The separate partition of Talia’s mind that housed the Fragment of the Weave glowed. Every shade of aureate sparkled against a backdrop of viscid, abyssal black. Threads of memory encased her like a cocoon, converging at the top and bottom in a series of intricate, nausea-inducing knots, in the centre of which sat a throne of golden radiance.

Talia stepped toward the seat, threads twanging and tinkling as she ran her fingers across them. Each thread represented a memory torn from the mind of a crescian matriarch. Some were ancient, taken through combat at a time when crescians had fought for dominance of the Surface. Others were newer—relatively speaking—shared and agglomerated when the crescians united as a species to meld multiple weaves into The Weave.

Whenever that was.

Oddly enough, this Fragment of the Weave, inscribed into Talia’s flesh by the centuries-old spider she knew simply as Matriarch, did not hold a record of the event. That it had happened wasn’t in doubt, though. The newer memories were all… ‘titled’ differently when they came from the Weave’s inception. But the moment of inception itself was missing. In fact, the Fragment seemed to be missing a lot. Gaps of time and references to historical events that were only ever mentioned in passing.

Haphazard tears in the fabric of context.

Just like our history.

Without a conscious command, a section of threads twisted to hover before her. Talia ran tantalized fingers across the rose gold. So tarnished it looked like burnished brass. Yet, oh so precious. She’d stumbled on them while organizing the convoluted mess of time periods and topics the library had originally been gifted to her as.

Once she’d discovered what lay within, Talia’s work indexing had immediately taken a backseat.

Memories of the Under, in the days after the sapient races had retreated from the Surface. The gleaming city of Karzakaad, the Lost City of Clans, as it underwent a renewal at the hands of the Ancients. A vivid recollection of the creation of an arcano-sun, from afar. A whole section of forgotten history at her fingertips.

And the secrets, oh, so many secrets. Layers upon layers of them, begging to be uncovered. Hiding in plain sight, easily overlooked.

Talia shook her head, waving away the threads that so eagerly beckoned her.

Next time. For now, you get to keep your secrets.

A few more metaphysical steps—they echoed strangely in this place-beyond-places—and she was running her hands across the glimmering throne. The Fragment rearranged itself at her prodding, the command a conscious one this time.

Bring me magics of the mind.

Aureate memories twisted and twined themselves, bending like fibres on a celestial loom until she was presented with a few hundred different threads. Talia sat on her throne, not bothering to examine them. She simply plucked the first one and brought it to her face.

The crescians were masters of psionics, or at least, their version of the ability. With their help, she had no doubt she’d be able to achieve what she had in mind.

Talia giggled at the unintentional pun, allowing herself to be subsumed into the life of another.

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She-Who-Waits-In-Darkness-And-Steals-Drops-Of-Sun was a cripple, her abdomen deflated and fragile, spinnerets next-to-useless. Her legs were stunted and weak, and her fangs were non-existent.

Her mother had cast her out a year after her birth.

But not before Waits-In-Darkness had taken a precious thread of memory from the young matriarch, the theft eased by how thin and subtle her crippling made her.

Exiled without her mother’s blessing, she travelled through dark forests, with a plan. When the large male drones of a rival web accosted her, she pleaded with their matriarch for a bargain. Food and shelter for a year, in exchange for the secret to defeating Waits-In-Darkness’ mother and her brood.

Intrigued, the matriarch accepted.

Waits-In-Darkness watched with glee as the family who had cast her out died.

When she left her temporary home, a year later, her benefactor’s weave was a dozen crucial memories weaker, and none the wiser.

Eventually, the crippled arachnid had a crucial realization. Why take from weaves, when she could take from the minds of matriarchs themselves? Her first attempt nearly ended in her death, as did her second and third, but on the fourth, Waits-In-Darkness cracked the secret to extracting memories from living minds without leaving a trace. Eventually, she no longer had to bargain for sanctuary, simply stripping the memory of her presence from the minds of those around her, along with whatever else she wanted. She became a ghost in all but name.

The Fragment of the Weave displayed the technique in excruciating detail, along with its many countermeasures.

