I don’t know what to write.
And that is normal, acceptable even, for the meaning of words can be lost in the labyrinths of the mind as you wander hallways upon hallways of mementoes and canopic jars.
They make no sense, they wander around as much as you do, they change and reshape and quip and talk back and everything goes on and on without you, a meaningless carousel that turns and turns around and around and around until you feel sick to the consciousness and you can’t do anything but want it to stop. Yet you can’t leave, you can’t pull the brake and make the world halt, you must keep moving with it, want or not-want, and that makes the difference between soldier and slave.
The former fights on for that which he craves, the latter breaks down in tears that are chains. Both live and coexist, both forget their roles and betimes they change them, both make an equilibrium of sorts that keeps the carousel running ‘round and ‘round without toppling over into a Nothing of Existence itself.
The Spider weaves on, his children playing at gods and devils alike, the worlds they so watch and bind their little playthings to move around at their will and wont. They watch and they chitter and they break open the wines, preparing to witness the rise of their lives.
So what is the meaning of this?
‘Tis simple really: I don’t know what to write, so I wander these halls and hope that one day something will come out of these lightless, starless tunnels, a glimmer of hope in a dark cave of chained slaves who see only shadows of things they think right but are wrong.
I don’t know what to write. And that is fine.
For the world knows how to be.
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The room they’d given Isse was spacious and sparsely decorated, the sight of the light yellow walls warming and relaxing. A single king sized bed sat against one of the walls, still perfectly made, untouched by her hands and body. Beside it stood a
large dresser that would probably be absolutely useless seeing how her dress could change into anything she desired, and other than that… it was empty, waiting for her to decorate it in any way she desired.
So she had spent well over three hours making herself a hammock hanging from the high ceiling, well away from the expensive looking light fixtures, in a little corner of the room. Truth be told, it was more a nest than a hammock at this point: she could skitter inside entirely and the silk would hide her completely from sight, hugging her from all sides comfortably, letting her sleep in total darkness, which is exactly what she did for the rest of the day after her arrival.
Only twice someone interrupted her sleep, opening the door of her room and causing the numerous strands of silk she’d spread around it to break, alerting her of the person’s presence.
The first time it was, of all things, a [Maid]: the woman came in, wearing loose black clothes that covered her entire body, looking exceptionally comfortable and warm.
She was the definition of prim and proper even with that, long black gloves covering her hands and arm up to, she imagined, the elbow, or maybe even higher, she couldn’t tell since the dress was long sleeved, while wearing comfortable low heeled shoes that clicked mechanically against the mable (or stone) floor.
She’d been carrying a tray filled with food, from simple rice to well seasoned meat if her nose and eyes weren’t lying to her.
Upon seeing all the strands of her web she’d sighed and shaken her head in… probably resignation of a sort, although she couldn’t be certain with the woman’s fond smile.
She’d left not long afterwards, bowing before closing the door. That’s when Isse had climbed down, eating the food that had been brought to her oh so gently. She didn’t feel hungry, far from it, but… the children needed their food, so, even if her stomach revolted against her with every bite she took, even as her mind told her that there was no need to feed, she ate, forcing down everything.
Then she climbed back up into her little nest and went back to sleep, her little spider pets cuddling up against her warm body.
The second person to interrupt her sleep was Mr Henrick, although he didn’t so much enter as appear in the room. One moment she’d been sleeping unsoundly, the next she felt something touching many of her threads slightly, as if trying to make themselves noticed without being a nuisance. She peeked out of her cocoon and, sure enough, there was someone down there: Henricks. He was moving around the room like a dancer, weaving through the quite literal minefield of threads like it was second nature. His movements were slow, the passage of his mop leaving behind a floor cleaner than she’d ever imagined a floor could be clean. Maybe she’d once seen the floors of her house this clean when her mother had hired someone who’d also waxed them. She also distinctly remembered trying to skate on them and falling face first against the back of their couch.
She watched as he moved around, following a rhythm all of his own: swish, stop, breathe, swish, stop, breathe, and like that for the whole room.
It took him twenty minutes all things considered and, all the while, he never broke a single thread, somehow. When, finally, he reached the door, Henricks grabbed the empty serving tray, dusting it off with a hand that didn’t allow a single crumb to fall to the ground, and stepped out of the room, the door not making any noise as he opened it, nor breaking any of the threads she’d affixed to it after the [Maid]’s arrival.
