In the nameless dark, Talia was but a speck of consciousness.
Less.
A flitting spark ejected from a wavering candle fighting a losing battle against a viscid black more impenetrable than the darkest reaches of the Deep Under.
Still, in her most primal of thoughts, she found herself unafraid. Undaunted by the chorus of insipid whispers that rose up from the fathomless void—from the bottomless pit of her own mind.
She didn’t know where the knowledge came from. Only that it was unmistakably true. Somehow, she was trapped in the jet of her thoughts. Caught in an in-between stage of conscious thought and subconscious realization.
With that realization came light.
A glow like that which she had seen flickering behind the skulls of every living being, ever since that fateful night.
It spread across the depthless, spaceless, space, like mana through a rune array, until the dark had been banished. Replaced by colour and life.
Slowly, in drips of calcite-laced water from stalactites high above, consciousness returned, and subconscious faded.
She was formless, but only for the interminable instant it took her to notice it. A face, her face, and then hands, her hands, to cup it in, a torso for her neck to rest upon, calcifying lower into a pair of legs and feet to stand on.
Ephemeral—non-existent— one moment, and then there the next.
The time of the transition between states was indecipherable, a puzzling sensation that slipped from her mind like melting wax, leaving her wondering what she’d been thinking of in the first place. Until even that faded and she found herself entranced with the glow that surrounded her.
With the crackle of a stalagmite come to life, Talia moved.
Soft, unnecessary breaths escaped from her lips as she traced her fingers against the walls of her prison—her being. She wandered for a while, following the twisting loops of her consciousness as they ran their way through her brain, gasping at the fizzing caress of colour against her fingertips.
On a whim, she grasped hold of a filament that didn’t quite belong, but still fit.
It tugged at her, dimming and glowing sporadically as she followed it down through a maze of memory and perception. The thread stood alone amidst her mindscape, though her brain held a groove for it that it should have slotted into; it was not quite flush, jutting out just so. Enough that she could wrap her fingers around it and feel it pulse insistently at her.
Deeper and deeper she went, until the tint of the colours grew more muted, more restrained.
This is the part that makes me, me. The things I define myself as in opposition to or in agreement with. The urges I fight and the passions I indulge.
The knowledge came unbidden, sprouting in her thoughts like a fungus through cracks in stone.
The now excitedly vibrating cord hanging loosely from her fingers jolted against Talia’s palm, urging her to press deeper, past the tangle of her muted subconscious towards something that both was, and wasn’t her.
A part of her that fit but didn’t belong, just like the cord, that she could sense just beyond the threshold of her subconscious.
She breathed a deep, unnecessary breath, marvelling as she did at how the light around her spun merrily with the motion for but a moment before falling quiescent on the exhale.
Then, fingers still gripping the thread that was and wasn’t her, she stepped across the doorway.
Into a mindscape both familiar and changed.
The thread slipped from limp digits to join its brethren as they coiled along the back wall, arcing down below her, to some other place beyond her reach, as well as up and over, leading back the way she’d come.
Her mana channels, she realized.
But that was the only part of the room that made sense to her. The rest…
Cracks spread viscously across the brightly glowing walls. Haphazard growths pulsed grotesquely, bending the fabric of the space they clung to. Amorphous fluid-gases dripped up from gashes in the floor and fluttered down from tears in the ceiling. Entire sections lay dim, dark, or in extreme cases, entirely missing. Not in the sense that they had been torn out, or damaged, but in a manner that made her think that the absent pieces hadn’t been there to begin with. Like a gaping void where life should have been, but simply wasn’t.
Horror flickered to life in her chest as she beheld the part of her mind that both was and wasn’t her.
Every fibre of her body screamed at her that this was wrong. That there was a brokenness here beyond simple decay.
