At journey’s end in New Hallownest, trembling voices speak of monsters. The brave, the curious, the desperate, the damned—all carried word of the things they escaped, things that could not be real, things that sat so poorly in weary, tormented minds that they often became not more than half-recalled nightmares. Remembered or no, those stories and dreams summoned a terror unbelievable; shared breathless down the strata of the Edged City—in its encampments, corridors, and bars—they provided perhaps the best evidence of the value of Queen Ephibysse’s bargain. Turn back to the embrace of horrors remembered and forgotten or remain under a rule as fair as it was absolute? Next to none turned back.

Calder had heard his fair share of such tales throughout his decades as Right Claw, serving as the hammer at the gates of Hallownest. He would play along, indulging them for the sake of saving as many bugs as he could. Wastelings were often an independent sort, he knew—even when they weren’t of the arachnids or the hunters. The tall tales served to resist this: convincing the restless that independence matters only to the living and that the possibility of living was growing rarer in the wastes. Calder had once wished that such stories existed which could frighten a stinger, that his tribe would have been similarly convinced into accepting the offer of Ephibysse’s peace instead of being reduced to its sorry state—scattered and dwindling. But as much as he wished it, he also knew that it could never be. No matter the tales that he heard, Calder, like all good stingers, did not believe in myths.

From growing up atop Hand Hallow and cutting his fangs, claws, and stinger on the lands surrounding it, Calder understood the horrors of the wastes not as myths but as beasts as real as he. Staring back across the desert towards the south west of the mountain, he could just barely make out a tall pillar of what bugs often called the Branching One. To them it was an evil monster or a god; to Calder and the stingers it was zaazuum: a vast network of vines that lured bugs into its fibrous jaw sacks with promises of fruit and cover from the sands. Though it was dangerous, it was but a plant. In fact, the stingers had long ago learned that it produced a useful sap with healing properties as long as one knew which vines to tap. The vines that held medicine instead of poison had grown rarer with each passing decade.

Further north of the distant zaazuum pillar, Calder could make out a large haboob crawling across the sands. It shook as it spun, and thus the bugs who saw it oft called it the Trembling Storm. It was said that impossibly large horrors lurked within, trembling with anticipation for new victims. The stingers knew it as ea buut, a herd of sand walker harvestmen who were truly magnificent in their scale but mostly harmless. It was not the fault of the behemoths that their long legs churned up sand into a storm as dangerous as any. They simply walked their migratory paths. Calder had always loved watching them, cherishing memories of staring at their glory as a little scorpling, listening as his mothers explained that the elegant beasts trembled out of fear for the storm they churned. The sand storm was smaller than it had been centuries ago when that memory took place. The migration followed ancestral routes in search of a food source that was fading. Calder grimaced at realizing this and kept moving towards Oilik.

Even the Wasteling Stinger Tribes must have once appeared as monsters to bugs traveling to Hallownest. What else would an insect think of a thing like Calder, hulking and powerful, walking on four long legs with two giant claws and a stinger almost as thick as his carapace, his mask only barely hiding his fangs and twelve eyes. He had heard the name bugs had for his kind once: Spiral Stingers, named for the spirals etched on their masks. Their true name was the Agrabi; the spirals were carved in commemoration for each year an Agrabi stinger survived. On Calder’s, those who knew this would find enough spirals to account for his age: four-hundred and forty six. He enjoyed the coincidental way it matched his spiral etched suit of Basin armor, a symbol that marked him not as a myth but as both a knight dedicated to the Queen’s mercy and a traitor to the Agrabi. Whether this made him a hero or a villain, Calder knew not; all he knew was that he was not a monster: he had a simple heart that, while territorial, loved and hoped and would one day thump a final thump.

Even the things that frightened Calder were not monsters, things that lurked beyond the great maze and lived in ancient Agrabi myths. A younger Calder, who had been restless and curious, had journeyed into those lands—to the northern realms where legends lingered. He saw them plain.

On the deserts near to the old stormlands, he encountered Shaar Inzieqaa, the spun endless storm who lived as a demon god in Agrabi myths. Its true nature was revealed when Calder discovered a collection of bodies left in its wake. Shaar Inzieqaa was but a swarm of things bound by flesh: floating, bloated creatures with long tendrils and mouths who joined together into something bigger. The man o’ war that hid within the storms was as killable as any beast, not that Calder possessed the strength to hunt it himself. At the very least, he had discovered the ways to avoid its wanting throats.

In the sand sea to its west, past the gates of a kingdom that all wastelings were taught to avoid for fear of never escaping its mysterious clutches, he encountered the Steel Ones, who Stingers called Gol Thaaia or Of the Ever Whet. Though his encounter was assuredly not with those that lived in Agrabi myths—towering blade bugs the size of mountains—he could certainly understand why the one he killed lived in the minds of simple bugs as a monster beyond reason. While it was shorter than Calder and slender in form, their duel remained the hardest fight he had ever endured. But still it died—less a bug and more a broken nail left to rust in the fossilized sea.

There was but one myth in the oral tradition of the Stingers Free that had once shown proof of the supernatural. It emerged at a time when the culture of the Agrabi was shifting to deny such magic. The beast in question cast their burgeoning logic and reason into doubt; Rraa Yrra was its name—the winding Wyrm who visited upon Hand Hallow and dug deep to take Hallownest. For countless generations, its blinding light lived in the peripheries of Agrabi stingers, a myth made real for ancestors going back until names were lost. But it was not to last; even that God had died, mortality proven by the Queendom made in the shadow of its blotting. It was but a bug in the end: the last myth of the Agrabi to fall.

At least it had been so. When Calder was summoned to the Keep Blackened and listened as Ephibysse declared the Wyrm alive again, his ardent belief that everything had an explanation—that everything could meet its end—buckled. Perhaps this was why he demanded to be the one sent out to greet it. Like zaazuum, ea buut, Shaar Inzieqaa, and Gol Thaaia, Calder intended to reveal the winding beast killable, if not by his claws, then at least by the those of his true Queen. The wastes had not yet provided that proof.

He nursed this growing doubt as he neared Oilik. The pock marked walls of the northeastern caves towered in the distance—each hole an entrance to the vast and mostly uncharted Great Swamp Maze. Though it guarded its horrors jealously, Calder suspected that each contained an explanation as simple as being a plant or bug. The wastes were a hard place to survive; those that did, be them thinkers or beasts, grew deadly and strange. Though there were few things in the southern wastes as strange as the ruins of Oilik.

The ruins were empty when Calder reached them, silent save for the harsh wasteland wind howling as it buffeted its remains. Its structures were ancient—myths themselves: the legendary home of the Silk Moths. At its height, it was said to have been a beautiful oasis city full of spires, courtyards, and waterways, but that was only if one could find it. Though it was built far away from any walls or caves, constructed in the middle of the great southern sands, the look of its stucco—blue and black swirls—caught oddly on the eyes of passersby, an effect still held by the ruins that remained. In all the years Calder stood at the gates of New Hallownest listening to the stories brought by trembling bugs, none had ever mentioned seeing Oilik. To them it was simply a mirage, a thing that sloughed off minds too worn by death and desolation to hold onto such madness as ancient ruins hidden in plain sight.

The Oilik that Calder once discovered years and years ago was far different than its myths—fading roads, spires reaching no taller than twice Calder’s height, walls crumbling into dust. A few marks of the legendary Silk Moth tribe’s rule remained—hallways constructed for their short stature and structures constructed around their obsession with silk and dreams—but no mark was clearer than those who inhabited the ruin. Barring the few immigrants who were lucky or observant enough to discover Oilik, its population was largely comprised of those descendants of the original servants to moth silk, still plugging away at ancient tasks given when the moths vanished. Their simple lives had once enchanted Calder, who was raised knowing only trials and brutality and homes that lasted no longer than a season. He felt it again as he walked the silent streets towards the town square, but it grew sour the more he saw—the Oilik that Calder walked through was far away from what it had been when he first found it, back when he left his tribe in search of answers and challenges. It had crumbled much, and the silence worried him greatly.

As Calder marveled at the disarray of the once beautiful town square, he detected the faint chemical sense of bugs in hiding. He let out a sigh of relief and called out. “Hail!”

“Hail, Sir Knight!” The call came from a brown locust stood atop a remaining spire built in the center of the square. The legends said it had once been a clock tower, though it had long ago lost all of what once bestowed it mastery of time. In lieu of chimes, a question rang out. “What news from the south? Carry thee a reason for this odd weather?”

“Nay. It is as mysterious to me as it is to ye. Though to my senses, the cold originated from the north.” Calder listened intently to the growing din of bugs hiding in the scattered ruined homes and market stalls, hoping to ascertain how many still lived in Oilik—hoping that the wastes hadn’t taken too many. “Tell me! Does Gerat still lead the circle?” Calder asked.

The silence that followed told Calder all he needed to know, but still he waited. The locust answered, “Seamster Gerat was my great grandfather, Sir Knight. He passed a century ago. I am Gesalt, head of the circle. We heard tale of the long lives bestowed to those of venom born, but in truth, I have scant believed it.”

“Was he long lived?”

“He was. Fifty-two years of fabric woven by him adorns our shells and our beds and our tapestries.”

“This heartens me. He was a good bug.” Calder rifled through a sack belted to his armor and pulled out a tattered, gray rag. “I would have apologized to him for ruining the shawl he gave me once. It shielded me from the sand and kept me warm for many years.”