“Good night, young miss. Rest well.”
Those were his first and last words as he closed the door behind him, the only reminder of his passage being the absence of any sort of grime or dust, together with that tray.
What a strange man, said Siidi, Why do we always find the strange ones?
More like they find us.
Maybe. Is it perhaps a secret Skill of you Wishers? To always attract the strangest people?
Greatness attracts greatness, tried to joke Isse, although it felt half-hearted to her.
Silence fell over the room and, a few minutes later, the arachne crawled back into her cocoon, making herself comfortable, and finally fell asleep, filled with the certainty that nobody else would disturb her for the rest of the evening.
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“How is she?” asked the King of Crows, Ravenspoken himself.
“She is resting, my Lord. We should let her do so,” answered Henrick over his plate of rice and vegetables. It was a simple dish for a simple man, made from products grown and harvested locally. They’d found out long ago that having an alraune among your greatest allies helped greatly with, of all things, the fertility of the soil in the local area, especially if that alraune had an [Aura of Fertility].
Surprisingly, or rather, unsurprisingly to Ravenspoken, their species didn’t normally have the capacity to Level because, for all that they took on the appearances of a human, at heart they were merely plants who had developed a different way to attract prey. They still ‘thought’ in the same way any other plant ‘thought’, and therefore they couldn’t Level because they had no real desires. Nivera though?
She’d been changed by a ‘verdant lamia catkin’, which made absolutely no sense to any of the others, but she was here and she was friendly and helpful, so they had no need to know more.
“I didn’t ask what she’s doing, Henricks. I asked how she is doing,” said Ravenspoken.
The [Cleaner] shrugged, eating another forkful of rice and chewing through it slowly, savoring every bite as if it could be the last. Sometimes the [King] envied that man and his ability to savor everything in life as if it were the first time.
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Finally, he answered: “She reminds me of the children who arrived at the orphanage after they’d been rescued by a village ravaged by war or bandits. Her eyes are as empty as theirs, and she’s twitchier than a headless zombie.”
The [King] nodded, although he didn’t quite understand the last words: “So, basically, like Tiana.”
“Like Tiana, but less on the doorstep of insanity, and more on that of crippling sadness.”
Ravenspoken sighed, rubbing his forehead. Nighttime had come and it was going with him, unable to sleep.
“Never in my entire life would I have expected an arachne to appear at my doorstep.”
“The crows,” said Henrick, as if that could explain everything.
“Maybe, who knows. Even I sometimes don’t understand them.”
“You should sleep,” said Henricks, causing the [King] to look at him in confusion.
The [Cleaner] put down his plate and made the gesture of laying your head on a pillow, causing Ravenspoken to chuckle: “I can’t. If I could, I wouldn't be here talking to you.”
Henricks shook his head: “The people here suffer from an inability to sleep.”
“Well, Archie grew up in a war and never learned to actually rest, Fred is a night owl, Nivera doesn’t need to sleep, Tiana literally sleeps with one eye open and one ear listening in the rare cases she actually sleeps, I’m the [King] and you… I’m still not sure why you don’t sleep.”
Henricks shrugged: “The dead do not sleep, nor grime.”
Ravenspoken sighed: “Maybe you’re right. I’ll try and get in a few hours of sleep. Goodnight, old friend.”
“Goodnight, Your Majesty.”
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The Mind Castle’s walls were filled with cracks. Oh so, so many cracks.
It almost looked ready to fall apart, and yet there it stood, stable as could be, the walls rising high towards a sky that had once been dark but, as she’d become more proficient with Soul Magic, had filled up with constellations made of brighter and duller stars. Little distant souls, most sitting in place, while a few others sometimes inched this way and that.
“One day we’ll be able to make our own constellations,” said Siidi. Isse hadn’t noticed her soul half arriving by her side, so lost was she in watching the spectacle over her head.
She turned now, looking at her in confusion: “Why would we want to do that?”
A shrug, a small smile: “Because we can. Sometimes, sister, all the reason someone needs to do something is wanting it. Life isn’t all about duty and reason.”
They fell in companionable silence, sitting down on the soft ground of the tower where it had all started, where they’d accepted each other’s existence and gone from enemies to, well, sisters, two united, if not unified, halves of the same soul.
