The cramped shelter came back into focus around Talia with a shuddering jitter of her senses. A deafening silence, the smell of sweat and leather and steel. Slices of grey sharpened into focus as her darkvision made out the shapes of her fellow delvers clustered about the walls. Two were conspicuously missing, Kaina and Silversweep’s packs lying discarded against the wall. Though given that no one was overly worried, she assumed their leaving was sanctioned.

Then she noticed that the group seemed preoccupied with one thing.

Looking at her.

Grif, his hood down, signed to her.

‘Nightmare?’

Was I making noise?

Talia shook her head, spotting the pity and sympathy in her teammate’s eyes where it wasn’t obscured by enchanted cowls. Her body creaked and cracked as she stood and stretched. A glance at her timepiece told her she’d been in the dream world for a few hours. Meeting the worried gazes around her, Talia hesitated.

A seed of a lie might work here…

But there were other ways to justify her new knowledge. The least of which being the chronicler in just the other room. Better to keep claims of divine revelation —or some such nonsense— as a last resort.

Metal fingers contorted silently as she signed back.

‘Am fine.’

The way the greybeard followed her with his eyes told her exactly what he thought about her response. Talia shrugged internally as she went to join Calisto. The man’s belief in the truth was unnecessary.

A peculiar pop filled her ears as she stepped through the silencing enchantment into the tiny office. Calisto didn’t even turn to look at her, standing with her back turned, logbook open in one palm while she poured over the simple map etched onto the wall.

“I have a solution,” Talia said without preamble.

“Leaving on your own will only get you killed, Talia, formidable as you may be,” Calisto muttered, dragging a distracted finger across the map.

The chronicler looked frazzled, hair in disarray, bony fingers shaking, shoulders bunched up with tension.

“I didn’t say I was leaving,” Talia replied evenly, “I said I have a solution. For all of us.”

Talia pulled up one of two stools, sitting at the tiny desk with a victorious smirk. It took a few more moments for the delvemaster to register what had been said, but register it did. The logbook snapped shut with a slap, and when she sat down, the stoicism had returned to Calisto’s face.

“Explain.”

Talia’s toothy grin grew wider.

“Tunnels, below the mid quarter. If my hunch is right, they should lead all the way up to the high quarter, maybe even up to the upper reaches. We just have to reach them.”

One of the delvemaster’s thin eyebrows arched up onto her forehead.

“You’ll have to give me more than that, Arcanist. I have read no accounts of any such tunnels, unless you mean the sewers, which are so flooded as to be useless to us, and have been for centuries.”

Talia hesitated. Some part of her wanted to keep the Fragment of the Weave to herself. An insistent voice that was becoming increasingly loud. Giving herself a shake, she stood from her stool and edged around Calisto to stand before the map. Comparing the crude, single-line etching to the recollection of a long-dead arachnid was a challenge, but she’d long memorized the few landmarks the memory had provided for reference.

She traced along a winding street, visualizing it in her mind until she landed on an intersection about a third of the way across the mid quarter from the shelter. Fully aware of Calisto’s questioning gaze on her back, Talia tapped the spot for emphasis.

“Here. An entrance to the old set of tunnels from the time of the Ancients. They run below the sewers, winding their way across the plateau and up into the third tier. From what I-uh— I am positive it can take us all the way up into the upper reaches,” Talia asserted, frowning as she felt sweat bead across her brow.

What the hell is wrong with me?

Calisto’s face drew blank. Concern, curiosity —or was it hope?— flickered across her features.

“Much as that would be convenient, miraculous even, I’m afraid, as I said that there is no indication these tunnels even exist, Talia,” Calisto said slowly, “Just where did you come by this information?”

I should tell her…I had a vision. That’s it! I had a vision. The others will be witnesses. I must have been moving in the trance —why else would Grif think I was having a nightmare?

As Talia opened her mouth to say just that, the words caught in her throat.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Why am I lying? Calisto knows my biggest secret already. She’s kept my secret from near the start. What’s one more? I can trust her.

“I—do you remember—”

Pain lanced across the back of Talia’s eyes. She stumbled. Her prosthesis fell slack against her side with a thump. Warmth dribbled down her lips, filling her mouth with the taste of salt and copper.

“Hurk—” Talia hissed, clutching at her head with her left hand.

“Talia? What’s wrong? Talia?!”

Trying in vain to mutter an explanation, Talia let herself be guided back into her seat, breathing a sigh of relief as the pain faded to a dull throb.

“I-I’m alright. I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me,” she mumbled.

Dark spots hung in her vision as she met the delvemaster’s eyes. The older woman pulled out a kerchief and dabbed at Talia’s face with worry, speaking softly, chiding.

“Talia, you’re crying blood, and your nose is bleeding.”

“What? No, I—”

Talia wiped at her face, staring with incomprehension at the red on the back of hand.

What the fuck?

A hazy memory came back to her. Waking up in the small cavern after her encounter with the Matriarch. The nodule of a psionic spell she’d noticed in the minds of her fellow delvers. Like a…ball of webbing, unspooling itself.

She did something to us. To me. Why? I thought she was helping me.

“Talia? Still with me?” Calisto asked.