A cautionary tale, I think. Tempting, but…not what I was looking for.

Talia let the rest of the cripple’s life play out in accelerated time, having gotten all she needed.

She-Who-Waits-In-Darkness-And-Steals-Drops-Of-Sun became the herald of a shadow war, with her at its centre. Eventually, she was hunted down and slain, but not before three dozen broods fell to her machinations.

Another one.

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She-Who-Feels-No-Pain, an embattled brood queen on the verge of losing a three-way war. Used her psionics to turn off her pain receptors, and do…something. The spellform was hazy and unclear. Whatever she’d done increased her reflexes and strength tenfold. In the end, it wasn’t enough. She died on a mountain of corpses, succumbing to wounds she never even noticed were killing her.

That’s…Maybe as a last resort. Maybe. But I’d have to practice, and…hmm. Next.

She-Who-Feeds-On-Prey-And-Triumphs, who used the primitive minds of prey to bolster her own psionic prowess, at the cost of their fragile brains turning to a bloody pulp. Which mattered not when she supped on them by way of a victory feast. Died of old age.

That’s…exceptionally awful. Blech. Next.

She-Who-Poisons-Broods-Through-Their-Young, who learned to turn daughters against their matriarch while they were still in the egg sack. Eventually had her own spell used against her after it was stolen by Waits-In-Darkness.

Useless. And terrifying. Next.

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Talia let herself be engulfed by the memories. Dozens of lifetimes. Dozens of different ways she could use her psionics. Most of which were horrifying to various extremes. One particular thread of memory had the spellform all but erased. The matriarch who’d created the memory simply warned against what she called the ‘Stranding-Plague’. A psionic working that travelled along crescian webs, erasing all semblance of motor control in every arachnid it touched, spreading across broods like a devouring swarm of urvai beetles.

It seemed to require webs to function, but without examining the spellform, Talia couldn’t be sure. And she never wanted to. The knowledge had been erased and simply warned against, whereas the spell that made fledgelings eat their way out of a matriarch’s egg sack had been preserved in all its glory without so much as a disclaimer.

That said something.

If it worked on humanoids…

That isn’t a thought process we need to reach the end of, Tals. Next.

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By the time she found something close to what she was looking for, Talia had lost track of how many threads she’d ripped through in her search. Even when it pertained only to magic, the sheer breadth of crescian lived history was, apparently, incomprehensibly vast. Nearly all of it unhindered by any piddling notions of time and place.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Eventually, however, she stumbled on something…potentially usable. It came in the form of a spell, or a series of spells, created by a matriarch whose ‘name’ translated to She-Who-Would-Be-The-Last-Queen. In the memory, The-Last-Queen was old. A conqueror, with more than thirty broods under her, and all the territory that came with it.

But she wanted even more. Dreams of her web spanning the known world filled her every waking moment, thwarted only by the threat of her own daughters usurping her. With the benefit of objectivity, Talia saw that much of the arachnid’s worry was more paranoia than true threat. But in The-Last-Queen’s mind, the two were one and the same.

If she could conceive of her daughters usurping her, then so could they.

So, being a logical, ancient psion of unimaginable power, she took the clear next step: setting about removing her offspring’s sense of ‘ambition’.

All of them.

As one does.

It was perhaps the single most baffling thing that Talia had ever seen or experienced.

The first experiments were done on the captured daughters of enemy broods. Then on their subdued mothers.

It did not end well for them.

Without a sense of ‘ambition’—or whatever it was The-Last-Queen had actually snipped free—the affected crescians simply…stopped. Catatonic. Unresponsive.

Those best off only lost the will to eat and drink. The worst of them, well. Died. Just like that. If crescians breathed, then they had lost the will to do even that.

But abject failure mattered not to She-Who-Would-Be-The-Last-Queen. She persevered, pursuing the perfect spell with obsessive drive.

Until she succeeded.

The result was—like many of the psionics held in the Fragment—mildly horrifying. Fully sapient, crescian daughters, gifted with creativity and innovative capacity, but with all the self-preservation, personality, and ego of male drones. Which was to say, none.

