Terminus

Thankfully, her ribs weren’t broken.

After getting pummeled by the glob of silk launched by Chillushrith to save her, Alice had spent a few painful minutes slowly recovering from the hit and, after carefully removing the soft breastplate of silk and chitin that she had been using as a garment, gently prodding her chest, feeling for any kind of fracture underneath the skin. Only after far too many minutes did she remember of her biomantic powers that could actually check for internal injuries.

A short but thorough inspection later, Alice confirmed that her bones were mostly intact, with a single tiny fracture appearing in the fourth set of ribs which she carefully started patching up with a thin lattice of new bone cells. Her softer parts, however, had suffered a much worse fate, the entire area a mess of broken capillaries and swelling flesh.

She got up with another wheezing sigh—breathing was still difficult after the powerful impact— and stared at her chest, which was slowly swelling up and reddening as the blood spilt out of the broken blood vessels and started invading the surrounding tissue. She knew she was going to be in for a few very painful days.

In the meanwhile, Chillushrith and Skitter had finally managed to completely sedate the hairless beast and the massive metal bindings created by an angrily hissing Maath had sealed the deal. The mutated mole-rat was now completely restrained, the only movement that of its ragged breathing.

“Thank you Chillushrith. You saved me again… and thank you too Skitter” she said once she had staggered closer to the two Thinkers, both still busily moving around the paralyzed monster.

Skitter briefly chittered before returning to carefully wrapping layer after layer of silk on the helpless captive while the larger female turned towards the injured girl, her unblinking eyes staring straight into hers as a soft hiss escaped her maw, one of her spikes slamming onto the ground beside her before she too turned on her heels and walked away.

“You really don’t like me uh? It’s okay I guess.” She shrugged before a sharp wave of pain reminded her of her many contusions.

Alice quickly sent a trickle of her magical warmth towards the throbbing pain receptors in her torso before stumbling forward and towards the Queen, a triumphant smile on her lips despite the soreness she was feeling.

“It worked!” She exclaimed, “I’ll also try with other species but the Lumen have formed a core in the mole-rat. I can restart the experiments and see if my idea on your illness is right,” she announced to the titanic spider.

“It is good news, Alice” Maath started, her limb slowly caressing the silken thread and causing the girl to smile eagerly at her.

“Yes! I believe the core will affect—” Alice’s explanation was interrupted by the two massive pedipalps of the Queen of Spear Spider slamming together with a metallic clang.

“However, I wish you would not risk your life uselessly.” She vibrated, the sounds from the cord now growing shaper and harsher.

Alice frowned at that, her hand balling up into a fist.

“It was unexpected! And I did it to help you.” She said accusingly, “I need to do this kind of things if I want to even have a chance of healing you.” She told the matriarch, who, as a response, managed to produce a hissing scoff with her maw.

“Between the last three slumbers you have twice risked your life—”

“Well the first time wasn’t really my fault. Was it?” she interrupted back, now glaring at the massive spider, watching a ripple breaking through the surface of her dulled exoskeleton and feeling it move in the metal under her feet.

“Silence, hatchling.” Upon hearing the words, Alice scowl deepened and she made to reply in kind but, before she could utter another word, a tendril of silvery metal snaked up on her legs and torso and wrapped itself around her mouth.

The young woman’s eyes widened as her hand went to the band of silvery alloy, ineffectively trying to rip it off while the Queen continued talking.

“While the first incident has been my own mistake,” Maath conceded, “in the brief period of time you have spent in this world, you still have risked your life more than it was needed. Your tales of reckless survival matter not if you are dead, and you will be if you don’t change.” She stated matter-of-factly, her palps clanking against each other.

“All your ideas of right and wrong, all those emotions you bare to the world mean nothing if you become food. I hear of your fights against beings that could—and have— destroyed entire nests and all I see in your triumphs is chance, not certainty.” She concluded as the binding around her mouth came loose and sloshed back into the ground.