Hearing this, the city came to life. There was nothing more sacred or more intimate in Oilik than the gifting of fabric. As the cornerstone of their religion, its value dwarfed even water and food; the tattered garment bore all the marks of Oiliki loom work and proved Calder a friend beyond any doubt. As the various denizens of the city filtered into the courtyard, he appraised them. The majority of the population was a mix of darkling beetles and locusts descended from the original servant class. The legends depicted on their tapestries suggested that the beetles constructed the buildings and the locusts served as guards and assistants. But in the absence of the moths, all picked up the labor of weaving. Among them moved a few clades not bound to the old oath: a group of cicadas who had lived in Oilik almost as long as any, a surprisingly large community of lace flies who Calder assumed were descendants of a smaller group that had been welcomed when he visited a century prior, a small family of short velvet ants with thick, wild coats of white setae surrounding their shells, a spattering of beetles of different clades, and a mole cricket who stared intently at Calder. Calder returned the bug’s stare, causing the young cricket to look away in embarrassment.

“We could replace the garment for you, sir.”

Calder returned his attention to Gesalt, who had descended the tower and stood staring up at him. The locust was the spitting image of Gerat—tall, lithe, colored a tan and brown that almost teetered into gold, two elegant antennae extending down to his back, a wide proud thorax draped in fine Oiliki silk, and nearly the same large, bright eyes. Calder had been fond of this bug’s progenitor and hoped that some of Gerat’s wit and charm had been passed down. “I would see this mended rather than replaced,” Calder answered.

“You truly do know our ways. You must be Sir Calder, then. How strange it is to meet a legend from our histories. It is said that you vanquished the Eulopha and freed our ancestors from their machinations. It is also said that my great grandfather never forgave you for leaving him.”

Calder felt a little tinge of something old and unhealed in his heart. “Yes. I am sure he did not. I was a restless thing back then, though it was not my intent to never return to him.”

“It must be odd to live so long,” Gesalt replied. “Come, let us descend to the circle to repair your shawl. There, we may also discuss what you have seen in all that time and share with you what has transpired here.”

“This would please me.” Calder followed Gesalt to a staircase hidden within the clocktower.

It led down into a torchlit, tight hallway that spiraled gradually into the earth. The low ceiling forced Calder to lean down and support himself with his claws. It was like it had been a century ago: uncomfortable but not uncomfortable enough to take away from the awe of beholding the history of Oilik depicted on a pair of long, intricate tapestries. The fabric record began a short distance from the stairs—far shorter than it had been when he last saw it. Seeing this, Calder remembered asking Gerat what would happen when they ran out of room. ‘The end,’ Gerat had said. Calder had once thought that the answer he received was one of the bug’s odd attempts at humor, but the strange, cold desert air lingered on his shell and made him shiver.

As they spiraled down, he admired the newer additions to the history, hoping to glean some knowledge about what had transpired in the years since he left. The woven history was split in two, one on each side of the hallway: the left showed events of great significance and the right detailed the the banal lives of the citizens of Oilik. Regardless of the side, the tapestries spoke of hardship. Food stores dwindled, strangers were spotted less, beasts attacked more frequently, many more died than were born, and the ancient mirage city crumbled further into dust. Calder paused when they reached the point where the tapestry showed the death of Gerat, letting wave of sadness wash over him as he inspected the elegant depiction of the old head of the circle and remembered the bug’s promise to build a new hovel tall enough to fit Calder. With a quiet exhale, Calder left the feeling and continued walking back in time, passing by a depiction of himself defeating a tribe of parasitoid wasps called the Eulopha, who had turned Oilik’s citizens into sacks for their eggs and meat for their spawn: another one of those legendary wasteland monstrosities that Calder had proven mortal by eradicating.

The fibers then told of history that Calder had once learned from Gerat: the eons spent guarding the ruin and weaving the record. As it spun back into the past, the tapestries faded, growing dim and muted in a facsimile of the way memory erodes with time; that is, until it reached a point when all the color returned as brightly as the day it had been spun—the day the moths vanished. Lost was their art then, forcing those they left to do with what they could.

At the end of the long spiraling hallway, near the chamber where the sewing circle met, the tapestries came to an end. At their end, Calder beheld something he had forgotten in the centuries since he first saw it—something that darkened his heart. At the dawn of the records of the Silk Moths, at the point when the Tapestry of Us and the Tapestry of All merged above the door to their meeting chamber, was a knotted mandala depicting the eight Great Wyrms: one red, one yellow, one orange, one green, one blue, one indigo, one black, and, in their center, one a pale, ominous white. Calder stared at it, feeling his venom churn within his tail. Before Gesalt could ask why he had stopped, Calder tore his eyes from the depiction and headed into the much more comfortably sized meeting room.

The room was mostly bare except for a circle of pillows on the floor and a nearly finished pair tapestries still attached two enormous looms. A pair of darkling beetles set about bringing over more pillows to a spot set aside for Calder. Noticing this, he said, “Save your pillows. The hard floor is preferable for stingers.” They nodded and went to their seats. Calder handed his old shawl to Gesalt and then took his on the cold, stone floor.

The rest filed in, sitting on pillows of various sizes and fabrics. The makeup of the circle had changed, no longer exclusively representing the darklings and locusts. This current configuration featured two of each bug living in their community: darklings and locusts were accompanied by cicadas, lace wings, and velvet ants with Gesalt sitting at their head. The sight pleased Calder very much, who had once spoken to Gerat about his confusion that only the descendants sat in the circle. Though it was likely the efforts of many bugs, Calder hoped that he had played some small part in it; the thought gave him hope for his Hallownest and its future as a home for all. As he inspected the assembled bugs, he realized that there was a missing member: a pillow sat before a wooden floor table with an ink well resting on it.

Gesalt took a needle to the old shawl. “Welcome, Sir Calder, scourge of the Eulopha, Mirage Knight, and former beloved of my forefather Gerat. It is good fortune that you have returned to us when you did.”

“That I could have been more timely and said goodbye to Gerat, thus I would have preferred,” Calder answered. “But it is good to see his lineage continued and that Oilik still endures the desolation of the wastes.”

“Indeed!” An older darkling beetle answered, taking the garment from Gesalt and preening some loose, ruined threads with a pair of shears. “The world sharpens us.” With that the garment began to rotate around the circle, each member providing some service to restore it with unused threads and fabric from the looms of history.

“Koor gaa vashaa,” Calder said in return. “Tell me of what has sharpened this city.”

An older cicada, missing an antennae and covered in scars, spoke, not taking their eyes off the garment which they lengthened with beautiful red thread. “Much. The wind howls loud and wears down our shells.”

The garment continued along, each bug adding new colors. “We risk not even flying in it some days,” a lace wing said.

“It ruins the remaining walls of Oilik faster than we can repair,” a younger darkling beetle added while adding a new inner pocket.

A velvet ant, perhaps one of the bugs Calder was most surprised to see for how often their kind was warlike and isolationist, took the garment to hem and said, “What promise of peace we once claimed here is fading. Monsters stalk us. My mates and I are called again to hunt and kill.”

“We do not wish this for you,” a locust said.

“But we do it all the same. All must learn to weave and all must learn to kill in this the end.”

“The end?” Calder asked.

Gesalt let out a tired sigh, taking the garment again and mending a hole in its hood. “You sense it don’t you, Sir Calder? Tell us why you have come.”

“I come seeking a monster. But also I carry with me grim news and a final hope. I lay them within the circle: Oilik is the last settlement in the southern wastes that yet stands. For how much longer that may be permitted, I can not say. Know that I do not make this request lightly, but I would see the bugs here survive. I beg of ye, though I know it defies the oaths that your ancestors pledged, follow me to a life of peace in Hallownest.

“We accept,” Gesalt answered.

“What ties you have to this home may seem unbreakable, I promise that in—” Calder stopped and realized what Gesalt had said. “You— you accept?”

“We do not accept it lightly, Sir Calder. This is still our home. But the time of Oilik is at its end.” Gesalt gestured to the new additions to the two tapestries. “With these last records, the tapestry walls are complete, thus ending our oaths to the moths. The signs are all there.”

“The signs?”

“The White Wyrm passed by us weeks ago. Its rebirth was foreseen. More signs are to follow.”

Calder stifled a growl. “Would you— tell me of them?”

