I don't know if you've ever had the absolute pleasure of being caught in some giant spider's web, wrapped up by said spider in a gooey cocoon to ferment with only your face exposed for some reason, then dragged off to god knows where. But let me tell you, it's not something I recommend.
The spider-creature-monster-thing had attached me to its back as it scurried across the web toward what I could only assume was where it kept the rest of its prey. It was also at that point I realized the strange heartbeat thread of mana I'd followed was in fact coming from the thing's web, which appeared to cover a significant portion of the floor of the labyrinth and was inhabited by a large variety of similar looking arachnids I'd periodically see above and beside me and my spider as we scurried along.
I do genuinely like to think of myself as an optimistic person, generations of null enslavement and my own indentured servitude to Lord Woodman had left me with little else but to hope for the best and prepare myself for the worst, but I didn't see anyway out of my present situation expect winding up as a shriveled husk of bones mummified in spider silk, so I think that's why I acted the way I did.
"Please, please, don't eat me," I begged the giant spider. "I promise I don't taste good."
The spider seemed unconvinced, and continued moving along its web.
"I swear I'll never come down and bother you again," I said. "Wait, I could totally lure people down here for you? Would you guys be into that? I would go up to people and be like 'hey there's a shit ton of treasure on the labyrinth's second floor,' and then they'd be all 'really that's sick! Me and my four friends should go check that out.' Then you guys get like five people for the price of one? Doesn't that seem like something at least worth considering?"
My spider didn't seem to think so, and stopped at some seemingly random interval in the network of spider webbing to unfasten the cocoon I was in off its back.
"You can totally understand me, can't you?" I demanded as the spider neatly fastened my cocoon to the surrounding web, unspooling thread from that weird butt thing spiders have. "I swear to Christ you can understand me and ignoring me is some sort of fucked up magical spider mind games, isn't it?"
The spider said nothing, but I'd swear to god and all his angels I saw it wink one multi-lensed eye at me.
"I knew it!" I yelled as the spider scurried away. "Oh, I fucking knew it!"
"Theo?"
And just like that, I found Iroha.
I could barely turn my head, but from the corner of my eye I found her face also inexplicably sticking out of a spider silk cocoon. "Iroha," I said. "Hey. Guess I wound up finding you after all. Wonderful."
She didn't have time to respond because, at that moment, another voice cut in.
"Yes, I suppose now we'll get to feed the Alke five humans instead of four," the voice said. "It really is something to celebrate."
I struggled to get a better look around, twisting myself this way and that inside the silk sack I was stuck in. I could barely see a series of other similar cocoons positioned around us out of the corner of my left eye.
"There are other people down here?" I asked. "Wait, what are the Alke?"
"The giant spiders whose webs we're in, you simpleton," the voice barked out, then another one cut in.
"Oh stop that Stanley," a new voice scolded. "They're just freshmen. You can't expect them to know everything about labyrinth creatures. They haven't even taken the introduction course yet. Oh, I'm Eleanor, by the way, Stanley's the rude shouty one."
"I am neither rude nor am I shouty!" Stanley all but shouted at us.
"I'm sorry," I said, trying to wrap my head around this. "Why are you two down here?"
Stanley snorted. "Why else? We were left down here during the Sophomore's practical this morning. Our bloody team leader led us straight into a pack of Bagger-Gheists and next thing we know, the three of us are getting tangled up in magical spider webbing."
"Three of you?" I asked.
"Yes… well," Eleanor said. "The giant spiders sort of ate Juliet earlier, before you and your friend got here. At least, we think the spiders ate her. There was a lot of screaming and a sort of sucking noise?" Her voice rose like the last part was a question.
Oh, fuck me. "How do we get out?" I said, immediately struggling against my wrappings. "Fuck fuck fuck. Is there like a spell or a knife? Did anyone bring a knife we could—"
"There is no escape," Iroha said flatly. "Arche silk absorbs any mana before you can cast it into a Working. Only a premade construct, piece of artifice, or some alchemical agents can get through it. We are all going to die here."
I tried craning my neck to get a better look at Iroha, but all that did was enmesh me further in the cocoon. To make matters worse, my nose was starting to itch.
"You can't mean that!" I said desperately, if… if I died down here, then I would have failed my primary mission from Lord Woodman. If that happened then—
"Of course I do," Iroha said tiredly. "There's no hope of escape for us. Even if we freed ourselves from this webbing, we would still have to fight our way out of the very heart of this Alke nest. Neither of us have mana capacities large enough for that, and even if we free the sophomores as well, they are likely depleted already."