A reddened and panting Alice now angrily glared at the matriarch with her slightly teary eyes, the Queen evidently uncaring of the stare.

The girl took a few, deep breaths before talking once more.

“You could have suffocated me.” she muttered.

“You needed to listen.” Maath shot back.

“Well, I had to take those risks. I had to eat and find a way out of this damn place!” she exclaimed, her fist slamming painfully on her thigh.

Instead of replying, the Spider Queen took her time, changing her position as a trickle of diseased blood flowed out of her wounds, only when she found a more comfortable spot did her leg come back to the silken wire.

“Why did you attack the brood of the Soundless then?”

Alice opened and closed her mouth in outraged stupor, “It was killing your sons and daughters!” she shouted, thinking back at the horrid white eyes of the creature as they stared through her; reeling when she heard the deep tittering sound coming from the chest of the massive Queen.

“And why would you care? You were not of the Nest. I am ♑︎❒︎♋︎⧫︎♏︎♐︎◆︎●︎ you did so, but it was not your risk to take.” She affirmed before continuing.

“Nevertheless, that isn’t the worst of the many stupid decisions you have made. You have told me of the creature that has taken your arm, how it did so many slumbers ago and, despite so much time having passed, you still haven’t done anything but cover it with a barely useful tool.” Maath’s tone now grew harsh on the wire, her pedipalps now grinding against each other with the sound of tortured metal.

“I see you struggle every day and yet you do nothing to improve your situation. My son and my daughter have told me of you healing the swarm after the fight, sealing wounds and growing carapace, and yet you are still here, crippled like me when you could be whole again. Why don’t you heal yourself?” the Queen finally asked, her palps stilling as the last word left the silvery thread.

“I don’t want to talk about it” she told her and made to move away from the clearing and the conversation, only to find her legs unable to move as a thick plating of metal bound them to the ground up to her thighs.

“And yet you will. I will not allow more idiocy in these halls. One Ricee is enough” Maath replied, her eyes still staring straight into hers.

Alice froze, her nails dug into her palms as the anger at the massive spider turned into rage.

“It’s fucking easy when you are a fucking spider that can grow back limbs after a few lunches! Do you think I haven’t thought about it? I’ve been thinking about it for weeks! And every single fucking time I look back into my arm I see something that I’m not sure I can repair! Do you know how many cells are in an arm? How they interact with each other? I don’t know if I can do it and I don’t want to know if I can’t!” she ranted, tears now freely streaming down her face.

“You will start healing yourself today while you prepare my cure.” She stated as the metal around her legs solidified, its coldness already seeping into her skin.

“And if I don’t want to?” she asked, staring defiantly at the tyrant, blood dribbling through her fingers and onto the ground.

“Then you will die.” Maath replied, her tone definitive and certain even through the vibrations of the silk.

“So you will kill me. Turn me into dinner because I don’t want to follow your orders?”

The Queen didn’t waver at that, taking only an instant before replying.

“No. You will kill yourself. In time. I need not waste my energies on something that will happen.”

Alice averted her eyes, taking a single look at the pointed prosthesis before looking away from that too. She stood there, in silence, until her legs started feeling numb, the cold still seeping into them.

“Will you release me?” she muttered.

“Will you heal yourself?” instantly came the answer.

“Why do you care?”

“It would be a waste.”

Silence followed for more, long minutes. Maath started eating one of the leftover prey, her fangs loudly piercing the chitinous plates of a particularly large millipede.

“Dammit. Okay. I will. I’ll try to do it.” she finally shouted, her hand slamming once more on the thigh, a reddened circle already appearing on the spot.

The hard metal turned into liquid in an instant, the alloy falling onto the ground with a sonorous splash before melding back with it, the surface returning to its previous glossy condition as Alice stomped out of the clearing and into the untouched side of the crystal forest.

Maath grasped a second cocoon and started consuming it.

Alice walked through the dazzling thicket of crystalline metal, each ‘tree’ composed of a thousand mirror-like facets, each one sending, in every direction possible, a thousand thousands tiny beams of the blue light emanated from the small piles of luminescent mold.

