Isse opened her eyes in the morning.
She mouthed the System’s words, the gifts of Levels and Skills.
One in particular stuck out to her.
[Progeny: Enhanced Magic Affinity]
What was it that Tobias had said about elves and half elves? Ah, yes: “The moment we are born we gain an affinity for an element that’s close to us. It could be anything. For example, since I was born during an eclipse I gained an affinity for shadow magic, but since I was born on a ship I could’ve gained one for water magic or wood magic or what have you.
The more she thought about it the more she found it made sense.
She had bred with Tobias, then killed and eaten him. It only made sense that her kids would inherit that ability from him.
…
She… had killed Tobias…
…
She had done it. She had murdered him. In cold blood, without any sort of hesitation. He was dead and she had killed him.
Whining filled her ears as she stared up at the gray-white of her cocoon, a sound like a radio having trouble picking up a signal. Another high pitched sound joined it soon enough, but what it was she couldn’t tell. She could only stare at the surface of her cocoon, her eyes following the individual threads, or tried to, because soon her sight turned blurry, the shapes of the webbing, so reminiscent of the ones she’d once seen in Grandmother’s first Trial, turning undistinguishable.
What’s happening? she asked Siidi.
You remembered. And you’re in shock.
In shock? Why? All that’s happening is I can’t see quite well.
She felt numb as well. Empty.
Isse… you’re screaming and crying. Your arms are clawing at the chitin of your spider half as if tearing it off would help and the Palace is crumbling. I’m currently the only thing keeping you away from going catatonic.
Siidi was lying. She wasn’t keeping her away from going catatonic. That… would’ve probably helped, in her opinion. No, she was fighting off darker things. Bloodier ones.
But there was no need for Isse to know.
No need at all.
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Existing in a Mind Castle wasn’t bad.
It was quiet when she wanted it to be, lively when the need arose, beautiful, always, and enchanting in every aspect.
Siidi had scoured every inch of the Mind Castle when she’d first appeared in it, months ago, bitter and angry at not having the body she’d thought, at the time, she rightfully deserved. In a sense she did, the body had been promised to her by Death herself but at the same time… she still got to share and, truth be told… she wouldn’t have known what to do with herself. Oh, sure, she should’ve forgotten who she had been once upon a time, so maybe things would’ve gone a lot more differently, but here she was and, as they say, ‘With ifs and buts you don’t write history’.
And what a story was being written. That is, if she’d cared to write it down. She’d only ever loved to read books, not write them, as could be quite clearly seen in her side of the Mind Castle, which had taken the form of an ancient library in a city in Eva. Yes, it wasn’t even a library of the arachne but, in truth, one made by humans. A simple piece of art, built out of wood and brick, but it had struck Siidi for the heart that had been put into it. It hadn’t been grand, nor big: to summarize, it had been built with a single purpose in mind: to store books and share them with the rest of the world. Or, well, the town. A town filled with corpses.
She could still remember, though, skittering inside the library and finding the last human left in the city: an old woman with completely white hair that emanated an Aura of Silence and Calm. She’d looked up, her sharp eyes noticing her features and body, and just shushed her, motioning at corridors of books behind her desk. That had been the first and only time Siidi had been merciful with any non-arachne (other than the dwarves), letting the woman live. Her sisters, both the ones bound in blood and battle and the others, had respected her decision and never touched the woman. A woman who, apparently, suffered from the Malady of Forgetfulness. She could tell you each and every book stored in the shelves of her library but, outside its walls, she became empty, her eyes vacuous, her motions more mechanical than biological. She would walk to her home, cook a simple dish, eat, go to sleep, wake up, go to the library and repeat it all. Siidi had been to the woman’s house once, while she’d been at work, and found the place decked with Mage Pictures of a younger woman in the company of a man. A man who, at some point disappeared, leaving the woman alone, until those Pictures, too, stopped.
She imagined the loss had eaten away at the woman until one day she’d just snapped.
For that story and the significance of the place she’d considered every library she’d seen afterwards as unworthy: too showy, too big, too much of everything. Libraries that were meant to show off power and wealth, where books and the people who perused them became secondary, background, to everything else.
In the end, nothing would ever manage to compare to the library of the [Librarian of Death’s Silence].
She wondered if the woman was still around: sure, more than ten thousand years had passed, but who knew? Ever since she’d first met her she’d felt Death’s presence at the woman’s side. Maybe she’d convinced their maker to let her be so long as she could stand in her library. Death was a sentimentalist like that, she would probably agree.
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Still, these thoughts didn’t matter as she battled the endless tides of blood attempting to reach the Mind Castle.
They had started to appear yesterday, as Isse’s desperation reached its peak, before Shriya’s helpful arrival. They’d been droplets, small figures that one would’ve found hard to notice in the best of situations. The most dangerous, really. The smallest parasites that would’ve reproduced and rapidly devoured her soul half’s mind, giving her a Bloody Skill, or worse. It had been easy enough to kill them.
