Bella backed away from the gigantic spider. It was impossibly monstrous. It couldn’t be real, but the heat upon her skin told her she couldn’t be dreaming. She tried to speak and struggled, but then a voice came from upstairs, desperate, and choking on smoke.
“Please!” Oriz cried, weaker than ever. “Bella, help me!”
Zoe chittered as she crawled forward with uncanny, machinelike precision.
“I won’t let you go to her,” Zoe said as two legs carefully gathered the web from her spinnerets and spread. “You will be mine.”
“You’d rather we both burn?” Bella said.
“Whatever keeps you from her.”
A faint scream rose in Bella’s ears like the wind through a distant canyon. She thought it was her own, but her jaw remained clamped with anger and fear. Stepping away from the advancing spider, she backed into a wall. The scream grew louder, and she glanced out the corner of her eye.
There, in the burning kitchen, sat her chef’s knife. Scratches along its blade glowed with fire like ancient runes. Her fingers trembled as the blade called to her and she to it.
Zoe crept forward.
Without hesitation, Bella sprinted into the kitchen as Zoe lunged. The gigantic spider crashed into the wall and squealed with rage. Web spilled out across the floor. If it had caught Bella, she would be stuck. She couldn’t remain defenseless.
She entered the kitchen and braved the flames. Her knife was so far away, but so close. With a gesture like a half-forgotten dream, Bella reached, and the blade came to her. It felt right in her grip, and she charged out of the kitchen toward the spider.
If it wouldn’t let her pass, she would kill it, no matter what face it wore.
###
Zoe stepped closer to her friends, Mirrored hands open before her.
“Bella, can you hear me?” she asked.
Bella nodded, and Zoe took another step forward, but the grass bent beneath her feet, the sword raised between them.
“You want to keep us apart,” Bella said.
Zoe stopped walking. She could feel in her heart that this was the real Bella.
“I’m here to save you,” Zoe said.
“You always say that.”
“It’s always true.”
Bella shook her head.
###
“You want me for yourself!” Bella screamed as she swung the knife at the face of the hideous spider.
The creature crawled up the walls, dodging Bella as it scurried across the ceiling.
“Oriz shouldn’t keep you for herself,” the spider hissed.
“She wants what’s best for me.”
“Help!” Oriz shouted from up the stairs.
Flames licked the walls, and the heat grew. Smoke curled around the hulking body of the spider. Her friend’s scarred lips stretched and distorted as mandibles protruded.
###
“Bella,” Zoe said slowly. “We don’t need to fight. We need to work together to escape this spell.”
“There is no spell,” Oriz said. “You are full of lies.”
Zoe sighed. She had tried talking. She had tried being calm. There was one trick left in her wheelhouse, but still — despite her earlier claims — she hesitated.
“Please don’t make me force you.”
Bella’s flat expression twitched into a sneer as though someone had threaded fishing wire into the corner of her lips.
“You want me to beg,” Bella said, but the words came disjointed, as though she were a wooden dummy. “You want me for yourself. To need you. Those days are over.”
Zoe straightened. She let her hands fall into the opening stance of the Grasping Vine as Mirror flowed up her body.
“Oriz,” she said. “You won’t even let Bella make her own decisions. There is no love without free will. This is just a perversion.”
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“Lies,” came the voice from Bella’s lips. “If only you could see how she sees you.”
Zoe cracked her neck. She had little Skein, so she needed to be quick.
“You’ve made this easy for me,” she said.
“How?” the voice came from Bella and the whispering grasses.
Zoe grinned.
“Because you’re a goddamned monster.”
###
The gigantic spider scurried along the wall toward the hallway. Bella’s eyes widened as she realized where it was heading.
“No!” Bella cried. “Leave her alone.”
The spider glanced back at her with a wretched expression.
“I am not the monster here,” it said.
It slipped through the doorway and up the stairs and Bella charged afterwards. Her knife wailed in her hand. The scratches on its blade deepened as the blade grew longer. No longer a kitchen knife, it was now a long dagger. It looked like a weapon unearthed from a burial mound but it felt as right in her hands as the soup pot felt wrong.
Her heart pounded as she raced up the stairs. Heat choked the air in the stairwell. She could hardly breathe, as smoke rose from the kitchen. Should she be fighting the fire? Should she be charging after a monster?
The walls closed in as the spider reached the top of the stairs and crawled into the hallway on the upper floor. Bella hoped their bedroom door was closed, though she doubted wood could stop such a beast for long.
She just didn’t understand how Zoe could do something like this. What on earth had possessed her friend to turn into a gigantic spider and attack Oriz?
She frowned as she reached the hallway. The spider lay at the far side; it crouched on the wall, staring at her with bedraggled hair framing a face of hopelessness.
“If you want to save her,” Zoe said. “You’ll have to go through me.”
###
Oriz wove the grass. Her cocoon tightened, buckled, swelled, contracted, a vast web made into a puppet show of strings and dreams. With one hand she pulled at the grass strands tied around her lover’s body, and with the other, she pulled at strings around her lover’s mind. Her work was as intricate as it was necessary.
