What? What do you mean you don’t know it? What are you doing then?

Talia gestured at the great culling of runes that the Matriarch was undertaking in the mists below. Even as she looked, the mass was edging ever closer to a healthier purple.

Tsk. Think, little starwalker. What use does a Crescian have for language? Even one as powerful and as versatile as your Ancients’. We do not speak. We do not write. We do not need its marvels to drink, or eat or for any other reason. The Weave provides.

If Talia were corporeal, she would have stuttered.

But… Your threads. The runes. The ones you’re manipulating right now, right in front of my eyes. Mind, head—whatever, you know what I mean.

Desperation crept into Talia’s thoughts, tinting them with worry. In the liminal that connected the pair, her disappointment was as obvious as the light of the arcano-sun. The Matriarch hissed in what was probably the equivalent of a sigh.

The Weave is instinctive. A part of me. No different from a hand or a foot is to you. If the Weave once held knowledge of the starwalkers’ tongue, then the Scream scoured it clean of any mention. Though as I said, it is doubtful that the Crescians ever learned it to begin with.

Talia slumped on her throne, closing her eyes and telling herself that, in reality, she was no further behind than when she’d started. The hope of an easy solution had been too enticing, but in the end, it would come down to her own efforts.

There was a certain kind of solace in that, in knowing that she could only rely on herself to get the task done. Then she frowned.

Wait. You didn’t answer my question. If you don’t know Ancient Runic, then how are you manipulating the runes in my… head?

A rhythmic clicking echoed across the chasm. Laughter, Talia realized.

Very astute. The simple explanation is that the runes know what shape they should take. You would do well to take note of this. They are not alive, but the blueprint of what they should be still lies within you, hidden within the undamaged sections. I am simply…coaxing them back into shape, allowing the unhealthy parts to be pointed out, destroying what I must and repairing what I can. It is something my predecessors and I have had much practice with. Every fledgeling must go through the process after their hatching, or they risk going feral, degenerating to a state worse than even mindless males.

Though the explanation made sense in a convoluted way, it nonetheless boggled Talia’s mind. She’d known that the Ancients had had ways of designing self-repairing runework, she’d seen it in her bracer after all, but this…this was something else entirely.

The revelation struck her like a ten-ton block of stone.

Mage-madness.

The Matriarch had said that the damage of the Scream had worsened through the generations. Mage-madness was a relatively new phenomenon, barely a century old if her half-remembered history classes were to be believed. No one understood where it came from, but those old enough to have been there remembered. Like Evincrest.

Was Talia looking at the reason for it? Better yet, was she looking at the cure? If so, could she learn how to do what the ancient arachnid was doing? She wasn’t Crescian, and from both the memories she’d experienced and the Matriarch’s own words, Crescian psionics were a different type of power altogether.

But maybe, just maybe…

In the in-between of the liminal, her thoughts may as well have been spoken aloud.

Hmm. I shan’t raise your hopes. I know not if such a thing would be achievable for you, though it is no stretch to imagine that it might be within your reach. Remember, however, that some are too far gone. The older Gifted human with you is beyond my help, and his pupil is on the threshold. That said, I can attempt to teach you if you are willing to grasp at something that may be beyond you.

Talia considered the proposition for a moment. Her goal in coming on the expedition had been simple, before the revelation of the arcano-sun’s plight.

Escape the clutches of bondage at the hands of mage-hunters and the magisters.

That, and a faint hope, barely even a whisper of a prayer, that she might find something that others had missed, in the ruins of Karzurkul. Something that would help her stave off inevitable madness.

She had imagined, perhaps naively, an ancient library, a repository of lost knowledge that would hold all the answers.

In a way, she’d found just that, though it had taken a shape she’d never expected.

Before she committed to it, however, a burning question surfaced in her thoughts.

You’ve said a lot about the Scream.

Talia’s being shivered, even in that place of pure thought.

