With my mind clear, I could once again feel Sheral's judgment fall upon me.
She wasn't looking at me.
Wasn't saying anything.
But I could feel it anyway.
Elara's hand was still pressed against the back of my neck. Her cleansing magic trembled through me, keeping the worst of the Queen's anguish from settling into my thoughts again.
The screaming hadn't stopped. I could just think through it now.
And right now, thinking about what Sheral would say wasn't going to keep anyone alive.
The smaller spiders barely resisted when my mana reached into them. Whatever intelligence or will they had, it wasn't enough to stop me.
Only the Queen's personal guard, those beautiful white ones, could fight back.
So I refined my strategy.
Using the immense amount of mana still overflowing inside me, I lifted myself off the floor.
Elara's hand slipped away. For a moment, I nearly dropped back down.
Then her spell followed me.
I kept low enough that Merlin could still reach my leg and spread my leylines outward.
A fucking disco ball.
That was what I looked like.
Lines stretched from me in every direction, each only about the width of a tennis ball. Thin enough to fit between bodies, beneath webs, through the gaps our frontline was barely managing to hold.
Through them, pieces of the room came back to me.
Bram's foot sliding in loose stone.
A spider moving beneath a dead Ent.
Mara's barrier bending inward before she braced it again.
And the white spiders reaching into my magic.
Where their mana touched mine, the edges of my leylines frayed. They pulled power away, worked it between their legs, and sent it back at us.
I felt one spell form before I saw it.
Merlin turned at my warning, catching the pale bolt on a sheet of force. His arm folded toward his chest under the impact.
He stayed standing.
Behind him, Sera dragged her hand across the last section of her rune.
Nothing happened.
Her mouth moved. She looked down, pressed two shaking fingers against a join, and pushed.
Snap.
The rune caught.
Lines flashed across the floor beneath the spiders pressing our left side. Webs jerked downward. Legs folded together.
Then the entire mass collapsed inward.
It wasn't an explosion.
It was a snare.
Dozens of spiders were dragged into a knot, their bodies grinding against one another as the rune tightened.
Sera tried to lift her head to see it.
Orin caught her before she hit the floor.
The magic inside the rune was more complex than I could follow at a glance. Something folded through something else, pulling on every creature caught within it.
I didn't need to understand it.
I had a feast.
My leylines reached the knot.
Taking from them was easy.
Too easy.
Their resistance gave way, and the rush hit me so hard that I forgot to breathe.
My body lifted another few inches.
For a moment, everything felt manageable.
Then my left hand stopped obeying me.
I watched my fingers loosen around the staff.
No.
I forced them closed.
A fragment of force magic burst beside my shoulder. Another formed near my knee without me meaning to cast it.
My levitation stuttered.
The mana wasn't settling anymore. It pressed against everything inside me, spilling into half-formed spells, making my teeth ache.
I was taking too much.
The white spiders rushed toward the leyline feeding me. Their mana spread wide, cutting into its edges.
A hundred mana vanished into one.
More into another.
Good.
If they wanted it, they could have it.
I bent the line away from myself and pushed the rest straight into them.
Their legs dug furrows into the stone.
One stumbled. A fine crack opened across its white carapace.
I pushed harder.
It felt horribly similar to stealing from them. The same reach into something that belonged entirely to another creature.
Only this time, I was forcing something in.
More cracks appeared.
Then the resistance changed.
The spiders stopped pulling separately.
Twelve white bodies gathered together, their mana joining between them. What I forced into one flowed into the others, spreading through a structure I couldn't quite see.
They were managing it.
Not comfortably. Not safely.
But they were managing it.
And now they were pushing back.
The leyline bowed toward us.
I reached for the others.
"Focus your mana," I called. My voice came out thin. "Into the lines. Help me hold it."
Merlin looked up at me.
Then his magic entered the line beside him.
Mara's followed.
Then more.
Not much from some of them. Barely anything.
But it gave me something to work with.
I kept the two lines carrying Jane and Liora's magic separate from the worst of the struggle. Their magic was still reaching the Queen.
Jane was on one knee, her free hand buried in the remains of a root. Liora leaned against Vera, too weak to hold herself upright.
Neither had stopped casting.
Above them, the Queen's foreleg twitched.
A spell gathered beneath her body, aimed toward Jane.
There magic reached deeper.
The Queen's leg drove sideways.
Her spell tore through an empty stretch of web.