Gesalt nodded; Calder watched as the two other locusts and the two darkling beetles stood and walked to the looms. Carefully, the bugs removed the final records of Oilik and carried them to either side of Gesalt. The one on the left showed an empty Oilik standing before the cave wall that led to the swamp—the hundred entrances, called the Weeping Eyes, were shut. The one on the right depicted the Pale Wyrm wound around itself and around the moth symbol for dreaming, its mandibles tangled in the symbol’s threads—in the center of both was a chrysalis. Before Calder could ask the meaning, Gesalt recited:

Broken clock who vainly marks the passing dawnless days
Without a voice you send us hence to dream within our graves
Dug past the weeping eyes we’ll find a death bereft of rest
In this bequeath to loyal slaves the curse of Oilik

Faithful bugs who labored long we know not what lies between
The day we left to seek our deaths and the day the city bleeds
From births to deaths, from war to peace, from glory down to dust
Spin it all, what lives you live, and hang them spiraled thus

Fill the halls we leave to ye our simple, dreamless wards
With history seen and lived then spun by meager, souless cord
From whence we fled on walls left bare take up our holy task
’Til walls and histories, lives and loss, all end at last

When only two remain to weave, to see your task complete
Caves will darken, beast fangs to sharpen, water and food deplete
And last the weeping eyes that watched will dry their endless tears
Spilt from its look the winding, white, woven thing shall appear

In its birth no clock to tick and herald this final doom
Heed our foretelling of it then upon our ancient looms
Which bore the lives you lived within the shadow of our deaths
Weave now the end that we foresaw and from your oaths rest

The labyrinth shuts its eyes and to slumber its secrets drift
The city bled and left to crumble, back under sands it shifts
The Wyrm consumes the corpse of our beloved, banished queen
A final hope in the night: a chrysalis strung of dreams

Only then spun and hung the full record kept
Will our wish for the end be born in Oilik

The threads of the tapestries, depicting the scenes described once by the moths and passed down seamster to seamster for generations, shined brightly. It was clear that the best threads were saved for this final task: the so called wish for the end that Oilik’s architects once made. As Calder traced the intricate loom-craft that marked the end of this city, he traced the lifelong suspicion he had of magic and destinies. The Agrabi had no such things in their culture—no ancient poetry detailing some far flung future marked in signs and symbols. Neither did New Hallownest, which bound itself to a Queen who promises of a peaceful future were known only by her strength to cleave it. But here, in the ruins of structures only younger than the caves themselves, was evidence beyond doubt that long dead bugs knew some piece of the future.

Calder did not believe in the supernatural, but neither could he ignore coincidences. He looked away from the tapestry depicting the Wyrm and watched as Gesalt stood and brought him the shawl. “Thank you,” Calder said and accepted the gift. He then stood and draped the repaired garment around his armor, covering himself in a patchwork of colors and patterns that would have once been saved to preserve the past. “When will the city be ready to leave?”

“Soon,” Gesalt answered. “We go to hang these final pieces of the puzzle and to gather our kin. We have but one final request of thee, Sir Calder.”

“What is within my power, I will give.”

The locust looked to the empty spot in the circle. “Our scribe, a mole cricket by the name of Kast, vanished recently. She was last seen heading for the weeping wall. Would you search for her?”

“You know as well as I, child of my beloved, that the maze is vast and unknowable. I will see what trail I can find, but know that it is unlikely for simple bug to survive in that hell and that I can not waste too much time searching for the dead. We must not tarry here long.”

“And we shall not. But she is our friend, and her daughter worries greatly for her. What you did for us so long ago can never be repaid, yet still we ask for more.”

Calder placed a claw on the bug. “My purpose, though in these years I’ve still yet to understand its source, has always been to preserve the peaceful of the wastes. I am owed nothing for that which I am honor bound.”

With that Calder began his trip back up the winding hall of history, soaking it all in for a final time. As he did, he wondered what the ancient moths had hoped for with this strange request. It was not the type of riddle Calder was capable of solving, not for lack of intellect but for lack of the capacity for indulging the arcane. He decided that it mattered not as he reached the end and exited the old clocktower. At the very least, the strange oath was ended and thus so too were bonds that kept these bugs from being saved.

One such bug, a short mole cricket, stopped him near the northern gates to the city and started to ask, “Sir? Did Seamster Gesalt…”

“He did. I go to look for her now. I make no promises though, little one.”

“She’s always getting into trouble,” The cricket said sadly. “I hoped that here she would settle down, but she did not.” She appeared to nurse some nervous thought, kneading as she rubbed her large claws together. With a huff, she said, “Let me go with you. Perhaps I can help.”

Calder knelt down so that the little bug didn’t have to arc her neck so much to look at him. “What is your name, child?”

“Karn.”

“Well Karn, sometimes we cannot help but answer the calls that ring in our shells. Fortunately, mine has always beckoned for me to play the savior. Does such a sound ring in yours?”

“I want to save her. But no, I have never been one for adventure.”

“Tell me then, what does ring?”

“Music,” Karn answered. “A simple thing.”

“A noble trade. I’ve never been good at it myself, but I do so love its sound. What do you play?”

The cricket held out her claws—beefy things evolved to dig. “No instrument exists for things like these. I sing.”

“Soon you will live in a place full of music. New Hallownest always needs more of it,” Calder replied. “It is the duty of those of us who feel called to chivalry to protect those whose calls are peaceful things. That it what makes this life worth living. I so loved Oilik for that. Leave your mother to me. You must sing and bolster these neighbors of yours: show them that peace awaits you all in my Hallownest.”

Karn bowed. “I will do as say.”

Calder reached down and patted her little head with his claw. “Good. Now, what call rings in the shell of your mother? Know you why she would have headed into those foul tunnels?”

“She wishes to know everything. She said little when she left, but I know what she seeks.”

“And what is that?” Calder asked.

“We traveled in there once, when we fled our old home in the north. I was weak then and remember so little of it, but I do remember one thing that we saw: a black structure built on the shore of black lake. I think she went back. I think she believes it has something to do with the old rulers of this town.”

Calder stood suddenly, the venom in his tail almost bubbling with fear and anticipation. He wanted to say more to the little cricket, to reassure her that what little she had to share was more than enough to solve the mystery of her mother’s disappearance. But he could not, for he knew of black buildings and black lakes and the death they so often brought. Calder’s desire to save so often teetered into a desire to keep those around him from feeling the whole of horrors that he alone understood. He could not bring himself to ruin the bright, hopeful expression Karn wore. He could not bring himself to reveal that his journey was no longer to search for a mother who almost certainly had died in hubris and darkness, but was now also to trace the cold that he knew emerged from the north, that the moths had predicted—to ease the knot that grew in his abdomen and dispel the sickening notion that there could be more than one Abyssruin. So he pulled his repaired shawl tight around his shoulders, bid farewell, and made his way into the maze.

The cave was bright, as brightly lit as the Pale Keep had been at its height. Hornet had never liked visiting that place, feeling it unfit for spiders or even a half-spiders like she was—its long halls filled to bursting with Pale light intended for the benefit of insects, or perhaps intended to render them compliant. The only thing it did to Hornet was hurt her eyes. In some ways, Deepnest was better. At the very least the spiders’ den was not full of bugs who would stop speaking as soon as she neared and bow for as long as she stood there. But in Deepnest, she was ever aware of how much her eyesight paled in comparison to her Mother’s. She made up for it in other ways, drawing on her half Wyrm body’s ability to sense the world through its skin and the eerie premonitions it cursed her with. But spiders are an observant clade, born to hunt through reflexes as sensitive as strands of tautly wound silk, and they could always tell that Hornet’s eyes didn’t work like theirs. They regarded her silently not for fear of her danger nor respect of her royalty but for how different she was from Herrah. Hornet belonged nowhere.

Perhaps that was why she preferred Greenpath, which wasn’t too brightly lit or too dark and was mostly empty beyond simple creatures and silent knights too occupied by Unn’s absence to care about a half-spider bastard queen with two homes she did not belong in. When she was young and still hoping to find a place for herself in Hallownest, still playing at being a knight or a princess or a beast, she had indulged the peace of the green only on occasion. But the longer she lived and the more horrors she witnessed, the more alone she felt until she stopped trying to find a home and started hiding in the green. The only other place she visited, when she wasn’t busy keeping the peace of kingdoms who never seemed to want her, was the corpse of the Pale Wyrm. She would sit near it and wonder if the reason her father became an insect was because he too felt lonely.

Time passed; the loneliness shifted from a wound to a weapon.

Within these old memories, there was a sense of the shell that embodied them. The way Hornet was too small for her Mother’s throne, too strong to safely duel her teachers, too beastly to bond with insects, too winding to hide with spiders, too Pale to be anything more than a tool to the Weavers, too resilient to become infected, and too different for her eyes to ever feel comfortable drinking any of it in. But the shape of that body was gone.

Its senses remained—a cocktail of premonitions, instincts, and reflexes honed for centuries and spread across various organs—all screaming at her that something was deeply wrong about the cave or the her who filled it. What was wrong appeared to her suddenly: the cave was not lit. She knew this from the lack of heat that would have radiated off of a light source and the lack of shadows that would have flickered or deepened. She felt for her needle but found nothing. In searching for it, she noticed that her cape was also missing. This—the brightness of the ceiling above her, the absence of her belongings, and the vague, amorphous sense that she was forgetting something important and horrific—urged her to rise quickly. She did and slammed her head into the ceiling. Before she could fathom how she had misjudged the height of her little hide so, a calming, familiar voice rang out.

“Elerra!”

Hornet turned to the sound and found herself staring into Shakra’s eyes. Something about them seemed off to her. At first, she blamed it on Shakra having taken off her mask. The white, finely crafted thing lay with her armor to the side of the bed mat that they shared. But the more Hornet looked into the worried expression on Shakra’s black, fuzzy face, the more thick the sense of oddness grew. The answer came to her at last as she realized with a start that, though they both were sitting, their faces were at the same height.

“Am I?—” The voice that came out of Hornet’s mouth was deeper, and it made her freeze.

“You are changed. What do you remember?”

Hornet did her best to recall, but all she could coax from her aching, tired mind was a large book and the feeling of tearing at it. “Nothing,” she answered finally. “What happened?”

“Much. I was instructed to not overwhelm you with it.”

“By whom?”

The look Shakra returned to Hornet was all the answer that she needed.

“Where is she?”

“In time.” Shakra answered.

