Sun cycle by sun cycle, she lived this way. Content to serve her Matriarch. To serve her nest.

She didn’t even see what killed her.

Next, she landed in the powerful body of a young broodmother. The aspiring head of a new nest. She’d departed from her Matriarch, her mother, in search of her own territory. A place to craft her own weave of history. A legacy all her own. Her Matriarch was strong. Old, but not yet ancient. She had many children to feed her nest and protect her domain.

Still, something pushed her to seek out her own way. With a gift of a dozen males and a few loyal sisters, along with her Matriarch’s blessing, the broodmother set off towards the setting sun in search of a home.

A thousand, thousand Crescian lives Talia lived in the span of an instant, stuck in the confines of her mind.

Until one day, one night, it all changed. Every incipient weave notes it. Every Crescian remembers. But only one Matriarch was there.

The specks of light that dappled the inky cavern of the sky burned. The ancient Matriarch sent out a pulse of alarm, gathering the fledgelings under her titanic form. Barely sapient warrior males and adolescent daughters flocked to her, huddling defensively around the gold cocoon that sat bulbously in the centre of the nest.

And then the stars fell.

Talia felt her body tense as half a dozen of the glowing asters got closer and closer, burning brighter with every passing second. The fledgeling spiders trembled beneath her, squirming anxiously as a roar and a boom rang out.

Then, as quickly as they had appeared, the burning stars dimmed, cooling to reveal a formation of six dark, sleek, shapes. They swooped across the sky above the frightened Matriarch’s head, before landing silently in a field just past the edge of the rocky promontory. The thrum that had filled the air quietened before fading out entirely.

Silence fell across the scene.

The starwalkers considered us nothing but beasts, at first. They erected metal structures to repel us with sounds that grated at our beings. From their great metal shells, they pulled wonders no Crescian had ever seen. With waves of their hands, they drew stone from the earth and spun fire like silk.

Talia watched as the tall beings—the Ancients, she realized with awed reverence— erected a small city over the course of days. It was all stone and metal and flowing lines. Alien flowers and trees that bloomed fast enough to be witnessed by the naked eye.

The…vessels…they had arrived on melted in an agonizingly familiar fashion, their intricately runed metal used in the settlement’s construction.

The Matriarch watched for a time, unsure what to make of the beings of fire and metal. All the while she recorded what she saw in her weave, to be passed to her successors. Until one day her nest was intruded upon, and she was forced to rush to its defence. Her instincts demanded no less.

The star-things had been getting closer for many revolutions of the light-orb. The Matriarch had watched fearfully as they crept ever deeper into the mountains, dreading the moment that they would tread upon the territory that all Crescians knew she had claimed as hers.

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Finally, the time came. A daughter murmured across the webwork that the metal visitor had crossed the threshold. The Matriarch buried her trepidation as instinct pushed her to call upon the warriors to defend her brood.

She knew they would not be enough.

With a shuddering heave, the titanic form of the ancient arachnid tore itself from the centre of her weave, charging her eldest daughters with protecting the next generation of eggs. Disused joints creaked and iridescent webbing twanged as the heart of the nest rose from her abode for the first time in a thousand, thousand light cycles. The Matriarch was old, her chitin chipped and grey, riddled with battle-scars that evidenced her right to rule. Old she may have been, but she would defend her home, even against strange fire wielders and stone benders.

I oft think back to how she felt, that lone, ancient, mother. With no understanding beyond the need to protect and prevail. Even she knew that the starwalkers could end her. But her feral mind would brook no other action. Luckily for us all, the threat was not as she perceived, nor even as she ever could have imagined.

The glowing star-thing had repulsed her warriors without even moving, restraining them with an invisible barrier that not even her hulking older daughters could penetrate.

Distantly, Talia noted a striking similarity between the Ancient’s armour and her bracer. The tall humanoid’s shimmering, metal armour glowed with the power of thousands of runes, a dizzying array in comparison to her paltry, vandalized armament. The thoughts swirled impotently against Her grasp on Talia’s mind, before succumbing once more to the tale.

Fear and dread filled the Matriarch at the sight of her brood so easily suppressed. With a screech of despair, she rose up on four legs, her weaver’s claws tucked in close to her thorax and her enormous fighting arms poised to strike a devastating blow at the intruder.

It never landed.

The Matriarch found herself frozen, her considerable bulk arrested into position. With one last, desperate attempt, she reached out with the weave, preparing to do battle as only Crescian queens did, with all the strength of her physically restrained but psionically free nest behind her.

That one choice, more than anything else, I think, shaped our future.

