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In the jaded centuries of her life, Hornet has never known a lasting peace. If she tried her hardest, reached deeply into herself, and summoned her illusory years of childhood, she could entertain the faintest breath of relief—fast turned rancid, of course, by the fact that whatever facsimile of a childhood she enjoyed soon graduated into a duty-bound existence. Raised a princess, a warrior, and a protector, she was doomed to guard a royal treasure trove of memories for a kingdom marked for death before even her conception. If she were to lay her history out in scrolls of silken parchment, it would sprawl wild and far like a befuddling, indecipherable tributary.
Hornet has always been afforded little time to reminisce, and her most recent recollections of memory were performed by force, a violent summoning of things long faded. But now, with the burgeoning saplings of new purpose intertwined inseparably with her commitments, Hornet has little choice but to allow remembrance to run its course.
“I never took you as the authoring type,” Lace giggles. “Has my little Spider been a secret poet all along?” Sprawled like an open canvas upon Hornet’s lap, she kicks her legs to and fro.
“You misunderstand. I am no more a poet than you are a hapless princess in a tower.” She rests her quill in the crease of the journal. The silly thing is bound by hide, warped and discolored by age—nested within like slices of bitter fruit are pamphlets crafted with her own silk, carefully strung together with some semblance of discipline. It bears some resemblance to a loom, she thinks.
“Ha! Then you must be a lamenting thespian, rivaling even the most forlorn of conductors. ‘O Fortuna, but wherefore hast thou forsaken me so? Mine own shell is warp’d by a resting grimace; I beseech thee to kiss it back into shape!’ And I shall be Fortuna, who descends upon you like a moth to a candle…”
A huff passes from between Hornet’s mandibles.
“Your imagination is incredible. But if you are Fortuna, then I suppose I must be Pharloom’s worst gambler.”
Lace puts a dainty hand to her chest with an exaggerated gasp. “Such platitudes! So you do have a thread of good humor somewhere in that elderly shell…”
With a sigh, she slumps over, curling into Hornet’s side. The texture of her woven skin is feathery, with each minuscule strand catching pearls of light. Her construction is meticulous and ageless—sadly, Hornet observes, Lace will never be fully freed from the image of her deposed mother.
A white hand patting her cloak removes her from her thoughts.
“Well, go on with your stories! Think of it like a trade…in return for tearing Pharloom’s frightful history bare, you tell me a little more about yourself. And I do love a good hero’s tale, Dear Spider.”
If something is rotting, it must be excised completely, and the affected area treated. An atrophied limb or a festering wound alike—to encourage no further decay, the troublemaker has to be wholly amputated. Hornet remembers perching atop a nest of silk cushions and warm textiles—her mother’s own woven works—and peering at hordes of Devouts anxiously hurrying wrapped bodies back and forth. Huddled in the heart of their den, covens of Weavers hissed and murmured among themselves, realizing that their hard-fought sanctuary was now at the mercy of yet another tantruming god. The loathsome pestilence drank and devoured deeply of any life; those yet to be infected were stricken with bouts of fatigue and exhaustion. The cool, earthen scents of the village were quickly overpowered by the sickly stench of rot, and the village waters turned murky and foul.
Once, Hornet had stolen past the dozing eye of Midwife and crept close to the moaning sick wards. She had seen both weaverlings and spiderlings, their carapaces still soft in youth, stricken with foul pustules of glistening orange hate. The infection would pop and pulsate with every haggard respiration like a furious organism, and rotted remains of shell and innards gushed copiously from infantile joints. Many of their masks, still malleable, had cracked and caved, revealing corroded mandibles and sloughing hair.
A Devout, with their myriad claws extended, was hard at work in clipping and flushing away the infernal boils. In her posture was a heavy resignation; knowing that the den’s young were beyond rescue, and her desperate practice will soon render her sick. Beyond privacy tarps hung delicately around the chamber, Hornet heard the aching sob of a weaver denied their offspring—and she had fled from the sight in terror, for she was still too young to understand a god’s cruelty. Midwife, in her search for the little escapee, had immediately snatched her up and whisked her to her room, inspecting frantically for any sign of infectious residue.