[So many delicate strings. What if one of them snaps before her mind? Are you so sure of yourself?
Oriz couldn’t let the voice distract her. She couldn’t think about failure. This would work, it had to work; it was the only way. With a twitch of a finger, she tugged at Bella’s arm, and the runeblade swung for Zoe’s throat.
###
Zoe stepped to the right, her head swaying as the runeblade missed her throat by inches. Bella spun, more like a toy than a person. Her whole body jerked, pirouetted on her toe, and swung the blade overhead at Zoe. Again, Zoe dodged stepping closer, following the path of the Grasping Vine. The attacks came, the runeblade howling and burying, the air popping with a caustic aura, and every time Zoe stepped closer, she had to stop lest the blade slice her apart.
A thrust toward her eyes made her leap back, and all her momentum vanished. The two women stood in a circle of cleared grass like a crop circle made into a battlefield.
Zoe wiped a thread of blood from her forehead. She hadn’t even felt the sword swiped through her Mirror, but the pain bloomed now. It had been barely a scratch from the blade’s tip, but that weapon was no joke. Zoe was lucky that the attack hadn’t cut through reality.
Bella strode forward, her footsteps floating as though she dangled on wires, she moved slowly but Zoe knew the speed could change at any moment. She was hesitant to use anything too destructive. A system-enhanced body was resilient, and Vitality could work wonders, but it was Bella… the idea of hurting her twisted Zoe’s stomach.
And it felt like overwhelming offense would be the only thing that could get past the inhuman blade work. Oriz’s knowledge of the Grasping Vine made it impossible for Zoe’s usual strategies to work.
The blade sang toward her, and Zoe stepped back. After fighting so long with unrelenting momentum, it felt wrong to retreat. She circled, strafed, as Bella’s body spun in attack after attack. Each blow aimed for an artery, and when Zoe tried to maneuver away, the sword cut off her exit.
She was forced to part, but the blade sliced through her Mirror. All her advantages were stripped away in the face of this conflict. Oriz knew Zoe didn’t want to hurt Bella, and Zoe couldn’t think of a way around this that didn’t end with her bleeding out in the grass.
###
The gigantic spider crouched at the end of the hall. Long legs bent and crooked as its human face drooled. Zoe’s expression warped and twisted as poisonous mandibles clicked with vile glee. Smoke drifted up from the stairwell at Bella’s back as she gripped her knife.
The blade grew longer again as she stepped forward. It looked like a sword in her grip. It felt right. She gave an experimental swing of the blade — how could something so heavy feel so light? — and the monstrous spider cowered.
It feared her, and Bella grinned as the fear cleared away like cobwebs in a fire.
“You won’t stop me from saving Oriz,” she said.
Zoe’s scarred lips flapped, but the mandibles in her mouth prevented any intelligent words. Poisonous drool dripped and hissed on the hallway carpet. Oriz’s weak cries for help came from beyond the doorway.
Bella charged.
The spider hunched back before it sprung forward. With its legs and grasping, Bela was once more shocked by its size. It looked like it could wrap around a sedan, but she refused to be afraid. She fought for love, and nothing would stop her.
A black metal scream rose from her sword as she swung it at the leaping spider. She cut through a limb and rolled under the bulk. The severed leg hit the ground and twitched. Zoe struck the carpet behind Bella and screamed in agony.
Bella had already turned, her blade raised and hacking. She had to kill the creature was dead before she opened the door.
###
Zoe cursed as the blade sliced through her fingers. Her digits flung into the air and glinted like chrome blobs as they melted and lost cohesion. Moth cried out in her mind, and Zoe gritted her teeth for the both of them.
More Mirror poured into her hand to replace the loss, but her armor grew thinner. She backed away from another slash, ducked under a hack, and leaped clear to the other side of the clearing before Bella could thrust the blade into her kidneys.
The blade wasn’t cutting portals, and Zoe hoped that meant Bella was still in there somewhere, still resisting. Because this puppet didn’t fight like Bella or even Oriz. It felt like Zoe was trapped in a blender. She reached through [Our Hearts Toll as One], but lowering the heartbeat did nothing since external Skein manipulated Bella’s body.
She had to get close enough and use [Mind’s Eye Incision], only then could she hope to slice through the strings.
But how to get close enough? She was tired, and bleeding, and Bella only grew faster with each attack. There seemed to be no way to attack, and Zoe wasn’t sure she could escape anymore.
Moth fluttered across her heart.
“Are you sure?” Zoe asked with a frown.
Another flutter, insistent and joyous and determined.
“Your right,” Zoe said. “She would do the same for us.”
The bladed puppet that was her best friend sailed through the air. Bella spun, and the runeblade branded glowing circles in the air.
Zoe extended a grasping claw as she and Moth poured everything into this last opportunity.
[Empress of Time]
She hoped it would be enough.