I felt It. Through the shadow of a memory, I felt It. I saw the gaping hole in the Weave with my own eyes—thoughts— ugh. What I don’t understand, is how a Scream, no matter how powerful, wrought this. Crippling not just one generation but every generation, until we are but husks. Killing off beings that were, well, it sounds like they were gods. Some worship them as gods. And now they’re dead. How does that even happen?

Talia felt as the Matriarch flinched, recoiling from even the thought of It. What the difference between that and naming it was, the young woman had no clue. She waited while the ancient arachnid collected herself, watching worriedly as the golden threads twitched and slowed mid-work.

When She spoke, Her voice had a coarseness to it, a feral bite.

The starwalkers spoke little of the Evil. All the Weave note is that they took responsibility for it. When the Consumers-of-Worlds ravaged the stars, they took the refugees into their embrace. From scattered tales from these refugees, the alvs, the dveri, I know that they fought it. That it possessed a power similar to the Weave, to the starwalkers’ psionics, but fundamentally different. A dominion, rather than a connectedness. The various tribes of the verga, the ones you know as beastkin, called it the Many-in-One. It is their—its— Voice that rippled across the stars in the Scream, tearing apart the connectedness, the Weave, ripping at the minds of those linked to it.

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The Matriarch paused in her work, strands of aureate thread stilling for a brief moment before pulsing back to life. Her six golden eyes stared into Talia’s citrine orbs with the intensity of a beast fighting its instincts.

The starwalkers believed that psionics were the foundation of uplifting, more than anything else. In every case, it was their first Gift to their protectorate races. They did not believe it to be a vulnerability, but a safeguard. A guarantee of empathy in a star-filled existence full of disparate peoples all struggling with their own battles.

The Matriarch’s incandescent eyes blinked slowly—despite the lack of eyelids— a deterministically sapient action that made it look as if She was chasing away tears. Talia sat enraptured by the force of Her sorrow, move by the heat of Her fury. Pierced, by the depth of Her loss.

How they remained so blind we will never know. Every Matriarch knows that before the Weave brought united us, the true battle was always fought through the weave. When males lay broken, fledglings slaughtered, and daughters defeated, the last battle was ever waged in the mind. After we realized that our powers were useless against them, we wrongly believed that they were aware of this universal truth, so intrinsic was it to our existence. We were wrong. The Scream attacked the very source of what drew the sapient races together, fostered by the guiding hand of the starwalkers.

A low drone vibrated through the space between them, twanging off of silk and stone; the gnashing of mandibles. Talia’s thoughts shivered with it.

Before you arrived here, you commanded creatures to die. You froze their thoughts and forced them to fall from the air. You are weak. Damaged. Alone in your thoughts. And with but a thought, twenty living beings perished to the strength of your mind. Like it was nothing. Imagine then, the concerted force of a thousand, thousand minds, concerted in singular purpose: to rip from the starwalkers their psionics, down to the flesh that granted them the ability to use them in the first place. We, their charges, only suffered the backlash, the overflow from an attack that blanketed the stars with Its Voice. Whatever changes the starwalkers had affected in us could not withstand the strain. Pieces snapped, and twisted, never to be whole again.

A stillness fell over the pair, as they both relived but a fragment of the immensity of Scream and quavered at its power.

But…you can fix it, right? That’s what you’re doing, fixing me?

The Matriarch hissed. For the first time, Talia considered how old She must be, to have grown so large.

Tsk. I am doing what I can, little fledgeling, but I am afraid even I don’t know how to repair all of the damage. Only your forebears could do that, and they have passed. If any yet live, it is not on Sach’elcor. Our world belongs to the Tide now, and the dark of the Under. No, what I do now is a stopgap. A web spun to hold against crumbling boulders. Eventually, the damage will be too great. You can only hope that it gives you time. Time enough to live a long life, by the standards of your people.

Her words were disheartening but honest, which Talia could appreciate, and only spurred the young woman to attempt to learn how it was done.

Leaning forward, she let out a breath and clapped her hands together.

Teach me how. Even if it’s only on myself, I want to learn how.

The Matriarch chittered tiredly.

I will try, but do not expect much.