When Hornet went to rest for the cycle, she was taken into the warm cradle of her mother’s arms. Herrah wrapped her body—tiny in comparison—close to her chest and whispered to her hazy stories of the past. Herrah—a beast, a queen, her mother. Crouched upon her stony throne, surrounded by the rugged triumph of her people and cloaked in beautiful red, she looked as though she was already ready for the hearse.
“You will not have me by your side forever, little treasure,” she crooned with the tenderness of nectar. “I am duty-bound—and one day you shall seek your own purpose too. Forgive me for the circumstances of your birth, but know this always: when it comes to you, I have never known regret.”
Her memories of Herrah are ancient and rotted. What face lay beneath her great horned mask is now lost to a fallen age, buried beneath ancient rubble. Time and experience alike have performed their surgeries, ripping away any part of Hornet that was worn blunt and weary, leaving her nature raw and jagged. In her past, she might have known softness; it could have been an idyllic eternity if she had chosen to descend into that ocean and never breached the surface again. But in her accursed longevity, perhaps she will never know such innocence again.
Still in her lap, Lace has ceased her idle kicking. “Your biological mother,” she begins, haltingly. “What well-meaning cruelty she imposed upon you. Born from duty, but with no other lasting intent than love.”
Hornet allows herself to feel some manner of wistfulness. She was indeed embittered by Herrah’s passing into deathlike slumber—she burned and resented and hated, hated Herrah so deeply for leaving her behind, abandoning her and Deepnest and whatever malformed idea of “family” she once had. But it was necessary, wasn’t it? It was Herrah’s choice. Her mother, to her final breath, refused to tread any path but her own, and she set the brick and mortar of the place she deemed “home”. She wrapped herself in a coffin of her own making, but for all of Hallownest’s desperation, her burial was proud. And her pride was not misplaced; it lived on still in her ugly and strange daughter, in an extremely distant future, still glittering like the embers of coal.
Pale hands caress the snout of her mask like a breeze. Hornet looks down, and meets Lace’s eyes. They glisten with soul, with such overwhelming life, casting a blooming glow that bounces about the bell’s interior. Fragile, yet deadly. She is, Hornet decides, akin to an elegant blade of glass.
When Hornet left Deepnest, she dared not look back, knowing looking back meant Herrah and Herrah meant a million more cycles at her unresponsive side. Her body was cold and could have been mistaken for a carving of stone atop her pedestal. Her intricate silks became tattered, and the tapestries embroidered with elegant Beast and Weaver patterns became torn and eaten through by a kingdom’s abandonment. Once the Weavers fled, twice over, there was no one left but the mournful Devouts and the snarling infected.
“I shall stay,” Midwife had told her, with a gentleness that beckoned Herrah’s phantoms. “Deepnest remains vigilant and its survivors require tending to. Do not burden yourself with sorrowful pilgrimages for the sake of those long passed—know that your home remains, and where it ends, you must continue.”
Hornet has fought battles—many necessary, some unnecessary. The rest of her sputtering youth spent after the Vessel’s sealing was under the diligent tutelage of Vespa, where she was quickly thrust into the exigency of survival. Vespa was like Herrah; as much made by her people as she made herself. The Hive was orderly, and much like the Citadel’s cog innerworkings, behaved like a singular entity—a well-oiled machine. But there was soul to the Hive, a depth of honor guiding survival; something wholly absent in the reanimated gilded corpse high above.
For a very long time, the only constant Hornet enjoyed was the presence of her needle. A powerful implement, a multipurpose tool, and an ever-reliable channel. As a sentinel and wanderer, she found little interaction with another living being, at least one that wasn’t beset by a goddess’ murderous afflictions. As such, she had little trust to offer, and her best companion was in the reflection of hivesteel.
She can recall the day she claimed the blade. The gift had cemented her role for centuries more; warrior, hunter—protector for a festering and immutable grave. Still bitter with her loss—if she could, she would curse the King a thousand times more—she carried with herself a malleable fury, one that Vespa sought to temper. So she took Hornet, a foul-dispositioned and miserable thing at the cusp of maturity, beneath her wing and made her into a daughter of the Hive.
Vespa ripped her away from her drifting and forcibly tore the misery from her carapace. In her, Hornet found the image of Herrah; the two could have been close, if only in a different time, unmarred by pale curses and a condemned kingdom.
