Time lost its meaning as the memories swept Talia through time and space, hopping from body to body like a wraith from the spooky tales her father had told her as a child.

The original matriarch’s nest was usurped by a competing brood in a bloody battle that left the victor heavily wounded and unable to defend against her competitor brood mothers. Eventually, the usurper was forced to flee the forest she’d claimed for herself and retreat to the mountains. But not without ripping all the knowledge she could from her slain foe’s web, including the records of her enemy’s experiments with the tree dwellers.

This time, necessity and finesse were the exiled Crescian’s watchwords, instead of greed and brute force. She was wounded, alone, and needed a place to lay a new clutch of eggs. Not to mention a source of food in the inhospitable reaches of the mountains.

All emotion was stripped from the memory, but Talia nonetheless felt the desperation in the spider’s gait, in the way it limped through the white dust— the purest white she’d ever seen— that coated the sides of escarpment.

Finally, it found a cave overgrown with lichen and mushrooms. Not the most nutritious fare, but enough for her to rear a brood of warrior males to take back her claim. If only the usurper could find a way to rid it of its inhabitants.

Large, bipedal mammals with four burly arms tipped with jagged claws had made it their home. They lay curled up in a pile of warm white fur for the most part and left the vegetation of their home alone. The furry mammals instead seemed to favour meat torn from rotting carcasses strewn in an alcove behind them, or gnawed bones sucked clean of marrow.

With a spark of primitive cunning, the usurper waited, tucked away in the cold powder of the slopes until night fell. Then, under the cover of darkness, she climbed silently into the cave whilst her prey slept in a great, heaving pile. Talia distantly felt her teeth grinding from the anticipation as the young arachnid crept slowly up the sides of the cavern to sit on the ceiling high above. The spider curled herself up, entering what Talia thought of as a fetal position, and sent out threads of psionic power to seep into the mammal’s minds.

The arachnid worked for days, subsisting off the lichen and mushrooms around her. The knowledge of the original’s domination helped the usurper little; she had neither the physical might nor the psionic prowess to impose her will on the creatures. So, she took a different route. A more insidious one.

Like the frost that oh-so-slowly crept along her motionless limbs and nestled within the chitin of her carapace, the usurper weaved strands of psionic power through the minds of her victims. Her progress was as glacial as the climate outside, but little by little, she gained more and more control.

The juveniles were the first to succumb, their still-developing brains easy prey. Then, one after another, the adults fell under the usurper’s control. The memory hazed at the edges then. Apparently, the battles that followed, fought by proxy with a swarm of puppeted mountain beasts, were unimportant to the topic that this thread of the Weave-Fragment sought to teach.

Either way, the end of the memory left Talia feeling conflicted.

It’s more subtle than what the first matriarch was doing. The usurper didn’t turn them into mindless husks. She just…nudged them in the direction she wanted, little by little, until they couldn’t tell her commands from their own instincts.

Talia sent herself back to the beginning of the sequence to watch how the arachnid had done it once more. She felt herself shiver as she watched the web settle itself over the minds of the hapless mammals. They weren’t puppets. Not like the tree dwellers had been, but the difference was close enough to be almost indistinguishable.

The only reason they didn’t become as mindless as Crescian males, is because the usurper wasn’t powerful enough. She was too young. If she had been…

The technique would have still allowed a similar, if not enhanced level of control. But it was still progress towards something less... domineering.

The young woman allowed herself to be dragged further through the memories, watching as years went by and the technique spread, changed and was lost, only to be found again by a desperate or lucky matriarch.

The true treasure trove arrived near the end of the thread.

A lone would-be matriarch had been sent with her mother’s blessing to settle her own nest, only to find herself cut off from possible expansion by neighbouring, more powerful broods. She found herself stranded in a vast expanse of sand—more than Talia had ever laid eyes on— stretching out as far as the eye could see.

Behind the blessed arachnid, her mother’s territory. Far to the south, the depthless expanse of an ocean. Competing broods had laid claim to the jungles to the east and west. The blessed was trapped. Hemmed on all sides, her males wasting away under the burning rays of the true sun.

The only source of sustenance in the desolate expanse was a speckling of hardy shrubs, the occasional fruit-bearing tree, and tiny mammals and reptoids not fit to feed the brood of fledgelings growing in her egg sac.

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

To make matters worse, the vast desert was plagued by titanic, dune-churning wyrms. Twice taller than the blessed’s mother and longer than entire forests, the wyrms were the greatest predator in the area. Their maws appeared in churning whirlpools before—

Talia almost whined plaintively when the memory seemed to fade a little before returning. The whole thing was fascinating. Though she had to admit that if whoever had curated the Weave-Fragment hadn’t removed the excess information, she’d never get anywhere. The young woman was self-aware enough to recognize that she could easily lose herself in the torrent of memories, from the sheer force of her curiosity. Even without the threat of getting inadvertently sidetracked by unnecessary tangents.