Talia disconnected from the memory at that point, allowing the rest of it to play out without her focus on it. Absently, she noted that The-Last-Queen’s empire did collapse, in the end. Not from dissent, but from food shortages. Due to just how large her brood became.

Well, food shortages, and then rebellion, but not from her daughters.

So, a success, just not the one The-Last-Queen was looking for.

That…is not what I need. Not at all.

The little kernel of powerlessness and fear reared up its head. A whiny voice that pointed out that with the right modifications, and a twist of purpose, it could work the way she wanted it to. She had the knowledge right at her metaphysical fingertips, after all.

For all that it was whiny, the voice had a point. Never mind that it was her, and that she was arguing with herself. Right now, that was irrelevant.

Tight bandage, and a splash of moonshine.

Reluctantly, Talia set the thread aside into the pile she’d marked as ‘usable with some tweaks’.

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

By Wyrr’s pendulous balls. Finally.

Through the haze of memory, Talia felt relief flood her veins. As she’d continued searching and only found semi-useful spells, a sense of panic had begun to seep into her. Like the inexorable press of thick walls closing in.

With the discovery of She-Of-A-Mind-Like-Crystal, that panic evaporated.

Talia had found it.

Describing what the spell did was…difficult. But it felt like clarity. An absence of fear and pain and worry. Pure, unadulterated focus, for as long as it lasted.

Which made sense, considering Mind-Like-Crystal had been a young brood queen being slowly consumed alive by parasites. She’d created the working to help her cement her legacy in her last moments, desperate to leave her gestating eggs with something to give them an advantage.

Talia let the rest of the memory pass her by without even noticing. Instead, she focused on the spellform. It was designed to linger, a little web of psionic power that tickled something at the edge of her recollection—something about it was familiar, but she couldn’t quite place it.

Doesn’t matter. Now that I have this.

The spell was a tiny ball of delicate tendrils that would seep into nearly every part of her brain, cutting off pesky things like fear at the source. Well, mostly. She would still fear things. Probably. But it would be like noting something, as opposed to being consumed by it.

She thought.

The only part that Talia found truly problematic was that it also numbed pain. Not completely, unlike the spell created by She-Who-Feels-No-Pain, but enough for it to be dangerous.

Pain, both Talia and Feels-No-Pain had realized, was an essential biological function. One that ensured sapients and sentients alike didn’t stretch too far beyond the limits of what their bodies were capable of.

Unfortunately, looking at the mess of tendrils, Talia realized that perhaps she’d been getting ahead of herself when it came to modifying spells. Without knowing which part affected pain, she couldn’t know which part to change.

Luckily, pain modulation seemed to be a common theme in crescian psionics. Considering the other common themes, she couldn’t blame them.

Resolve buoyed, she committed what she could to memory, set aside the thread containing Mind-Like-Crystal’s memories for later and got back to work.

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Talia opened her eyes. The radiance of the Fragment of the Weave faded away. Her body was stiff. A glance at her timepiece revealed that she’d been within the library for a little over five hours.

It had felt like years. Even accelerating the passage of memories as she had, she couldn’t help but feel discombobulated. Slowly, the experience faded to the back of her mind like a dream, leaving her with only the knowledge she’d sought out. And the feeling that if she wanted the rest, all she would have to do was look.

Talia cut off the negligeable flow of mana to her boon, knowing that under her armour, its glow had faded.

Meep.

“Yea, Menace,” she whispered with a—slightly—manic grin, “I got what I needed.”

Erp.

The juvenile wrested his way under her arm, seating himself in the nook of her crossed legs, nestling himself in like a dwarven monarch of legend. Only less furry, and more imperious.

The webbing between her fingers received the blessing of a rough lick as the cat deigned to grant her his attention.

Talia scritched her way down the crown of his head to his back. Purrs became snores faster than she could register the difference.

“Wish I could fall asleep that fast,” Talia muttered jealously.

The cold current of panic crept up her spine. Sleep didn’t hold good things for her, these days. Only nightmares.