The cerulean shimmering was even more confusing with her enhanced eyesight, the more than doubled light-receptors allowing her to focus on many reflections at the same time, sending a blinking overload of colorful information to her improved visual cortex until, after stumbling on her own feet, she found herself on the ground, the prosthesis scraping unpleasantly on the hard metal and her bruised chest sending new, throbbing waves of pain in protest.

“Fuck” she wheezed out, her eyes shut close as she took her time to regain her balance, trying to push down the rage still bubbling in her chest and stomach.

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck” she shouted while slamming a fist on the ground until it felt sore, until she felt the capillaries rupture in her flesh, until she stopped and opened her eyes.

She was in a tiny clearing in the middle of the arcing growths, the ground occupied by a peculiar protrusion which, going against the trend of all the other ones around it, had decided to grow horizontally instead of vertically, forming a contorted, bench-like shape that could have perfectly fit into an abstract sculptor’s gallery.

She carefully got up on her feet and sat down on its hard surface, finding a comfortable-enough spot that didn’t dig too much into her butt.

Then, without saying another word, she pulled off the chelae from her arm, making sure to keep contact with the fist-sized shadowy core contained within, before placing it between her thighs.

Then, she slowly unwrapped the soft silken cloth that she had been using to keep the rough chitin away from her skin, her eyes not leaving her stump as, fold after fold, the wrappings were removed and finally revealed the skin hidden beneath.

Her chin trembled slightly as she finally really looked at her residual arm.

The limb simply stopped existing after around thirteen centimeters below her elbow, the remaining part of her forearm was covered in a layer of pale skin that seemed to be almost stretching to cover her flesh, the dermis transparent enough for her to see her blue veins.

She hesitated an instant before forcing her eyes lower, forcing herself to stare at the misshapen scar tissue that had grown over the almost perfect cut she had received.

The gnarled tip of her forearm looked like the contorted knot in the wood of an old olive tree; two hard lumps slightly pushing against the skin marked her severed ulna and radius, the two bones barely covered by skin folds that had badly fused together as they tirelessly worked to seal the injury on that sorry excuse of a limb.

Alice couldn’t keep her eyes on it a second longer as stinging puke worked its way up her esophagus and splattered on the ground in front of her, tears again streaming down her face.

She used the wrappings to clean her mouth before delving deep into herself, into her arm.

Less than two hours later, Alice stumbled back into the clearing of the Spider Queen, her stump safely enclosed in her crustaceous prosthesis once again. She didn’t spare a glance at the massive arachnid resting on her silken cushion, instead heading towards the Lumen bowl and quickly dumping her entire head in it, letting the ever-hungering glimmers clean her face.

Raising her glow-dripping face from the basin, she briefly checked on the mole-rat, finding it still paralyzed and completely restrained.

She nodded to herself and went into her tent to retrieve the implements for the next experiment. She would need to be very careful.

She started by covering her now purple and blue chest with the breastplate, wincing every time the sturdy but stiff garment moved on her wounds. She had been sending a good amount of her warmth to the chest, trying to speed up the healing, but it seemed to be taking more time than usual; another purple edema had appeared on her left thigh, right where she had slammed her fist in anger. She shrugged, sending yet another trickle of power to the new bruise before she moved on with her preparations.

She carefully wrapped her mouth and nose with a new length of silk and then proceeded to use one of the older ones as a new set of foot wraps, she didn’t want to risk stepping on some infected remains.

Finally, she removed a new pair of metal bistouries she had had cast in the previous days before steeping out and walking towards Maath, her sharpened limb already caressing the silvery wire.

“I’ll start the experiments now. I will need a sample and for you to be ready to coat the creature with metal if things start going badly.” she sharply told the Queen, focusing the entirety of her attention on the gleaming fangs appearing behind the pedipalps, their surface coated in a translucent sheen of grey fluid that sometimes dripped on the silk below.