Sequestered safely within a warren of red rock that she’d had the last few of her males clear of the scant few insectoid inhabitants, the blessed turned to the web she’d been granted by her mother for answers. The young queen searched through the lives of her ancestors and those of the foes those ancestors had conquered until she stumbled on her answer.

Talia perked up excitedly as she followed the thoughts of the long-deceased arachnid.

The blessed was like the usurper. Young, lacking in both psionic power and physical might. And like the usurper, her only resource was an enemy that, with the right approach, could be turned into an asset. Unlike the usurper, however, even the youngest of the sandwyrms was beyond her power to control, to dominate.

But who said she had to control them?

Huddled up in her little warren, the blessed sought out the minds of the youngest sandwyrms, yet to reach the titanic size of their parents. More often than not, she’d realized, the juveniles were starved out by their larger brethren, unable to compete for the immense amounts of food that they required to survive in the desolate wasteland.

So, when she felt the mind of a young sandwyrm approach her haven, the blessed sent out a call to it and dragged one of the corpses of her dead males out onto the sand. She sent an impression of food to the sandwyrm, guiding it towards the corpse, safe on her stone promontory.

Once it had consumed the carcass, the blessed sent out one more psionic nudge. It conveyed the idea that there would be more to come.

She’s training it. Not dominating it, just using her psionics to communicate intent. Do this, and there will be more food.

Talia watched as the blessed repeated the process over days, starving herself of the nourishment that the males’ corpses represented. Soon enough, she had an entire pod of juvenile sandwyrms conditioned to return to her rocky promontory at dawn, when the sand heated up. And then, when the day came that she no longer had any food to dole out, she nudged the group of juveniles in a different direction.

The arcanist watched, amazed as the blessed guided the juveniles towards a larger sandwyrm, telling them through images that if they guided it up, out of the sand and onto the rock of her nest, they would have as much food as they needed.

It worked.

The pod of juveniles, under the direction of the blessed, nipped and bit at the larger adult’s ‘belly’—insomuch as a meat tube could have a belly. Too large to twist and fight back at the group of its smaller brethren, the wyrm fled through the sand, unaware that it was being corralled. By the time it realized that it was headed straight for an embankment of stone, it was too late.

The memory faded before Talia got to witness the gargantuan creature crashing against the promontory in an explosion of sand and gore.

The next set of memories was from the perspective of the same blessed arachnid, now an old and powerful matriarch. She sat surrounded by fledglings in her red stone warren, its walls coated in sharp crescian silk.

Sandwyrms still hunted the desert, but so tame were they that all it took was a psionically transmitted image for one to ram itself into one of the waste’s many rocky outcrops. Its death provided for not only the blessed’s brood, but also the numerous pods of juveniles that the matriarch domesticated from a young age, almost from birth.

Then the thread ended, and Talia found herself once more in that other place, threads of aureate memory arrayed around her like a tapestry.

Holy gods. That was…

Talia had no words for the experience. It had been disorienting, to be sure, but the breadth of the experience was…breathtaking. The fact that she’d found what she was looking for was almost, but not quite, an afterthought.

The allure of more knowledge, more experiences, tempted her. She felt a longing that she couldn’t ever remember feeling before.

At that moment, she almost succumbed, reaching a hand to another thread that called to her, this one about a great work constructed by the matriarchs that had lived during the time of the ancients.

Then, she felt a pinprick of pain on her scalp and a tugging sensation on her hair.

Immediately, she left the library, sparing a moment for a longing glance before it faded away into the darkness of her eyelids.

An invisible weight balanced precariously across her shoulder, and Talia yipped as she felt a few strands of hair ripped out of her skull, batting at whatever was sitting on her shoulder. The godsdamn cat flipped through the air, appearing and reappearing spastically, before landing on her bed with an outraged eep.

“Ow! You little menace. My hair is not food!” Talia hissed at the fluff ball.

The lynx, predictably, did not understand, choking on the black and ruby strands for a while before coughing them up and glancing curiously up at her. As if to say ‘who? me?’.

“Yea you. You’re a menace, you little shit. In fact, from now on, that’s your name. Menace. Got that?” she whispered, repeating the word a few times and pointing at him.

Menace only meow-growled plaintively before sauntering over to the drawer that held her bag of jerky and futilely adding a few scratches to the ones already there. Talia rolled her eyes.

Menace the dipshit cat. It fits. I can’t believe I ever thought he was cute.

For a moment, Talia considered using her psionics to start training the miscreant then and there. Only the fact that she didn’t know how long she’d spent in the Weave-Fragment stopped her. She had work to do tomorrow, and she’d already stayed up far too late.

Oh, gods. Tomorrow is going to suck. Time to sleep, Tals.

With a huff and glare at the idiotic feline, Talia flipped over and pulled her covers up under her chin, rubbing painfully at her head.

“If you rip up my sheets again, no jerky for you,” she mumbled as sleep took her.