The voice was the first thing Talia heard. Grating. Raw. Torn.
Maddened.
Please. Please make them stop. PLEEEAAASSEEEPLeASepLEasEpLeaSePleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease—
Then flickers.
Of another Talia. One with eyes that burned. Like embers carved lit with rage.
Body pierced and ravaged. Infested with twists of bright indigo coils. Like some otherworldy, parasitic worm feasting on her flesh.
Nothing but a mewling girl flanked by taunting shadows. Like insidious whispers fluttering across an empty room.
All of it witnessed through a pane of reflective glass.
Silver sheen splattered in blood.
It’s so dark. S-s-so cold. MAKE IT STOP.
Talia’s alter ego rocked frantically. Curled up on herself, hands clapped against her ears. Banging her head against the glass.
Thump thump
Chains of their own making tore at them both. Ripped against them with eerie symmetry. But with obvious favouritism.
Thump thump
Where one felt desperation, the other felt only disgust. Where one was trapped, the other had agency.
Thump thump
And yet, when Talia felt pushed to reach out to her other self, moved by a swell of empathy —she found only bands of purple pressing against her.
Thump thump
So she watched, just as helpless as the girl behind the glass. The mirror. Listening until she wished she could clap her hands to her ears just like that poor, wretched thing. But her chains prevented it. So she watched, and listened.
Thump thump
Then something changed.
Thump thu—
The blubbering pleas melted in on themselves, distorting, altering. Until it wasn’t Other-Talia speaking at all.
Mirrored glass melted to puddles. Oozing like smoke given fluid form. Pleading shifted to blaring, tinny warnings. Talia’s perspective bent until the floor was the wall and she fell through the shimmering puddle, consciousness squeezed through a pinhole like the gush of ground meat through a grinder.
The metallic voice flared louder, corrupting mellifluous, oh-so-familiar words into something grating and over-enunciated.
Images flickered by.
A single thread, burnished brash and shining gold, straining to stay whole.
Dark, metal-walled tunnels.
The click and scuttle of spider mandibles. Ghostly. As if remembered.
Twist after turn after twist, Talia shot down the vacant, cavernous corridors. Until she arrived at a door. Silverite, or something like it, clamped flush to the wall. Sealed tighter than a vise. Inscribed with runic markings, dense and dripping with rune-rot.
Something beyond it beckoned, calling to her on a level more primal than need. More forceful than hunger. More tantalizing than breath. Begging her to listen. To understand. The blaring of the tinny voice lessened but remained insistent. Purple runes shifting to red and orange scrawled themselves atop her vision, translucent and stuttering.
Then it all flickered.
Already dark palettes faded to grey like the dream’s painter had spilled water across the canvas in a fit of desperate rage. Sound fell out of the frame entirely. Ash filled Talia’s mouth with scents of grease and copper.
The bands of purple pulled taught around her neck—
And then even that faded to blackness.
----------------------------------------
Talia jerked to life to the shaking of the earth. Dust and pebbles drifted onto her face from the ceiling. Thumping heartbeats rattled her chest in time with the rocking floor.
BOOMM—rumble
Huh? What? Where?
Swivelling her head, she found that someone had propped her up against a wall in her sleep. Her eyes were crusted shut by something sticky that had dripped down her face —blood. Her mouth tasted like old parchment and copper and dead things. Her body ached. The back of her eyes, especially, throbbed. Darkness crept in on the edges of her vision. Almost like a particularly determined carpenter was treating her eye sockets like windows to be boarded up —if all they had to do so were a set of rusty nails and two-ton brick to smash them in with.
Bent over with her head against her knees, Talia’s ill-fated attempts from the previous night came back in spurts and flashes. The void between the liminal and her mindscape. The barrier she could not cross.
The crystal mind spell…
Coating every part of her. Tearing through the fabric of her consciousness and sealing the holes with itself. The popping sensation as she’d pushed past the barrier to pluck at its tendrils. The stuttering darkness —the dreams.
Not a dream. I don’t know what that was, but it was not a dream.
The featureless dark room. The mirror. The reflection that had looked back at her. The wild swings between desperate fury and virulent fear in that other self’s burning eyes. The gnashing of teeth and the rocking back and forth and the pleading. The shadows whispering into hands desperately clapped over bleeding ears. All while Talia watched. Unable to do anything to help.
The way the…not-a-dream had changed at the end. The corridors and the door.