“Have you started healing yourself?” the question coming without any acknowledgment of her previous statement, making her grind her teeth in annoyance.

“Yes. I’ve started looking for a way to regrow it. It will take time” she replied as she started climbing on the pillow, her hand and claw clinging on the smooth silk as she moved upwards.

“Good.”

Removing the small fragment of diseased flesh didn’t prove to be difficult and, despite still being angry at the Queen, she had briefly expended a large amount of her magical reservoir to check again on the state of the infection, finding it only slightly worse than before, she was pretty sure the reduced intake of food was already sapping the strength of the Illness.

A couple of minutes later, the young woman was once again standing in front of the paralyzed mole-rat, a small sample of infected tissue held aloft between her two scalpels-chopsticks.

She had already asked Skitter to pump the beast full of venom, the large amount of paralytic agent probably able to keep it still for at least half a day, unless the core hadn’t improved its resistances.

She moved even closer now, feeling its hot breath coming from an open maw that smelt like old rotting meat and feces, staring at the four yellowed incisors that protruded from its mouth, fearing their sharpness.

Squashing down her fear, she quickly stepped forward, extending her hand and sinking her scalpel in the pointed, pinkish tongue that was almost lolling out of its mouth, the skin easily parting and letting out a small trickle of blood that soon turned pinkish when mixed with the copious saliva pooling in the fetid cavity.

After a single moment of hesitation, she gently placed the small rotting sample into the wound before placing a hand on the greasy skin of its sagging cheek and sending an empowered Hemostasis to the wound, making sure to seal it with a fresh, if thin, layer of flesh.

It is done. She thought as she moved away from the creature’s horrid head and moved towards its rear, looking for the safest spot on its body.

In the end, she approached the short and pink tail of the mole-rat which, to her relief, had also been glued to the ground by the spiders with a large amount of silken threads.

Within a minute, a small spot had been torn open in the resilient material and she gently placed her hand on the extremity, sending her consciousness into the body of the beast.

As soon as she was inside the system of the mole-rat, Alice automatically activated her Biomagical Instincts skill before starting a thorough inspection of the system.

The body around her was a thriving universe of life; the warm flesh of the animal constantly irrorated by a flood of hard-working red erythrocytes, carrying oxygen and nutrients to the hungering cells that eagerly produced the energy keeping everything alive.

The young biomancer moved along with the flow, following the plasma around until, a few minutes later, she found herself deep into the heart of the monster, ever pumping its vital fluid throughout the organism.

Once inside the pumping muscle, she started feeling the pressure of the being’s magical energy, the cold tendrils of its power still flowing towards its core from the many organs and tissues of its body.

To her surprise, she discovered that the lines of energy didn’t only come out of the recently mutated organs, their presence slightly glowing in her magical field of perception, but also from the rest of the body of the creature, even if the amount that was being sent was only a mere trickle when compared to the main source of the magical powers.

The biomancer’s surprise soon turned in astonishment when she actually observed the core itself, finding its size already much bigger than before, now about the size of a fava bean.

Is it because it ate more of the glimmers? Is it the size of the monster? Does it only take time to congeal? Dammit I don’t know enough.

Feeling annoyed at her ignorance, the young woman quickly left the heart and flowed through the body until, a few seconds later, she landed inside the large, muscular organ that was the mole-rat tongue, instantly landing inside the infected wound she had created and inspecting its state.

The fungal blight had already started establishing a foothold in the adjoining cells, its round, tiny particles rooting themselves onto the larger microorganisms and starting to consume them from within, using their nutrients to start growing and multiplying as she had seen them do many times before.

Already, the monster’s body was reacting to the invasion, the area around the wound swelling and filling up with white blood cells and antibodies that were showering each one of the minuscule invaders with dissolving enzymes and kamikaze proteins that forced the brownish platelets to explode in a mass of envenomed residue. Alice smiled as she saw the large and weakly luminescent white blood cells start consuming the infective mold, forcing the attackers to a standstill.

