How would you react if you saw something big, green, exceedingly long and scarily menacing hovers over the most precious thing in the world you can call yours?

  Well, the answer, you’ll find out, is surprisingly easy: either you panic, or you fight it.

  And Isse was so far gone after all the tragedy she’d been through that she didn’t think for even a moment about doing anything other than open the palm of her hand and throw a well aimed [Fireball] towards the window, at a distance that wouldn’t endanger her precious eggs.

  She heard a sound not dissimilar to someone slapping something behind her, probably coming from Archie, but she didn’t care.

  The ball of heat and compressed flame, fueled by fear and anxiety and a hundred other unnameable emotions swirling around her grieving mind, was much less powerful than it should’ve been, some instinct deep inside Isse making her ‘pull the punch’, reducing the amount of Mana she’d fed to the Spell, turning what should’ve been a very destructive ball created by humanity with the sole intent of bringing despair… into something more akin to a very hot suggestion to get the fuck away from the caster.

  It made contact with the green thing.

  And it immediately caught on fire.

  The thing shouted. No, not screeched, as she’d expected: shouted. A very feminine and extremely panicking voice shouted: “AGH! SORRYSORRYSORRYSORRY I DIDN’T MEAN IT WHATEVER I DID I’M VERY SORRY PLEASE PUT IT OUT PUTITOUTPUTITOUT!!!”

  The serpentine form resolved itself and Isse realized that she wasn’t dealing with some kind of overgrown snake which existence would have proven the world over why the jungles of Eva were not a place for the faint of heart. No, what was now thrashing around her room’s window, visibly moving away from her eggs, was made of leaves and branches, not scales. It also had something akin to a face that was, currently, looking very frightened as she kept on screaming for someone to ‘put it out’.

  For a moment Isse felt a sly satisfaction in knowing that she was the reason for this thing’s panic.

  Then Archie stepped beside her and, with a very tired expression and a sigh that spoke volumes of how little patience was left in him, shouted: “STOP WITH THE FARCE YOU DAMNED TWIG! YOU’RE IMMUNE TO FIRE!”

  And immediately the plant snake stopped shaking around, her face – now that she thought about it, how could she tell it was a her? – locking in place as she registered the goblin’s words. Then she turned around, looking extremely surprised as she realized that yes, the leaves composing her body weren’t burning at all – which begged the question of what, exactly, was causing the fire to keep on burning merrily – and smiled, slapping her forehead: “Oh right! I’d completely forgotten about that Skill!”

  She waved a hand, water appearing out of nowhere in the form of a little heart that she then chucked at the burning… whatever, dousing the flames.

  Then she turned back towards the duo – trio if you counted the very unimpressed crow – and smiled a smile so wide it nearly split her face in half: “Hi!”

  Isse raised a hand and prepared to throw a lightning bolt: this thing may be immune to fire, but there were many, many other ways to kill something.

  Before she could throw the Spell though, Archie stepped forward, putting himself in the line of fire, and sighed again, looking ten years older and extremely weary: “Isse, this is Nivera. Nivera, Isse. Please, young arachne, stop trying to kill her: people stronger than you have tried and failed, and this isn’t even her main body, just an appendage she uses to look around.”

  Then he turned towards… Nivera? Yes, that’s the name he had used for her. He looked up at her smiling face, opened a hand, which now contained a pebble she was pretty certain he hadn’t been holding up until now, and threw it with pinpoint accuracy right into her forehead.

  “Ow! What was that for?” shouted the plant woman as she reeled back slightly.

  “That was for being a nosy little insubordinate shit who cannot follow orders or a plan even to save her own life. What did I and Henricks say about going near the arachne or her eggs?”

  Nivera pouted, her lips seemingly enlarging to make the action more noticeable, and in lieu of an answer said: “But they’re so small and cute!”

  “THEY’RE GODSDAMNED EGGS! THEY’RE NOT CUTE, THEY’RE NOT ANYTHING YET! THEY’RE NOT EVEN BORN!!!”