“I need not be coddled,” Hornet let out an impulsive growl that was much lower than ever before. “I have faced more than enough horrors in my life to have earned your faith in my ability to endure.”

“Has any ever truly coddled you?”

Hornet didn’t answer. She instead remembered the expressions of countless eyes staring back at her. In them swum fear, respect, desperation, and desire. That old loneliness became a wound again: even in the eyes of the few mates she had taken in her life, there was never something close to being coddled or cared for. That was until Lace’s eyes and the eyes that stared back at her now.

Shakra placed her claw on the back of Hornet’s neck and began to lightly trace her scruff. “I have never doubted your strength. If I care for you, it is not because I have started to. I do it because I want to and know you would return it to me even if I would likely respond the same.”

Hornet’s body wouldn’t relax even if she wanted it to, but she did not reject the sensation of being gently pet. “Is being cared for this uncomfortable for everyone?” she asked.

“You know as much as I.”

Hornet shifted to return Shakra’s affection, but as she moved her pedipalps, new nerves caught fire—nerves connected to a pair of forelegs that were not there before. There were no thoughts then, just a hiss that spilled from her mouth and the sensation of her recoiling from Shakra’s touch. Hornet then felt the cold of the cave pressed against her back; it brought back memories of the first time she hunted for herself, of the little bug that tried in vain to hide from the spiderling who stalked it. In bringing her claws up before her face and beholding all four of them, Hornet became the prey who shivered in fear of a predator beyond sight—hidden around the edges of her eyes . Pressed up against the wall, she could see the little cave clearly: the bed mat, the web that surrounded it, and the torn remnants of her old shell suspended like a bit of prey—her old head shattered and staring back at her.

“What have I become?” Hornet shook.

“We can face it all bit by bit. Everything is—”

“Tell me.”

Shakra was very still then, her voice low and gentle. “You molted and you have grown.”

“I must see it.”

“Elerra…”

“Please.” Hornet begged. She hated how the sound felt on her tongue. “I need to know. And I need you to stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m a hurt child.”

Shakra stiffened. “You are right. I have never in my life felt for another like I feel for you. You endured much and I fear how it will you harm you. Forgive me. I need only patience as I learn what it means to feel this way.” Shakra turned away from Hornet and rifled through a pack near her armor and mask.

As Hornet watched, a memory trickled into her mind: past the image of ripping apart a book was a pedestal draped in the vague shadow of a spider’s web. It made her shiver and impulsively move to wrap her pedipalps around herself, but her new forelegs joined in. Their movement triggered more waves of nerve pain, and so she released herself and sat perfectly still—not even breathing and staring at nothing. The sound of Shakra placing a washing bowl between them and filling it with water roused Hornet from her stupor. She stared at it and then stared at Shakra.

Shakra did her best to hide her worry and said, “No matter what you see, know that it is dear to me. No matter what the sight returns to you, what memories you might recall, know you are one of us—always.”

“I feel as strongly for you as you, me, Shakra. I appreciate your kindness even if I bite. I—” Hornet felt the edges of a memory that left her sick: a puddle of hemolyph at her feet. “I—”

“We will face it together.”

Hornet swallowed back venom and nervousness and crawled over to the bowl of water. A spider looked back. Not a half spider, not a thing that fit in nowhere, but a spider with six eyes born upon a fuzzy, black, horned face. From its shoulders sprouted two pairs of appendages; around its neck was a patch of scruff much longer and more wild than before; in its filling of the bowl it showed itself to be lanky and tall. Hornet knew that this was a reflection—her reflection. The part of her that held her knowledge of science and mechanics would not do her the mercy of forgetting that. But the other parts disagreed. The beast in her growled at the foe it saw staring back; the witch trembled at its mystery; the reaper bid her kill; the wanderer, run; but it was in the hunter—the inheritance she received from the Weavers and was then molded by a group of knights and a queen of bees—that its shape became something more: a memory and a wound.

“I think I remember my Mother’s face,” Hornet said at last.

“She must have been quite beautiful, then.” Shakra replied.

The reflection rippled as Hornet filled the bowl more, not with water but with tears. Shakra held her as she wept.

The light trickling down to the bottom of the Sphendices stung Hornet’s eyes. She kept them open even still, wishing for the sting to ignite some inkling of what hid in the holes of her memories. The sting brought no clarity; all she had was what Shakra would tell her. She had molted. After, she had fled to the little cave where she later awoke. Shakra had found her there and had taken turns with Lace watching over her. Days had passed wherein Hornet did nothing but silently stretch and drink and sleep. While prying this from Shakra, she had hoped that being told anything would awaken her to the memories that were so slow to come, but they stayed locked tight. Eventually, Hornet decided that she would not find any answers while hidden away in that tiny hide filled with blankets, webs, and the remains of her shriveled, torn exuvia. So she left.

It had been clear when she made to leave that Shakra wanted to ask her to stay and rest more. Hornet was grateful that Shakra had not; she would not have been able to say yes, and she grew more and more wary of how much her nature put her at odds with her lover’s wants. It was not that she disliked that Shakra worried for her or wished to keep her nestled in an embrace wrapped tight in blankets and webs. There was little to hate about the way the wingless wasp smelled or how her fuzzy body felt against Hornet’s or how she tasted when they kissed. But the way that Hornet did not fit neatly in Shakra’s long foreleg’s anymore—the way that, while pressing her face into Shakra’s thorax like she liked to, her body stopped not at bug’s upper leg segments but instead kept going past her feet—prevented her from giving her still hardening body the rest it needed. There was no escaping what happened and the way she couldn’t remember any of it.

The large, Wyrm-sized tunnel spilled out into a terrain of haphazardly stacked tomes. They rose far above Hornet even with her new height and hid what she was looking for. She took a moment to breathe it in—smelling the dust and paper and decay—and then wrapped herself tighter in the brown blanket she had brought. The air was cold. Hornet knew that it wasn’t supposed to be cold. She ignored it and listened instead.

Down the length of the yellow tail that wound between the hills of knowledge and away from the hole it once carved, Hornet heard the familiar clamor of the Flea caravan. She headed off down a ravine of pages sealed by grime. The sounds grew louder: the rumbling of the wheels and the fleabeasts were joined by yips and howls, then the sound of Kratt shouting, and finally a familiar voice shouting back.

“—got it! Lower the cart!”

Past an outcropping of books and scrolls stacked like boulders was a clearing. In the center of it was Lace, standing in the distance next to one of the fleas’ makeshift pulley systems and directing the descent of the bath cart. The rest of the carts dotted the valley, articulated by little fleas fluttering about and the sounds of repairing, howling, and cooking. Hornet had once found their family’s warmth too intoxicating to deny; her early days in Pharloom were so full of rage—hunting for answers and revenge—but her first exposure to the fleas had left her shaky and uncertain. When she then found a flea trapped and later returned to see it cradled in the light of the caravan, belonging somewhere, a tinge of something long denied grew in her. Against her better impulses, she found herself always listening keenly for the yips of their missing kin, enduring any obstacle to rescue them, and devoting her time and energy to helping them move from place to place until she found them what she hoped would be their final home. Hornet did this because, though she never felt fully comfortable being in their number for long, being around them was the closest she had ever come to belonging somewhere in her whole life.

Lace looked comfortable as she assumed Hornet’s old role: directing their descent and keeping the little fleas from running under the final cart. With her pin, she signaled up to Grishkin and Mooshka and guided the two as they released more rope. From the cart echoed whimpers from Kratt who held tightly to the side of it. He had done the same the few times Hornet had helped drag it up the various cliffs of Pharloom, refusing to part with his beloved business even at risk of falling to his death. The whimpers rose to a shout that Hornet couldn’t make out, and Lace called back, “jump then, fool!” The ropes creaked and the wood moaned, but after a few breathless moments, the cart landed safely on the ground.

“Dondeshna, my sweet lady.” Hornet heard Kratt say as he leapt down from his cart. “How ever can Kratt repay your care with guiding his cart?”

“Not ever calling me lady again would be a start,” Lace answered then ignored Kratt’s apologies as she walked to the pulley system to help take it apart.

Watching it all made Hornet wish to head out and join Lace in her task. She even took some silk to bind her makeshift shawl in place so that that she could use her claws to help, but the sensation of her new forelegs rising with her pedipalps made her stop and stay hidden.

In her youth, Hornet had learned again and again that she was a monster to those around her. How many conversations cooled in her presence, replaced with nervous glances and trembling voices that would always end up chasing her away. Over time she stopped trying, preferring to sit silently out of sight and listen—to pretend that she could belong. But even that was taken from her as she watched every bug or spider she could have found camaraderie with fall to infection, isolation, and death, hardening her until her heart became as indestructible as her chitin. The bugs she traveled with had put a chip in it, but standing again on the outskirts, holding breaths in her new, monstrous body, she felt a sudden, frustrating fear for being seen—a fear that she would emerge from her hiding space and watch all the joy and life vanish around her. Better to leave them be, she thought and turned away.

“Hello?” An unfamiliar voice called out.

Hornet watched as a flea, one she hadn’t seen before, rounded the corner and stood in front of her. Hornet tried to return the greeting but struggled to find her voice.

“Can you help me?” The flea asked.

“I—” Hornet saw the way this flea looked up at her without a single ounce of fear and let her body begin to breathe again. “What do you need, miss?”

“Sister Vog bid me keep track of little fleas. I lost some.”

