Farewell

Alice worked silently on the ravaged body of the Queen of Spear Spiders, using her limited magical reserves to heal the worst of the injuries caused by the fight between the remnants of the Anathema and the Lumen glimmers.

She sealed the many abscesses that riddled the intestinal tract of the matriarch, directing the cellular regrowth in ways that would benefit the spider in the long run; she reformed the lost neural pathways to the long-dead stumps that had once been healthy limbs, revitalizing the residual flesh that had long become atrophied.

Carefully, the young biomancer started restoring to its original condition the part of the system surrounding the gigantic entry wound, once infected battleground, which she had been forced to cauterize to prevent Maath’s death from blood loss.

She couldn’t do much to the injury itself, it was too large to be really resolved with her meager magical energy. Alice could only make sure it would improve over time by healing it as much as she could, working from the inside out as she formed a lattice of proteins and extended bridges of tissue to facilitate the regrowth of the rest.

She went as far as repairing what she was positive was the ovary of the Spider Queen, restoring an entire portion of the huge, multi-lobed organ that was placed just beneath the intestine.

The young woman only stopped when Eisor’s silvery core was only a sliver of mana away from crumbling, leaving the fist-sized orb intact and able to slowly restore its magical potential. Letting it crumble into glassy sand didn’t feel right in her mind.

Alice tiredly pulled herself away from the Queen’s huge system, too exhausted to experience in full the feeling of loss and nakedness that washed over her brain upon finding herself back into her own, small body.

The unpleasant sensation of coldness that had been slithering from her physical self through her mind-link —and had been gradually increasing over the long hours of tireless work— now turned into a frozen numbness caused by the cold water she had been submerged in up to her naked torso, her garments having long become glimmer food.

Her muscles shivered beneath her goosebumped skin and she swayed on her feet, her legs weak and unable to hold her upright, forcing her to balance herself in the water with her equally tired left arm.

The right one hung limply on her side, useless once again, with the gaping wound in her biceps now sporting white and waterlogged edges from the long time it had passed soaking in the pond.

Alice ignored it as she pushed herself away from the now silent Queen, the many wounds marring her exoskeleton no longer weeping pus or diseased blood after her ministrations.

When she finally reached the edge of the pool, the girl dropped on the hard metal ground, finding it strangely warm when compared to the glowing liquid she had just crawled out of.

She laid there for a while, unable to stifle the shivers of her muscles, her breaths coming fast and ragged out of her blue lips.

She heard multiple plinking steps grow nearer to her position, ignoring them until her vision of the dark and distant ceiling was finally obscured by the heads of multiple Thinkers, their pedipalps twitching worriedly in front of their gleaming fangs.

The girl attempted to speak but found herself unable to do so between the numbness of her lips and the chattering of her teeth.

Suddenly, her ears caught the discordant notes of a vibrated wire and her attention snapped to Maath, finding her slowly crawling out of the pool with her three intact legs, heading towards the place where her silken throne once stood, no silvery wire in sight; the sound was not coming from her.

Only after a moment of confusion did she realize that the noise was coming from the gangly, striated spider standing just beside her, a thick wire tensed between her frontal limbs as Ricee attempted to produce words she could understand.

Alice sighed in relief, her reckoning had yet to come.

“A̶n̵a̴t̵h̶e̴m̵a̸?̵” asked the spider with a surprisingly worried-sounding click before pointing at the spider matriarch.

“D-dead” she uttered in response before woodenly curling up on herself in an effort to retain the small amount of body heat that remained in her organism.

“M-aa-ath heal-thy” she added before closing her eyes and concentrating on the idea of heat and warmth, trying to trick her brain into feeling those sensations as she listened to the sound of plinking legs moving away from her and towards the healed Queen.

She was thus pretty surprised when she felt a warm blanket land on her body, marveling at her visualization skills before opening her eyes and realizing that the cover was actually there, hastily woven by a silent Chillushrith before she too stepped away, following the rest of her sisters as they crowded around their mother.

Alice gripped the smooth material tightly and wrapped herself in it, feeling its texture change as the silk dried to the air.

Despite her eyelids growing heavier with each moment that passed, the girl forced herself to stay awake, slowly starting to move around in order to warm her muscles up.

The more she moved, the more the numbness faded, gradually replaced by the painful tingling sensation of recently-warmed limbs, coupled with a hypersensitivity to both touch and movement that had her body begging for her to stop and stand still.

She grit her teeth and ignored it, forcing herself to keep moving despite the pain, trying to tune it out as she slowly regained the lost body heat.