And yet, and yet…
In its own way, it was beautiful. Beautifully artificial. Like a carving of a flower. If she looked carefully at the parts that were whole, she could see where the walls would fit naturally, where the glowing colours were meant to join seamlessly with the rest of her mindscape. How the two different parts should be indistinguishable… A harmonious whole. Were it not for a missing piece here, a gash there, a growth pushing gruesomely at jagged corners. Were it not for the sheer wrongness of it all.
Looking behind her, even the existence of the threshold, the doorway she’d stepped through to get here, seemed wrong to her. Something told her that it shouldn’t exist. A careful examination revealed what she could only qualify as stitching. Parts of her mindscape bent out of shape to accommodate the unnatural addition and the partition it led to.
In the end, it begged the question…
What is this place?
A sibilant voice replied. One that echoed with a dozen overlapped tonalities.
A tragedy. What you were meant to be, before the meddling of the Evil. Before the Scream.
Unsurprised at the intrusion, Talia looked up, finally noticing what she had been missing. Above her, through the cracks in the ceiling, spanned a weave—the Weave— of incandescent gold thread, which curved around her mindscape, cradling it in a mother’s embrace.
A hissing sigh resonated through Talia’s thoughts.
I suppose I should not be surprised that you are awake. Even damaged beyond recognition, the starwalkers’ work is not to be trifled with. Come. Now is as good a time as any for you to ask your questions. I am sure you have many.
Talia nodded hesitantly, gaze riveted on the many rips, growths and tears that riddled this part of her mindscape, caught in a haze of sparking fluid-gases. The darkened spots inspired revulsion tinged with inexplicable despair.
She couldn’t tear her eyes away.
Until a pull at her navel made her glance down to see a thread of gold caught in the flesh of her bare belly button, right as it yanked her out of her mindscape.
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Talia sat on a throne weaved of sharp, aureate silk that hung suspended above the Chasm of the Lost like a pendulum from an antique clock. Below her swirled an iridescent mist filled with an achingly familiar sight. Snippets of dreams and half-remembered flashes in the corner of her vision.
Purple runes. Thousands upon thousands of them, milling about busily in the mist like industrious little worker insects.
As Talia watched, some flashed between red, orange or yellow.
Strands of Crescian silk speared down into the mist, whipping to and fro, gathering up the deepest reds and quashing them, shattering them into sparkling motes of energy that faded away into the mass of multicoloured fog. Others, the yellows, the oranges, the silk gently tweaked, rearranging lines back into place until their colours shifted closer to bright purple.
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It’s all… arcanistry. Ancient Runic arcanistry.
The gargantuan mass perched opposite her in the Weave, which had thus far gone unnoticed, shifted in a facsimile of a shrug. An incongruous movement that nonetheless managed to convey a sentiment of approximate agreement.
After a fashion. The art that you practice pales in comparison to the feats the starwalkers were capable of. An imitation at best. This I think you know, however.
Talia looked to the form of the Matriarch, crouched in Her web, maneuvering and manipulating dozens of different threads even as She spoke. The Crescian Spider was titanic. A towering mass of pitted grey chitin and eight scything legs twice, no, three times the size of the tallest sapient Talia had ever seen.
Her body was the quintessential spider—the image from which all other arachnids were derived. A slim cephalothorax that connected to Her powerfully articulate limbs, followed by a bulging abdomen the size of a wagon, maybe two. Her head was ovoid, with a set of delicate mandibles that looked like they’d nonetheless be able to shred Talia into mincemeat. Six golden eyes reflected the luminescence of the threads attached to a dozen spinnerets that ran along the bottom of Her bulbous belly.
Though they were hidden by the Matriarch’s head, Talia knew from the memories she’d experienced that a pair of fragile limbs hung from Her thorax, right behind the head, used for fine manipulation, eerily similar to a pair of insectile hands.
The sight should have terrified her.
Instead, she only felt at peace as she watched the Matriarch work. Talia felt the arachnid’s eyes focus on her naked form.
Ask.
The arachnid’s sibilant voice echoed in the space between them.