“I could help with that,” Hornet answered. “This is not the first time I’ve gone searching for them.”

“Oh!” The flea said. “You are Honnet?”

“Hornet. And yes— that is who I am.”

“You found me.”

Hornet realized then who she was looking at. She had wondered what the lifespan of the fleas was like—why some spoke where others yipped and flew. The feeling of it, knowing that this one who stared up at her would not have found her voice but for Hornet’s rescuing, sat dissonantly against the self imposed loneliness that haunted her.

“Do you feel better?” The flea asked.

Hornet thought about how to answer the question. She did not feel better, but neither did she want to worry the little bug before her. “In a sense,” she decided on at last.

The little flea smiled. “I am Feia! The others talk about you muchly.”

“Do they?”

“Yes! But you seem better. No more worry for them. Let us go catch fleas.”

“Ah— yes. Where last did you see them?”

“This way!”

Hornet followed Feia through the labyrinth towards the place where the group of fleas had gone missing. Feia chattered about fleas and about words, unconcerned with Hornet’s silence. Hornet half-listened while searching the air for their scent and the sound of their whimpers like she had in Pharloom. At a fork in the road of books and dust, Feia stopped and asked, “How do find a flea?”

Hornet knelt down next to Feia and said, “My kind are born to hunt. I use those senses for this task.”

“But how?”

Hornet held a claw to her mouth and bid Feia to listen. They sat in silence for a while until it was barely pierced by a distant whine. “Did you hear that?” Hornet asked.

“Yes! But where?”

Hornet pointed to a pile of debris at the entrance to one of the branching paths. “See how it is different?”

“Oh! The word-things tumbled.”

“It is hard to move without leaving a trail. Come.” Hornet stalked down the path with Feia close behind.

At the end of the trail, the piles of books formed into a cave that smelled like mold and knowing and fleas. As they walked further in, Feia reached out and grabbed the claw on the end of one of Hornet’s new forelegs. Nerves ached in response, but Hornet ignored them, not wanting to frighten the little flea by pulling away and letting out the growl she smothered.

“I can’t see,” Feia said, stumbling through the dark.

Hornet tightened her grip on the little flea’s claw. “Fleas aren’t made for the dark.”

“Who is made for the dark?”

“Me.” Hornet answered. Deeper in the cave, the muffled sounds of whimpering grew louder. At the end, Hornet found three fleas trapped under a cave-in of books. Feia scrambled to try and set them free, but Hornet stopped her. “You risk caving us in.”

“But—” The books began the tremble.

Hornet snatched Feia in her forelegs and threw her pedipalps in the air to brace agains the unstable ceiling. The books pressed down against her claws; tremors with the tenor of wood, leather, and pulp rippled around her accompanied by fearful cries from the trapped fleas at her feet and the one whose face was buried in her abdomen.

“What do we do?” Feia whispered.

Before Hornet could answer, she heard the sound of something stomping quickly into the cave. The sound was then joined by the thick, familiar smell of Vog’s fur and her husky voice. “Bug. Take the fleas and let Vog hold up the cave.”

“No,” Hornet replied. “If I let go, it will collapse. The little one is in my forelegs and there are three at my feet. Take them and run.”

“Vog must—”

“I said no.” Hornet growled deeply.

She felt Vog reach around and take Feia and then the fleas. “I will return, friend,” Vog whispered and then ran towards the entrance of the cave.

The books began to shudder; the weight of the ceiling grew and Hornet collapsed to her knees, her pedipalps and forelegs straining to hold up what remained. She reached out for silk to set herself free, but found her weak, still adjusting body empty from all the webs she lain. Hornet grunted and wondered if her new body was still immortal. A sickening sound echoed from the entrance—thousands of books collapsing under their weight. Hornet braced herself for learning the answer and felt a bit of joy, for if the answer was no at least she had spent her last moments saving her beloved fleas.

Hornet would not find out the answer; instead she found Lace, having rushed up behind and taken the trembling, weakening Hornet in her forelegs. “I’m here,” she whispered, and then the remaining pocket of the cave set alight with spinning shears and seals as Lace tore apart the ceiling and launched the two of them up through the hole she carved.

They blew through the top of a mountain of books as it collapsed in on itself. Just before they collided with another pile of books forming the floor of another valley, Hornet adjust her grip to cradle and shield Lace. The impact ripped a moan out of her, but she ignored the pain and held Lace tightly.

After a moment, Hornet felt Lace whisper into her neck, “Was this how you felt when I used to hold you with my old body? All small and safe.”

“I have never felt safe, but you did make me feel small.”

“You are safe now,” Lace said. “Even if you don’t feel it.”

Hornet tightened her grip as she wondered and wished and slipped into slumber again.

Hornet awoke within the walls of their sleeping cart. She knew it before her eyes opened, smelling the mix of velvet, silk, metal, perfume, venom, bug, and beast that lingered there even when she and the others were away. She groaned, her body still aching from the cave-in, and sat up.

“Hello, spider.”

“How long has it been?” Hornet asked.

“A few hours.” Lace sat before Hornet and placed a waterskin in her claws. “Drink.”

Hornet did, her setae growing drenched as she greedily slurped down the water. Once she was done, she looked down and inspected Lace.

She looked different, but not as different as Hornet did. Her face the same, two white eyes nestled on her pretty, dark face, staring coyly up at Hornet, but her body was slightly thicker: less petite and taut than it had been. It was a subtle change, but Hornet liked it—the way it ruffled and folded from the position Lace sat in. As she traced the shapes of Lace’s body, she took in the biggest change in her mate: her hair, which soon transfixed Hornet. It was no longer bound in its typical large, regal poof. It had untwined and become wild—countless ribbons of silk spun, twirled, and bounced, filling out her head like her old hair had, but covering her face slightly. It was thick and beautiful.

“Spider?”

“You are changed,” Hornet said finally. She reached to touch Lace’s hair but stopped herself.

“You can touch it,” Lace said. “I’ve grown quite found of it, thankfully.”

Hornet ran her claws through Lace’s hair. “How did this hap—” Hornet started to ask but stopped as a memory crawled into her mind: of waking up and finding Lace transformed into a web. “Lace—” Hornet got out.

Lace shifted and laid Hornet down, placing the spider’s head on her lap. She whispered down to her, “A lot has happened. Try not to force it.”

“You did not intentionally become this?” Hornet asked.

“No.” Lace answered. “I know not what you remember, but I unwound myself to catch you. When I respooled, I looked like this. I haven’t figured out how to change back, not that want to, mind you. I like it, I think. It suits me to change.”

“You saved me,” Hornet spat out through her tremors.

“Of course I did.” Lace caressed Hornet’s face. “You saved us, too, and sacrificed much for it. Who knows what would have happened had you not put that poor monster out of its misery. I shudder to think of it.”

“You have been saving me a lot lately.”

“Someone has to, spider,” Lace replied. “And I’ll keep doing it as long as you need it.”

“You’ll keep sacrificing yourself for me? Enduring the chaos I bring to your life and the lives of the rest. What point is there? What benefit does it bring you? Only debts I may never be able to repay before incurring more—ceding more ruin to the lives of those I love.”

Lace didn’t answer. She gave Hornet an unreadable look, then looked away, and finally looked back and said, “When I met Sherma, he said something to me that made me so mad I almost didn’t let our new friendship continue.”

Hearing the name made Hornet tense suddenly though her mind would not tell her why. She pushed through the dread. “What did he say?”

“He said you and I were alike.”

“I can see why you would dislike that. I would not wish being like me on anyone.”

Lace pet Hornet’s head. “No. I was mad because he was right. Not in every way, of course. You are much more serious than I could ever be.”

Hornet let out a frail growl.

“And much more sensitive.” Lace smiled weakly, but it faded as she said, “But there is one way that we are undeniably alike. A curse we share.”

“What curse is that?”

“We both sacrifice much for those we love, but we’re not good at knowing if its because we love them or because we don’t care about ourselves.”

How many bugs had Hornet saved in her life? It was certainly not as much as those she killed, whether out of mercy, revenge, hunger, or desperation. But there were still mountains of them: countless attempts to protect the peace, a peace she never felt comfortable being a part of. When she was quiet and weak, she would see them again—appraise the faces of those who relied on her even if they always died in the end. It was only when she was weak, however, for remembering their stories and the part she played in them always left her feeling a dark, writhing, unnameable thing that she built her life around ignoring. But laying on Lace’s lap and looking up at the bug’s face, what it was appeared at last: Hornet hated herself. She had not known it until that moment, a moment only possible because of the many moments of being loved that led to it—unworthiness, discomfort, duty, desire, and loneliness that all revolved around the black hole she lived in yet could not see the whole of.

In the black she saw her grief and her failings, bared clear and drunk in by her six trembling eyes. Beside them, she found the memories she had so desperately wanted returned: foul, confusing images of a Hornet even taller than she was after her molt, stalking and gnashing and skittering in the dark. In feeling them again, the way her beastly form was unable to hold back the traumas she kept so neat and buried, Hornet understood that she had not sought their return out of duty to face them, to be strong in front of others or to make amends for what hid within. She wanted to suffer, for it felt unfair that one should make as many mistakes as she did and outlive those she hurt. For what else is an immortal thing to do with self-loathing?

In looking up at Lace, she saw again her tattered and torn body, tangled in the forcipules of the poor beast she was sent to kill—a beast like her, a lonely, angry guardian that far outlived its purpose. “I don’t want you to be like me, Lace,” Hornet said at last.