As the Matriarch struck with her weave, marshalling all of her strength, she found the mind of the star-being to be the opposite of what she had expected.

The metal creature recoiled, to be sure. But not in pain, or in fear. No, all she felt from it was…bewilderment. Awe. Shock.

All at once, the dynamic switched. The force of the weave was rebuffed, effortlessly.

The Matriarch, her daughters and mindless warriors were all released, though pushed back a ways, this time with a gentle force.

Then, the star-being folded itself in half in a gesture that the ancient mother couldn’t understand the significance of. Seeking clarity, she fought against her feral instincts and extended a thread of the web to the being. She took care to protect herself, while also avoiding the dominating intent that she usually employed with fledglings or warrior males.

Instead, the Matriarch extended the thread in…kinship, as she might to a daughter who was leaving the nest with her blessing.

The fate of the Crescian race changed that day. The starwalkers, the ones you call Ancients, had come to move the Matriarch’s nest, believing she was a barely sentient threat to be relocated far from their city. Instead, they discovered a species on the burgeoning edge of sapience…

Talia gasped in a breath as a flash of images—memories— streamed past her still-closed eyes, devoid of the…intensity of the previous experience but still just as overwhelming in their sheer volume.

A delegation of Ancients, wreathed in glowing, runed metal, greeting the Matriarch. Offering to teach them. To help them. To uplift them.

Eggs given to the ‘starwalkers’ in good faith, with the promise of freeing the offspring from their oppressive feral instinct.

Crescian spiders stalking a city of stone and metal, mingling with dwarves, elves, gnomes, all manner of beastkin and many other beings that Talia had never seen.

Hundreds of Matriarchs working in tandem to create a weave of shimmering gold whose proportions were beyond comprehension. The Weave, of which a part had been taken by Her ancestor and stitched or reproduced in the span of the Chasm of the Lost.

They called our world Sach’elcor, or Sanctuary, in the Starwalker Tongue. Named after its purpose, to shelter other beings from beyond the stars whose existence was threatened by the Great Evil.

At the mention of the so-called ‘Starwalker Tongue’ Talia’s thoughts jittered, escaping the flood of memories, to wonder at Her, begging her, pleading for an answer to the Enigma.

The Matriarch chuckled.

All in time. The story is almost over. Now hush and let me work. It will never be as good as what the starwalkers intended for you, but I think you will find the improvements to your liking.

Talia almost keened as the object of her greatest desire was dangled tantalizingly in front of her, before being whisked away, without even a thought spared to the rest of what the ancient being had said.

Her mind was being stretched, drawn thin. Her sanity slipped through her cupped fingers like dust through an old hourglass.

The memories continued.

A dozen shining, living cities, each dedicated to another new race of refugees from beyond the stars. Strange creatures roaming the air, water and land, kept away from the sapients with fence-like constructions that emitted piercing noise that only a few could even hear.

Stretching Crescian silk in the largest web that even the Matriarchs had ever seen or seen recorded in the Weave, at the starwalker’s behest. A web to span the whole of Sach’elcor, they said.

Then, though Talia could tell it was muted— even in her daze— a Scream.

The Scream.

The one she had heard hints of in the gaping hole at the center of Her Weave.

It whipped across the Crescian’s collective memory like the lick of liquid flame dripped into the center of a map, burning out Its own memory.

And still, Talia heard It, such was Its power. It ripped across the Matriarch’s minds and through them into Talia’s.

She would have shrieked if her body had been in control of itself.

The young woman’s body convulsed, boneless, until She realized what had happened and shielded Talia from the psionic backlash.

Still, Talia shivered. Whatever had done that had… the word hurt just to think about now. She shook her head and stopped herself from imagining whatever being was powerful enough to hurt her through a memory.

Tsk. So fragile. Your ancestors survived the Scream untouched with no more than a headache. Yet the bare memory of it is enough to render you insensate.

The ancient mind's emotions overcame Talia, a mix of sorrow and disappointment, followed by a decision.

Nothing but a shadow of what the starwalkers intended for you. This shan’t do, no, no.

What…what…was that? What are you doing to me?!

Hush, child. I am almost done, and then I will answer what I can. Unfortunately, it seems I underestimated the damage. I shall have to…tweak your companion’s memories somewhat.

Wait, WHAT? No stop! I don’t have time— We—

The bolt of lucidity and alarm came too late.

Tsk. Fear not, little starwalker. It shan’t be long, and they won’t even notice. Now, SLEEP.

Talia didn’t realize the dark was creeping in until consciousness had already fled her.