30th of Thermidor, 1535

The wreckage settled as a thin layer of dust filled the room. Moira dug herself out from under a heap of broken chairs and glass. She kept her dislocated elbow close to her side as she kicked away loose boards from her path. Moira could feel welts and bruises forming across her back; her limbs, on the other hand, had a durable exoskeleton protecting them. Moira kept losing her balance and had to lean against various wooden frames to steady herself. She felt around her head; there was a sizable gash on her right temple.

Moira examined the space above her—a mass of collapsed walls and floors separated her from the surface. She let out a thankful sigh that the rest didn’t fall on her. Hopefully, Oleander and Cormag could make her an opening soon.

Something moved off in the distance—wooden boards shifted and then tumbled to the floor. The puppeteer was still around here somewhere. Moira dislodged a leg from the now broken dining table, it would serve as a useful cudgel. She kept low as she crept around the room. She stumbled across the spool of wires; it was smashed to pieces by a rogue armoire. All the wires lay limp and lifeless on the ground. A scratching noise could be heard now followed by soft sobs. With her weapon gripped tightly in her three hands, she tiptoed around a displaced wall.

“Mum’s here,” the puppeteer said in a pained voice. She was desperately trying to pull herself out from the debris. As Moira quietly observed, she noticed that a jagged, broken board had impaled the woman through her left side. She winced and gripped at her left hip. There was an initial spattering of blood, but the board appeared to have corked the majority of the bleeding. “Mu-mu-mum’s coming to save you.”

Moira scuttled to the injured woman and pinned her head to the floor with one of her legs. She prepared to swing the table leg. “No please!” The meek-looking woman tried to cover her head, “Don’t hurt me anymore.”

Moira looked down at the pitiful person, “Tell me where they are.”

The woman turned away from the disguised spiderkin. Moira tossed her weapon aside and slowly grabbed the wooden board stuck in the woman’s abdomen.

“Wait-wait!” Darcy yelled. Moira stopped just as she started pushing the piece of wood down.

Moira asked again, “Where are the children?”

Darcy took a deep breath, “When you enter from the hole under the barn if you’re looking where the tunnels diverge, they’re in the far right one. It’s where we store the food, it’s where I put the children when I sense any danger nearby.”

“Why did you do all of this? Every one of those children has a family that is worried sick about them.”

“I-I…” Moira put her hands back on the wooden board.

The woman shrieked in fear, “I didn’t want to be alone anymore!” Once the last word of her confession passed her lips, she started weeping heavy tears. She clutched her hands to her face and started pulling at her hair. Grunts of pain followed as it sounded like she was about to vomit from stress.

“I didn’t want to be alone anymore.” Those words echoed in her mind. She’d heard such a confession before. Moira let go of the board and took her leg off the woman's head.

“What is your name?” Moira asked.

“It’s Darcy. Yours?”

“Moira Kallenberg. This was your home, correct?”

Despite the fountain of tears and the trickling of blood, Darcy was able to get back into a kneeling position. She nodded.

“You said you did not want to be alone anymore. What made you do all this? Did it have something to do with that spool?”

Darcy took another deep, shaky breath. “It was the 30th of Floréal, earlier this year, I can’t stop thinking about it. Peter. Peter came home late that night. He was angry. He’d always had a short temper, and it was especially bad tonight. He tried to work out a deal with Liam and his sons, the nice boys who help us pick our fields, but Peter was sometimes…most times too frugal with our money. He came home beat red and ready to pick a fight. I don’t remember what exactly we started shouting about, but it woke up our daughter, Grace. She was our little miracle. We had tried for years to have a child with no luck, but in January, we had Grace. Something about her crying snapped something in him. He grabbed Grace and shook her to make her stop. I pulled her away. We shouted at each other some more. It took hours to get Grace to go to sleep that night. I don't know if she was scared or hurt by Peter. Now, I think it might've been both. I ate dinner by myself before crawling into bed with Peter."

“Then what happened?”

Darcy took a moment before continuing, “That night, Grace woke us both up with her crying. When babies are that young, they need constant attention. Peter couldn't stand the interruptions. I would tell him she don't know no better and it's okay she's our little angel. Gods." Her tears drenched her face and the top half of her shirt. "I should've been the one to check on her, but since I was up so long getting her to go to bed in the first place, I asked Peter to go instead. I wasn't thinking. One moment, I heard her wail helplessly, and then nothing. I knew something was wrong. I ran in to see Peter..." Darcy's words were stuck in her throat; Moira could see her miming an action.

"He smothered her."

Darcy dropped her hands and wailed. “I tried to stop him!” Darcy's tired and faded blue eyes met Moira's sharp yellow eyes. “I promise I tried to. I couldn't pull him away. He kicked me out of the room and screamed at me. He blamed Grace and me for everything. I-I ran to the kitchen and came back with a knife. I don't remember how many times I stabbed him, but he wasn't breathing when I finished. When I realized what I had done, I grabbed Grace and locked the bedroom door. I cried and held her tight for hours, praying she would open her eyes again."

Darcy continued, "The next morning, I buried them both. The house was so quiet. I hated it." Her voice quivered, "I lost track of the days, but eventually that thing appeared. A devil. Horns and all. He said he could make everything better, and then he asked me what I wanted more than anything. And I—"

“—Asked to never be alone again,” Moira interrupted.