“I am not Herrah,” Vespa warned her when they met, “and you will not find comfort here if you continue to seek her postmortem. But I am as much a mother as she was, and her resolve burns unfettered within you.”
And she had taken Hornet’s shivering claws in hers, with a burning, exonerating look—“Daughter of Deepnest, make your choice now—whether to wallow in Hallownest’s regrets or to embolden yourself. Then I shall welcome you into the warmth of the Hive.”
Hornet made her choice then.
“This Vespa—she must have been an exemplary queen,” Lace comments longingly. “She sounds like she could whip an entire kingdom into shape.”
“That, she did,” Hornet replies, feeling strangely pleasant. “If she made it her business, she would have seen it through. But she chose to err on the side of caution, and rightfully so, to dedicate herself to her kin first and foremost. It was by her strength that the Hive surpassed Hallownest in longevity.”
Lace’s fingers wander across Hornet’s carapace, brushing faintly past a rippling meadow of ancient scarring and warped healing. If her shell was taken apart and affixed to a chapel wall, she could make for a mosaic, with the glory and decay of two kingdoms written in each fragment.
“...But the Infection took it, in the end?”
“Yes. After all, how can a mortal’s will overcome godly wrath?”
Hornet’s time in the Hive could be classified into an extended set of trials crafted by Vespa herself. It was under her tutelage that Hornet claimed her name; no longer deemed a half-spawn or simply the Gendered Child, but as her own self.
She remembers hesitantly searching for Vespa’s approval when she made her decision: “‘Hornet’. You have taught me to strike and sting, to use my body and blade as extensions of my being…I thought it fitting. It…feels natural to take that name for myself.” And with watery eyes, Vespa had embraced her with the warmth of a thousand. “Hornet. It is fitting indeed.”
She felt an ocean of pride, with the sense that she’d made Vespa proud—and, at the other corner of the Kingdom, perhaps her slumbering mother could feel pride too.
“Hor-net. Hornet.” Lace sings to herself, turning aimlessly in the bedcovers. “It is quite the daring name you’ve chosen, little Spider. Though it’s rather fitting, hm? You, with your indelicate sensibilities and sharp tongue…the way you wield your words like stingers and barbs! It’s so fitting.”
Hornet teasingly pinches Lace’s cheek, causing her to yelp and squirm.
“I could say that your name is fitting as well. With the pristine and delicate air you hold about yourself, your prowess in battle is cleverly disguised. In all my time, I have never known one quite like you.”
“Well, it’s my pleasure, Hornet dearest! This name…” Lace hesitates momentarily, then averts her gaze. “It was chosen by Mother mine. For most of my ugly existence, that name existed to declaw me—but I am glad it has transformed into something greater.”
She crawls back into the comfort of their shared warmth, deep in contemplation.
“How curious, what the nature of oneself is. You and I, and all that has lived, seeking a sense of importance based on a handful of sounds.”
“Perhaps the desire to be known as something is carried by the desire to understand oneself better.”
Every cycle, Hornet scampered among Vespa’s knights, assuming the reputation of a fearsome little thing by her claw and fang. But, being born of a beast and a god, she could not understand the changes in her own body—and when it came to comprehending her nature, she had nothing but the spoiled memories of Herrah’s teachings and the covetous spellwork of the Weavers to depend on.
In the late hours, Hornet would rest in the comfort of Vespa’s company, asking her innumerable questions—but it was never Vespa’s duty to instruct her on the circumstances of her pale heritage. And so Hornet remained questioning, even as she moulted painfully and shed her childlike self, devouring it in the hopes that her naivete would never rear its head again.
As a newborn, Hornet was once in the Pale King’s care. Herrah, thoroughly exhausted from the ordeal of the unnatural birth, had retired to the Royal chambers, leaving the King to inspect the status of his hybrid offspring. Hornet cannot remember much from her moments of infancy. But somehow, she remembers how the King’s piercing observation, the mimicry of eyes hidden in the darkness of his crowned mask, seemed to soften— and how ridiculous it is that a god, some untouchable mirage of enduring insight, can be humbled by something so simple as an infant?
Soon after, she was swaddled and returned to Herrah’s care in Deepnest. The stories of her sire were told to her in impressions, fables, and the oftentimes sour opinions of her mothers; Vespa told her, much like Herrah once proclaimed, “Your sire is a fool—a King who can puppet, humor, and study his Kingdom, but never understand its people. His divine status renders him incapable of surpassing that veil. And that is why he, a fool God, cannot save Hallownest from another God.”