“Heh, sounds good to me,” she said after a moment of thinking.
As the night went on they settled down on the comfortable cushions that covered practically every available surface of the tower, cuddling close to each other with a frog plushie hugged between them (because frogs were awesome).
Sometimes she liked to imagine the first ever arachne who, Siidi had told her, apparently had been a lot less civilized than those of her time, just wandering into a forest, seeing a frog for the first time and just suddenly all stopping to stare at the bouncing and croaking animal, their eyes going wide in wonder before they started fighting against each other for the honor of being the one to keep the animal. It was a hilarious image that never failed to make her smile, even now.
Music began to drift up to her, coming from a hidden orchestra below. She couldn’t remember this song so it probably came from Siidi’s memories. It was gentle, slow, like many things these days felt after the all-too-exciting escape from Tedam.
“What song is this?” she asked her soul half.
She smiled at the question, a genuine gesture that expressed a fondness one could show only when thinking about a distant, happy, memory.
“We called it ‘The Child’s Dance’. It was a dancing song from our last years, before the Hunters began pushing back in an effective way.”
“You remembered it?”
“Just this morning.”
She wiggled a bit and Isse opened her arms, letting go of her soul half as she rose, stretching out her arms and spine.
“I remembered dancing this with one of my blood sisters, Siramia,” the smile hadn’t left her lips from before, but it became fonder still, something Isse didn’t know to be possible,
“And that would be…?”
“Ah, right. You remember my Trial?”
“The one where I tried to kill you with an endless horde of Hunters? Yes.”
“Well, Siramia was the arachne playing the violin and harvesting people’s souls with her songs.”
Oh, that one. She could still clearly remember the three arachne her soul half had summoned during their second Trial: the woman with the violin, an average looking arachne carrying a beautiful violin and wearing a golden monocle she imagine she’d stolen from a corpse somewhere; the [Mage] with a line of white hair that shot spell impossible to stop or unweave; and the woman covered in knives, who fought by Siidi’s side and moved like a storm, cutting to pieces anything in her path. Together those four alone had managed to stave off an entire army of thousands of Hunters for minutes on end. An eternal battle that was more a massacre than a fight. They’d lost only because they’d been outnumbered thousands to one.
“What’s the song about?”
Siidi stretched her legs: “Nothing. There are no words, it’s just a song to dance to. But… it was inspired by the Witch of Spiders. One of our own wrote it in her honor. I think.”
The Witch of Spiders, the woman who’d created the song that had helped her through some of her worst times: ‘We’ll Meet Again’. A song of an eternal, undying, love between two women who would find each other no matter what, no matter where. A promise more than a song, one they’d managed to fulfill if Siidi was to be believed.
We’ll meet again, In Death’s embrace
That’s how the final stanza began.
That’s how Siidi had told her goodbye in that dream. “So, wanna dance?” suddenly asked Siidi.
“...What?”
“Dance. Do you want to? You know, that thing people do when they move around to the rhythm of a song, sometimes extremely badly, like you and I.”
“You can’t dance?”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you; that memory of me dancing with Siramia was more like her trying, and failing, to teach me to dance anything other than what we liked to call ‘The Corpse’s Tango’. The only reason I didn’t step on her feet was that arachne don’t have feet.”
A chuckle escaped from both of their lips, Isse rising and abandoning the frog plushie on the ground.
“Really? I’ve seen you fight, you would’ve been a great dancer.”
“Corpse’s Dance, I told you. It’s not unusual for us arachne, really: dancing with eight legs is difficult, no matter how coordinated you are. Fighting, on the other hand? It doesn’t take much to look graceful when doing that.”
“So that’s why you call it ‘The Corpse’s Dance’, eh?”
“Hole in one.”
Another chuckle, a stolen smile forming on her lips as she finally finished rising from the quite literal mountain of pillows, stretching out her arms and spine.
“So, how do we go about it?”
“Ha, like I have a clue. We just try stuff and see how that goes.” And so they did.
