It was hours later when Desdin awoke on a couch of a cozy little apartment. He unburied himself from several blankets to unveil a room littered with books, odd trinkets and little dolls. His hair was a disheveled mess, and it appeared as if his pants were almost undone. Standing up, he looked into the next room to find Ingrid fully clothed and snoring lightly on top of her bed. He muttered to himself, “at least I didn’t break that rule.
He walked over to the window overlooking the town from three stories up. The streets were quiet and artificially bathed in pale blue chrism light set atop lampposts. Not even the cars that were running around Leoris during the day were operational. He gathered his things and quietly stepped out into the cool air of the night, looking around before walking towards the port, cutting through alleys where he could to take the shortest route.
As he went down a long alley, the chrism lamps flickered on and off. Goosebumps formed across his skin, and an icy chill ran through him as he heard skittering and scraping on the buildings and street behind him. The sound of sharp edges brushing violently against stone and concrete became louder and louder. He stopped and looked back, staring for some time at the dark.
Two yellow orbs snapped into view. He focused his eyes, seeing splintered black and red crosses in their center. As they came forward, he could tell they were glowing behind a thin black veil. A woman in a black dress similar to those from the funeral the previous day stepped forward. He turned in her direction and said, “Hey, are you really there?”
A raspy yet demure voice answered, “Does the ant see visions of gods?”
Desdin shrugged. “Yea, but the things I see rarely talk back, so we are both here. You are far from home, aren’t you?”
The woman had stopped moving forward with eyes unblinking and said, “This one in front of you was busy weaving a beautifully symmetrical web. Closely threading all the ones here to her design. When the ant came flying into the web and pulling all of her beautiful silk loose. Does the ant always charge in crashing headlong?”
Desdin rubbed his chin and said, “I hear that a lot. But hey, would you mind packing up and heading back up north?”
She lurched side to side slowly while taking his measure with her eyes, still concealing much of herself in the dark. “This one followed the thread that led the ant here. Along with those other ants that followed him. Somehow, a fateful thread has bound us together. Dancing in sync on the great web of a much bigger design. The ants are not mere ants. Antlions.” Her body seemed to unburden itself of the dark and grow larger. Her posture bent over poised to take action. “This spider will be first to find the Roots of Dragsil. We seek to drink the vitality of the same knowledge. Does the antlion have anything to offer for this one to spare his life?”
Desdin raised an eyebrow. “I’m not sure we are understanding each other at all here. Language barrier maybe? You don’t answer questions with more questions and then say the one thing that is going to make me want to drag some answers out of you. Any chance we can talk this out?”
She hissed in retort. “The barrier is no more. This one will have back that which was stolen. This one will nurture the seeds of life. This one is deigned to only answer to a queen not you. The antlion will dance away!” Like a spear of bone, a sharp and sinewy appendage lashed out from the veil. From the moment she set her eyes on him Desdin had a hand on the the scabbard of his short sword and rushed to pull it from his belt. He used the sheath as a shield against the strike while also drawing his blade with his other hand. He briefly but firmly gripped the hilt before slinging the sword full force at the face behind the veil.
He was running full tilt behind the tossed weapon, which was caught by another sinewy appendage, forming a claw. Yet another bone like spear came at him, which he parried down. It grazed his calf sharply, drawing blood. He yanked the sword from the claw and cleaved an appendage apart that flopped to the ground before dissolving into a black fluid. He didn’t waste a moment to cut at her neck, which only tore away her veil. The woman had leapt a great distance backwards. Beneath the veil was a pale face with soft features and wiry black hair. The bubbling fluid from the cut off appendage smoked and dissipated into the air, leaving behind a sickening foul odor of decay.
“Oh, fierce one, I believe we will dance again on a more taunt web.” Her blackened nails seem to dig into the flesh of her skull. “How tempting it is to devour you now! But no, too soon. This one must weave the web whole. The threads explored.”
Readying himself defensively, Desdin called out to her. “I feel the same. I wish to know more before I put you down.” He pulled air in before holding his breath. His eyes shimmered with a deep crimson tint.
The spider smiled unnaturally, baring her clenched broken teeth. Two more thick limbs lashed towards Desdin, twining into one mass rushing at him. He placed his scabbard in front of the blade of his sword and braced to defend against the attack. They pushed him back down the alley as the arm vanished with the woman into the dark of the night.
The chrism lamps all returned to their full brightness as Desdin sheathed his sword with caution. He looked down at his leg and was more concerned with the tear in his pants rather than the wound. He turned and continued making his way to the port.
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The van had a single large chrism light shining towards the town in the night. Sitting out front was Cherry, who had fallen asleep in the foldable reclining chair behind the empty tables where Demalyn had set up shop. Desdin strolled up and sat beside her before nudging her awake. She stirred and looked over at him for a good half minute before sitting up and pulling a cigarette to her mouth.
She leaned back a bit before asking, “Did you know picking a fight at the hunter’s lodge isn’t low profile?”
Desdin shrugged. “I think we won over quite a bit of the town and the audience. We are moving the needle in the right direction. We needed them to think we were capable and not the bad guys as well.”
Cherry looked at him with her cigarette still not lit while she asked, “Did you break both rules?”
