Tallah

To her shame, she let Vergil lead the way into the dark as they moved forward at a crouch, the tunnel tight and low. In places they had to squeeze forward on their bellies, the narrowness suggesting who had dug the thing in the first place.

Everything hurt. The ache in her shoulder burned with the promise of infection and a fever to come. It was all she could do to keep one foot ahead of the other. Crawling forward on her belly frustrated her to tears as her left arm was a dead weight at her chest that throbbed at the slightest provocation.

Even so, she registered it all distantly while her mind was distracted by more urgent concerns: they’d gone through her barriers. How? She had been fresh and opened to illum, but it had barely meant anything to those white creeps. Even the memory of them breaching so easily, eight bony legs propelling them across the corpses of their black brethren, sent a cold shiver lancing down her spine. The blacks had been held back, but the white ones had simply bypassed the barriers as if not even there.

What were they really? If she thought better of it, were they really chitinous like the rest? Something in how they moved and how their carapace seemed to bend organically… ugh. The remembrance punched her straight in the bowels.

Not that it would matter now. She was useless in her current state. No weapon on hand—she’d dropped her staff, foolish hen as the ghost called her—and the Goddess ignored her pleas. Even her normal channelling failed them in this moment. Just ripping open the rend felt like needles running through her veins, the power jagged in her and refusing to be drawn or shaped. She’d used the last dregs she had saved up.

“Sil? You alright?”

She couldn’t see Vergil’s face but imagined the concerned look as she nearly crashed into him. “Mind the way and don’t stop. See that we don’t fall and break our necks in some invisible chasm.” She made a good effort of sounding stronger than she felt. It wouldn’t do for the boy to know how bloody scared she was in the confine of the passageway.

She’d probably soil herself the first moment a spider came into view, and that’d be the last thing she ever did as the beasts overwhelmed and ate them.

That’s uncharitable. You should have some faith in him, at least until you dig his grave. Another walking corpse for you to lead—

“Not the dark. Please, not the dark.” The voices rose up to flood the passage in wailing echoes. “Are you there? Are you coming back? Please don’t leave me in the dark.” On and on and on. At least they distracted from thoughts that she shouldn’t be alone with. She had to admit that curiosity kept her feet following after Vergil’s whilst terror screamed itself raw behind her eyes.

“They’re getting louder,” Vergil said from ahead. He spoke low, unwilling to add to that cacophony of pleading. “Are you close to me?”

She reached her good hand and touched his shoulder. To his credit, he barely flinched. There was heat on the back of his head, a sign that they were far enough from Tallah that the enchantment on the safeguard would begin to take effect. Hopefully, they weren’t heading to an explosive conclusion.

“I’m here,” she reassured him. “If something attacks, I’ll be out of reach. Don’t worry.”

“That a way of saying you’ll run and leave me to fend for myself?”

She would’ve knocked him one over the helmet if she weren’t worried of the attention the noise might attract. A soft chuckle showed he wasn’t serious but making light of their predicament.

“I think spiders would choke on your bones. Focus on giving them indigestion for me to get away.”

He laughed softly. The air changed, a musty odour of rot and decay rising from the dark as their path began to dip. It reeked the further in they went, like blood, mould, and excrement mixed together. Sil had to press a sleeve to her nose or risk heaving.

A bend in the tunnel brought them into light. It shone ahead, the end in sight at long last. Nothing moved in the faint glow of the exit, even as it yawned larger by the moment.

They found corpses.

Sil surveyed the scene as they shuffled out into crystal-vein light. It all made very little sense. They emerged into what had been some kind of… prayer room? Statues lined the walls, of winged creatures with arms raised, faces in rapt adoration of something. The high ceiling was shattered and a many-legged corpse dropped just then onto the mound beneath.

Vergil squinted against the crisp light coming from a spire outside the high windows. It dressed the scene in hues of crimson.

The floor had been taken out, shattered and dug away by some unknown force, to leave behind a hole filled with the jutting stubs of ancient statuesque figures and assorted debris. Corpses piled high in it, some of them still moving.

“What do you see, Vergil?” Sil wasn’t quite ready to believe her own eyes without confirmation.

“It’s… I… Are those human girls?”

She shook her head. “Not quite. No, I don’t think.”

It was a mass grave of horrors that brought to Sil an echo of Anna’s deep domain and the chimeric aberrations that had been bred there. The theme of this was rather simpler.

Creatures not quite human and not quite spider lay gathered in a bloody, messy pile of exposed viscera and shattered chitin. Her eyes settled on them in turn, reason trying to make sense of whatever fresh horror this was and unwilling to pull in all details at once.