The resistance, however, didn’t seem enough to hold off against the tides of chaos and slowly, over the course of many hours, the corruption started spreading in the surrounding cells.

Alice left the mole-rat’s body more than five hours later, when her own system started screaming at her consciousness from their link, requiring the sleep and nourishment it had been denied for far too long.

When she finally returned to her own body, she found herself barely able to stay awake, the large expenditure of energy having crippled even her improved metabolism.

She drew a ragged breath as she stood up on her wobbling feet before advancing towards some of the bundles that had been left beside her own tent; each one containing a possible meal for the hungering human girl.

They usually changed every day but they always contained a single, smaller-sized creature that she had found palatable in her long research for something decent to eat.

To her relief, each cocoon had also been slightly opened and she could pick her favorite between a small cluster of snapping rock crabs, a lone screechling or something that looked like an oversized tadpole with stick-thin legs and a large mouth. All in all, she had found out that, between all the options, the tadpole was the least disgusting in flavor, even if the texture of its cold meat resembled that of somewhat mushy oranges.

After quickly ingesting her meal and feeling the tadpole’s flesh heavily settling in her stomach, the tired girl stumbled towards the bed and, before even hitting its smooth and soft surface, she found herself asleep, floating in the dark chamber of her mind where, as usual, she started planning for what she would do once awake.

I wish I could dream again. she finally thought aloud.

When she woke up, a few hours later, Alice quickly rinsed her mouth with the glimmers, using them to clean away any residue between her teeth before moving back to her test subject which, as she slept, had finally managed to fight off the paralytic agent in its system and was now shrieking and squealing like a demented pig.

The pinkish rodent uselessly strained against the unyielding bindings, its snapping maw trying to bite at anything within range whilst a thick brown pus trickled out from its rotting tongue and onto the ground where it pooled into an infested puddle.

“Yeah I can’t have it that way” she stated, keeping her distance from the maddened creature.

Thankfully, she had already thought of a solution for sedating an infected creature without needing Skitter or one of the other Thinkers to bite down on it and putting themselves at risk of contagion.

Thusly, she quickly ambled to Eisor, busy ‘conversing’ with a surly Chillushrith, and had her produce a small metal container which she then used to milk and collect the Spear Spiders’ venom—after managing to convince of her good intentions a few very dubious Thinkers.

In the end, she managed to collect something close to a deciliter of venom, which she then promptly inoculated into the creature by pouring it into a deep wound in its side.

Within a few minutes, the monster was once again completely still and she proceeded to delve inside of it once again. This time, she didn’t wander around the mole-rat body, electing to instead move straight into the microscopic battleground that was its tongue.

The infection had managed to establish itself into the organ, slowly consuming its muscle fibers and leaving behind the many small abscesses and pustules that spewed out the pus that had been trickling out of the rodent’s mouth.

The deadly blight was already moving down the throat and through the palate, the soft tissues slowly succumbing to the relentless aggression of the tiny pathogens.

The war, however, wasn’t being fought equally in the entire body as Alice realized a few instants later, when she found herself staring at a large pocket of resistance still busy opposing the raiders despite being almost completely surrounded by the festering disease.

It was, to her exultance, the small patch of esophagus that had started mutating when she had first introduced the glimmers into the mole-rat’s body.

The brightly-glowing Lumen cells were now a wall of staunch defenders that seemed to be able to slowly destroy any malign pathogen coming into contact with their glow; the tiny mold particles shriveled up and were consumed as soon as they burrowed into the thin cellular membranes that didn’t give them any ground.

It’s working! It keeps them at bay! She thought in elation, her eyes unable to leave the tiny confrontation.

The young woman watched on, her smile growing as the minutes passed and the blight didn’t advance on that small field of luminescent tissue; she was almost moving away to check on the rest of the monster’s body when, suddenly, she felt something snapping in the glowing cells.

