The Swarm Cradle delegation marched on endlessly.

The Millipedes and Beetles could keep walking for days at a time, so long as they were fed gallons of Titan Honey every few days. They practically inhaled the golden soup from enormous metal troughs and buckets, itself stored in large drums atop a Titan Millipede’s back.

It was strange, getting used to sleeping atop a moving animal - but Iyojin had felt the same when she first came to the Paperhall, so she managed. Heavens, the Paperhall itself swayed when expansion of the Cradle chamber was being down, as the new tunnels carved into the walls created short-lived drafts and gusts.

Food for the travellers was usually caught, as the accompanying Executors went hunting in the nearby woods. The beasts and monsters that made the forest home didn’t dare venture onto the large, cleared routes that had been established between Swarm Cradle and the nearby cities.

The delegation would have to diverge from its current soon, turning north to cross a mountain pass rather than turning north-east to travel beside it. Past that the journey to the Inner Cities was much less fraught with danger, as the land passed into the protection of the Myriarch.

Passing through the mountain itself, however, would be a dangerous, if brief, diversion. The delegation didn’t anticipate losing any Executors, but Iyojin had been briefed on the dangers of straying from camp or her caravan as they crossed.

The inhabitants of the range were supposedly the descendants of ancient gods, who were incarnations of each of the mountains in the range. The surrounding towns of the range had given each peak a different name and title, and pronounced each one a different god.

Sometimes children from these villages did awaken with strange, stone-like skin rippling over their bodies, manifesting unique powers as though gifted them by these gods - but Executors had investigated the range and found the true culprits: a strange species of enormous, hibernating, crustacean-like creatures. They were, in fact, the ‘Peaks’ the villages spoke of - not gods but monsters with powerful abilities, who regular spawned ‘Peaklings,’ flocks of buzzing, stone-skinne creatures that leapt and hovered, manifesting the unique abilities that village mythology assigned to them.

The link between these creatures and the empowered village individuals was still being investigated.

With Executors to defend them, the Peaklings would be fought off easily, and the Peaks themselves were undisturbed by the passage of mere humans.

With the knowledge that battle would be coming, Iyojin felt strangely restless, energised. She wanted to prepare, in some way, for the upcoming battle - even though she would not be participating, it felt wrong to ignore the danger.

She tossed the page aside and sighed, pressing one hand to her forehead. She had been trying to work on her project’s Weave again, if only because it felt wrong not to. But as usual, that familiar mix of anxiety, shame and despair kept encroaching, the longer she spent futilely staring at the problem.

Perhaps she could get to the busywork instead - try to get her tools up to standards and hope for breakthroughs in the meantime.

She ran her finger down the segmentation in her Chitin, detaching the Spinneret module, and lifted the panel of carapace off of the exoskeleton. She brought it over to the workstation of the carriage, and sat down, then reached underneath and pulled out a large box made out of a similar shell-like material. She unlatched the lid, and opened it up to reveal a similar, soupy bath of nutrients to the one she stored her project in.

This vat however, contained Pedipalps - a pair of sort of Chitin gauntlets, with hyper-dextrous manipulators at the end of each finger and layered with an incredibly fine fur, that kept the Weave adhered to her hands when she wished and loose when she didn’t. Each one sported a cable of Bridging Silk emerging from the back of the gauntlet, which would necessitate connection to the nodule at the back of her neck.

She rolled up her sleeves and pushed her hands into the soupy liquid, seeking the gauntlet apertures and slipping her fingers inside. Once the carapace jaw had locked around her wrists, she pulled the Pedipalps out, wiped the gauntlets on a prepared brushboard, and carefully picked up the Bridging Silks, before reaching behind her neck to connect them.

Once done, she returned her attention to the Spinneret. The outer Chitin layer was simply the defensive part - she run her fingers around the edge and flexed the manipulators at the tip of each finger, unlatching the entire outer layer and removing the panel again, revealing the module’s insides.

At the core, the actual organ found within Titan Spiders - a living, pulsing organ, almost stomach like, with a tupe and valve connecting the organ to the sphincter on the end of the Spinneret. Around that organ wove a mass of silken threads, connecting every vital section of the organ to the broader circuitry of the Chitin. In unlatching the section Iyojin had disturbed those connections, but once she pressed the module back to the suit they would re-couple with ease.

These cords of silk represented the Weave - the fundamental circuitry upon which all Chitins and Chitin Modules ran. Every organ required the mystically conductive silk of the Titan Spider to become empowered - in this case, to produce reams of silk which could be further put to work on other Weaves.

With the Pedipalps, Iyojin reached into the heart of the Spinneret and plucked at the cords therein. At this stage, understanding what she was doing was more art than science - the fine hairs of the Pedipalps granted her intense sensory feedback, and she used that to gauge the purpose of each silk, feeling out along the entire web to see where it connected, how it resonated, and a dozen other factors she could only begin to conceptualise.