  He pointed at Isse, becoming more and more incensed as time went on: “This one is less trusting than a wild goblin and is thrice as dangerous as one of our best soldiers. There’s enough Mana inside her to put to shame a [Mage] with a [Mana Well] and she was raised by people who consider murder a chore instead of a crime. And still nothing in that Stars-damned head of yours made you go ‘Yeah, maybe leaving the arachne’s unborn progeny alone would be a good idea’. No, of fucking course not.”

  He sat on the ground with a heavy sigh and put his face in his hands: “Why am I surrounded by idiots?”

  Nivera made a grouchy face and stuck out her tongue: “I’m not an idiot!”

  The glare she got from the goblin made her slither backwards a bit more.

  “I’m really not! I just really like kids!”

  Archie’s hand shot out towards the eggs: “Do those look like kids?”

  Nivera nodded, arms appearing out of the serpentine form, which she crossed: “Yes, they do! They’re small and cute and fuzzy and I can see them through the shell. They’re the most enchanting little darlings!” there was, again, clear excitement in her words, her arm uncrossing, her hands closing into tiny fists as she moved them around energetically, looking for all the world like a kid who’d just seen a doggy playing in a puddle.

  At those words Isse lowered her arm, her eyes as wide as dishes, her pupils slowly expanding as the idea of being able to see her kids before their time came travelled through her mind and brought only joy.

  “You can see them?” she asked at the same time as Archie, although the [Architect]’s tone was more surprised than delighted.

  “Of course I can. I’m a [Carer], for Verdancy’s sake!”

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  “Could you show me?” without her noticing a smile had appeared on Isse’s face, her canines showing through and dragging everyone’s attention to them.

  The arboreal figure’s smile turned slightly sour, a hand rising to the back of her ‘head’: “Erm… nope. Sorry, it’s a Skill I have, I sadly can’t show you. But don’t worry: you’ll only have to wait a few more days, then you’ll see them.”

  Her cheerfulness came back with a vengeance at that last part as she gave her two thumbs up, the leaves forming her hands shifting around to make them look bigger.

  But Isse… she didn’t want to wait, to put it simply. Now that she knew that someone else could see her children, even before her, before their very own mother could get the chance, now that she knew that the possibility was there, out of her reach just because of some simple fucking rule imposed upon her by some nitwit gods and some incomprehensibly ancient being she’d never met, well…

  She got angry.

  Then she remembered: arachne had always been very good at breaking the rules. And she just so happened to have the exact tool for that kind of job.

  So she smiled, a sinister gesture now, the other two could tell: “Oh, don’t worry about that, I’m sure there is a way.”

  She raised her finger, a strand of webbing seemingly emerging from it, shining of a light of its own as she imbued her Mana into it. With a gentle, nonchalant, gesture, she waved her hand towards Nivera, her palm pointing up as if to offer a deal.

  But there would be none: she would just get what she wanted, if only because she was jealous of the possibility offered to this thing of nature. And it wouldn’t hurt her, not at all! She’d just sift around her memories a little bit, get to see her kids as the woman had seen them, and leave. Maybe she’d even leave her a gift as she did that: repair some damage on the way out.

  The thread never reached Nivera.

  Instead Archie’s hand rose with the speed of lightning, closing into a fist around the thread as he shouted: “Don’t you dare!”

  She didn’t have time to react: her mana touched his. Their souls connected.

  And she was in.

  Darkness.

  It was so dark.

  Blacker than the depths of this world’s trenches.

  Blacker than the hole in the world in Airm, the one the lead out.

  Blacker than Nothing itself.

  She stared into that darkness.

  And felt warmth. The warmth of an embrace she had felt once already, the day she had died on Earth. A warmth that Siidi recognized, even though she, like Isse, had forgotten.

  Then there was light.

  Only a pinprick, distant, oh so distant, and yet in that utter darkness it was blinding.