I stared.
Then the twelve guards surged against us, and I had to turn back.
Mana crowded the space between us.
Different colors. Different textures.
Merlin's held together under pressure, giving way a little and then stopping. Celine's slipped around everything I tried to put in its path. Sera's arrived in uneven little sections that somehow locked together.
I could recognize them without looking.
Even exhausted, even reduced to scraps, none of their mana felt quite the same.
I guided it toward the center.
Twenty of us.
Twelve of them.
Thirty-two minds trying to control the same growing mass of power.
At first, I could tell where I ended.
I pushed, and something pushed back.
I adjusted, and someone beside me adjusted with me.
Then I felt the shape Merlin wanted the mana to take before he made it.
A wall.
No, a brace.
His shoulder hurt.
My shoulder hurt.
For a moment, I couldn't remember which one of us had been hit.
I tried to pull back.
Something small and frightened pressed against me from the other side.
A spider.
Its leg was cracked. It was trying to keep its weight off it without letting the others know.
I knew that.
I had no idea how I knew that.
Then the room disappeared.
---------------------
There was sunlight on a kitchen floor.
Someone was calling a name I didn't recognize.
A hand rested on a hospital blanket.
Rain ran down the inside of a sleeve.
None of it stayed long enough to understand.
Our memories struck one another in pieces, tangled with thoughts that had never belonged in human heads.
Stone against the sensitive ends of eight legs.
Air moving through a broken window.
Hunger.
The comforting weight of something much larger settling nearby.
Their mother.
The tower had already been empty when she came.
We knew it through their memories; cold rooms, abandoned furniture, corners untouched by anything except dust.
Then silk.
Eggs.
Movement.
One of the little white spiders tried to climb a wall and slipped.
It tried again.
A larger spider reached down and laid a strand across the stone. The smaller one caught it, hauled itself upward, and stood trembling beside her.
I recognized the larger one.
The First Daughter.
Not as we had found her.
Smaller. Unscarred.
Alive.
Another memory caught us.
The Queen touched one of her young with a foreleg. It pressed up against her, and I felt recognition pass between them with a certainty I had no human word for.
She knew which child it was.
Of course she did.
They made a home there.
We felt warm stone and crowded nests. The vibration of familiar feet approaching. The satisfaction of repairing a torn stretch of web.
Then-
Something changed.
The same doorway stood open.
The same doorway was blocked with rubble.
Sunlight fell across the nest.
Rain blew through a broken ceiling.
The First Daughter turned left.
She turned right.
She was hurt.
She was whole.
All of it happened together.
I tried to separate the memories, to put one before another, and felt myself coming apart with them.
Then Blake was there.
Not standing beside me.
Just a presence that didn't recoil when the possibilities multiplied.
He couldn't make them stop.
But he gave us something to hold on to.
These weren't moments happening one after another.
They were branches.
Layers.
The lives had split, and each one had kept going.
The spiders hadn't known.
They had felt something missing. Something wrong.
They hadn't known what.
A screen formed in front of them.
Threads stretched through the air, knotting into something we understood even though none of it looked like writing.
A place.
A purpose.
Things they were supposed to do.
Things they were supposed to attack.
The white spider whose memory held us backed away from it.
The screen followed.
We felt it struggle.
For hours.
For days.
Its thoughts kept returning to the same places and finding less there.
The room where it had hatched.
The sound of its sister moving through the nest.
Its mother.
It tried to hold on to her.
We felt how hard it tried.
And we felt those memories become less important to it, even while it was still desperate to keep them.
That had already happened.
I understood that much.
We were feeling what had been taken from them.
Then I remembered how easy they had been to consume.
And the memory wasn't only mine anymore.
-------------------------------
I lost my grip on the mana.
Someone else tried to catch it.
So did the spiders.
Too many hands reaching for something none of us could hold.
The center flashed white.
I hit the wall before I heard the blast.
Something cracked inside my chest.
For a moment, there was no air.
There was only the need for it.
I slid down the stone, my staff scraping beside me, and tried to breathe.
A thin, horrible sound came out.
Around the cavern, people were moving.
Some weren't.
Merlin was on his hands and knees. Mara lay beside a broken sheet of her own barrier. Orin crawled toward Sera, dragging one leg behind him.
Across from us, the white spiders had been scattered.
One tried to stand and collapsed.
Another kept moving a leg that no longer reached the ground properly.
The Queen was still above us.