It was, truth be told, an absolutely hilarious spectacle as the two tried to waltz around the too-small space, their legs tangling more than once and causing the two to fall to the ground swearing up a storm. A sailor overhearing them during one of those disasters would’ve probably taken notes before congratulating the duo on their fantasy. They laughed all the while, forgetting the world outside of their shared mind as cracks and tears in the walls of the grand cathedral-library slowly began to close up, the leaves on the grand tree planted in the central courtyard gaining back some of their lost greenery, the machinery that had started to form in Isse’s part of the castle beginning to tick anew with familiar, companionable, patterns that mixed together with the distant song from Siidi’s memories.
Old rusty stains, remnants from the last time the Blood had attacked, were absorbed by the stone and wood walls as if they were a sponge, breaking it down into fragments of sensation and memory, grinding it down into a fine dust of negativity, and finally dousing it all in a mixture made from that simple joy of absolutely failing at doing something delightfully simple as dancing.
Because that was one of the problems with the blood: even if one, somehow, managed to push it out, to fight it off and not be infected, they still turned into something that was a mirror image distorted into a silverer’s worst nightmare, changed into a monster wearing the wrong skin but unable to take it off, a cursed costume made in one’s own image, even if someone managed to dodge that destiny… it still left behind a part of itself, something to infect the unfortunate soul’s thoughts, to turn them towards things that would weaken them, giving the Blood another chance. Now, though, that hold was broken, Isse’s mind turning towards better things.
In a shadowed place in the Mind Castle a little bone white button hummed pleasantly in time with the tune, the memory of a promise to someone else bound to her, not to be known.
Isse and Siidi danced ‘round and ‘round in their tower of comfort and silliness, not knowing nor noticing these changes.
What they did notice, at some point, was a strange sensation of pressure in their lower belly, around the area where their human and spider halves met, a sensation not unlike the fullness that came from having eaten too much.
And then they woke up.
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The first thing she noticed the moment her eyes flew open was the sensation of fullness, as if she’d just eaten her body’s weight and then some.
The second thing she noticed was her body literally screaming at her to push as hard as she could.
For a moment her mind went back to her first moments in this new life of hers: the inside of her egg, its welcoming, liquid, warmth as it constrained her into a curled up position that made her feel comforted, desired, wanted and, most of all, alive. Then the instinct, together with the voice screaming in her head, telling her to push, to get out, to leave, this small slice of Larnos, the first and last of it that would ever be guaranteed for her.
Now she scrambled out of her cocoon-turned-nest, uncaring for the damage she was causing it, scaring her little spiders awake as they scrambled on top of her, fearing that their big sister was about to run away again.
She wasn’t. Instead, she scrambled down to the floor, where a feral, animalistic part of her told her to sit down as much as she could so that her extremely precious payload (yes, her mind called it payload) wouldn’t fall towards the ground.
Then she began to push.
And everything became a blur.
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It took a while before the fog surrounding the rational, thinking, side of her mind lifted.
She groaned, the cotton in her head slowly disappearing, leaving behind only the thought that she should’ve had a headache. All she got, instead, was a strange sense of joy and satisfaction, as if she’d just won a marathon, coming in first well ahead of everyone else, setting a new record.
Hmmmm… I didn’t remember this feeling so good, said Siidi after a while.
Isse smiled, the sensations pervading her reminding her of the day she’d first managed to perform a meaningful change to Grandmother’s soul after months of lessons, only twice as satisfying.
Then she looked down, towards the floor, where she knew what awaited her sight: eggs.
Five of them.
They were small, rotund, things, completely unlike chicken eggs. Right now they were the size of her head, but she knew they still had some growth left in them: after all, she could still remember how big her sisters’ eggs had been the day she’d been reborn.
A gentle hand rose, stroking the slimy eggs, cooing rising from her throat as she felt her heart swell with barely contained joy, her smile only growing bigger before, suddenly, her lips began to tremble, her eyes stinging as tears began to roll out and down her face. She let them, unwilling to control the tears of pure joy: she wasn’t alone anymore. She wasn’t the last of her kind, of her entire species. Soon, she’d be able to hug her children, to hug another arachne, to hear their little hisses as they tried to communicate and failed miserably, as they learned to conserve their energies at first and cuddled up together at night.
She wasn’t alone anymore.
We’re not alone anymore, confirmed Siidi.
They became one and cried in joy, their arms reaching down gently towards the eggs gathering and hugging them with a gentleness most people wouldn’t show even to newborn children.
She wasn’t the last one anymore.