"Even if you free the Sophomores as well?" Stanley cut in. "What? You mean you'd leave us here to cut and run? Fucking Shang—"
"Stop that, Stanley!" Eleanor's voice cracked out with authority before softening. "I do hope you can forgive his manners. Stanley's usually such a dear, but, well, today has been a bit stressful. As you can imagine."
I could only imagine.
"We'd definitely not leave you two behind if we got out," I said, in a tone I hoped was convincing. Honestly, at that moment, I'd probably ditch the three of them, Iroha included, if it gave me a guarantee to get out of the labyrinth alive.
"None of us are getting out of here," Iroha said. "The Alke will devour us and no one will even know how we perished."
"Is she always this gloomy?" Eleanor asked me.
I sighed.
***
It was like that for a fucking hour.
Iroha tossing out increasingly dour comments about how we were all going to die. The sophomores sniping at each other, and I trapped in a bloody spider cocoon, unable to escape or muster more than the barest threads of a spell before the spider silk soaked it up.
I was beginning to wish for the monstrous giant spiders to show back up and put me out of my misery when I caught the faintest whiffs of something in the air.
I'd stopped paying attention to the pulsing mana that had led me to the Alke, since I'd been told rather dully by Iroha it was a sort of lure the spiders set to attract prey, but there was something new alongside it that outshone the heartbeat pulse of the Alke's web.
It was like the sun, hot, scorching, and furious, and it was coming toward us faster than I would have thought something could move. I wasn't the only one feeling it, either. The surrounding webs shook as giant spiders scurried out from around us, for the moment ignoring the fact that they'd snared four humans for their larder.
"What's going on?" I asked no one in particular.
"The Alke are agitated," Stanley said. "Obviously. Perhaps a larger predator has come up from the lower floors to eat them. And us."
That last part hadn't felt necessary.
I was about to tell him so when a blast of light, of radiance, filled my vision and the next thing I knew, Sylas Thorne, of all people rushed toward a horde of stunned Alke.
Sylas's mouth was in a smile so wide it was almost like his face was splitting in two. He held a jet-black sword outstretched in both hands and sliced through an Alke in one fluid motion before glancing up and quickly before leaping back as another spider attempted to leap on top of him.
Sylas skidded back on the stone floor, his eyes turning forward and narrowing. Rosamund and Mason were soon behind him and both laid a hand on his shoulders. There was a crackle in the air and the Narrative seemed to intensify further.
Reflection of the sun—
Seven arrows—
The air pulsed with a crazed discordant shine and I could almost smell the blood and rust in the air.
"What did they just do?" I asked as Sylas flashed forward again, his eyes fixing on me before veering away from a pair of giant spiders who rushed toward him with clicking legs.
"I think they've formed a Circle," Eleanor mused. "Odd. I hadn't thought they taught Freshmen how to do that till the end of second semester."
"They don't Eleanor, don't be mysterious or cryptic," Stanley said. "You're horrible at both."
"Oh bugger off Stanley," Eleanor said. Then she paused. "Is he doing a circuit as well with that sword?"
"A circuit?" I asked.
"Using a conduit continuously to draw in mana while pumping a single spell out," Eleanor said. "Gives amazing results, but it's also an excellent way to wind up exploding into flames."
I remembered my break into the library, and how I'd lost my first conduit. Was that how I'd bypassed the library's front door? Had I made a circuit with that piece of finger bone?
I didn't dwell on the thoughts for long. The fight below took up a good bit of my attention.
Sylas stabbed his sword into the spider's head, down to the hilt, then tore it back out. He spun away from another arachnid leaping toward him with a blur that had to have been supported by a spell of Mason's or Rosamund's. I wasn't sure how Circle Workings functioned and I only had the smallest inklings of how the magical circuit Sylas had established with his sword worked from my own scant experiences but—they couldn't actually expect to take on an entire nest of giant spiders with just the three of them, could they?
"We need to get down there and help them," I decided.
"I concur." Stanley's voice came from one side of me. "If the four of us join into their circle, and run for it, then there might be some prayer of us surviving long enough to make it back to the surface. Your friend won't be able to maintain that circuit for much longer. That sword he's wielding will burn out sooner rather than later."
"No," Eleanor sounded awestruck. "Stanley, I think that's a blade made in replicant of an older one, a sort of prop to better wedge the caster into a particular Narrative… Welsh? Definitely something Celtic, maybe a bit of Germanic thrown in as well… why does a freshman have something like that? It should burn him out just to use it as a conduit."