“Yes, sorry, just—”

“No need to explain. You need more rest. We can discuss this in the morning, when we’re both fresh.”

Talia shook her head angrily.

“No!” she snapped.

Calisto recoiled at the vehemence in her voice.

“No. I need to get this out now. If I don’t…”

The spell had influenced her, pushing her to act as it designed.

But it’s not like I haven’t shared the Matriarch’s existence before…I told…who did I tell, again?

Her thoughts became muddled for a moment, warring with the clarity of the crystal mind spell. Jerking her head up, Talia gave Calisto a pleading look.

“I told you about my meeting with the Crescian Matriarch, right? You remember?”

For a moment, seeing the glassy-eyed look that came over the chronicler, Talia feared the other woman would deny it. But the delvemaster slowly nodded, seeming confused.

“Yes—? Yes, you did, didn’t you? How odd that I didn’t remember until now,” Calisto muttered, taking a seat once more, flipping through her logbook, “Yes, it’s here, but…”

Something is messing with her mind, just like mine.

“Ok,” Talia sighed, “Ok, that’s good. Now do you remember how I said she helped me with my, ah, mind?”

“Somewhat? It’s written here, but my memory of the event is...fractious, at best. Why is that? Did you do something?”

“Not me, but I’m going to try to fix it now,” Talia answered, “Hold onto that thought, please. Anything you can remember about our conversation.”

“Al…right?”

Talia closed her eyes, stretching a tendril of psionic power over to the delvemaster’s mind. Not entering her mindscape, just hovering above it, looking for any hint of a psionic working.

There!

Thin tendrils of yellow webbing twisted through the delvemaster’s thoughts. Subtle and thin, nearly unnoticeable. Just one colour among many. But now that she was looking, it radiated an obvious otherness, like it didn’t belong. A pluck with her power had it unravel —distantly she heard a gasp— and she followed the fraying remnants across the surface of Calisto’s thoughts, eradicating every trace of it. Only when the last shred of yellow thread had been crushed under her psionic boot did Talia withdraw from the outside of the delvemaster’s consciousness and open her eyes.

“Better now?” Talia asked, noticing that the task had significantly drained her Core.

Calisto was staring down at the pages of the logbook, flicking through pages as if reading them for the first time.

“Yes, I remember now. The way we woke up, the ancient crescian you told us about, the—”

The chronicler fell silent, staring incredulously at the parchment covered in her own handwriting. Talia didn’t push, letting her gather her thoughts.

To protect the knowledge of her existence? But then why wouldn’t she just erase it from our minds directly? Why the roundabout way of ensuring our silence?

The sheer power the Matriarch had exuded had always been impressive, but it had been tempered by Talia’s certainty of the spider’s benevolence. Now, she wasn’t so certain. What if there were other things hidden away in her own head? Things she would never remember? Somewhere along the way, had she just become a pawn?

The spiral of ‘what if’ cut off abruptly as the potency of her crystal mind spell reasserted itself, forcing her to look at things from a different angle.

If she wanted us gone, there was nothing we could do. That she leaned on subtlety, rather than brute force, is all the evidence I need. I can remove the spell if I need to, and as far as I can tell, all it does is conceal her existence from being dispersed.

Nonetheless, Talia needed a way to explain how she’d gotten the information about the spiderways to Calisto, at least.

Maybe if I don’t mention the Fragment directly?

“So,” Talia started.

“This…Matriarch. Clearly, she’s altered our minds,” Calisto stated, “Is that how you know about the tunnels? And why you hurt yourself when you tried to tell me about it?”

Bracing for another spike of pain, Talia nodded slowly.

Nothing.

I can work with this.

“She gave me a…gift,” Talia hazarded.

Still nothing.

Noticing her hesitation, Calisto encouraged her with a nod of her head, pulling out a pen and setting the nib to paper.

“She called it a boon. Think of it as…a library. One that lets me learn about…things that happened in the past that only creeeeee—ahh.”

So the link between the knowledge and the crescians in the problem.

Talia waved off Calisto.

“I’m ok. I’m ok. I can see the, uh, events of the past, but only what certain individuals have experienced, you follow?”

The chronicler looked like she had half a dozen questions, but her gaze was fixed somewhere on Talia’s cheek, where the psion could feel a drip of wetness. No questions were forthcoming.

“And in one of those memories, I saw the spi—ancientways. Ugh. This is irritating. The event was reliable, and the individual in question used them to get around the city unseen,” Talia finished.

The discussion continued like that, with Calisto beginning to grasp what Talia could and couldn’t say, and prodding with gentle questions to get the full scope of her knowledge. In the end, the chronicler was satisfied that the tunnels existed, which was a step forward, but then she closed her logbook and brought up the two other problems. Well, a problem in two parts.

“What do we do about the urvai? We can’t use clickers, which is quite the handicap, even with handsign to fall back on, and we still have to make our way through the swarm for quite a ways before reaching these…ancientways.”

Talia opened her mouth to answer, only to be interrupted by the arrival of Kaina and Silversweep. The former spoke as soon as she was past the silencing enchantment on the door.

“There’s a giant Aberrant thing fighting the urvai in the middle of the city.”

The shelter rumbled.

Boom—rumble

Calisto swore.