She only ceased her frantic exercise when the shivers finally disappeared, wrapping herself even tighter in the warm silk and ignoring the now constant need for sleep as she dove into herself, finding the small amount of magic present into her well and carefully moving it towards her arm.

As soon as she found herself in that complex subsystem of muscles, bones and tendons, Alice delicately repaired the brachialis nerve she had severed when digging for the blight worm that had been crawling up her arm, and then started forming the scaffolding for the regrowth of the tendons and muscles of her biceps, not trusting her Lesser Regeneration to be up to the task.

The biomancer took her time, finding herself strangely clear-headed when inside of herself, more able to ignore the effect of exhaustion. Up to a degree at least.

Until she suddenly found herself in her mind room.

Alice floated in the jet-black void, her mind projection slowly closing in on the wall of fiery glyphs that hovered in the darkness, she could feel their warmth as more of them slowly coalesced in front of her face.

In the end I really managed to do this, huh? Maath is healthy once more, or, at least, she will be healthy in a bit of time.

She shrugged and started reading.

You have reached Level 21 in the Biomancer of Symbiosis Class.

A dangerous life begets scars, be they mental or physical ones, the latter won’t worry you anymore. The skill Lesser Regeneration has been advanced to Regeneration. You may decrease the speed of the ability to enhance its accuracy.

[…]

You have reached Level 23 in the Biomancer of Symbiosis Class.

Your relationship with the glimmers grows deeper still. You have obtained the skill Control: Lumen. Your control of the glowing particles has been further refined. They are an extension of yourself.

[…]

You have reached Level 25 in the Biomancer of Symbiosis Class.

You have won your battle against a being of rot and death. You will fear it no longer. The skill Lesser Toxin Resistance has been mastered; you have obtained the skill Bioresilience. Non-magical poison, venom, disease and blight won’t stop you ever again. Magical substances will have a much reduced effect on your physiology.

You have reached Level 26 in the Biomancer of Symbiosis Class.

Damn. That’s a lot of levels.

The young woman was woken up by a sharp leg repeatedly poking her in the ribs.

At first, she tried to ignore the obnoxious limb but when the legs started increasing in number, she finally decided to stand up, exhaling a surprised gasp when she found her movements fluid and painless.

Upon inspecting herself, the girl discovered not only that the wound on her arm was almost completely healed, the muscle beneath the new and soft skin reacting smoothly to any prodding, but that any other injury on her entire body had apparently disappeared overnight without leaving any trace.

Her new regeneration skill had already started working.

Covering her naked body with the blanket she had been given by Chillushrith, Alice batted away Ricee’s legs and looked around the clearing, taking stock of the number of changes that had taken place as she slept.

The wide Lumen pool had been vastly reduced in diameter while its depth had been increased accordingly to store the luminous water.

The rest of the glade had turned back to its normal metallic appearance, with the addition of a new and only partially constructed burrow of silk, currently being worked on by a surprisingly silent Ozren and a small team of her Weavers.

In front of it was Maath, laying down on a much lower and smaller cushion and currently staring at the girl with her five remaining eyes, a limb already on the faintly vibrating wire that allowed her to speak.

Alice faltered for just an instant before taking a deep breath and stepping forward, crossing the distance until she was just a few meters away from the massive spider, in her right hand she held the silvery core that had allowed her to destroy the Anathema infesting the matriarch.

“Alice.”

The Queen’s voice echoed in the clearing, causing any other movement to stop as she spoke to the young human, her Thinkers watching silently from the edges.

“Hello Maath. Are you feeling better? I mean do you still feel pain?” she stammered out, her left hand gripping hard on the blanket she was using as a garment.

“You have healed me. The Illness is no more. I feel it within me. You have done what you promised.” She stated as the massive, gleaming spike moved smoothly on the silk.

Alice remained silent as dreadful expectation filled her mind.

“I just wish you had failed.”

The newly molted platinum carapace of the spider roiled and shivered for an instant, just as a keening hiss briefly escaped her maw, both quickly suppressed by the matriarch.

“My desire to live and not be a burden has meant the death of my child. Another one. How many of them will I lose before it becomes my turn?” she asked, speaking almost to the caves themselves as her pained words disappeared in the endless maze of underground tunnels.

Alice found herself crying silently as she watched the Queen’s pain, guilt stabbing at her stomach with every single one of her breaths. She still took another deep shuddering one before speaking.