Now though, as Isse had realized what she had done to Tobias? The droplets had become a tide. A small army, really. An army made of blood golems riding atop bloody horses as they charged at the flying castle, attempting to get inside by applying the rules of Dreams, not knowing that they were arachne, that the Dream had never truly had a hold upon their minds for they’d been made long after it.
But they had endless numbers on their sides, and the corpses would soon start piling up.
“Annoying little motherfuckers, leave! You’re not welcome here! I won’t let a single droplet of yours land among the flowers of the garden, the halls won’t be bloodied by your existence, the memories of that night won’t chain her down! I! Won’t! Allow! It!”
She shot more lightning at the horde below as she glared up, up at the stars looking down at her, up at the System. The slave of the gods, or rather, a fraction of it, looked down at her, judging her actions as It always did.
For Its part, It was just doing Its job: judging Issekina and waiting to give her a Red Skill if and when the need arose.
For that was the thing nobody ever understood: the System didn’t give people Red Skills as a form of punishment (not usually) or some self-righteous need to show off how badly someone was hurt. No, Red Skills came from The Blood, an… existence? Entity? It didn’t know for sure, still, a being that was an amalgama of negativity and hate and sadness and… everything not nice. It was in everything and everyone but, sometimes, when someone became too weak, The Blood would surge and fill someone, changing them.
Red Skills were the System’s attempt at containing the infection.
Siidi hadn’t known this up until now.
So now she glared up: “Do something! Stop them!”
It didn’t, for It couldn’t. What It did by assigning Red Skills and, sometimes, Classes, was already ‘going against protocol’. Interference of the highest order, a gift of Skills and abilities that hadn’t truly been earned. It had managed, though, to find a way around Its programming to help fix things. The way? It assigned a
Their presence was not a kindness, therefore it wasn’t considered a Gift, therefore not breaking any rules. It was basically cursing people, but in doing so It was preventing them from ending up in a worse situation… usually. The System gave the
It wanted Siidi to understand this, but It couldn’t talk, so instead It Observed and Judged as the arachne jumped down from the island on which her and her soul half’s Mind Castle floated, down into the gaping maws of the horde of Blood, wearing a blue jacket and holding a giant pen.
A single [Lengthy Step] moved her away from the group that had formed underneath her, the things fusing together into a giant monster that had opened a maw big enough to swallow her whole. She shouldn’t have been able to do such a thing since she was in mid-air, but this was her mind as much as it was Isse’s, so she had a modicum of control over it. So, as she’d fallen down, she’d tugged at the memory of the most beautiful library she’d ever stepped in. The white shadow of an old lady appeared behind her as a book she remembered reading appeared under one of her spider legs, allowing the Skill to activate.
Then, unseen by her, the shadow raised finger to lip, making a shushing motion, and the battlefield went silent as a good chunk of the horde disappeared… silenced and forgotten.
Siidi blinked in surprise, time seemingly slowing down as she glanced around.
But there was nothing. Just air where previously Blood had been marching on the corpses of its brethren in an attempt to form some kind of stairs to the island, and air behind her, and… a soothing silence.
She smiled.
And then she was down in the battlefield again.
It wouldn’t be easy, but then again, there was little difference between The Blood and humans: they both used swarming tactics on the arachne to win. She knew all the ways to counter that.
Plus, she was playing in her own home.
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Death looked away.
Or one aspect of her.
That’s the thing about Death: he had many faces. Some said it had as many faces as there were people in the Web of Worlds, but that would’ve been wrong. She just had many faces, taken over thousands of years. The faces of people who had impressed it, come to him with a smile, maybe won a game but, instead of taking the extra time she offered, just smiled and said they didn’t need it.
Death had many faces.
One for each aspect she represented. One for each group worthy of it. There was a Death of Mountaineers, always smiling and warm with an undertone of cold, a Death of Wanderers that, to this day, still traveled on a white horse wearing white, a Death of Writers, a Death of… many Deaths. Too many to count, and yet never enough.
This one… was a new addition, for a given meaning of new. The Death of Silence. A Death much attuned to True Death, the face never seen, the face that emerged only when universes died. The face that would disappear last before the Nothingness.
The Death of Silence had no purview. She existed as a jolly, a reserve, incomprehensible and unpredictable, kindest of them all, cruelest too. Meaningless. For that was her nature: she came at the moment of death for the meaningless, for those that died in silence, that wouldn’t be remembered. Just like her.
Death, the sum of all Deaths, looked at that part of itself, and spoke: “You interfered.”
That was a crime. It did not break any Laws or Rules, but it was still a crime against Death’s very nature. Death intervened and acted only in herself, never outside that purview.
The Death of Silence looked at the whole in front of her, smiling: “She remembered. I was not meaningless. I mattered.”
Death narrowed his eyes.
And let it go.
She was new. She was allowed one mistake so long as it didn’t break the Laws and Rules.
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[Soul Curator Level 24!]
[Skill – Bane Weapons: The Blood Obtained!]
[Skill – Silence Obtained!]
[Warrior Level 6!]
[Skill – Air Step Obtained!]