Her body shifted against the remaining webs.
I tried to lift my staff.
My hand shook.
There wasn't enough left in me to do anything useful with it.
The Queen lowered herself from the ceiling.
Every scrape of her legs against the stone sounded too loud.
She looked at us.
At the broken roots.
At the bodies caught in Sera's rune.
Then at her young.
A white spider lay between her and Merlin.
Merlin saw her approaching. His hand lifted a few inches, force flickering around his fingers.
The Queen stopped.
For a moment, neither moved.
Then she lowered herself beside the spider.
Mana gathered beneath her foreleg.
She touched the cracked shell.
And started to heal it.
I waited for the attack that should have followed.
Nothing came.
One of her legs lifted toward us, shuddered, and slowly folded beneath her instead.
Across the room, Jane's spell guttered out.
Liora's followed.
The Queen kept healing.
[Hidden Quest Completed: A Will of Her Own]
[Objective: Save the Spider Queen.]
[Raid Cleared: Spider Queen's Lair]
[Difficulty: Legendary]
I read the first message twice.
Save.
Jane was bent over herself, one hand pressed against her side. Green light leaked between her fingers.
I wanted to ask her what she had done.
What they had fixed.
She couldn't even lift her head.
Sheral reached me before I could try to speak.
Her hand pressed against my chest.
I jerked away.
"Stay still."
I tried.
Her face tightened as she felt along my ribs.
Then something inside me moved.
I screamed.
There wasn't any dignity to it. I grabbed at the stone with my remaining hand and screamed until I couldn't draw enough breath to keep doing it.
The bones had to go back into place before she healed them.
I knew that.
Knowing didn't help.
Across the room, Bram made a deep, strangled noise. Ilyra murmured something to him and kept working.
Vera held Liora upright while Celine brought water to her mouth.
Elara had both hands over her face.
Nobody was celebrating.
Sheral's magic spread through my chest.
The next breath hurt.
The one after that came easier.
I looked past her.
The Queen was still bent over her child.
For a moment, I remembered being small enough to fit beneath her.
Then I remembered pulling a soul apart.
My stomach twisted.
They hadn't been able to resist me.
That was what I knew.
I had decided it meant more than that.
Sheral shifted her hand to another injury.
I wanted her to say something.
I dreaded it.
She just kept healing me.
Nearby, Merlin managed to sit back against the wall. One hand stayed pressed against his shoulder.
His eyes followed mine toward the Queen.
Then he looked down.
Neither of us spoke.
[Quest Completed: The Heart of the Nest]
[Reward: Title — Webbreaker]
[Raid Reward: Queen's Spinneret]
Something clear formed above the stone in front of me.
For a second, I thought it was a piece of crystal thrown loose by the blast.
Then it settled gently onto the floor.
An eight-sided die.
All glass, or something close enough that I couldn't tell the difference. Eight triangular faces meeting at sharp, clean edges.
No numbers.
No metal.
I put my staff into my inventory before reaching for it.
Sheral watched my hand.
"Slowly."
Even leaning forward hurt.
I picked it up.
[Queen's Spinneret]
[Ability: Eightfold Sight]
[Each face can hold a view of one location.]
[Touch a face to a surface to set its viewpoint. Looking through that face shows a live view from the marked position.]
[Setting a new viewpoint replaces that face's previous view.]
[Maximum Viewpoints: 8]
I turned it between my fingers.
A security camera.
Eight of them, I supposed.
I pressed one flat face against the stone beside me, then lifted it to my eye.
Through the glass, I saw Sheral from below.
The curve of her shoulder. Her hand against my chest.
My own face beyond her.
Pale.
Blood around my mouth.
I lowered it.
That was enough looking at myself.
Across the cavern, the injured white spider finally managed to stand.
The Queen stayed close while it tested its leg.
[Hidden Quest Reward: Abandoned Mage Tower]
[Ownership Registered: The High Order]
[Ownership applies to the tower on this layer only.]
A home.
That should have made me happy.
I thought about the loom in my inventory. Rooms we could sleep in. Somewhere to leave things without wondering whether we'd ever come back for them.
Then I looked at the silk covering the walls.
One of the white spiders approached a fallen sibling. It touched the body once, then settled beside it.
The Queen watched.
I closed the notification.
Sheral eased her hand away from my chest.
I took a careful breath.
It hurt, but it stayed inside me.
For a while, that was enough.