Here, the Spinneret was horribly inefficient - with a few swift alterations, she shortened cable and recoupled them into far more effective branches, bumping the Spinneret’s speed of production and strength of silk, simply by eliminating redundancies and lazy Weaving.

With another touch, she drew out a bundle of silken threads and helped them aloft in a single gauntlet, before bringing the second Pedipalp up to pick apart the mess. The power of the Chitin was transmitted through vibrations in the silk, or so the current predominant theory stated - no one truly understood the fundamental power of Titan Insects, which obeyed strange and unique rules.

Still, the Weave had clear routes of efficiency and effectiveness - she had learned the most vital ones under Yatsuki, her Orb Mother. Iyojin had spent more time working to understand the Weave than the vast majority of Swarm Cradle’s population.

Picking through simple problems of Weaving like this were practically second nature to Iyojin, now - her Orb Mother had set her many challenges in the form of half-baked modules, with very obvious inefficiencies and problems fundamentally built into their Weave. Unpicking those and working back through the system to figure them out and eliminate them was something she did to unwind, these days.

And yet she couldn’t do the same to her current project - no, she couldn’t even build an effective way of visualising those redundancies.

She was… so much further behind.

Iyojin narrowed her eyes, and kept plucking at the tangled knot before her. She would just have to devote her attention to perfecting the Weave on her current Chitin as much as possible. Next she would examine the Spiderleg Brace, then take a look at each limb, perhaps the Antennae and eye sockets…

Even if Iyojin couldn’t make progress on the thing she should be, she could at least try to make the best of this.

As she worked, her thoughts spun off.

I could thicken the threads by reconnecting these elements, she mused, swapping silken cords with a simple flex of her fingers. Increase density and ductility by emphasising these connections instead.

Almost without thought, she began restitching the panel itself, broadening the Spinneret aperture and reconfiguring the connection point, so that she could draw out multiple threads from the module at once.

She spent the next few hours revising her changes, drilling down through the various layers of Weave and correcting her mistakes, making ever finer and smaller changes. By the time she was done, the sun was already beginning to set, and Illumina was halfway through its skyward climb, Susuli far behind.

Iyojin stood, finally re-latching the panel, Weave completed, and reconnected the module to the Chitin. Weaves could never really be said to be ‘done,’ but she had customised the tool to as great an extent as she was comfortable with.

She returned the Pedipalps to their nutrient bath, and strode outside to sit atop her Beetle’s head.

In order to ensure that no time was lost, mealtimes in the delegation were carried out whilst moving. Each Millipede or Beetle would light a glowfly lamp and set it out visibly on their mount. Soon enough, an Executor would come round carrying the rations you had been assigned - in most cases, this took the form of an already roasted slab of meat from whatever roaming beast had been recently slaughtered, along with steamed vegetable and a slathered Titan Honey sauce. Iyojin also had rice inside that she could boil if she wanted, though that would require setting up her portable firepit outside, and hanging a pot of water above, potentially for it to fall victim to the swaying stride of the Beetle.

Iyojin doubted it would feel the boiling water if it did spill, but it would be irritating to go to all that trouble. She simply set out her candle and sat patiently.

Around her, dozens of other delegation members did the same. Most were in groups and collectives, either networking or chatting with their friends. Executors sat round the firepits of Paperhall initiates, or reconvened with old merchant friends. Iyojin could even see a light inside Gihan’s caravan, and silhouettes that implied companionship, though he hadn’t set a candle out.

An Executor passed by shortly, and Iyojin retrieved her food with a nod of thanks, before extinguishing her candle. Before carrying her meal inside to eat, she cast her gaze around the dozens of either lights and felt a solemn sort of regret blanket her.

Everyone was… with friends, or meeting new people. It had been the same back at the Paperhall, she the isolated worker and everyone else socialising, but… there it had never been quite so visible. Iyojin could return to her quarters and pretend that most everyone else was doing the same, but here, she could see exactly how connected everyone else was while they ate.

Unlike her. Even Gihan, Geonbi and the others only wanted her there for her technical expertise, not because they particularly wanted to talk to her.

The sense of melancholy intensified, as Iyojin realised that aside from her Orb Mother, Yatsuki, her life was devoid of companions. She had no friends among the other members of the Paperhall, no comrades in the merchants or Executors.

She was alone.

Her gaze turned inward to her caravan, and she spotted the Chitin hanging in the far corner, held up by hooks on the wall.

Alone except for her work.

Her lips tightened, her gaze narrowed, and her shoulders hunched. She strode into the caravan and set her meal atop her desk, pulling out a novel she had picked up for the trip as she did so.

She’d wanted to know a little more about the Inner Cities before they arrived, and although this book was more concerned with a tawdry romance, it still provided some fascinating details. Iyojin set her attention to the book and the food, and tried not to think about the quiet hum of companionship everywhere but her caravan.