Talia slipped into the cramped water closet, careful not to squish the godsdamned cat against the washbasin. Though the gods knew the little shit deserved it.

She hurriedly unbuckled the straps on her chest piece, yelping and doing a little dance as she went, nearly knocking the toiletries from the shelf behind her in her haste.

“Dammit, dammit dammit— would you quit squirming, I’m getting you out,” she hissed at the bloodthirsty feline.

Finally, the scaled cloak and vest were off, tossed into a heap on the commode, leaving her in her greaves and white undershirt— one of the last pristine ones, now stained red and ripped in slashes across her abdomen.

Talia glared down at the ‘blank’ spot on her belly, rolling her eyes as the lynx’s camouflage fuzzed at the edges.

He had stopped tightening his grip, but seemed in no mood to actually get off, frozen in a fear response that might have worked, were he on the ceiling of a dark cave, and not tearing into her stomach.

“You know I can see you right? You’re not— oh why the hells am I speaking to a cat,” she muttered, throwing her hands up and wincing in pain as the movement jostled her parasitic passenger.

“Fine, if that’s how we’re going to play it…”

Slipping her fingers under the little bugger’s claws, she carefully pried him from her, one paw at a time, ensuring that none of her flesh went with him, until she was dangling the nigh-invisible ball of fluff from his forelegs.

He stayed frozen throughout, not moving a muscle.

Talia sighed and held him up against the ceiling of the water closet, blinking in surprise when her half-thought-out ploy worked and he transferred his attachment to the metal-threaded wood.

She kept an eye on where he sat for a while before shrugging her shoulders and crouching down to rummage through one of the ubiquitous wall-cupboards in search of some gauze bandaging. Her healing talent made her resilient in the long term, but it didn’t mean she didn’t have to care for her injuries like anyone else.

Delicately pulling her undershirt off, the young woman flicked the lock on the door—she’d forgotten it in her haste— and shifted around so she was facing the small, polished silver mirror that hung on the wall.

Talia’s gaze slid past the now thoroughly scarified tissue that rippled down from her collarbone to the bottom of her ribs, twisting uncomfortably to get a good look at her tenderized belly.

She grimaced at the damage. Where a regular kitten might have left little irritating scratches on her skin, the godsdamned cat had ripped gouges into the flesh in her abdomen. The burgeoning definition of her muscles had been torn all out of shape.

At least it’s mostly just flesh wounds… Should heal up pretty fast. Better bandage it up to be safe, though.

Then she caught a whiff of herself as she twisted to grab at the medicine bag.

On second thought, when’s the last time I showered?

The fact that she couldn’t remember was worrisome.

Shower first it is!

Talia untied her and kicked off her boots first, wincing as the movement drew fresh blood from the wounds on her abdomen. Her greaves were another matter, not just analogous to pants, held up by her belt, but rather a collection of scales of varying sizes all attached at different places by a dizzying array of buckles and clasps.

One that she hadn’t gotten much practice donning and doffing, considering the armour was pretty comfortable and easy enough to clean, so she just slept in it most days.

With a sigh, she reached back to grab—

A flash of gold caught her eye in the mirror, pulling a furrow to her brow.

What the…

Moving closer, Talia twisted so that her left shoulder was at the right angle in the small pane of silver, and finally noticed the thin, barely visible threads of gold lurking just beneath the skin. She pulled back, unsure of her eyes, and twisted her neck painfully to try to catch a glimpse of it.

Then she saw it. A web.

A little boon…

The feeling of it against her fingers was faint, almost unnoticeable, but clearly other in a way that was hard to describe.

Following it with a fingertip, she found that the threads flowed in twisting almost symmetrical patterns down from the crook of her neck, spreading across her shoulder before delicately wrapping around her biceps and trailing down to her elbow, where they coalesced into a series of tiny bumps, each the mooring point for the end of a thread.

Now that she knew where to look, she could unsee it.

A web.

No, not a web, she realized, but a weave, a sibling to the Weave. Comparable but not.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

A little boon, She’d said. This must be it.

What else could it be?

Looking within, to the place where her Core lay, Talia noticed a tenuous connection to her channels, the thread itself thinner even than the hair-like tendrils of a sub-channel.

Gingerly, cautious now that she was devoid of the omnipresent calm of the liminal, Talia pushed a tiny drop of mana into the artificial construct. Her marvelling at how smooth her mana channels felt was pushed to the side, usurped by the immediate reaction from her new…tattoo.

Her face slumped into impassive disbelief.

It glows. Of fucking course, it glows. The world is conspiring to turn me into a walking, talking arcano-lamp. I swear if one more part of my body starts glowing I’ll— I don’t know what I’ll do but by the gods, I’ll do something!

Her magic was one thing. It was not conscious. It couldn’t help itself. Reasonably speaking, it was unaware of the threat presented by glowing eyes in the middle of the Under.

Probably. Hopefully.

The Matriarch, on the other hand, should have known better.

Talia could only surmise that ancient as She was, She didn’t know everything and was unaware of the odd reaction to her mana.

Still, the young woman couldn’t deny that the effect produced was…striking.

The aureate glowing thread traced hypnotizing motifs across her shoulder, a cross between a spider’s web and an abstract mosaic. Somehow both and somehow neither.