It’s always doors. And that voice, and the runes, but mostly doors. Big doors, small doors, paths leading to doors.
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But mostly the tinny voice, begging her to understand.
Talia shook her head, nearly chuckling at the madness of ascribing any meaning to a feverish nightmare. One brought on by tampering with things in ways her mind clearly objected to. A sneaking suspicion told her that her place of power, that segment of her mind filled with runes, was deteriorating once more. And yet, with the crystal mind spell active, it would remain just that, a suspicion. A strong hunch.
Just like the hunch that told her that her preparations for removing the spell from her mind would be insufficient at best. Damaging, possibly lethal, at worst. Myriad as its benefits were, the downsides were looking more and more grim.
Luckily, the spell itself helped her reach the logical, pragmatic conclusion of that thought, conveniently brushing away any speck of emotion or turmoil the realization might have brought on.
Maybe this was a mistake, but I’m stuck with it. At least until—until I can… Find someone? An expert? It really doesn’t matter. As long as the spell lets me get the job done.
The girl from the mirror in her dream —if it was her— didn’t seem capable of doing anything but slowly breaking down. She could barely care for herself, let alone shoulder the weight of an entire civilization. Even if Talia could dispel crystal mind, she wouldn’t.
Not that it matters, because I can’t.
The door from the not-a-dream rose up in her thoughts unbidden, causing her to shake her head.
Pushing it all from her mind, Talia focused on taking deep breaths and clearing her thoughts.
Work to do. Plans to execute. We—I need focus.
As the migraine faded, Talia glanced around the room, splashing a bit of water in her hand and wiping the blood off her face as she did. The delvers were all slumped in various postures of sleep, as she’d left them. Only Grif was awake, keeping watch, seated in the spot she’d occupied… Talia checked her timepiece.
Five hours ago. Well, there goes my rest, I suppose.
The old veteran noticed her moving and turned to beckon at her. His unlit pipe rolled across his teeth, the nub well-chewed already.
Talia fought the urge to roll her eyes.
Better not to antagonize him. Who knows who will still be on my side in a few hours?
She rose with a light grunt, taking a seat next to the old man.
‘Sick?’ he signed, after a while.
Talia frowned, adding two and two together and realizing Grif must’ve been the one to prop her against the wall in her sleep.
‘No,’ she denied
No point in coming up with a lie now.
‘Bleeding, shaking, groaning,’ the man signed, looking doubtful.
Talia shook her head.
‘Not sick.’
The old greybeard seemed to struggle with something, gesturing at her face, drawing two fingers from his eyes down his cheeks.
‘Bleeding sadness.’
Bleeding tears? No, handsign has a word for tears, he’d just use that. Unless he forgot how?
‘Not sad,’ she signed back hesitantly.
Grif shook his head, crunching into his pipe in frustration. Talia stole a glance at the runes in the doorway and considered telling him they could speak freely.
Even whispering might wake the others though, considering how quiet it is.
Biting back a sigh, Talia thumbed the clasp on her belt pouch and pulled out her journal, flipping to a blank page and handing it to the man. He puzzled over the trinket pen for a moment, before setting the journal in his lap and sticking his tongue between his yellowed teeth. The writing he passed back to her was barely legible, but it was only two works; she managed.
Scarlet Lament? Ah. I guess it would look like that, wouldn’t it?
Talia shook her head vigorously, digging a metal finger into her collar and exposing her throat. The lack of bleeding pustules and angry, varicose veins only seemed to confuse the poor man further, but at least it proved she wasn’t diseased.
‘No bleeding sadness,’ she affirmed.
‘Acknowledged,’ he signed back.
They sat in metaphorical and literal silence after that. The light of the old delver’s mind, close enough for Talia to reach out and touch, churned and fought with itself. Talia considered that maybe if a psion were peeking at her own surface thoughts, they might see the same.
Eventually, she closed her eyes, sinking into a trance and cycling for the few hours they had before Calisto woke them. The grinding of her Core growing larger reverberated across her bones; a cleansing pain.
----------------------------------------
Someone tapped Talia on the shoulder. Her eyes flicked open as her cycle ground to a halt. Calisto looked down on her, icy demeanour shrouding her like a cloak.
‘Time to explain the plan,’ she signed.
Talia hesitated before answering, debating her course of action for a split second before coming to a decision.
