Tsarnassan Silk, Part 2

The name of the woman he’d rescued was, to Keinan’s amusement, Ash. 

Of course, when he had to explain that he’d killed her pursuers from atop an ash tree, she only gave him a brief polite smile, and Keinan immediately felt awkward and embarrassed.

Ash was a couple years older than him and unquestionably beautiful, and Keinan felt just as awkward as he had expected to. Tetragnath quietly snickered in his ear.

“Do you live here?” Ash asked him, as they searched the felled legionnaires for orders and other papers.

Keinan supposed he should feel bad at killing the soldiers, but all that he could think of were the child-sized cages he’d seen years ago.

“For about six years now,” Keinan said. “Managed to escape the child-catchers, fled into the forest.”

“That must have been one of the first mass kidnappings,” Ash said quietly.

“The first in Tsarnassus, to my knowledge,” Keinan said, not looking at her.

“How have you survived this long in Aito without being eaten?” Ash said, glancing nervously around the forest. “I’ve heard so many stories about Tetragnath.”

Keinan waited for Tetragnath to speak via one of the spellforms woven into his clothes, but the spider said nothing.

“Tetragnath doesn’t eat people,” Keinan said. “They will kill those who disrespect Aito, but will only eat insects.”

He didn’t mention how Tetragnath would weave webs around the corpses to snare carrion flies.

“So we’re safe from it, then? You know how to avoid its attention?” Ash asked.

Keinan glanced at her and raised an eyebrow. “There is no way to avoid their attention. Tetragnath sees everything that happens in Aito and the lands around it.”

Ash glanced around nervously.

“You don’t need to worry, though,” Keinan said, pulling out a sheaf of papers from a belt-pouch half trapped by fresh-grown cedar roots. “Tetragnath doesn’t want you dead. They were actually the ones to send me to rescue you. I think Tetragnath figured you’d be a little less terrified than if they did it.”

Ash stared, all her nervousness focused on him now. “You… you’ve talked to it?”

“Every day for years,” Keinan said. “Who do you think taught me magic?”

The letters were just personal letters from the legionnaire’s family. Frowning, he tucked them back into the belt pouch with some difficulty. Even if they were dead enemies, they deserved to hold onto mementos of home.

“Why would…?” Ash said, then trailed off.

Keinan glanced at her.

“Tetragnath is no friend of the Empire. They’re tried to burn out Aito more than once, and their patrols and incursions have gotten more aggressive recently,” he said. 

He stood up. 

“Let’s get moving. We should get a little farther away from the edge of the forest, just to be safe.”

-----------------------------------------

Keinan guided Ash to a spring fed pond at the base of one of Aito’s great hummocky hills. He was, of course, guided in turn by Tetragnath’s silk whispers.

He settled himself against a great boulder of pink feldspar and waited as Ash splashed her face with the cold water of the pool. Eventually, she seemed to gather herself, and strode over to him, settling herself against a smaller, though still immense, sandstone boulder.

“So why was the Empire chasing you?” Keinan asked bluntly.

Ash just stared at him for a moment, then seemed to make a decision.

“I’m a rebel,” she said.

Tetragnath made a satisfied noise in Keinan’s ear.

“A rebel?” Keinan asked.

She nodded. “It started with riots, thrown rocks, and a little arson the year of the first mass abductions. Or, at least, the first mass abductions in Tsarnassus. They’ve been going on for decades in the outer provinces of the empire.”

At those words, Tetragnath was finally stirred to speak out loud.

“Those abducted children were far away, of course,” Tetragnath said sarcastically. “So there’s no reason that would provoke any outrage.”

Ash quite literally leapt upwards, then continued traveling upwards as a gust of wind launched her atop her boulder.

“Who was that?” Ash said, drawing a knife.

Keinan rolled his eyes. “That was Tetragnath.”

“But it came from you,” Ash said, eying him nervously.

“It came from my clothes,” Keinan said. “They’re woven of Tetragnath’s silk, so they can speak through it. And he does make a fair point.”

“We had no way of knowing if those rumors were true or not,” Ash said.