Talia took a deep breath.

It was time to fix that.

Closing her eyes again, Talia painstakingly recreated what she was calling her ‘crystal mind’ spell. She’d managed to modify the pain-numbing component after a memory from the aptly named She-Who-Feasts-On-Agony-Enraptured.

Talia shuddered as she remembered the way the crescian had managed to find pain centre after pain centre and home in on them like a healer’s razor. Steady, precise, surgical.

Torture was apparently a staple of sapients everywhere.

Feasts-On-Agony just did it for fun.

Regardless, the crescian’s grim work had allowed Talia to trim away the negative aspects of the crystal mind spell. She supposed she should be grateful.

“This is a mistake, Tals. You’re messing with your brain. You’ve just seen how disastrous that can be. Don’t tell me you’re going through with this,” Torval scolded.

Talia scowled, eyes screwed shut, her focus on the Image construct.

“Bah, you worry too much,” Zaric drawled. Talia could taste the crooked smile on his face. “It’s almost like you enjoy her being a cracked mess of a person. Just so you can lord it over us, like some paragon of virtue. Surprise buddy, I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re all the same godsdamned person.”

“This isn’t the right way to fix it,” Torval insisted, “You have no idea if this will work the way you want it to.”

“No, delvemaster, it’s the most efficient way to fix it,” Zaric mocked.

Gods, will they ever stop?

“Sure we will,” Zaric whispered in her ear, “Why, you’ve got the spellform all prepped and ready. A little mana, and poof. Steady, stable, dependable Talia is back. Oh, wait. Did she ever exist in the first place? I can’t remember. Why don’t we find out?”

Talia suppressed a giggle of anxiety.

Am I really about to test unproven magic on my mind, because a voice in my head told me to?

For a moment, she hesitated. A snarl built in the back of her throat. She wasn’t doing it because a voice in her head had told her to. She was doing it because she couldn’t trust herself anymore. She thought back to the panic attack. The toxic swirl of emotions that had consumed her since the end of the battle of the bridge. The guilt. The uncertainty. The fear.

“The wonder, the empathy, the affection for your friends,” Torval pleaded.

“Not worth it,” Zaric whispered.

“No. No, it’s not,” she muttered, ignoring the mad cackle that only she could hear.

A splash of moonshine, a tight bandage for the demon to chew on, and then back in the fight.

“See you never again, Tals,” Zaric goaded, leering.

Clenching her fist, Talia sent a pulse of mana squirming its way up her channels. Crystal mind flickered to life, its tendrils rearranging themselves slightly—

S-St-Sta-a-aaa-aabbb

Talia’s vision s-st-stuttered-d. The spell latched onto her Core, drinking d-deeply of the primal force it c-contained. H-Hollowing her o-ou-out. Her ears rang with the beginning of a t-t-tinny warning call. Copper spread across her t-to-tongue.

It was just the beginning.

Oh fuck—

She fell limp.

Darkness.

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Talia’s heart screeched back to life with the force of a battering ram. Her gasp filled her ears. Menace skittered across the bed, fur raised into a puff of spikes.

Blinking the blurriness from her eyes, she looked around, seeing the wagon as if for the first time. She felt like she’d been caught in a gas eruption for her entire life, and was just now leaving it behind. It felt good. Like her mind was a piece of cloudy quartz turned to diamond.

Talia felt a smile stretch across her lips, full of teeth and promises.

< Come > She spoke to Menace. Weaving her psionics felt easier than it had ever been.

The mirage-lynx approached her warily, as if sensing that something was different. A low growl built in his chest. Talia ran gentle fingers across his brow.

< Calm >

He slackened at her touch.

Meep?

“Good boy.”

Talia stood from her bunk, all thoughts of sleep gone. She took a long look at the mural of Karzgorad painted onto the wall in violent, vibrant hyperbole.

< Menace, follow, quiet and hidden >

The mirage lynx hopped off the bed, his iridescent fur rippling into invisibility.

Talia walked out of the wagon with a spring in her step. There was work to be done.