She turned her eyes back to the throngs of the defenders and, to her dismay, found their light slowly dimming and fading, the firsts of their numbers already succumbing under the now pressuring pathogens.

The infection, which had slowly spread around the glow, had finally managed to completely enclose the resisting cells, cutting them off from the rest of the body.

As soon as the last healthy cell was turned into blight, the glow of the entire tissue had started subsiding, slowly weaking until, a few minutes later, it stopped completely and the infection took its course.

In the meanwhile, a worried Alice couldn’t stop thinking about that snapping sensation she had felt when the glowing tissue had lost its strength.

Almost as if something had been broken… or interrupted! Her eyes widened at the realization.

The core! As long as they had the core’s power backing them, the Lumen cells had enough energy to kill the infection but as soon as they lost it they were also consumed! That’s the same issue I had with the normal glimmers and the mold! Then if I had a way to send more powers to the glimmers while they fight I bet I could tip the scale towards them!

Unknown to her own consciousness, Alice’s face was smiling now.

Before doing anything drastic, the biomancer spent some more time observing the advancing blight as it tore into the resisting body of the mole-rat, noticing the way it shied away from its bones and even its blood vessels, each filled with mutated lumen cells that would bravely fight and even win against the squirming rot.

Thusly, the infection had instead proceeded to attack the rest of the body, slowly working to weaken the resistance in a long and ruthless siege that left no prisoners, only a graveyard of rotting cells and putrid ooze.

As she witnessed that silent, inner war, Alice could also feel the way the core gradually lost its strength as the hours passed and the still growing infection sapped at the weaker organs, the energy requirements slowly growing higher as its production dwindled.

Alice finally decided to act.

The young woman moved back to her own body and rushed to the metal basin that contained the now thriving glimmers, constantly multiplying thanks to the scraps she had been chucking into the waters after every meal.

Now, she dipped her hand in the cool liquid and commanded the tiny glowing specks of green light to move towards her, asking them to coat her arm in a luminescent ooze.

When a bit less than half of the microorganisms of the bowl had moved onto her own body, the girl ran back to the paralyzed animal, straight towards its mouth that still oozed out corrupted humors. Once there, she carefully extended the gently shimmering tendril until it touched the creature, leading the eager particles into its mouth and down its esophagus, feeling them burn and consume the putrid abscesses and the festering infection.

As soon as the last particle had left her hand, Alice ran back to her position near the tail of the creature and entered its body, resuming her connection to the glimmers as soon as she could.

Repressing a sigh of frustration when she saw their already reduced amount, Alice started feeding the hungering Lumen with her own magical power, feeling them sap her energy to gain the strength to triumph against the rot.

The shimmering green wave started consuming pus and growth alike, leaving only more of its kind which then joined the fight against the entrenched illness, still trying to dig deeper into the dying body of the monster, like a scared fox escaping from the hunter’s hounds.

Alice did not relent, leading them forward, eating away at the illness until a sharp spike of pain broke through her trance, the unwelcome signal of her dwindling powers.

She now felt the assault falter, crash against the suddenly unbreakable walls of the twisted mold, now fighting back as it spewed decomposing spores onto the glimmers which started fading, first slowly and then more quickly as time went on.

All Alice felt now was helpless rage as all her efforts simply resulted to nothing, her magic not enough.

Never enough.

No! I refuse! I want them to stop!

The blight started growing once more, feeding on the remains of her armies and going forward, ignoring the scarce resistance of the dying Lumen. She wouldn’t allow it.

The headache had turned into a migraine, her powers completely sapped, and yet she didn’t want to end it all in a whimper; they needed energy and she could get some more.

Through her body, Alice felt at the small ball of condensed sound gently humming against her throat, hidden under its simple bone necklace.

She watched the mold digging further into the body, already consuming the mutated cells.

STOP.

She ordered, forcing herself into the tiny, pea-sized core and releasing its energy which changed to become her will, condensed into a single word that seared itself into her mind.

TERMINUS

The mold stilled. For a moment, everything was right.

*****

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