Tetragnath said nothing, and Keinan followed their lead.

After a long silence, Ash stepped from the boulder, and slowly descended through the air. A brief gust of wind washed over Keinan’s feet as she landed.

Several of Tetragnath’s bodies clambered onto Keinan’s body, making themselves quite visible. Ash flinched at the sight, but didn’t comment. 

“So your rebellion started out as riots when bad things started happening to you and not someone else,” Tetragnath said. “Then what?” 

“We…” Ash started, then swallowed nervously. “The Empire cracked down viciously on the riots and disquiet. We were still angry, but they flooded us with so many troops there was nothing we could do. We started hearing rumors of the experiments the Empire was performing— tinkering with minds, stealing words from people. Forcing people to learn invented language after invented language, then using the…”

Ash leaned forwards, and continued in a whisper. “They started using the tongue eater on them.”

“There’s no need to whisper,” Tetragnath said. “The tongue eater won’t steal your words simply for saying its name.”

“The tongue eater?” Keinan asked.

“It’s a weapon,” Tetragnath said. “I’m not sure if it’s an artifact, a ritual, a creature, or what, but it can devour entire languages. When it’s used, it devours the language from existence entirely. Not just from living memory, but from the written page and carvings as well. The Ithonians have had it for at least two centuries now. I don’t know where they acquired it, but it’s the backbone of their engine of conquest. And it does not, so far as anyone knows, work on individuals, just on entire languages. The fact that they’re using it so freely, however, is nothing if not alarming.”

  “The people that have escaped are… broken, somehow,” Ash said. “It’s like they’ve had part of them ripped out, and now they’re just going through the motions of living.”

“So that’s what kicked off the rebellion here again?” Keinan asked.

Ash shook her head. “There were still too many troops here, until rebellions started cropping up all over the Empire. The Ithonians had to disperse the legions everwhere, and as soon as they did, the Tsarnassan rebellion started right back up.”

“Given that you’ve been chased into my woods, I can’t imagine the rebellion is going particularly well,” Tetragnath said.

Ash just sighed at that.

-------------------------------------------------

Ash wasn’t the last rebel or refugee to be chased into Aito. 

The next was a blacksmith who had struck a Legion officer when the man refused to pay. Like most blacksmiths, he had some minor metal magics, which had helped him escape pursuit long enough to make it to Aito.

Next came another member of the rebellion, a friend of Ash’s she’d thought killed or captured.

By the end of the first month, there were fully fifteen new refugees, and a small village was taking shape in the depths of Aito, alongside Keinan’s silk home. Nearly half the refugees were rebels, and they began pushing for action against Ithonia from the beginning.

Tetragnath refused all requests of aid there, and spent much of their time grumbling about the work of building the new houses, but Keinan suspected the spider was quite pleased to have more company.

After six months, the little silk house by the hill had turned into a sprawling town of over three hundred souls, as word spread that Aito had become a safe harbor. Many of the rebels who slipped out of Aito to spread the word never returned, for the legions were patrolling more closely than ever.

Not a single tree was chopped down for construction, though Tetragnath begrudgingly allowed a few to be chopped down to clear land for farming. Silk-house after silk-house began growing between the trees around the base of the great hill. While they all started out ivory-white like Keinan’s, soon the villagers began developing their own dyes from indigo, oak gall, and a dozen other natural dyes of the forest, and the silk-houses began taking on a riotous profusion of colors. It wasn’t uncommon to find as many as half a dozen different colors on a home.

Keinan found himself spending much of his time speed-growing fruit and nut-bearing trees, for Tetragnath far preferred them to ground-based farming. And, in truth, their yield was the same or even higher per acre. It was still a lot of work for Keinan, though.

For all the jokes Keinan and Tetragnath had made, nothing ever sparked between him and Ash. Instead, Keinan found himself spending more and more time with Emala, a young widow his own age, who had a pair of twin toddlers, Anna and Garren. A couple months after their arrival in the village, all three somehow ended up moving in with him. It was, to be sure, a huge adjustment for Keinan, but he often found himself inexplicably wearing a huge smile as he walked or flew through the woods.