Vespa and Herrah were correct in that respect. With what Hornet knows now, of the everlasting stains of ink upon the Pale family, her sire had led his own kingdom to its death, and it perished with not a roar but a whimpering rattle. In the vacant, all-consuming stare of her half-kin, Hornet has seen the placid image of her sire and their pale mother—but in their unnatural silence still remained a shivering and furtive desire to survive.
This crushing, all-enveloping will to live—Hornet knows it too well, has lived it for centuries past. But will she endure it for centuries more? To persist on the cusp of peril, with the distant promise of a resolution is to be in search of a singularity. In the darkest recesses of Hallownest, Hornet has regrettably entertained the possibility of escaping this duty—at some point, becoming self-imposed, with no one but corpses and taunting, rain-soaked effigies to motivate her vigil.
In those hours, she felt a crushing loneliness and the resurgence of her old, haunting wrath. Wrath against the King for cursing her with so many things she cannot understand (or perhaps she doesn’t want to understand), to see an eternity of decay and a destruction of what little comforts she had.
She thinks of encountering the wandering archivist Quirrel near the wastes, blessed with forgetfulness, even with the somber mask of his life’s mentor atop his head. How she had tested him, flung her needle at his forlorn figure, only for the blade to clatter uselessly against Monomon’s protective wards—and she had seen the faintest piece of hope that change could come to her extinguished home. Stepping into Pharloom, having been rudely introduced by the whims of its late monarch, she felt much like Quirrel at the steps of Hallownest’s surface cliffs; ready to cross an unknown yet somehow familiar Rubicon.
“This grandiose plot to contain the rampaging Goddess’ plague…it was constructed by your sire, correct? And he made the ones you call your half-siblings, the terrifying Abyss-born ones?”
“Indeed—though terrifying as they may seem, they were doomed at conception for this plot. Children, all of them, born into assured death.” Somewhere in Hornet’s carapace, her numbed heart pangs with longing.
“I barely knew them—as Hallownest’s protector, I even sought to hunt them down, for fear that the thoughtless beings would topple the fragile stasis of the Kingdom and unleash the Old Light. It was only when I had met Little Ghost that I realized my preconceived notions were entirely false.”
Lace’s face shines in the shimmering lamplights hanging above. The malleable, black silk entwined into compacted skin almost appears shell-like.
“What a wretched family your sire has made. At the very least, for all the crimes we’ve brought about here, your siblings can finally be at rest…surely.”
Another string of pain twangs in Hornet’s chest like an exposed wound beneath her shell.
“I can only hope so. Though my sire is responsible for the void-tinged plan, it was only made possible through the cooperation of Hallownest’s Queen.”
Hornet, half-spawn of Herrah and the Pale King, made not from love but by a deal weighted by a kingdom’s worth of lives. Hornet, dutiful but painfully temporary student of Vespa. Hornet, disillusioned sentinel for the ashen consequences of the Pale plot. When her senses were made keen by her time in the Hive, and the infection grew too great to combat, Vespa had urged her away.
“Hallownest is on its last breaths,” she was told before her reluctant departure. “You must be keen-eyed, for gods and mortals alike are relentless in their will. You are strong—you will persevere.” And numbly, with a dull ache resembling the gaping absence of Herrah, Hornet left. Two homes abandoned already—what more will she disavow?
The Root Goddess chose to call herself the “White Lady”. Between the Lady and the King, Hornet was never privy to any other name—but what is identity to a god? Hornet carries within herself half of one; yet as a youth, when she gazed through the monochrome black, silver, and white chambers of her sire’s palace, she felt nothing. The ethereal divinity of her pale relatives and how their presence was more felt than heard made for a daunting chasm, one she didn’t dare leap. For all the divinity of soul housed in her silken nature, Hornet feels no more divine than Herrah did, shaking from fatigue and bathed in the hemolymph of her enemies, or Vespa did, eroded by the encroaching plague and worn slow by her age.
The White Lady is divinity encompassed; in Hallownest’s golden age, her image was the epitome of beauty, and her wisdom was unquenchable. It was said that her limbs grew in networks so vast beneath Hallownest that she could feel a pin drop miles away from the capital. Her beauty was unreal—far removed from the mortal and corporeal beauty of Herrah and Vespa.