The young woman craned her neck, attempting to spot the caravan, but saw only an indistinct grey when she looked away from her immediate surroundings
Where are we?
A liminal space. Between the Weave and your mindscape. Neither here nor there.
Talia nodded as if she understood.
And that? she asked, waving a hand at the roiling, rune-filled mist.
A representation of your mind as I see it, no more real than the place you found yourself in moments ago. If you focus, you might even spot the similarities.
Even as She said it, Talia watched the fog coalesce into the shape of a brain, its flesh filling in with a wash of colour and life. Runes seeped into the walls of the construct, with mostly purple ones interspersed throughout. A concentration angrily pulsing red, orange and yellow, with the barest hints of violet, teemed at the back of the construct—in that place-that-was-but-wasn’t-her.
It was there that the Matriarch focused all her efforts.
In fact, for all that Talia searched, the rest of her mindscape was devoid of the differently coloured runes, with the few that lay there uniformly glowing purple.
As she watched, an array of purple gathered on their own—without the need for Her prodding threads—gathering around an angry red gash and tightening.
For a moment, she thought that the healthy runescript might prevail on its own. The gash drew closed, sealing itself shut as if it had never existed.
Immediately, a dozen other rips sprouted across the back of her mind, all orange, all smaller, but visibly expanding and darkening in colour.
The revulsion returned, crawling up her throat like caustic bile.
So you see the brokenness you were left with, little starwalker. Fear not. I will stem the damage as best I can.
Talia tore her gaze away from the premonition of doom steadily spreading across the back of her brain.
Why do you call me that?
Tsk. It is what you are. Perhaps not flesh of their flesh, for the starwalkers had no true children, but blood of their blood, work of their hands. Theirs was the blueprint that your very being was based on.
The young woman jolted.
Are you saying that the Ancients were…sterile?
The Matriarch let out a susurrating hiss as the threads below them converged on a particularly stubborn mass of red.
Yes. But they had no need of fledglings, for they were deathless. I know not how; even Crescians, long-lived as we may be— second only to the alvs— die. They spoke of an epiphany, an event in their distant past where they gained the ability to halt the ravages of time. The Weave suggests that it was this that broke their ability to sire fledglings. Though it is supposition, not fact.
Talia reeled at the implication.
What must it be like? To live forever?
She realized that her thoughts had been ‘spoken’ when She answered.
I know not. But the span of years presses with inevitable weight. It wears on the mind. The Crescians have the Weave to stave off the grinding of time against memory. The starwalkers had something similar—it is what drew them to us most of all. Though theirs was not a record, more of a safeguard against apathy. Thankfully for my people, the two were compatible enough. In fact, much of our work with them revolved around efforts to merge the two.
Talia breathed a sigh of amazement, questions battling their way through her, fighting for dominance. Her gaze kept darting to the runes—the Ancient Runic— that teemed below her. The answer to the Enigma lay there. Within her. Quite literally. Probably within all mages, if she had surmised correctly.
They were all empaths? Telepaths? How did they live so long? That’s—impossible.
Yes. They spoke to one another as a nest would, felt each other’s sorrows and witnessed each other’s triumphs. From what I understand, it was not a natural trait, but something they did to themselves, in the same way that they worked to curb our more bestial instincts. As for the answer to their immortality, I know not. If they ever shared the secret, then the Weave does not recall.
The Matriarch paused, and in the silence, Talia felt a deep sadness. Anger at what had been stolen from them bubbled beneath the surface, though Talia intuitively knew that She hadn’t experienced it directly, only by proxy, through the memories contained in the Weave.
It is possible that we knew, once. The Scream damaged anything connected to the Weave. In truth, It damaged all weaves, big or small, including the starwalker’s connectedness, their… psionics. I can only imagine what It did to their minds. Though survived It, they were changed by It.
Pity rose between them on threads of gold.