Tetragnath was clearly happy for all the additional company. Though most of the villagers were uncomfortable speaking directly with the spider, Tetragnath was quite happy merely observing them. The children quickly grew comfortable with the spider, though, and they were constantly telling them stories and answering their questions as they wandered through Aito. The parents, though usually less comfortable with the spider, grew to enjoy having an always present baby-sitter, and never having to worry about losing their children.

The spider did, at times, seem a little overwhelmed to Keinan, but more emotionally than anything else. Tetragnath certainly had no trouble carrying on dozens of conversations at once.

--------------------------------------------------

The first attack came in the small hours of the night. 

Keinan sat up with a jerk, Garren tumbling off his chest onto the oversize hammock bed. The disoriented toddler started to cry, and Emala woke up as well.

“What is it?” she asked, only half awake.

“I have no idea,” Keinan muttered.

Anna woke and started crying, and Emala sighed.

“Keinan,” Tetragnath said. “A legion raiding party just crossed the edge of the forest.”

Keinan swung out of bed immediately, and began dressing himself.

“How many?” he asked.

“I don’t have an accurate count yet,” Tetragnath said. “They’re using some sort of mobile ward I’m unfamiliar with to shield themselves from my gaze.”

“What?” Keinan asked. “Mobile wards shouldn’t work in the forest, the trees should disrupt them as they passed through.”

“That’s not a concern this time,” Tetragnath said. “You’ll understand when you get there.”

Keinan frowned, but grabbed his bow and sprinted out the door. He half-ran, half-flew to the staging ground, a meadow just outside the village.

Ash and several other mages were already there, and by the time Keinan had caught his breath and his mana reservoirs had refilled from their light use, the dozen-strong strike force had already assembled.

“Is this all of us?” Keinan asked.

He looked around, and realized that every member of the group was a mage with flight capabilities. They were, in fact, every flight-capable mage in Aito.

“I’m assembling a second strike force in another meadow,” Tetragnath said. “They’re for mop-up and containment. Your group’s job is to take down the mobile ward.”

“How’s the other strike force supposed to get there in any reasonable time?” Ash asked Tetragnath.

“The incursion is on one of the closer edges of the forest, and there’s a stream that runs almost all the way there. I’ll be assisting our water mages in conveying the rest of the strike force there via water,” Tetragnath said.

Keinan nodded, checked to make sure his bow was strung securely over his shoulder, and gave the hand signal for take off.

You didn’t strictly need to bend your knees and push off like you were jumping when taking flight, but Keinan did anyhow. It was a near universal habit among flying humans, for some odd reason.

With a blast of wind, the twelve of them took off into the sky.

-------------------------------------------------

Group flying was much faster than flying solo. While flying on your own, you could only fly as fast and as far as your mana reservoirs could push you. In a group, however, you didn’t just push yourself— you contributed a bit of your power to everyone in the group. 

With a wind affinity, you flew by lowering air pressure directly ahead of you, actually pulling yourself forwards. It was also the most mana hungry of the common ways to fly. With a gravity affinity, you lowered gravity’s hold on you until you floated, then propelled yourself with specialized spells. The propulsion spells were, frankly, rather ineffective. Force mages propelled themselves through the air with jerky bursts of force. Those bursts of force were nearly impossible to steer, however. When you combined the three, however, you got unusually effective results. Gravity mages to lower everyone’s weight. Wind mages to provide effective steering and steady forward motion. Force mages to provide extra velocity.

Even contributing mana towards helping everyone else in the group fly, Keinan was using less mana for more speed than he would normally. The benefits of synergetic casting added up quickly for almost any affinity. There were plenty of stories of collected groups of mages working together overcame one of the Great Powers. 

There were other affinities that granted flight, of course, but those were rarer. And when you combined multiple modes of flight in a single individual, they grew truly awe-inspiring in the air. A few generations back, the Ithonians had a mage with all three major flight affinities. She’d been declared an honorary great power, despite being relatively little use in a fight, and had been able to cross the continent in a single day, carrying several passengers through the air. She’d been judged more useful and effective than most combat-ready great powers of the time.