Lace leaned down and kissed the crown of Hornet’s head. “If you weren’t like me, then I would feel so alone. No one understands what I went through like you do. No one understands the curse we share: that we must let our mistakes accumulate without end. I’d rather not be alone as I face that. Maybe that makes me selfish, but if you would let it, I bet I could make you feel less alone too.” Hornet made to rise, and Lace helped her up, scooting to sit in front of her. Lace went to hold Hornet’s claws in hers, but brushed the new pair Hornet had grown causing the spider to wince. Lace stopped, smiled gently, and took the ones attached to her pedipalps instead. “I owe you an apology,”

“For what?”

“For acting like I had all the answers. I was so caught up in doing the right thing, in taking care of everyone—of you especially—that I thought it meant I was healed. But I don’t know if I’ll ever be. I mistook enduring for enjoying my life.”

“Perhaps I did too,” Hornet said. “I’m not sure I’ve ever known the difference.”

“Maybe we can find out together.”

Hornet looked down at the way Lace held her claws: tight like she wouldn’t let go for any reason in the world. With a delicate, low hum, Hornet added her new claws. As she did, letting them too be caressed and cared for, the nerve pain began to dim. “I’m sorry your tailcoat was destroyed. I know what it meant to you.” Hornet said, too raw from Lace’s words and the rush of fragmented, beastly memories to think of anything else.

“I am too,” Lace answered. “But nothing should be forever.”

“I could make you something new,” Hornet offered. “It would appear that have to make myself a new cape. The old one wouldn’t fit my body as it is now.”

Lace let go of Hornet’s claws. “Actually—” She leaned over to a thatched bag, pulled out Hornet’s cape, and handed to her.

Hornet did not have to put it on to know it was tailored, the amount of cloth cradled in her limbs was far more than it had been before. She put it on, letting it ruffle as it always had only a little longer. There was a slight change where the old red fabric became the knew—a weave that Hornet was unfamiliar with—but it was nice in a way for things to change.

“I did not know you possessed this skill, child.” Hornet said.

“It was not me who tailored it.”

Hornet looked up from tracing the new weave with her claws. “Who then?”

“Trobbio,” Lace answered. “He’s quite the talent.”

Hornet was silent for a long while, though she kept feeling the moment where the cape changes with her claws. With a sigh she asked, “Would you tell me where I could find him?”

Organized neatly on a sheet of red fabric, Trobbio had set out the collections of tools he had once taken from the Citadel—devices collected from the underworks, vaults, and choral halls. At first, he had started the collection for the changes he intended to make to the little stage he had claimed: installing trapdoors, pyrotechnic devices, pulleys, lights, and curtains. He had learned a bit of stagecraft in Baiae from the various bugs who joined his troupe: simple motors, illusions, and mechanics that could simulate magic like visiting a new land, seeing ghost, or confronting a monster. Alone, hoping to find something worth living for in that strange, haunted tower, Trobbio had thrown himself at the task, spending months tinkering and learning so as to make up for being a one bug act. He was already talented enough at acting, singing, and writing—certainly talented enough for bugs too haunted to do much more than groan or kill—and the distraction of picking at some new puzzle was a salve. In truth, he became far more lost in it than he intended at first.

Fate it must have been, Trobbio figured, for him to learn so much of mechanics and then be blessed with a lover spun by broken cogs. Like a plot in a play: too convenient to be realistic. But life was often that, full of coincidences that belie belief. Trobbio selected a delicate pair of tweezers and a wrench and moved closer to Second. “Are you ready, dear?”

Second sat against a crate, his foreleg tied down on a block of wood with its metal casing removed to reveal its internal mechanisms. As Trobbio reached in to loosen a screw, Second said, “B-beg, should your Sentinel?”

Trobbio let out a low laugh. “Perverted machine. Perhaps when I’m done fixing you up.” He reached in to the foreleg and and began to work, removing shattered cogs and ruined springs, heating up bent axels to restore their shape, sketching the schematics in a journal to keep track of what was done. It was a delicate task. It reminded Trobbio of the work of an old spider in Baiae, who had made a name for himself creating little clockwork scenes and automatons. Trobbio had always been enchanted by them, but now wished desperately that he had paid attention the evening he got the chance to watch that spider at work. Trobbio ignored the faint memory of smoke that came whenever he thought of what was lost with Baiae and began putting Second back together.

Once it was all in place, Trobbio untied the foreleg. “Let us see how I did.”

Second bent his foreleg, but it caught half way and made a click. “Ah—”

“Blast.” Trobbio muttered under his breath. “Okay, back down. Let me take a look.” He tied the foreleg back to the block and checked over his work, tracing up and down the mechanisms and comparing them with his notes. Near Second’s shoulder he found the answer. “I am sorry, dear, but without a new cam here and a new axel, it will likely always click. I could sand them a bit to lessen it.”

“C-careless, was this Sentinel. This is the cost-t-t.”

“There is another option,” Trobbio offered. “I could head up to the Architect you found and see what components yet remain in her limbs. I am sure she would want you to persist.”

Second sat silent. To another bug he might have appeared like a statue, but Trobbio could sense the nearly inaudible whirring of sadness as it made its way around Second’s cogs. “B-broken, I would prefer to be. Only an Architect-t can choose to recycle the parts of a cogbug.”

“It never ceases to fascinate me that you cogwork things can be so logical and still have superstitions.”

“Whether real or n-no, to fear the curse of taking-g from a soul machine, unpermitted-d and forced, is a part-t of what remains of my making.” Second reached out with his good foreleg and ran his claws through Trobbio’s scruff. “It is alike to you l-leaving on your light.”

“Well, if I didn’t leave a light on the stage, it would be dangerous! Someone could fall.”

“Lonely, the g-ghosts would also be.” Second said.

“Ah—,” Trobbio reached up and intertwined his claw with Second’s. “I didn’t know you knew of that superstition.”

“Overheard your g-goodbye to the theatre, did your Sentinel. In illogic and superstitions-s, we find the g-ghosts that made us.”

Trobbio whisked away the intensity with which he felt Second’s statement with a laugh. “What a poet you’ve become, my love. I am going to steal that.” He wrote it down next to the schematic.

“Yours, it-t is. P-payment for returning my words.”

A knock came from the door. Before Trobbio could ask for a few more moments of privacy, he heard Hornet’s muffled voice say, “Trobbio, may I come in?”

Trobbio glanced at Second. “I’ll tell her to come back, dear, Once we have—”

“Repaired, this Sentinel is as much as he will be. Difficult, must it have been for her to choose to seek-k you out. We should let her speak.”

“Very well.” Trobbio opened the door and let Hornet in.

She took a few steps into the cart but froze upon seeing Second. “You have been injured.” She said. “Was it?—”

“Damaged, this sentinel was by the beast we sought-t-t.”

Hornet grew quiet and tense.

“Have you stopped by to stand above us looking as if you’ve seen a ghost?” Trobbio joked, “or would you like to stay a while and chat?”

Hornet sat down. At first, she said nothing, staring silently at the two of them. Then, suddenly, she turned and began to quietly inspect Trobbio’s tools. “I was not aware that you were skilled with mechanics, sir. Nor skilled in fabric. We have both in common.”

“Just a few things I picked up over the years,” Trobbio replied.

Hornet nodded and clawed at a little blade whose original purpose Trobbio didn’t know. “Thank you for tailoring my cape. It was kind. I would like to repay my debt to you.”

“There is no debt owed, you gloomy thing,” Trobbio answered. “It took me no more than an evening. Think not of it.”

Hornet looked up from the array of tools. “If not repayment, then may I offer a service of my own volition?”

“Not up to me,” Trobbio said, looking towards Second.

Second sat up slightly at the suggestion, realizing it for what it was: an attempt to mend what lay between them. “Amendable, this sentinel is t-to your offer. A true repair, however, may not be p-possible.”

“Perhaps.” Hornet said and moved closer to inspect Second’s foreleg, inspecting each component one at a time. Then, she gestured for Trobbio’s notes and looked over them, tracing the schematics and comparing them with what she saw. Over the course of inspecting the work her demeanor softened. “This is impressive. Who taught you?”

“Oh, countless bugs,” Trobbio answered. “I’m a nosy thing as I am sure you’ve learned. Couldn’t help but peak over the shoulders and wings of my old stage techs.”

“This is beyond what could be gleaned by watching. You have a talent for it. I wish I had known.”

“Why is that, dear?”

“I—” Hornet gave Trobbio a said look, but stifled it quickly. “I like machines. But I have had few bugs to share that with.”

“Affection, does this machine have for thee as well.” Second said.

Trobbio laughed and Hornet began to stammer. “I—”

Trobbio interrupted her. “Well, now that you know, maybe we can share in it going forward. I’m always looking to learn more.”

Hornet perked up. “Can I show you something I learned, then?”