In a quick response, Desdin said, “No.”
She struck a match and lit her cigarette this time, which Desdin took as a sign that he could relax. He put his leg out for Cherry to see his wound. “Demalyn said you got through the fight without taking a hit.”
He gave her a half smile. “She knows we are here. A Fallen matriarch. An ancient one too. With some extra sensory nonsense. She called herself the spider. It is going to be a problem.”
Cherry exhaled smoke before taking a closer look at the cut. She said, “The Lux had archives on the Fallen, but we haven’t encountered them in five hundred years, so I don’t know what we are dealing with. You are going to have to explain.” She seemed to determine the cut was superficial and leaned back again.
Desdin acknowledged her and said, “Before he was the Warden King, Jonah researched them in depth. The older a Fallen becomes, the more radical their bodies and basic functions evolve. Matriarchs in particular. However, their mind and sanity become more and more frayed, which, if you knew how they bred, how they kept it together at all, is a miracle. Some hold on to their wits longer than others. The Fallen tribes we held truces with knew this and when their kind would get old enough to lose their shit, they would euthanize volunteers or exile them to the Devil Lands.”
Desdin looked away as he recalled past events. He continued, “I only helped hunt a single matriarch. A few small settlements vanished and others were being attacked by new born Fallen that were already feral. While we dealt with the lesser ones, our King Jonah himself went to deal with the matriarch that had nested somewhere in the cave system of the nearby mountains. He returned to us a week later. It was the first time anyone had seen him wounded.”
Cherry listened and asked, “I know about the physical mutations that appear. What is this extra sensory nonsense, as you called it? The Lux doesn’t put much faith in anything outside of what science could prove. But being stuck on an island nation all this time, we’ve never had the chance to study some of the madness I’ve seen in the outlandish regions of this continent.”
Desdin scratched his chin, thinking of a way to explain it. He said, “The Fallen call it a web. Threads that connect everyone you interact with. You leave some kind of impression on everyone you meet. The lesser the impression, the weaker the thread. It allows them to see, track, and manipulate influential targets. It also gives them a heads up if someone is hunting them. If their senses are powerful enough, they can foresee people they haven’t met and potential events that haven’t happened yet. They manipulate the threads to events fitting their own design, which by her own admission she is doing. The Spider is beyond appropriate for her name.”
Cherry put out her cigarette. “I’ve also seen the damage she can do to the human body. It is visceral. She is singling out men in particular and looking through the files, I noticed that several of the hunters are missing. Which means she may have a nest where she is breeding. We are going to need the lodge and the town to cooperate with us if they hope to survive the winter.”
Desdin looked at Cherry, giving her a wry smile. He then said, “Oh, and something else. This Fallen said the thing. Roots of Dragsil.”
Cherry gave a frustrated groan. “No. We have a deal. If you find a definitive location for the Roots before the Lux contacts us for extraction, then we look into it. Chatting up fairy tales with an insane thing, expecting to find it makes you an insane person. I get that Jonah’s last words to the lot of you were to ‘find the Roots of Dragsil’ but he spent close to three decades looking for the place. I admired Jonah as well, but he came to the Lux and got everyone worked up about it and spent a year locked away in our archives with nothing to show for it. You need help. I don’t know what the hell Ouren did to you in that prison and we don’t know what the hell Demalyn is yet and I don’t want to find out while we are struggling to stay alive and undercover.”
Desdin sat forward with his hands folded together. “Perhaps we were wrong to be looking through archives and tomes. Especially in the Union, where they control what people can and can not read. And I mean no offense, but it's likely that the Lux archives also suffer from the same problem. The answer could very well be with this matriarch.”
Cherry breathed out while looking at the sky through her smoke. She did not show any offense to Desdin’s statement. “Stop saying reasonable things. That is my thing. If the roots end up on our radar I’ve promised you we would look into it. This spider is already more trouble than I thought.” She took another drag before looking warily down. “I won’t lie to you. I feel a bit scared. Do you remember how I first found you?”
He turned his palm facing up before answering, “Barely. The Union had placed me in that coffin on that train. If I didn’t die, I would rot in Ouren’s prison. I was holding onto Jonah’s broken sword that Esthea had left with me. I had attempted to use Dragon’s breath and what was left of the sword to end my life there. But you kept me alive.”
Cherry nodded. “And as soon as I did that, and we arrived, you went to die again. But somehow, together, we survived. We escaped. And we started this adventure together. I’ve come to love both you and Demalyn. Let’s not rush to die.” She then stood up and began moving towards the van. “Today has been exhausting. I need a full night of sleep and with the van hooked up to the dock now, we should be able to shower and enjoy all the amenities in the morning.”
Desdin resigned himself and stood up as well. He looked up to one of the circular windows of the van, where he noticed Demalyn watching on. She caught onto his gaze and smiled and waved down at him. “Cherry, thanks for indulging me, at least in these hunts I take on in the towns we pass through. I’m also scared. It might be a bit more dangerous this time, but I’m glad you both are here with me.”
Cherry looked away with a glint of guilt and shame. “Don’t mention it. The three of us are all complicit in the circumstances these people are in. We were all in agreement when we broke the Glass Road.” Cherry glanced back at him and then wearily at Demalyn.