The legion ward came into sight about ten minutes after takeoff. It took the form of a great thundercloud hovering just a tree-height above the forest, but a cloud subdivided into the harsh, geometric designs of a spellform. It was like like someone had flayed and vivisected a storm, then anchored it just above the ground. On the ground below, Keinan could see the torches and glow-crystals of the legion advancing.

A flash of lightning within the cloud revealed the silhouettes of Ithonian mages hovering around the rim of the cloud-ward, and Keinan gulped. They were considerably outnumbered, just based off of the numbers he could see.

“I’m not sure how they’re doing it, but I can’t feel any of my bodies within the bounds of the ward,” Tetragnath said. “No-one’s ever accomplished that before. Take down the ward, and I’ll take care of the legion.”

Keinan didn’t respond, just unslung the bow from over his shoulder. 

“On my signal,” Tetragnath said.

Keinan drew an arrow from his quiver. To his sides, he could see several members of the strike-force readying their own bows, spears, and, in the case of one gravity mage with an iron affinity, a brutal spiked chain.

“Three,” Tetragnath said.

Keinan set the arrow to his string.

“Two,” Tetragnath said.

Keinan began a slow, deep inhale.

“One,” Tetragnath said.

Keinan pulled back the string as he began an exhale.

“Now,” Tetragnath said.

As the last of the air left Keinan’s lungs, the arrow left his bow.

--------------------------------------------

In the light of the flashing ward lightning, Keinan could see his target slowly sink through the air, desperately trying to tear a rapidly growing sapling out of his shoulder.

Keinan dropped his synergistic flight spells, and focused only on his own flight. He could feel the other mages around him do the same as the two forces clashed.

Off to one side, he could see Ash engaging in a spear duel with another wind mage. Ash wasn’t a particularly powerful mage, and tended to run out of mana quickly, but she looked to be holding her own for now.

“Roll left!” Tetragnath shouted in his ear, and Keinan did so without hesitation, drawing a deep breath. A firebolt screamed through the air next to him, close enough that he could feel burns forming on his skin. 

Keinan spun and drew back another arrow, spinning as he did so. 

He began exhaling, and before he’d finished, had spotted the attacking mage, sprinting through the air towards him, fireballs forming her shoulder and a long, light polearm in her hands.

Keinan exhaled and fired. The arrow arced perfectly forwards, straight towards the attacking mage’s heart.

Only to smash against an invisible wall.

The arrow plummeted towards the ground, twisting and growing into a sapling as it fell. Keinan ignored it, watching the mage sprinting towards him.

Air-stepper. They were commonly thought to be a variety of force mage, but were in fact a variety of wind mage, capable of hardening air into temporary stationary sheets. They were exceptionally rare, and only useful for short bursts of combat— the more you tried to force a substance away from its usual behavior with magic, the more mana it required, and you didn’t get much farther away from the normal behavior of air than hardening it into sheets.

Two more fireballs launched towards Keinan, and rather than try to dodge, he simply dropped his flight spell. He dropped vertiginously, his stomach barely keeping up. Both firebolts simply arced right over his head as he fired another arrow, which clattered off another wall of air.

This would be so much easier if he could maintain a windshield around himself up here, but it was impossible for most wind mages to do that and fly.

Keinan caught himself after falling twenty feet or so. The air-stepper hadn’t ever stopped running forwards, and with a bellow, she launched herself forwards and started hurtling down towards Keinan, swinging her polearm in a vicious arc. Glowing spellforms began to race up its shaft.

Keinan forced himself to stay calm and breathe in. Draw. Exhale. Fire.

At the last possible moment, he threw himself forwards at full speed. He actually felt one of the air-stepper’s feet kick him in the back as he did so.

Keinan whirled to face the air-stepper, and found the woman likewise turning to face him. They both paused for a moment staring at each other.

Then the polearm sagged, and Keinan grinned.

