Reconnecting 1

The One-in-Webs was nervous. These meetings – where the mechanistic minds of Light and Stone were forced to focus – had always been rare. Even the somnolent Flesh and the skittish Shadow were scarcely roused from their duties to speak to the rest of the whole. Now, it had to be done.

The One-in-Webs shoved down a phantom ache as it reached for the missing body and felt nothing; a lapse in focus would have worse consequences than attempting to use the piece it had lost.

All of its eyes closed as brass limbs sank into stone like water in eight far-flung rooms. There should have been nine. There had been nine. Its main consciousness flickered out of the shell that nested among scrolls older than Christianity and stepped into the void before it could dwell on that.

Limbs of thought began weaving the scarcely visited plane anew with power borrowed from its kin. The space had only seen use thrice: the founding, the birth of Stone, and the flight of they who Would-be-Shadow. Each time it had grown. Now, it was reduced. Swathes of bare void were exposed where before the stillness of glass and mirrors had covered them. Within, strands of light and not-light pulsed along the Great Weaving that they were so very close to, here.

Looking at them, the One-in-Webs couldn’t help but realize that it was truly scared.

Change of this type was not in it and its kin’s nature, not even the ever-shifting Flesh. They had been given a duty when they were made, bound ever tighter to it at the founding. That duty had been threatened for the second time.

They were to preserve. Knowledge and thoughts, artifacts and dreams. To protect what had been for those that were, so that those who would be could go further and further.

Now, staring at the holes left by the One-in-Reflections’ severing, it was no longer sure that they could truly recover what had been lost. Not even one of its kin had been unharmed when the One-in-Reflections had been taken from them. The shells and trinkets and pieces of the kin that had been woven into her being and her Archive, all gone. They had worried for her at first. Then, as time went on, they had worried, too, for the knowledge she had been charged with. They did not patch themselves as time passed; better a fractured whole, the cognizant kin had decided, than a whole fraction.

As days passed, the worry had turned to the fear that churned within the One-in-Webs. Agents sent to her did not return, patrons and protectors spoke naught of substance. Reports filed in restricted sections across the world had commented on her protector’s apparent death, just as they had when its own maker had fallen. None spoke of her demise, nor that of her well, her tree, or her collections. They spoke of lost assets and stony silence, of dimensions of thorns that bled those who tried to intrude. Those among the patrons who had legal jurisdiction over the area, according to the most recent accords, had cautioned patience to the kin. They were too fearful to dismantle the protections around her and return her to the whole. They had spoken of inheritors and contacts and oaths too tentatively to bring real results.

Through all of this, what portions of her had been left to the One-in-Webs and her other kin had begun to rot and writhe, degrading despite the best efforts at preservation her fellow archivists could provide. The process had been slowed, nearly stalled in parts, but as months passed the whole had watched as pieces decayed in ways that they who Would-be-Shadow had not. Even when divided during the first threat to the kin’s duty, their pieces had remained as a semblance of life.

Without her well, any part of the One-in-Reflections was fated to fade away.

When connections had reopened, the One-in-Webs had been ecstatic. The artifact and materials requested before the separation had arrived swiftly, but words had lagged behind. What spoke to them where the One-in-Reflections had been was – different. She took the pieces they had tried to preserve, but they no longer fit. The shards of the kin she had kept were missing and her thoughts were jagged and cold.

Steel and Gloves had rejected an immediate rejoinder and advocated for caution, as they did in all things.

So the meeting had been called and it had fallen on the One-in-Webs to weave their space anew. Work that had passed by seamlessly as it thought, now long done. Still, the One-in-Webs did not call through the rest of its kin.

Instead, it took the time to gaze into the exposed void and think.

It was still thinking when the avatars of the other Archivists stepped through, from the suppurating mass of the One-in-Flesh to the trailing ribbons of iridescent wind that formed the One-in-Echoes. Here in this place their connections were vivid, no less solid than the room in which they stood or slithered or hung. Through them, the others could feel its worry, its uncertainty, and its fear. Just as it could feel theirs.

It did not like change. But deep in itself, in the physical being made from centuries of grinding gears and simple tasks, the One-in-Webs knew that the Initiative’s peace had been shifted. It spun like a coin flipped overhead, end over end.

Where it would settle, no augurs or oracles could say. They had no knowledge of what passed within the Archives. Some had pried, when they who Would-be-Shadow had been sundered and night had taken those that threatened their purpose. They had been…reprimanded.

Now, none dared.

Change was inevitable, as was conflict. The One-in-Webs would not hesitate when it came to restoring and preserving its family and its purpose. Someone had harmed its sister and endangered their grand project.

None would do so again. It decided on that, and its kin pulsed affirmation.

In the material world, within its legion of shells and smaller selves, a click rang out in sync. Rune-etched gears shifted to patterns that had been worshipped, once. In most, they slid back moments later with a softer thunk.

But within the Archive of Anansi, two patrons frowned at the sound. They stared at a small brass spider that gazed back with empty eyes that, they would swear, had flickered red.