----------------------------------------

Minute-long days melted into eternity-spanning seconds, time rendered meaningless in the haze of the liminal, as the two worked at containing the damage done to the part of Talia’s mind that governed her magic.

It was exhausting work. Devilishly complex and utterly baffling.

The ancient arachnid’s description of how she repaired the runes had been spot on. It wasn’t a matter of knowledge but of Will, of coaxing the purple to overtake the flaming hues, twisting what they could back into shape and destroying what couldn’t be saved. The runes knew what they wanted to be, they just needed a little help.

The exercise, though tiring in the extreme, gave Talia the same sense of accomplishment and serenity as cycling. Something about the knowledge that every tweak, every twist and sharp tug served to improve herself was intoxicating.

But that did little to soothe the nugget of dissatisfaction that had nestled in Talia’s brain.

The mystery of the Enigma hovered tantalizingly close, quite literally at her fingertips. Runes to shape flesh, to govern thought and regulate power among a myriad of other functions, they were all there, if only she could tell which was which.

It was the most powerful enchantment she’d ever laid eyes on.

And Talia couldn’t even read its runes. Couldn’t even begin to parse their meaning. For the nth time since she’d become an arcanist, the young woman lamented that Runic was a pictographic language and not a phonetic one. Elven words and even most beastkin dialects could be deciphered from their root words along with repeated prefixes and suffixes.

Not so with any of the runic languages.

Sensing the young psion’s frustration, the Matriarch told stories as they worked, stopping once and a while to point out a particularly tricky set of runes, or to warn against touching certain configurations.

She told the story of Tidefall, of the many beasts driven mad by the Scream swarming across the oceans in a tide of flesh and bodies that gave the cataclysm its name. Of how at first, the sapient races had fought them back. Had held their ground.

But only for a time.

Eventually, the maddened masses had begun coordinating, operating as if under the control of a single, terrible mind.

Whispers of the Evil had abounded. That it had infiltrated Sach’elcor with its insidious tendrils, pitting the horde against the remnants of the starwalkers’ cities, and the refugees they protected.

Eventually, the losses became too much to bear, and the remaining Ancients had pushed for a retreat from the Surface.

Talia could only imagine the feeling of looking up at the sky for the last time, knowing that her children would never see its radiance. She thought it might be something akin to what she’d felt looking back at the arcano-sun hanging in the distance as she embarked on the fated expedition that had changed her so much.

Tears streaked down her ephemeral cheeks as she wondered how Orvall was doing. If she’d ever see little Isabel again or have the chance to share what she’d learned with Reggie. The old gnome would have a fit.

The thoughts only pushed her to work harder, to learn faster. If her training in the past few weeks had taught her anything, it was that she no longer had the luxury of quitting when things didn’t come easily. Too much depended on her pressing forward.

And so she worked. She pushed.

Rune by rune, gash by gash, she worked to improve herself both body and mind. Her efforts paled in comparison to the miracles that She was working, but Talia did her part nonetheless.

Soaking up knowledge like a sponge was her current job, nothing else.

Until finally, the only specks of colour that marred the purple glow were tiny bits of yellow here and there. The occasional stubborn orange, and a small gash of red that refused to close no matter how hard they tried.

I believe we have done all we can. The rest must happen with you asleep.

The Matriarch sounded worn through to the bone—exoskeleton?

Talia sighed.

I still have so much to ask.

I know child. I know. If you will allow me, I will leave you with a parting gift. Nothing so grand as what the starwalkers have granted, but a boon nonetheless.

The young woman nodded, unable to shake her disappointment, but grateful either way. She’d already gotten more than she could ever imagine. More than she deserved.

Why did you help me? We would have attacked your nest—might still have to. You know we can’t afford to turn back.

An enigmatic, hissing chuckle was Her first response.

It is what they would have wanted. What they did for us, so many millennia ago. And worry not about my brood. I think you shall find the issue to have resolved itself when you wake.

Talia frowned.

What do you—

Her eyes drooped and her form slipped from the liminal space before she even had a chance to speak. The nameless dark claimed Talia once again, leaving the ancient Matriarch to put the finishing touches on her final gift to the young starwalker.