It looked alien. Like something from a fever dream.

It pulled at her, drawing her in, almost like…

The Weave itself.

Succumbing to the feeling, her apprehension fading, melting away like wax in a magma pit, Talia goosed mana into her mindsense, twisting it into the tendril that had started it all, and plunging it without hesitation into the living memory inscribed under—into— her flesh.

Immediately, the cramped water closet disappeared, replaced with a vision of a place eerily similar to the liminal but somehow…not.

It was hard to describe, but the young psion thought the difference lay in the absence of another sapient being.

The liminal was a shared space, both her and not her.

This was more akin to her mindscape, that dizzying array of colour and light that she subconsciously interpreted as the realm of her thoughts, her being.

The place that the tattoo took her was closer to her mindscape than the liminal, almost…an addition to it, part of it, but separate. There were no colours, no light, only a monochrome of gold varying from metallic to radiant down to dullish rose.

Strings of silk spun into a cocoon around her in every shade of gold imaginable, with her at the center, on a throne of thread so thin, so pale, it looked like glass.

An impulse whose provenance she couldn’t pinpoint pushed her to run her fingers across the weavework, plucking at the webbing like a harpist would strum strings.

A gasp— her gasp— echoed in Talia’s ears as though ringing through thick stone, or a metre of water.

Old gods preserve me, it’s—it’s a library.

And what a library it was. Each string, each thread, a story, a moment of history. A personal account of events. An analysis of technical documents from before Tidefall. Snippets of memory from a Matriarch who had participated in one of the Ancients’ grand workings. The proper ways to care for newly hatched fledglings. Proper psionic techniques for the pacification of hostile predators. An account of—

The list went on seemingly endlessly.

Talia ran her hand against the cocoon as she imagined a lover might, filled with wonder and a deep, abiding hunger.

To know. To understand. To learn.

The whole thing was a mess, following no sorting system that Talia could comprehend, but that was a minor setback compared to the sheer vastness of the information contained within.

If this was what She had at her disposal, no wonder the Matriarch was so formidable.

As if drawn by the thought, an errant thread informed her that what she was experiencing was but a fraction of what the Weave contained. A fragment of a fragment, curated by Her as best She could, with things She had deemed useful.

It boggled the mind.

Thousands upon thousands of years of history, of knowledge. Right at her fingertips.

Literally.

Ok, Tals. Don’t get sucked in. You have things to do, and this isn’t the time.

Pulling her hands from the library, she stepped off the throne and found herself back in the water closet, half-blood dripping down her legs.

She heaved a shuddering sigh of pure need.

If this is what people mean when they say they’re horny, then I am most certainly, unequivocally horny.

Contrary to the trio of books Evincrest had provided her with, the Weave-Library—

Ach, terrible name, Tals. Terrible.

The library, whatever she’d end up calling it, was tempting to her in a way that exceeded base survival.

She had needed to read the primers on magic. Even the two books in her cupboard that she’d been avoiding were necessary. Matters of life and death. As such, there was no enjoyment in them, no wonder, no mystery.

Talia grumbled to herself as she remembered the dread-inducing tomes.

The Weave Fragment, however, represented freedom. An avenue to lost knowledge that no sapient from the Under-Cities had ever laid eyes on. A true discovery.

And so much more.

If she could parse it, categorize it, who knew what she’d discover?

An Exploration on the Mechanics of Arcano-Suns, and Mage-Madness represented that as well, in a way, but only in the sense that they addressed archaic, ill-understood phenomena. To Talia, they represented only the bleakness of her situation.

The Fragment of the Weave, on the other hand, was a hope. A concrete one, of a past whose glory was so great that her present could only be bleak by comparison, and whose promise spurred her towards a dream of brighter skies.

The name still needs work, but eh. And let’s be real, the recognition you’ll probably get from all the amazing shit you’re going to blatantly plagiarise plays a small role too.

The ‘once you get back to civilization in one piece, assuming it hasn’t collapsed already’ was left unsaid.

Grumbling at her cynicism, Talia shook off the smug little voice in the back of her head and busied herself with the buckles and clasps of her greaves, before setting the temperature gauge runes to just below scalding and hopping in the shower.

She stayed in until the water grew cold, sorting through the Fragment of the Weave with determined enthusiasm, quickly realizing that she could ‘sort’ the threads with a focused thought and a minor effort of will. Even change their hues.

Little by little, she began the work of categorizing the gift of knowledge she’d been given. Sorting them by age first, then provenance, then topic.

Nearly an hour passed—though it felt much shorter— before she was interrupted by a low yowl and the distinctive spray of water resisting pressurization. Followed swiftly by a wet ball of floof falling right on her face.

You little shit.

The godsdamned cat, still invisible, scrabbled out of the tiny showering cabin—eschewing the convenient curtain, of course, being more partial to climbing up the walls and back onto the ceiling.

Talia watched in annoyed amusement as the time little pinpricks in the wood began to approach the nozzle again and decided that she’d been showering long enough.

As it appeared, her decision was right on time, a knock on the door rang out almost as soon as she was done bandaging herself up.

“You done in there, arcanist?” Hanmul’s voice growled out, “The delvemaster’s called a meeting, and some of us have to shite, you know.”

Shit.

“Be right out!”