A familiar black-haired head sat atop a fleshy stalk growing out of an eight-legged spider corpus. Its face was alien in its hideousness, six eyes dispersed across an inhuman visage split apart by a jagged gap of a mouth filled with too-large fangs.

Another, beneath it, bore little resemblance to any kind of humanity aside for the soft skin covering its mutated, bloated body. Multi-legged, multi-armed, it had a head like melted wax sculpted into some sort of approximation of humanity. Vestigial chitinous legs sprouted out of what would’ve been its abdomen and wiggled faintly as the creature drew laboured breaths. Its white skin, deathly pale, moved as if infested by maggots beneath the surface.

One had broken apart on its fall, spread in chunks across the stub of a statue’s wing, bloody gore dripping out of chitinous shells, all moving and trying to come back together. Its viscera hung there like obscene garlands thrown across a mound of disfigured corpses.

Others were spider in full, black overturned bodies caught in fits, human arms and legs pushing out through gaps of chitinous shell. Anna’s excesses had been kinder than these amalgamations.

She couldn’t help but get nearer, to the very edge of the grave, and suffer the racking revulsion. Echoes of the Banshee’s Wail kept her from looking away. If she took the human parts on display she could reconstruct the likeness of a girl of maybe ten, maybe twelve Summers, with raven-black hair and eyes the colour of deep ice. Her face was everywhere, stretched into monstrous grins and cacophonies of forms, but it was a singular visage staring back at her with dead, gaping eyes.

They all stared.

Like one, the entire pit became animate and reached hands and claws toward her.

“Save me. Take me away. Don’t leave me here.” Throats and mouths not meant for human speech slurred the words but not the meaning. If there was clear intent behind them or some echo of something, Sil couldn’t begin to guess.

But the mass of corpses moved like a great, ponderous creature dragging itself forward on too many misshapen hands and feet, bodies falling over one another and getting buried beneath the squelching mass.

She drew back. Revulsion made way for terror and panic. Vergil’s sword was little comfort at her side as they both teetered on the indecision if to run back or try and find another way out. They shared a look as the corpses got nearer, an avalanche of flesh crushing the most unfortunate beneath its bulk.

“Don’t go. Please. Take her away.” The wailing pleading shook the walls. “Take her away. Take her away. Take her away.”

“Her?” Vergil mouthed the word. “Who?”

“Hear I. Hear us. Hear. Please. Don’t go. Take her.”

They wailed and reached out grasping hands, their desperation tangible in its many-eyed gaze. It wasn’t terribly hard to imagine who they were on about, given all the evidence of the room. The why and how of it, however…

She took a step forward. “Look for a way forward. We don’t want to get further from Tallah,” she said and waved him away. To the abomination she called out, “I listen. Stop where you are and tell me what ails you.”

For I am of the many, and I am of the few.

Deep, well-earned terror gripped her throat as she tried to stare down the squirming mass. They raised one of their own to almost her eye-level, a black spider held atop a trembling stalk of malformed life. Too many human eyes regarded her from across the thing’s multi-segmented body. Fanged palps twitched as she and the elected ambassador regarded one another across the empty space of that chasm.

Her knees were ready to buckle as the thing drifted closer and she couldn’t tear her eyes off it for fear of it pouncing. She idly wondered how her voice might sound, but she had to ask her questions.

“What are you? What’s done this to you?”

“You will hear us.” It spoke in a parody of language, the words gurgled and chopped by whatever inhuman chords produced them. “You will know. You will take her away?”

“Who’s her? I don’t know who you mean. I don’t understand.”

“Hear us. We give you our Knowing.”

What tinged its words? Hope? Despair? It moved its legs and palps as if trying to communicate soundlessly. It twitched and shrunk in on itself, legs brought in tight against its body, terror in its eyes.

“She listens,” it growled out. “She seeks. No time.”

“Make sense. I don’t understand.”

“You are of Her. You do not understand Us. We are all Us, are Kin. Speech is not of Us but poison of Her. We have made mistake. We know now. She has gifted Us with regret. We regret deeply.” It was gaining coherence as other voices joined into its ramble.

Sil let it happen, trying not to cringe at the threat of its twitching.

“She is in Us,” the whole mound whispered and shuddered with what she could only interpret as revulsion. “She is in every part of Us. In our deep recesses. She trashes. Bites. Gnaws on Us. She is poison.” They whimpered and drifted their ambassador even closer.

Sil took two steps back as the thing reached the edge of the grave. It made no attempt to follow.

