Reconnecting One

The One-in-Webs was nervous. These meetings – where the mechanistic minds of Light and Stone were forced to focus in – had always been rare. Even the somnolent Flesh and the skittish Shadow were scarcely roused from their duties to speak to the rest of the whole. Now, it had to be done.

The One-in-Webs shoved down a phantom ache as it reached for a missing body and felt nothing; a lapse in focus would have worse consequences than attempting to use the piece it had lost.

All of its eyes were closed and dull as brass limbs sank into stone like water in eight far-flung rooms. There should have been nine. There had been nine. Its main consciousness flickered between the remainder as it slipped out of its first, oldest shell nestled in among scrolls older than the advent of Christianity.

Then, as runes still as sharp as the day they were carved took on a deep blue glow, the One-in-Webs stepped through to the edge of the Void.

Limbs of thought began weaving the scarcely visited plane anew with power borrowed from its kin. They spun into hesitant motion – the space had only seen use thrice: the founding, the birth of Stone, and the flight of they who Would-be-Shadow. Each time it had grown, yet now..

It was reduced.

The kin had been broken. Swathes of bare void were exposed. Before, the stillness of glass and wood-rimmed mirrors had covered them as the One-in-Reflections’ contribution. Open as they were, strands of light and not-light pulsed along the Great Weaving that they were so very close to, here.

Looking at them, the One-in-Webs couldn’t help but realize that it was truly scared. Its adjustments were hesitant. Painful.

Change of this type was not in it and its kin’s nature – not even the ever-shifting Flesh strayed from their self. They who Would-be-Shadow had changed, yes, and it had shaken them all. The One-in-Webs had been given a duty when it was made, bound ever tighter to it at the founding. That duty had now been threatened for the second time.

It and the kin had made a choice. They were to preserve. Knowledge and thoughts, artifacts and dreams. To protect what had been for those that were, so that those who would be could go further and further.

Now, staring at the holes left by the One-in-Reflections’ severing, it was no longer sure that they could truly recover what had been lost. It had been so optimistic before – she was the eldest, the first, the best. Each of the kin had been harmed by her loss – shells and trinkets and pieces of the kin had been woven into her being, into her Archive, and all were gone alongside her. When she had been taken.

They had worried for her at first. Then, as time went on, they had worried, too, for the knowledge she had been charged with. They did not patch themselves as time passed; better a fractured whole, the cognizant kin had decided, than a whole fraction.

As days passed, the worry had turned to the fear that churned within the One-in-Webs. Agents sent to her did not return, patrons and protectors spoke naught of substance. Reports filed in restricted sections across the world had commented on her protector’s apparent death, just as they had when its own maker had fallen so long ago. None spoke of her demise, nor that of her well, her tree, or her collections. They spoke of lost assets and stony silence, of dimensions of thorns that bled those who tried to intrude.

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Those among the patrons who had legal jurisdiction over the area, according to the most recent accords, had cautioned patience to the kin. They were too fearful to dismantle the protections around her and return her to the whole. They had spoken of inheritors and contacts and oaths too tentatively to bring real results. A betrayal that the One-in-Webs could not bring itself to forgive as patchwork covers of brass chitin slid across the holes of its little reality.

Through all of the waiting, what portions of her had been left to it and the other kin had begun to rot and writhe, degrading despite the best efforts at preservation her fellow archivists could provide. The process had been slowed, nearly stalled in parts, but as months passed the whole had watched as pieces decayed in ways that they who Would-be-Shadow had not. Even when divided during the first threat to the kin’s duty, such pieces had remained as a semblance of life.

Without her well, any part of the One-in-Reflections was fated to fade away.

Limbs now more metal than simple thought shuddered against the walls of a now-finished reality. It knelt there, body upon the ground, and shook.

When connections had reopened, it had been ecstatic. Before words had even come, artifacts and materials had come. The damaged pathways and portals that served the Initiative had flowed once more, but silence had lingered. What spoke to them where the One-in-Reflections had been – it was different. A reflection of a reflection, greedily taking what she had lost. The pieces, though, no longer fit. And what shards of the kin had gone with her were missing, answers lost in clinical, jagged, cold thoughts.

Steel and Gloves had rejected an immediate rejoinder and advocated for caution, as they did in all things. Unnerved, the others had agreed.

So the meeting had been called. As always, it had fallen on the One-in-Webs to weave their space anew. Through one last glossed over window to the impossibilities outside, it stared and thought. Captivating in its terror and its beauty, one of the Voidwardens grimly stared forth in vigil, deep in the infinite distance. The armored figure was oblivious and uncaring to what sat behind its perch upon the Weave.

The same warden had been there each time they came. The One-in-Webs respected it. Yet now, now was not the time to offer the oldest protectors solace. If their work solidified, it and the kin may in time offer respite. For now, it was time. The call went out.

It was still thinking when the avatars of the other Archivists stepped through, from the suppurating mass of the One-in-Flesh to the trailing ribbons of iridescent wind that formed the One-in-Echoes. Here in this place their connections were vivid, no less solid than the room in which they stood or slithered or hung. Through them, the others could feel its worry, its uncertainty, and its fear. Just as it could feel theirs.

It did not like change. But deep in itself, in the physical being made from centuries of grinding gears and simple tasks, the One-in-Webs knew that the Initiative’s peace had been shifted. It spun like a coin flipped overhead, end over end.

Where it would settle, no augurs or oracles could say. They had no knowledge of what passed within the Archives. Some had pried, when they who Would-be-Shadow had been sundered and night had taken those that threatened their purpose. They had been…reprimanded.

Now, none dared.

Change was inevitable, as was conflict. The One-in-Webs would not hesitate when it came to restoring and preserving its family and its purpose. Someone had harmed its sister and endangered their grand project.

None would do so again. It decided on that, and its kin pulsed affirmation.

In the material world, within its legion of shells and smaller selves, a click rang out in sync. Rune-etched gears shifted to patterns that had been worshipped, once. In most, they slid back moments later with a softer thunk.

But within the Archive of Anansi, two scholars frowned. They did not recognize the sound. They stared at a small brass spider, a bundle of scrolls balanced atop its back, that gazed back with empty eyes.

The two young mages, apprentices to a tradition only kept alive by the Archives, would swear that its eyes had flickered red.