“...Yes. He said I could have a family again. All he wanted was—”

“—your soul,” Moira finished Darcy’s sentence again

“Y-yes, how do you know about deals with a devil?”

Moira deflected the question, “So, in exchange for your soul, he gave you those wires?”

“I didn’t know what to do with them at first. It was only after I captured a dog and started controlling him that I had an idea about how to use them.”

“So that’s when you started kidnapping children?”

Darcy only responded with a nod. “I-I just—”

"—I don't want any justification. Each of those mothers misses their children just as much as you miss Grace."

Darcy couldn't hide her shame from Moira, "What are you and your friends going to do to me?"

Moira looked over to see the pool of blood underneath Darcy. Examining closer, Moira could also see that the board had splintered after passing through Darcy’s body—pulling out the foreign object would be like pulling a rusty saw through her flesh.

“I was originally thinking we would take you to prison, but I doubt you’ll live long enough to see a trial.”

Moira offered Darcy a hand, but the woman could hardly pick herself off the ground. Darcy’s right ankle was bent at the wrong angle and her left foot would barely move.

She grunted in pain as she fell back down to her knees. “I just want this pain to stop. I just want it all to stop.” Darcy grabbed at Moira’s dress, “Please help me…”

Moira asked, “How?”

She sobbed into the Spiderkin’s dress, “...I don’t know.”

Moira sighed. If she did nothing, this woman would suffer, wither, and then succumb to her misery and injuries while being paraded around town before dying at a public trial. It ultimately wouldn’t solve anything. A single solution popped into Moira’s head as she remembered that she was still disguised as a Church of Caryna member. As Darcy wailed into her tattered clothes, Moira gently put her hands on Darcy’s shoulders.

Moira spoke softly, “Close your eyes. Pray to whomever you wish that a devil isn’t near.”

Darcy pulled her face away visibly perplexed, but she did as instructed—addressing her prayer to Caryna the Merciful. Moira pulled back her hood and extended her fangs. She bit down into Darcy’s neck and injected her venom into her carotid artery. Darcy recoiled and clutched her neck. A steady stream of blood trickled down her shirt.

She spat out, “Why did you bite me?!”

As she struggled to scoot away from Moira, her arms and legs started convulsing. She fell on her left side initially feeling a jolt of searing pain before it disappeared completely. She grabbed the board and wiggled it slightly—nothing.

“What-what did you do to me?” Darcy’s lips quivered as she asked.

“My neurotoxin will degrade your nerves and take away your ability to feel pain,” Moira explained.

“Nerves? Like I could do with my spool?” As Darcy looked back at Moira, she finally noticed her face. “W-what are you?”

“A wish a devil made real.”

Darcy’s eyes widened. Each breath took more effort; it was like a lead weight was slowly pressing against her sternum. Her legs convulsed until they locked into position. Darcy reached her shaking hand out and caressed Moira’s face, “I’m—sorry—I’m—”

“Don’t speak. You will be with Grace soon again,” Moira said as she held Darcy’s hand. A smile formed on her face.

“Th-thank you,” her eyes stopped watering as her final breath escaped her lips. Darcy’s face took on a somber blue color as Moira waited for the poor woman to finally pass on.

The presence of death brought a shiver down Moira’s spine, “I hope you two get to meet again in some way,” Moira closed the woman’s eyes, but she pulled back with how cold she suddenly felt. Her venom never did that before. In Darcy’s right hand, a warm blue wisp appeared above her palm.

“Is-is that a soul?” Moira was both unnerved and in awe of the little bundle of energy. Something else spiraled around it—as Moira got close it sounded faintly like Darcy speaking but in different tones and seemingly at different points in her life. “A soul…and a consciousness?” Her father taught her years ago all beings are made of three components: the consciousness, the body, and the soul. He also mentioned that apart from the body—the other two can never be seen. But there they both were, outside a person’s body—fascinating and absolutely terrifying. “If I can bring these to a Church of Careena, or of Aurelian, or of Maelonya, maybe they can…pass it along to the Heavens above?”

She reached out for the soul. It met her hand but did not make contact with her skin. It floated two inches off of her palm. It felt soothing but exceedingly fragile. “Moira!” The spiderkin was pulled out of the serenity of the moment. Several pieces of debris shifted above her, faint beams of light filtered into the room. “Moira, are you down there?!” Oleander’s voice was too distinct to miss.

“I’m here!” She called back, “I’ve...subdued the puppeteer! I also know where the children are!”

“Fantastic, we’ll get you out in a moment.”

A burning smell caught Moira’s nose. All the warmth in the room was sucked towards one location; a giant circle made of incredibly small signum glyphs seared itself into the far wall. Once the diagram was complete, the area within the circle turned black and changed consistency to that of ink.

A red-skinned humanoid stepped out from the portal. Two horns. A tail that ended with an arrowhead point. And much to her surprise, four legs that looked uncomfortably like hers. His eyes were jet black with white pupils, they stared a hole right through Moira’s very essence.

In a deep voice, he spoke, “I am Azephra. You have my prize, now hand it over.”