“You came from the lair of the Old One that hungers. Not Kin to it. Not Kin to Us. Different. New. Strange. We did not know you. We did not know Her.” It swayed and shivered.

The Old One? So they knew the creature in the maze but it wasn’t of them. She wondered exactly if whatever had made that thing had also made them, but it seemed unlikely.

“We took Her to Us. She was beautiful. When you came to Us, we did not know you and we did not understand you. Your cold claws cut Us. Your hot breath burned Us. We meant to understand and learn. We wanted to learn. You killed Us. You killed so many of Us. Not for food. Senseless. Why?” Their tone flashed into anger for a moment and fangs were bared across the great bulk of bodies. It quickly subsided.

Sil swallowed the lump in her throat and looked to Vergil as he skirted around the pit, sticking his head in through side doors unblocked by the ruin of ages. They paid no attention to him, all eyes turned to her.

“Did… we hurt you?” she asked tentatively. “When we came before?”

To her one spider was the same as another. To them one human would be the same.

“Yes,” all voices answered in unison. “Yes. You cut Us. You burned Us. You… murdered.” It spat the word in one voice again, like venom. “She was the only piece of you that understood. We could see that she understood. We tried to build a web together. We tried but you murdered and murdered and murdered. Your hunger for death knew no ends.”

Vergil had gone into a passage on the other end of the room and took a worryingly long time before reemerging. He jogged back around the circumference, eyes on the tower of creatures. Theirs remained steadfast on Sil.

“Is that really true?” Sil asked. How could she separate the truth from the lie? Ludwig’s words clashed against this creature’s. She knew it capable of deceit.

Though, were these creatures deceitful? Their resemblance to the girl—for there was no conceivable way that the human component wasn’t the missing Erisa—seemed something they had no control over or wish for.

“No,” she went on before they answered her. “No, I believe you.” Like Tallah’s obscene instinct for danger, hers knew to separate lies from truth. It was utterly convinced of the sincerity of these wretches. “Tell me what happened in truth. What was done to you?”

“There’s a passage there. Another tunnel,” Vergil whispered in her ear, huffing slightly. “I don’t know where it leads but it’s lit and there’s a draft. What do we do?”

“We listen. Then we decide.”

“She comes. She is angry. She brings pain!”

They screamed in horrible concert and thrashed in the grip of some terrible fit. Vergil grabbed Sil’s arm and pulled her back as the tower of flesh and chitin threatened to come undone and collapse on itself. A change gripped the creatures, starting from the bottom and moving up, body after body freezing in statuesque immobility. Eyes stared out horrified, too-many-fingered hands grasped for nothing, malformed backs arched to inhuman angles.

“If children can’t keep their tongues from wagging,” the top creature said in wholly alien voice, “maybe they should have no tongues at all.”

Blood erupted in jets out of every mouth Sil could see, all vomiting out chunks of what were definitely human tongues.

“Better,” the speaker said finally, a horrid satisfaction seeping into its voice. “I should have done this from the moment of birthing you.”

It wasn’t a spider anymore. Its body drew into itself and ruptured in a jagged line running down its centre to open into…

Sil’s breath hitched in her throat.

A girl emerged from the crimson depths of the creature. Not deformed like the rest of the corpses. Tall and slender, unblemished but for the blood on her white skin, she met Sil’s confused gaze with one of pure fury. The tower shifted beneath her feet as she stepped forward, seemingly enslaved to her will to carry her across the separating divide.

Sil’s stomach lurched with the putrefying stench of the girl as she stepped out of the cooling corpse and onto bare rock, blood and puss oozing off her. No, not unblemished at all now that the mess slowly leaked off. Another horror that barely maintained human shape, like a kind of distorted mirror… or a memory of what humanity might have looked like.

Sil had feared spiders her entire life for reasons that went beneath the sheen of logic and reason, the fear etched into her by some primordial echo of what it had once meant to be prey.

Erisa Egia looked very human and not at all, and she terrified Sil worse than any spider could ever manage. The girl affected and wore humanity like skin, but missed something fundamental, something integral that spun her into the only descriptor possible: creature.

Sil swallowed around the lump in her throat and reached out for her voice.

“Ask your questions, sister,” the inhuman girl spoke in an uneven voice that ill fit her, preempting Sil’s intentions. Her lips did not match the words. “Ask them for I know you have been misled.”

Many questions crowded around the one that Sil needed answering before she figured if to scream, run, or embrace this monster laying terrible eyes on her. The cringing spiders would be useless to elucidating the mystery, so Erisa ought to do.

“What really happened?”