Trobbio scooted close and watched Hornet take out the cogs and axels in Second’s foreleg. From under her cape, Hornet pulled out a shell chunk and used the small knife from the blanket to carefully etch the shape of one of the damaged cams. As she did this, she talked, quiet at first but with a growing excitement the more she said. “The components of Citadel cogbugs aren’t perfectly square. They have a slight bevel to them that allows for more fluid movement. It is ingenious actually.” Hornet handed her example to Trobbio. “You can keep this while you learn to cut the teeth. If you find it too difficult, a cast sometimes work, but they are never exact enough. You can always come to me for practice and pointers, and I can make another if it wears out.” She then carved three more cogs out of the same chunk. “The beveled edges need to align at an angle to accommodate the movement of the axels and this moveable joint. It looks to me that when Second’s foreleg was bent, it slightly shifted everything to look straight, but if it is straight it won’t move naturally with the pulleys in his shoulder. We’ll have to melt some metal to cast a new axel, would you—” Hornet looked up at Trobbio and caught the look in his eyes. “What?”

“I—” Trobbio smiled. “I am simply enjoying listening to you talk about something you like. I admittedly did not know you had it in you.”

Hornet was silent for a long while. “I am sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize that was how I seemed.”

“No,” Trobbio replied. “I am sorry for putting you on edge. I have to imagine all my poking and prodding at your past was irritating. I never know where to start with you warriors.”

Second had been quiet the whole time Hornet showed Trobbio what she had learned, doing his best to hide a bit of emotional acid that had begun to eat at him as he watched Hornet carve a near perfect Sentinel cog from memory alone. He wanted desperately to let the two continue to bond and repair the incompatibility between them, but the feelings he felt churned louder and louder in his thorax, drawing Trobbio’s attention.

“Dear…”

Second gave in and asked, “By what t-teacher, did you learn how to m-m-make this?”

“The Twelfth Architect. She showed me how to do this and a few other things.”

Second’s still working gears tightened. “In the p-presence of Twelfth, were you when she ceased functioning?”

“I was,” Hornet answered, placing the cast down on the floor. “She died of old age I believe. Her rotors slowed.”

“Her d-demeanor, how would you d-d-describe it at the end.”

“Peaceful.” Hornet kept quiet and watched Second process what she said through his cogs and motors. Then, suddenly, she stood. “Would you two excuse me for a moment. I need to retrieve something.”

“Of course,” Trobbio answered. He watched Hornet leaved the cart and then turned back to Second, taking his claw and tracing its intricate metal grooves. Second’s grief that pinged and spun around his construction, and each delicate sound it made broke Trobbio’s heart a little more. Though he did truly understand how his lover felt, the misery of being the last, he knew better than to express it. In the vertigo of confronting a loneliness that deep and endless, there was little one could say to relieve it. Whatever comfort kind words and presences might offered became ever cast in shadow by the undeniable reality that fate could take it all at any moment. Trobbio himself found much relief in Second’s company, and that of the others, but still he felt that same scar: that he would never again speak with another who lived the joyed of his Ruby of the Wastes—never exchange memories of its theaters, gardens, and inhabitants. It was always an act of intentional labor to build new bonds to replace it, and it always felt so precarious.

They were of this sort, the family around the fire: the last of the Sentinels and the Cogbugs, of Baiene, of the Weavers, of the Silk-spun, of the Grunkinder Hornsteeds. Not even Shakra and Sherma were saved from this grief, for Shakra’s home would kill her if she ever returned, and Sherma’s church had been destroyed utterly when he lost his faith. The closer they all become, the more they feared the day it would end.

The door to the cart opened and Hornet returned to sit in front of the two. Carefully, she placed an item wrapped in silk in front of them, unwrapped it, and held Twelfth’s pristine core up to Second. “In her last moments, the Twelfth Architect left me this.” Hornet said quietly, her voice just barely rising above the whines of Second’s grief that crescendoed in his core. “I kept it with me—a memento of her. Though my lineage goes back to your home, I did not find much in common with it, save for her. I would have liked to talk more freely about our shared passion, but I have never been good being friendly. At the time, what we shared was quite close to friendship. I have not known what to do with her gift since that day. It felt too cruel to use it for crafting. But I know now where it belongs. Would you accept this gift, Second, in promise that I will aspire to the friendship I once offered you and will now also extend to you, Trobbio.”

“You’ve got a lovely bit of drama to you, my compagno di scena,” Trobbio replied.

Second took the pristine core from Hornet with his still functioning foreleg and said, “Friendship, have we always had-d, bug red. Even if you did not know it. With gratitude, I accept-t my final mothers final c-c-core.”

They sat in silence, listening as Second’s cogs drifted into a cycle the said peace. Then Hornet returned to work, showing Trobbio how to carve a proper sentinel axel and putting Second’s foreleg back together. When he tested it then, it moved as if it had never been broken. Hornet sat back and let Trobbio seal the limb up while she added her schematics and notes to his journal.

Trobbio tightened the last screw and said, “Who knew you were such a healer, Hornet. Second and Sherma are almost as good as new—”

Second reached out quickly and grabbed Trobbio’s foreleg to stop his words.

Hornet looked up from the notebook. “What do you—” It all came back.

The puddle of hemolyph rippled. The droplets rose up, traced to a body that fell. It fell so slowly to the floor and splashed, spreading its sickly yellow on Hornet’s legs and a mysterious book laying on the stairs. Hornet blinked and then saw Sherma, torn and dying at her feet. She stared blankly at nothing, living at the same time in the moment in the past and sat in front of a pair silent and mortified expressions. Then like a tremor, she felt the memory of how Sherma’s shell crunched as she pierced it with her fangs—tasted his flesh on her tongue. She shivered and stood.

“What a monster am I. I fear you are all fools for entertaining that such a thing as me could be a friend.”

She fled before Second or Trobbio could speak.

The world appears so different in stasis. In the madness of change—dark catching fire with blinding light, aching lungs filling suddenly with air, thoughts awakening in the void of endless slumber, bodies falling from old, tainted exoskeletons—birth, death, and apotheosis—the world warps. It grows bigger and smaller, faster and slower, hotter and colder; it slips into unreality: the realm of the mind which, in its desire to survive, supplants actuality with fears and hopes. In the surviving of it, bugs are left wondering what was real.

Sherma had no answers as he walked along the dias at the bottom of the Sphendices. In the moments before he was hurtled into that strange world of light and nothing on the tips of spider fangs, it had felt so big and foreboding, like it was as tall and wide as the Citadel itself. But it was only a dozen paces wide and barely four paces high. The staircase that Sherma remembered climbing, rushing to Hornet’s side, had felt like the golden steps west of the Citadel—a pilgrimage. Though his limp and the occasional convulsions of venom clearing from his body made the steps feel long and tall, there were only six. Why then, he wondered, did his body remember running up many, many more?

Fear had not just added things to Sherma’s memory, it had robbed them. So transfixed was he with saving Hornet and the book she had set about destroying that he hadn’t noticed the two stone carved pedestals arranged on opposite sides of the structure: made perfectly for books the size of the one he had found in Hornet’s claws. Nor had he noticed the intricate etchings that lined it, long winding segmented tails that spiraled along its side and then veered towards the center where the tails become crowns of mandible that left Sherma ill at ease, all biting into another of their kind: a Wyrm bleeding and spiraled in the center, cast in gold instead of white. It was as beautiful as it was gruesome.

He took a seat on the stone bench that ran along its railing and placed the book he had taken from Hornet next to him. It had taken Sherma the whole week to repair it: mending the torn pages, drying the few that were stained with his hemolyph, and then placing the gently taping back into the book. Some part of him had hoped that he would have found understanding of its contents through healing it, like how mending Vog’s shoulder had brought them closer together. But books are so unlike bugs, simultaneously more open and more shut depending on the reader. Repaired again, Sherma wished that he had even an inkling of where to start with translating its strange script—which appeared more as depictions of beasts and objects unknown than characters—or the strange, page-sized glyphs it appeared to discuss endlessly. While waiting for the glue and viscera to dry, Sherma had painstakingly scaled the library looking for texts on hieroglyphs, translation, symbols, and Wyrms. He had spoken with countless Spoken and followed countless Sighted searching for answers. The library, though vast and beautiful, was as simple as Sherma was in a way: both contained matter that made them what they are, but neither could say for certain what lurked within their damge. Sherma could not say with accuracy what ached from envenomation; the Sphendices could not say what books lay disheveled in the age of its raping by curses and exodus.

After days of unsuccessful browsing, Sherma at last made his way back to the site of his near killing so as to ponder the previous days. He thought of the figure in the light, wondering what they were and why they had looked so terrified. He thought of Hornet, who he awaited the chance to sit with and hope for healing with his forgiveness. He thought of the book and how little progress he had made with copying it. He thought of the pedestals and the implication that there was another. He thought of death and how close he had come to it.

A voice interrupted his thoughts. “Little Learner, how fitting to find thee sat upon the wyrmweld.”

“Wyrmweld, maiden?” Sherma asked, looking up from tracing the etching towards Zeba who crossed the dias to sit next to him.

“Perhaps not its real name.” Zeba answered. “We named it for its carvings and after a similar sort of object written about in the Lands Serene. Their welds were alters of sacrifice and rebirth. Though we did not name ours for this, it seems that in naming it thus it was made to be.”

“I wasn’t a very good sacrifice.” Sherma said.

“We shall see.” Zeba replied.

“I guess we shall. Tell Maiden Zeba, is the wyrmweld as old as the library.”

“Older, I’d think. What we know of it comes to us from the age when the yellow light first seared the minds of our ancestors, who then awoke in the empty library bound to the first sighted.”

Sherma watched as Garosch approached the stain on the steps of the wyrmweld, the place where he had bled. The centipede seemed to smell it and then shivered. Sherma shivered as well and then looked away, following the Sphendices up. Each floor was lit again, filled with the clattering and blind of keepers organizing, repairing, and mourning their dead: a hundred spirals of white bone and grief. “So all of this was here before you? How odd.”