The damage you suffer from now is the result of it, passed down through generations. Though the first…humans…did not know it at the time. Their new web was still juvenile, their connection tenuous and their powers still growing. Most did not even hear It. Little was recorded of that time, but it seems they thought that they had escaped unscathed. They did not know that the consequences would only be felt later. So it was with many of the races the starwalkers brought to Sach’elcor. All of them were in the process of being enhanced, elevated. The starwalkers strived to give them the tools to fight the Evil, to protect themselves, if it came to it. The Scream ruined it all, a fatal blow to the starwalkers and a crippling one to those whom they cradled in their care. And then Tidefall plunged us all into darkness. The Weave claims that after they led us into the Under, the last of the starwalkers faded, their immortal lives depleted in our defence.
Talia struggled to parse the information she was being given, each word from the Matriarch’s lips—mandibles?— the seed of a new question. She was a living repository of the world’s history. So little was known about the Ancients, who they were, and what they did. Only their works and the little recorded knowledge that they had passed down remained, apparently twisted by doctrine and zeal, such that it was almost unrecognizable.
And Tidefall…so little was known about the event. Most history books only mentioned the name, so vague as to be nearly synonymous with cataclysm. Yet here She stood, with firsthand accounts of those who had lived it. There was so much to learn. So much to ask.
Sorting through what she’d been told so far, Talia latched on to the question that had been bugging her since the beginning and had only gotten more unclear at the Matriarch’s words.
The Enigma crooned as the young woman reluctantly set it aside for the moment.
Wait, wait. You’re confusing me. What do you mean when you say that humans are Ancients—I mean starwalkers. From the memories you showed me, they were much taller than we were. And as far as I can tell, we are far from immortal. Besides, you said they were sterile. It doesn’t add up.
Hmm. What was unclear? Ah, I see. Tsk. A difference of conception, then.
The matriarch tugged a few of her silken threads at a particularly virulent strand of orange and yellow runes, their hues bordering on light red.
The Ancients, as you call them, were indeed sterile. You are not their offspring in the sense that you are imagining. According to the Weave, the starwalkers claimed that all life was governed by a set of…rules. A kind of…blueprint for organic construction, much like one of your primitive enchantment schemas, but smaller than the smallest grain of sand. With the right tools, they were able to… tweak these blueprints.
A hazy image floated across the space between them, a memory, sputtering and unclear. Tall humans—no, Ancients— wreathed in rune-inscribed armour, in a room filled with glass tubes the size of a human, filled with shimmering fluid and glowing with etched runic. The memory faded before she could make out much more.
They used their own schema as the base and then changed it. Removed whatever it was that prevented them from procreating and added other things. In doing so, they…damaged you. Produced lesser replicas. Imagine attempting to recreate an enchantment more complex than anything you have ever seen, each portion intertwined and interlinked, written in a language that was not your own, while removing specific functions and changing others. Adding new functions from completely different enchantments. How many iterations would you go through? How much time would it take you? How many times would you fail? That is what they were doing, but on a scale unimaginable. They did the same to all of us, in ways both minor and major. Always to help. To improve. They called it uplifting.
Talia grappled with the idea, imagining beings of such power that they could alter the very fabric of their being to create something distinct. New. But the longer the thought about it, the less it made sense. The Ancients were ostensibly immortal and powerful beyond belief.
So why did they need mortal offspring, inferior in almost every way?
The Weave does not say, and perhaps we will never know. There are hints in the memories that they were not done with whatever they had planned for you. For us all. But the Scream ended that in its tracks.
Still unsatisfied, Talia nonetheless sensed that the Matriarch had said all she knew on the subject. She also sensed that their time together was running short, and there was still so much to ask. Much as it pained her to set aside a question with only a half-answer in hand, Talia did just that, deciding that the puzzle would have to wait until another day. If that day ever came.
No matter. While the history of her race was equal parts fascinating and worrisome, the young woman had more practical topics to consider.
The answer to the biggest mystery in all of arcanistry lay right within reach.
Talia would be a fool not to pounce on the opportunity.