“We can speak out loud, I added the silencing enchantment like you suggested,” she said at normal volume.
And just like that, Talia had everyone’s attention.
Most seemed surprised at the sound, others curious but unfazed, while a few, Kaina and Grif, notably, frowned over the obvious question Talia’s words posed: where had she gotten the mana? Calisto shot an annoyed glance at the psion, who shrugged.
“Good, I suppose that makes this easier,” the delvemaster asserted, “Listen up. As you all have guessed, the mid-quarter is infested with an urvai swarm. Kaina and Silversweep were able to confirm yesterday that the hive has progressed past the larval phase and well into the warrior phase. We can expect drone flyers, on top of the usual larvae, as well as presumably a contingent of stonebound warriors, and a few spitters.”
The delvemaster looked to the scouts who nodded their confirmation. The company shuffled uneasily but remained attentive.
“To make matters worse, our scouts also spotted what they believe to be an elder karztwyrm in the centre of the plateau—and because we seem to just be that lucky, it also Aberrant,” Calisto stated, hands already raised to quell the upswell of muttering, “Quiet, please. It’s not all bad—I said quiet! Discipline yourselves. You are not children!”
The muttering died down, but not before one of the humans Yasida and her group had convinced to join shot out a question.
“How big is this beastie?”
Calisto swept her stern gaze across the assembled team.
“Large enough that it is likely the cause of the quakes we’ve been experiencing.”
There was no muttering after that. It was one thing to know, intellectually, that wyrms grew big. It was another entirely to feel the consequences of one’s movements shake the very earth beneath your feet like jelly.
After the silence had drawn on long enough, Calisto continued.
“Luckily, it seems the Aberrant monstrosity is contesting the urvai swarm over the only major source of food in the quarter, the overgrown parc. All we have to do is slip by it…”
Talia nodded along seriously as Calisto went over the plan as they’d discussed it the day before. The team would have to make its way through the edges of the embattled swarm, across roughly a third of the city before entering the ancientways. Comments and questions were answered as they popped up, until one finally gave Talia her opportunity.
“Righ, so we’re slinkin’ through an urvai hive for a good ten kilometres, and hopin’ we don’t get noticed or sprayed down with pheromones —which is impossible— with no coordination ‘cause our clickers are fucked, and just hope and pray that we make it there alive?” Yasida drawled, “Did I get that right, Delvemaster? Because that sounds like suicide.”
Talia opened her mouth to say her piece and put Yasida back in her place, but Colum interrupted her with a tangent.
“Um— why can’t we use our clickers anyway?” he asked, ducking his head self-consciously when the whole group turned on him with varying expressions of incredulity.
Kaina smacked the boy up the back of the head.
“Don’t interrupt kid,” she hissed.
“No, no, can’t blame the boy fer bein’ curious,” Grif grumbled, chastising, “How would he know?”
He has a point though —hells, I don't even know— but in reality, the explanation is meaningless. The devices are useless, what more is there to know?
Turning to the shiny, the old veteran slipped his pipe from his lips and explained.
“Clickers are jus’ carved and pared down urvai shells,” the greybeard revealed, other delvers nodding along, “We think they use ‘em along with their pher-y-mones to talk to each other, and we use ‘em for the same reason. Means that when a swarm is nearby though, we pick up their chatter, and it makes it impossible to understand each other, get it?”
Colum raised his head, nodding appreciatively and opening his mouth to ask another question, only to yelp as it was covered by Yasida’s palm. The ganger stared at Calisto with a challenge in her eyes. The delvemaster glared back icily.
“I think I asked my question first though, sweet as it is to be edurcatin’ the kid.”
My turn.
“I will be takin’ care of both problems,” Talia announced calmly.
Yasida looked ready to snap, but something stopped her. A memory of their previous interactions perhaps?
“With respect, Arcanist, that fancy arm ‘o’ yours is great and all, but it won’t do much for a swarm falling on us. And as far as I know, your enchantments need…”
The ganger’s gaze shifted slowly to the brand new enchantment on the door, active, and most importantly, filled with mana.
“…mana,” she finished.
Well, someone finally put two and two together.
Talia chose not to address the understanding in the other woman’s eyes, instead speaking to the whole group.
“I’ll be handling both communication and concealment, with my magic.”
An errant pebble dropped loose from the ceiling, echoing through the room.
The delvers just stared. Then they all began speaking at once.