“I’m sorry. I-I really am. It was my fault. I talked your daughters into searching for the titan’s core. I still think it was the only real option but I also did it for myself. Because I couldn’t stand living here for months or years while healing you over time. And now Eisor is dead and Skitter is injured. I should have tried talking to you. T-to find a better way. I—” she sniffled and brushed away the tears while trying to keep talking between the sobs that wracked her chest and shoulders.

“But you did not. Eisor is dead. It is not your fault. I should have been dead many years ago, my hubris and hope prevented me from surrendering to the blighted curse of the nightmare.” She admitted, “Nonetheless, my own guilt does not change the fact that just as I hate myself, I also can not stand your presence. Not now. Not so soon. I watch you and I can not help but see another Anathema, a more subtle one, that makes you suffer without piercing your skin. One day maybe we will see each other once more and I will have forgotten about my sadness. Until then. I bid you farewell, I hope that this world will treat you better than it did to me.”

The Queen of Spear Spiders stood there, now silent and defeated while Alice sobbed silently in front of her.

“I-I’m sorry.” She almost begged once more.

“Leave. Please.” Even through the wire, the words of the Queen of Spear Spiders were tired and sad.

She obliged.

Alice ran away from the clearing, a mess of tears and snot streaming down her face as she ran through the crystal growths, her naked feet hitting the cold ground beneath her.

She broke down crying on a familiar protrusion that grew parallel on the ground instead of upwards.

She curled up on one of its smooth and hard nooks, naked and alone once again.

She would soon need to depart. Until then, she cried.

The girl was interrupted once more by a plinking of legs approaching her position, she raised her head and then used a corner of her blanket-cloak to clean her face of the snot and tears still covering it. She couldn’t do much for the puffy eyes but she really didn’t care enough.

In front of her stood all the Thinkers she had really gotten to know over the months spent in the colony.

Khemi, Ozren, Ricee, Qhevi and Chillushrith watched her silently, she immediately averted her eyes.

“I’m leaving. Don’t worry.” She whispered to the silent spiders as she got up on her feet and covered her body once again.

She took a single step towards the exit of the nest before stopping once more and turning back, her right arm extended and showing the fist-sized orb she had been holding ever since waking up.

“I forgot to give you back Eisor’s core. I didn’t destroy it but without it I wouldn’t have been able to heal Her. I’ll leave it here, I’m sure you’ll find a proper use for it.” she said as she carefully placed it on the metal floor and took a step back.

A click made the abstract metal trees around her shiver and plink as Chillushrith stepped forward, between her palps the mace she had forgotten on the ground of the hall of the Queen.

The silvery behemoth carefully placed the weapon near the crystal orb before extending a single spiked limb towards the two objects, a ripple shaking her carapace as magic poured from her body into the inert alloy which suddenly began to shift and change.

Alice gasped when the flanged head of the mace suddenly warped and extended six thick tendrils of metal that grasped the core and ensconced it in its middle, soon hiding it with another layer of the platinum alloy.

The human girl carefully approached it, looking up and into the huge spider’s eyes before carefully raising the weapon and swinging it around, finding it actually less unwieldy than before.

“For me? But why?” she asked in disbelief, only receiving a hiss from the Thinker before she stalked past her, stopping on the other edge of the clearing and staring at her.

Another, softer click asked for her attention as next in line came Ricee, also holding a weapon between her pedipalps, the sharp dagger Alice had been using as a close quarter alternative and to butcher her meat, it too was dropped on the floor with a clang.

Surprisingly, behind her was Khemi, the silent mason spider that controlled stone instead of metal was using her mallet-like frontal legs to carry a small chunk of void-black obsidian, which she dropped near the dagger in a shower of broken shards.

As if already prepared, the two arachnids also extended one leg each and touched the two objects.

Within seconds the metal had warped and turned fluid, grabbing the sharper looking pieces of volcanic glass as it slowly turned into a single, uninterrupted edge that seemed to gradually become blacker and sharper the more energy flowed into it.

Alice stared open-mouthed at the tool for a long moment before a chittering interrupted her wordless astonishment.

Ozren was already moving around her at extreme speeds, weaving silk and actual metal into a length of armored cloth while, behind her, Qhevi silently extended carefully selected pieces of chitin and bone to act as increased protection.

Within minutes, an entire set of armored silken clothes was laying on the ground in front of her, comprising of a pair of silken socks with chitin soles, an armored knee-high skirt, a comfortable, if tight-fitting, chitin and silk shirt with long sleeves that acted as vambraces, a belt and bandolier for her tools and, finally, an actual sack of particularly resilient silk she could hang on her shoulders through a strap.

Alice looked at all the gifts given to her by the thankful Thinkers and broke down crying once again.

*****

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