Hornet remembers being a child, still under Herrah’s care, creeping into the Queen’s Gardens from dusty tunnels. Yet to be overgrown by negligence, the terraces were lush and perfumed with overwhelming life. Curious little thing she was, Hornet stalked about, stuffing nectarine bulbs between her mandibles and sneezing from pollen. A single white root had carefully wrapped around her bumbling form and whisked her away to a quiet chamber, where the Lady rested in her binds.
“Sweet child,” she had spoken, even as Hornet gaped in quiet wonder. “You should best temper your curiosities, lest you worry your dear mother.” Hornet had babbled and chirped, enchanted by the Queen’s loving presence, until Herrah herself rushed into the Gardens—only to happen upon the Lady humoring her daughter with delicate little blooms.
During her unending vigil, after the Pale King long abandoned his people, Hornet had cautiously visited the gardens. She crept through the shade of thorny brambles each time, unnoticed by the traitorous mantises, who were all rendered dull and brutish by their communion with the Old Light. In the overgrown chamber, she raged against the Lady; poured out her grief, her fury, her despair alike into a vicious barrage. That she knew not her purpose, that she didn’t know how she could go on guarding dead secrets and foul corpses. That she was born into failure—failure, failure as a princess, a failed warrior, an incompetent daughter, a failure who abandoned her homes yet watched them decay regardless. And the Lady, feeble and blinded, had bowed her head and caressed Hornet’s shivering body with brittle roots, no less gentle than the day they first met.
Hornet’s recollections of the White Lady are meager, most rendered acrid by the weight of her actions and her part in Hallownest’s deepest atrocities. If Hornet had been younger, she would have known nothing but this hate and drunk herself delusional on her desperation. But she has grown wise, and she thinks of the soft-spoken Queen from her memories, moments before claiming the pale bloom. Weaver, pale being, queen, warrior, daughter—Hornet does not desire pity, as if her making was a tragedy. She has seen the Queen’s remembrance; her sensibilities, her guilt, and her furtive, so very mortal hope. That across time, in the most terrible recesses of the void, the descendant of a dead kingdom, the bastard daughter of Hallownest, can return vigor to a dying one. That the yearning, furtive things that scrabble so desperately to survive, will endure and find life.
***
Curled into the bed, Lace weeps.
“Stupid Spider, with all your silly secrets…” Her fingers clench, balling into fists.
“You…beloved by not one, but three. Beloved by your Kingdom, that their gifts would persist with you far beyond.” With heaving breaths, she turns to face Hornet’s mask.
“I…hearing this, I…I feel so selfish. It is all I could have wanted. Just one, just one in the entire span of my miserable existence. Is it so much to ask for? Forgive me, Hornet. I am so, so utterly selfish.”
Her hands dig uselessly at the fabrics. They were made round and clawless—so that even in her anger, she will forever be vulnerable.
“They loved you so much, oh, they loved you. It is…it is torture, oh—we must both be cursed, Spider. To yearn forever for something, or to have it and lose it so violently and completely. What sorry daughters we are.”
Gently, Hornet wraps the silk blankets around Lace as she trembles and stifles her sobs. When her weeping finally fades, Lace burrows her face into the comforting juncture of Hornet’s neck.
“I’ve thoroughly embarrassed myself now! Ha, I just can’t quite believe it…”
“Cursed as we may be, we still have our futures ahead of ourselves,” Hornet gently reminds. “The affairs of my creation, of yours—our upbringings, tragic as one would think them to be, only serve to define ourselves in ways we and we alone permit.”
Lace laughs wetly, and the sound is muffled by Hornet’s shell.
“So plainly spoken, Spider dearest. It’s funny, isn’t it? Two foolish daughters who lived by their mothers’ sacrifice.”
Hornet sets aside her journal and rests her mask against Lace’s cheek.
“Foolish indeed. But we are still here after all, aren’t we? And of all the choices we have faced, for all the sins we must atone for, we have decided to live.”
She hears another quiet laugh, and Lace’s embrace tightens just barely. Beyond the walls of the bellhome, the tinkling of bells can be heard like city rain.
“Indeed, we live, Little Spider.”
***