  Then there was agony: a sword piercing through her chest, passing right by her heart and piercing a lung, then going through on the other side. She screamed, looking down, trying to see the weapon that was killing her, but there was nothing, the pain was just a ghost of what had been, a distant memory kept fresh in some unknown way, like trying to freeze a person in ice to keep the body fresh.

  She screamed as the agony seemed to intensify. She screamed, and Siidi screamed too, and then they were one and still they were screaming together.

  Then the warmth touched them again.

  The agony was gone.

  The light was closer, less bright, friendlier.

  And then they ran away.

  Isse and Siidi, Issidi for now, two and one, fell to the floor, their body seemingly crumbling like an overly complicated sand castle under the unstoppable force of a stupid child. They could still feel the agony of those few moments spent in the recesses of the [Architect]’s soul, the feeling of a sword stabbing through their body, a hair’s breadth away from their rapidly beating heart.

  They wheezed, feeling the air going into their mouth, down their throat and into two whole lungs, and yet it still felt as if one of them had collapsed, as if their throat would flood with blood at any moment.

  And, beyond all of this, beyond the distant agony that they were certain shouldn’t have felt so distant, there laid that memento of warmth, the distant, total opposite of the womb of their egg, and yet the same: the embrace of Death, the call of their creator, the promise that, in the end, there would be calm. They longed for that touch, longed to be welcomed, to be allowed to meet those they had lost so, so long ago and those they had lost only recently.

  A hand touched their hair, combing through them gently, like the hand of a kind [Teamaker] who wanted to help, who didn’t, couldn’t know better. They leaned into the kind touch, if only to escape that deep desire for those they had lost.

  The fingers felt cool as they travelled through their hair, as if the person had dipped their hand into a bucket of cold water. They were made all the more soothing because of that. It took them a while, seconds, or minutes, they couldn’t tell, but in the end they also heard a voice singing tunelessly at them.

  Or maybe it’s a song from somewhere else, they thought with an unexpected certainty, for there were words in the song, even though they couldn’t understand them.

  “Don’t think, dear. Feel and rest. You’ll get to see your young, that I promise to you.”

  They did just that: it felt good to let go for a moment, to forget about every problem, to just sit there, in the moment, and let go of everything.

  The voice spoke again, but not to them this time: “What did you do to her?” it sounded angry, but that made no sense, for how could something so beautifully calming be capable of such a thing as anger.

  “Me? Nothing. It was all her work. You know what the arachne are capable of, Ravenspoken told us the stories. She was going to do strange shit to your soul.”

  “Archie, I don’t have a soul.”

  “...Pardon?”

  “I’m a plant Archie. Yes, I can think and feel and do all that stuff you fleshies can do, but I don’t have a soul. I am an anomaly, I am a part of this world that learned to think. Trying to do ‘strange stuff’ to my soul would be like trying to read the world. It wouldn’t have worked.”

  “Well how was I supposed to know? I’m an [Architect], not some godsdamned [Priest]!”

  The hand combing through her hair stopped for a moment as the woman sighed: “I don’t know. This situation… it is different. I know how to deal with kids, that’s my speciality.”

  “She’s no kid.”

  “You’re wrong: she’s a kid who was forced to grow up too fast. I can tell. She suffered through a lot, too much for anyone her age. I’m surprised she’s not drowning in Blood.”

  The hand stopped combing her hair again as, suddenly, she felt tendrils of something cold and soft wind around both halves of her body gently, lifting her in the air with the kind of slowness one would reserve to a most precious package. She felt the air move on her skin as she was moved around until, in the end, she was placed back down on a silky, comfortable, surface, her human half placed against something warm: her eggs.

  A happy hum left her, a small smile on her face.

  Then: “Sleep, dear. And remember: [Tomorrow Is Another Day].”

  With those words a strange sense of hope and calm filled her: it felt alien, maybe because she hadn’t allowed herself the kindness of hope in a long time. But oh how sweet it felt right then and there.

  In the Mind Castle, she and Siidi cuddled close to each other and allowed oblivion to get them.