“We could say the same about the caves. Who made them and why?”

“Wind and water made them. Nature.” Sherma answered.

“But what is nature? What does nature know of our fates, and does it seek to warn us by turning its breath cold.”

Sherma thought hard about Zeba’s question but found no clarity. “Would that I could know why.” He said sadly.

“Why would that be better, little learner?”

“Because then I might fix this. When I thought the song was good, that answers to our suffering existed in its notes, I felt as if I could heal this world. But in seeing that song false, I feel my self wandering aimless, unsure of what we can do to heal, to mend, and to live well. But the call to rise to it still lingers in me as loud as ever.”

“A heavy burden. All of your number seem to have such. Such heavy footsteps have echoed in our home these last days.” Zeba stood. “But perhaps that you feel compelled to carry such a weight is the reason you shall succeed. One can hope. Take this book with you when you go.”

“What? But taking is not—”

“What can we give to repay what has been returned to us? What good could we do with a book no sighted can read nor spoken memorize. Certainly nothing without its twin.”

“Its twin?” Sherma eyed the two pedestals again. “Where did the other book go?”

“Tear mask took it. Maybe if you find her you can eek some justice and reunite the two tomes. Then, when all is done and you have found your answers, Little Learner, you can return them to the library.”

Sherma lifted the book into his forelegs, ignored a little convulsion from his wound, and smiled. “It would be the honor of my life, Maiden Zeba. Truly, though our time here was fraught and full of horrors, I feel grateful beyond words to have seen your Sphendices. When I return, I will pass the tomes meaning on to you and then spend as long as time permits wandering this place again.”

“Always are the learners welcome here, my new friend,” Zeba said, then stopped to listen to Garosch’s tapping. “It seems it is time for you all to leave us.”

“What do you mean?”

Frantic footsteps echoed the the distance, drawing closer towards the dias. Sherma rose and watched as Lace bounded up the steps, Hornet’s red cape held in her claws. Sherma understood before Lace even got out the words, “Hornet is gone.”

He gripped the book tighter and replied, “Let us follow after, then.”

The maze was dark and winding and vicious. Even its plants seemed to grab at the life that wandered through it, catching on Hornet’s makeshift cloak—a disguise she had fashioned out of the simple brown blanket she awoke in. She carefully loosed the the fabric from the vines that snatched it and kept moving. Though she could have cut herself loose with her needle, she elected not to. It felt strange in her claw. The weapon had been a little big for her, designed for tall warrior bees like Vespa and Hornet’s hive-sibling, Vlare, but now that she was tall it felt wrong somehow. She carried it with her, but she didn’t use it, slinking through the maze past the dangerous carnivores who stalked it, leaving them to their peace.

She was hungry, but she didn’t eat, feeling too monstrous to entertain the taste of flesh, fearful that it would taste too similar to Sherma’s. Her body trembled, starving and reeling from the memories. In large, overgrown cave, the trembling worsened, turning to stumbling. On the shore of a deep, dark green pond, she collapsed.

“I am a coward.” She muttered, staring at her reflection in the dark, thick water. “I should turn back.”

She did not, unable to rise from the dirt for how guilty and tired she felt. The thought had crossed her mind multiple times as she stumbled aimlessly through the labyrinth, each time beaten down by flashes of what she had done to her dearest friend. No matter how intensely she felt the desire to go to Sherma, to throw herself at his feet and beg for forgiveness, she buckled for fear what she might find in his eyes: hurt, anger, terror, or, scariest of all, forgiveness.

It was this last fear which bound Hornet so tightly to the wishes she granted: a desire to earn forgiveness for her immortality, her viciousness, and her power. But she had never stayed around to receive that forgiveness. As much as she wanted it, to claim itself felt unforgivable.

She sat up and stared idly at the figure in the water: a tall black spider draped in a tattered, hooded cloak, needle resting at her side. She looked so like her mother, whose eyes also bore the same guilt and inability to accept forgiveness as Hornet’s did. In seeing Herrah’s face reflected back at her, Hornet found so many memories returned: the many moments she spent looking up at her mother and wondering why she was so sad and silent all the time. Staring down at her reflection and the same expression, Hornet felt suddenly that she understood. She rose.

“Is that how you were, mother? Too hurt from your life and guilty from your crimes to accept that you still deserved to be loved—to be loved by me or by Vespa. So scared of forgiveness that eternal sacrifice seemed better.” Hornet felt the tears well in her six eyes. “Do I have even a hope that I could become different than you.” With a labored breath, Hornet decided it better to try. She turned back the way she came.

As she did, the pond rippled. The scruff on Hornet’s neck rose, and she lunged to the side just barely evading a tentacle tipped with a long, green spine. Hornet watched as it reeled back to a shape rising in the water, a tall stalk of thick green flesh that looked almost like a tree but with the branches that wound through the air like whips, splashing up water and disturbing the dirt of the shore. It inched towards Hornet, who realized with terror that in her haste to avoid the blow she had cornered herself.

Vainly, she reached for her silk stores, but found them still too meager to used. She gripped her needle tightly and searched her foe for a weakness. Another tendril launched and Hornet dodged and bisected it. On hornet’s deep growls, her venom oozed thick and sweet, but she had no clue if the translucent hybrid of plant and bug before her had the type of body that seized from venom. She braced for death or for eternal torment, still unsure if this new wyrmless body of hers was immortal. She thought of Lace and Shakra, who had tried so hard to love her. She thought of Trobbio and Second and the friendship she had tasted and then forsaken. She thought of Zaza whose life was ever bound to the absence she caused when her hubris killed Garmond and who still ran to save her. She thought, finally, of Sherma and of how much she would’ve like to tell him thank you and sorry and take care of them for me. Her thoughts were drowned in the wobbling and whipping of this death.

A sour, fermented stench filled the air, and Hornet watched a spray of sickly, pink venom rain slammed into the beast. It squealed and died, its body irreparably burnt in mere moments. Hornet lunged away from steaming, stinking corpse towards a different path than the one which had brought her to the pond, knowing that whatever could kill such a thing so quickly was a true monster and that she had to lead it as far away from her companions as possible.

As she ran, a voice called out. “Hail! Worry not traveler. I am a friend.”

Hornet watched a tall, fearsome scorpion emerge from behind a thick patch of foliage. Even with her new height, the knight towered over her, his claws as big as her head and his tail a bludgeon that reminded Hornet of Hegemol’s old mace. Like Hegemol, the warrior’s voice had an odd gentleness to it which slightly, but only slightly, alleviated her terror at the power he exuded and had caused her to stope her hasty retreat. She inspected the warrior, tracing the beautiful patchwork cloak that covered his body and the swirls that covered his mask. From this, she determined that he was of the scorpions that lurked above Hallownest, a mysterious and lonely tribe that had always known to give the gates of Hallownest that Hornet guarded a wide berth. To see one traveling so far from Mount Hallow struck Hornet as odd. But her wonder for this lasted only until the knight shifted his cloak and revealed the armor he wore underneath.

She recognized it immediately, having killed countless bugs wearing its make. The armor of the Basin was unique, but to see it worn upon a scorpion made even less sense than seeing a scorpion wandering the swamps. The one defining feature of the Basin Kingdom had been its hate of any bugs not of old Hallownest, labeling Mantids, Fugus, Ooma, and Spiders as traitors to the Pale King, though the bug they meant was only a pretender. For this, Hornet had levied the sentence of genocide, carving out that culture again and again for the threat it represented to her. Her campaign against them only worsened when they had succeeded in destroying the mantises, an act of violence that Hornet never truly recovered from, blaming herself for not killing enough to prevent it. She wondered how many old wounds would find her on this lonely walk through the labyrinth while also wondering what sorts of change would need to visit upon Hallownest for a wasteling stinger to have such armor custom made.

“Tell me, sir, who are you?” Hornet asked

“Sir Calder, Right Claw of the Basin Guard and Queensguard of Ephibysse of Hallownest. Though I may appear fierce, you can trust that as long as you are peaceful, so too will I be. You have the look of a fierce warrior, maiden spider, though I hope its fierceness is wielded on behalf of the weak.”

Hornet did her best to not stare at the armor and answered, “That is what I intend though I am not always successful.”

“As a fellow venom born warrior, I understand that curse well. But to resist our base needs is truly of chivalry. Perhaps we could travel together for a time. These caves are quite treacherous, and I could use some assistance in my task.”

“What task is that?” Hornet asked.

“I seek a mole cricket named Kast, and I seek what she may have discovered in here. You no doubt feel the sting of the cold air. Thus do I wind through these foul tunnels for. Once I find her and my answers, I plan on returning to evacuate a city south of these caves and make for my home. Help me now, and I could see one with skill like yours raised up. To dodge a Hydra’s spurs and even cut one takes true talent. Hallownest always needs new guardians of such skill, O spider who may or may not have claimed a name.”

Hornet stilled her body, doing her best to hide the fear, anticipation, and curiosity that vibrated up to the tips of her setae. As she eyed the warrior before her, she thought of Trobbio’s warnings all those nights before, that Hornet’s identity and knowledge of Hallownest was more of a curse than a boon. Though the guilt of running away still lingered, it held not a candle to what stood before her: answers. “I will join you in this, sir. And you can call me Fang.”