The air-stepper glanced at her own polearm— at the glowing spellforms, at the wickedly vibrating edge, and, most of all, out of the sapling growing out of the shaft.

With a curse, the air-stepper hurled the weapon away from her as the cedar roots began to dig into the spellforms.

The polearm’s enchantments exploded before it hit the treeline. Keinan’s eyes began to widen as the blast bowed trees and shattered branches in an expanding circle. He really hadn’t expected the blast to be that big. Those enchantments must have been a hell of a lot more powerful than expected.

Keinan pumped as much mana as was safe into his flight spellform he held in his mind’s eye. More, if possible. Black and red spots began to crawl across his vision as he hurtled upwards, his blood rushing away from his head. When his vision had been almost entirely obscured by the crawling spots, he dropped the flight spellform entirely and constructed a windshield spellform in his mind’s eye. 

He hadn’t even slowed down noticeably by the time he had the spherical construct spinning around him. A moment later, he felt the shockwave of the blast hit his windshield, and he blacked out as he was launched upwards.

----------------------------------------------

“Keinan!” Tetragnath shouted.

Keinan woke with a start, head reeling. 

It took a few seconds to orient himself and stop his tumbling in midair with a spell. Around him the remnants of his windshield were dispersing, and he could feel himself reaching the apex of his flight.

He pulled himself into a hover and looked out over the battle. He seemed to have only blacked out for a second or two, but the whole course of the battle had changed.

Beneath him, he could see Aito sprawling out in the distance. Directly below him, he could see the remnants of the cloud-ward collapsing and buckling. The blast from the exploding polearm had been enough to rupture one edge. Keinan watched as the rest of the rigid, geometric cloud lines began to collapse, sending bolts of lightning arcing out in every direction between them and down to the ground below.

“I’ve regained control over my bodies among the legionnaires,” Tetragnath said through the spellforms in Keinan’s silk shirt. “There’s nearly an entire legion down there. For the moment, at least.”

“How many of the others survived?” Keinan asked. 

Tetragnath said nothing, and Keinan swallowed.

That polearm must have had impressive mana reservoirs of its own to result in a blast like that. Keinan didn’t know of any other way to produce an explosion that big.

“We have a problem,” Tetragnath said.

“Another legion?” Keinan asked, his eyes shooting up towards the horizon.

“Not an immediate problem,” Tetragnath said. “A future problem. That legion was marching straight towards a major junction in Aito’s great spellform. If they’d broken it, the whole thing might have failed.”

“What would happen if it failed?” Keinan asked. If there ever was a time to pry into Tetragnath’s secrets, now was it.

Tetragnath said nothing for a moment, as screams began echoing up from the legion below, then sighed. “There’s a labyrinth at the heart of Aito, deep in my swamps. Centuries ago, someone or something damaged it badly. Over the centuries, I’ve grown my great spellform to keep the labyrinth intact, and help it heal. It will be centuries yet before it’s healed, and if the spellform fails during that time, the labyrinth will rupture entirely.”

Keinan blinked. He’d expected the great spellform to be some sort of defense, or powerful weapon. 

“What happens if the labyrinth ruptures?” Keinan asked.

“It will take most of Aito with it,” Tetragnath said. 

Keinan paled. “It’ll explode?”

“Not exactly,” Tetragnath said. “The level of destruction will be similar, however.”

“What are we going to do?” Keinan asked. “They’re not going to give up until we’re no longer a threat.”

“We’re going to go to war,” Tetragnath said. “We’re going to begin full recruitment for our little rebellion immediately. And as soon as the dawn thermals begin rising, I’ll be issuing our response to this attack.”

Keinan nodded.

“Go home,” Tetragnath said. “Be with Emala now. Take what comfort you can for now.”

Keinan nodded, then took off, not looking back at the screaming remnants of the legion as Tetragnath’s countless bodies swarmed them.

-------------------------------------------------

As the sun crested the horizon, the land began to heat up. Great columns of air began to stir and rise, heated by the warming land. 

If one looked closely at the thermals rising above Aito forest, one might see little glimmers rising up within them. Just a trickle at first, then a steady stream, then a veritable flood. Soon, it would look as though great plumes of glittering, shimmering smoke was rising above Aito forest.

If one were to fly closer to the plumes, one might start to see delicate strands drifting through the air, and realize that the whole mass was rising spider silk.

At a height higher than the greatest tree cities of the south, half the height of a great mountain, the rising thermals intersected a great southerly current of air. The clouds of rising silk were seized by the current, and swept almost due southwest.

The silk wasn’t scattered by the great current as one might expect. Instead, it began to link together, forming a shape like a great sail in the sky, and that sail was blown even more swiftly by the wind.

If any farmers or traveling merchants looked up to see it in the sky, they’d see hardly anything, save from the precisely correct angle, when a coruscating ripple of rainbow light would shine across the great silk sail.

Just before noon, the great sail began to descend from the great current. Ahead and below was the great fortress of Gryphon’s Rest, garrisoning two full Ithonian Legions. Around it was a city of nearly twenty thousand souls, most emigrants from Imperial Ithos. That greatest of cities burst at the seams, and the Emperor paid those citizens who would emigrate to the provinces handsomely.

The sail began to break up as it descended.

For too long, Tetragnath had been quiescent, tending to Aito. For too long, Tetragnath had indulged its own love of quiet, of secrecy. 

For too long, the Great Powers had retreated, allowed the Ithonian Empire to spread unchecked. The great dragons and sphinxes forced into the depths of the Skyhold Range. The demons plaguing the eastern shore of the continent purged entirely. The immense, unkillable sunwing at the heart of the great desert of the southwest had been bound in sleep beneath the sand. Countless human archmages forced to hide or join the Ithonian Empire. 

The Great Powers had been relieved, perhaps, by the stability. By being able to relax their constant vigilance, the constant struggles for food-rich and aether-dense territory, or simply the need to fulfill their own rampant ambitions. Tetragnath certainly had been.

No longer. Tetragnath had no desire to rule others, no desire to dominate the Tsarnassans they’d lived alongside for so many centuries. Nor, however, could Tetragnath any longer abide their suffering. And by the rumors that had reached them, others Great Powers were stirring. Those stubborn old beasts that Ithonia hadn’t been able to crush were preparing for war once more.

The children of the town were the first to notice the descending silk, followed by the lookouts of the great fortress. The children reacted with glee and amazement, the lookouts with shouts and alarm.

As the glimmering mass descended, the sharpest eyed of the people below began to spot little black dots hanging from the silk strands. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of tiny black dots. More. All smaller than a fingernail. 

-----------------------------------------

There was one thing all the stories got wrong about Aito forest. One thing that all the stories got wrong about Tetragnath, the Spider With More Legs Than The Sky Has Stars. The stories were meant as warnings for children, to keep them from disobeying their parents or straying too far.

But children had never been at risk in Aito Forest. Children had never been at risk from Tetragnath, the Spider With More Legs Than The Sky Has Stars. 

Tetragnath had met a few lonely others like themselves. Endlings. Terminarchs. The last of their kinds. For all Tetragnath could endlessly breed more bodies for himself, they were no more new individuals of their kind than a hair was human, or a scale was a dragon. Tetragnath was alone in the multiverse, and when they passed, as all things must, there would be no more of their kind.

The other Endlings Tetragnath had met were a strange, eccentric bunch. Many ashed out against the multiverse, leaving destruction in their wake until they found the deaths they craved. Of the Endlings that didn’t seek violent destruction, most desperately searched for ways to continue their species. Others wallowed in despair. Some sought a quiet, peaceful death. A few, like Tetragnath themself, came to accept their lot, and merely tried to live the best lives they could until the end.

For all their endless differences, there was one thing that all Endlings Tetragnath had ever met had in common, save for the violently suicidal ones. 

None of them would harm a child if they could help it, for that was the one thing none of them could ever have again.

And indeed, not a single child died that day, for Tetragnath had never and would never hurt a child.

But Tetragnath’s mercy didn’t extend to a single other soul in the fortress of Gryphon’s Rest and its attendant town that day.