"What?" I asked, my mind spinning. I'd never seen Sylas use that sword and if it could burn him out… I had visions of watching helplessly from my fucking cocoon as Sylas exploded into flames and ash as he tried to free us from getting eaten. I struggled against the cocoon more viciously. If I could just make the smallest hole in it, then maybe I could unravel.
"Theo, it doesn't matter," Iroha's voice sounded dull. "None of it matters. Sylas will die down there, even if that sword of his doesn't kill him first, and we'll be soon to follow." She sighed tiredly. "May our next lives be happier than this one has wound up being."
It was then when I finally couldn't stop myself from snapping at her. "What the actual fuck is the matter with you?" I all but yelled. "Why are you so eager just to curl up into a tiny ball and die? Has life just gotten too hard? What, things stop going your way for a month and suddenly you're ready to give up on everything?"
Iroha's eyes flashed, and there was something in them, something hard and predatory. "You have no idea what you're talking about," she said in a low growl.
"Don't I?" I snapped. "Oh, don't kid yourself. You're not the only person in the bloody world whose life has utterly sucked as of late. But I have people I need to make it back home to so I'm going to need you to put aside whatever horse shit you're going through and put that brilliant mind of yours to work on figuring out how to get us the fuck out of here."
I could feel Iroha's eyes on me, trying to tear holes into me with the sheer force of her glare. I kept my own eyes on Sylas's ongoing fight with the Alke spiders. So far he'd sliced off the legs of two more that had attempted to get past him to Rosamund and Mason, still holding hands and chanting. Narrative thrummed in the air, but I couldn't make it out.
"Artifice," Iroha said finally. "Only a piece of pre-enchanted Artifice, a knife or some sort of blade, can cut through Alke spider-silk. But we have nothing like that."
There was an agreeing murmur from Eleanor and Stanley.
"But if we could make something somehow…" Iroha muttered. "Something that could cut… serving enchanted silk…"
There was a cry from below as one of the spiders sank a set of teeth into Sylas's leg. He still killed the thing, driving the pommel of his sword down hard on its carapace's head, but there were dozens more spiders coming out of the webs, several rustled by our cocoons as they went.
"Of course," Iroha said. "Of course, why didn't I think of it earlier?"
Sylas bled from the wound on his leg, and it made his movements more sluggish. I watched as he gritted his teeth, clenching his sword more tightly, and there was a pull in the air as he drew in more mana aggressively and forced it into his Working. Or was it Workings? I could hear, no I could feel, twin discordant pulses of Narrative. Each slightly out of beat with the other, but close together like someone was trying to smoosh two vaguely related stories together.
The noise was enough I didn't even notice Iroha had freed herself from her cocoon until she was standing over me and slicing into mine. I let out a cry of surprise when she pulled me out.
"Be careful," she said. "Only some of the Alkes' threads are sticky and made to catch mana and prey. Others are what they move around on, those are a slightly paler white."
"How'd you get out?" I asked, and Iroha held her hands out to me in response. The tips of her fingers ended in black claws that curved into wickedly sharp points
I took a step away from Iroha in surprise, and she grimaced.
"It's a trick I learned back home," Iroha said.
"Ah," I said, forcing myself not to continue backing away from her.
"Hey," Stanley called. "Would you two care to cut us out before they overwhelm your friends down there and eat us all?"
He made a good point. Iroha moved past me and quickly sliced the two sophomores out of their silken prisons. I assessed my own mana supply while alternating between keeping an eye peeled for giant spider monsters that might realize their dinner was escaping, and how Sylas was faring against his own pack of oversized arachnids. He'd taken a few more blows and swung his blade in a way that even I could tell with my untrained eye was defensive. Mason and Rosamund had largely stayed back from the entire fight, I assumed so they could continue maintaining the Circle or something, and they'd both fallen to their knees, eyes staring forward in an unfocused haze.
Then there was a crackling surge of mana and a Narrative that set my teeth on edge.
I am a reflection of the sun. So long as it shines, I shall fight and fight and—
It felt wrong. Polluted, like being amid a fever and still having to go out and do work. Your lungs, struggling for every breath of air like they couldn't inflate because they were made of glass.
Seven arrows. Seven tears wept by the Eye of Ra.
The tempo of Sylas's blade began anew in a crazed fury. He almost seemed to dance with the sword, a pure arc of death and desolation that tore into the carapace of spider after spider. I could scarcely breathe watching him.
"What is he doing?" Iroha asked next to me. I hadn't even noticed her approach, or that she had freed the sophomores. "How is he doing that?"
A boy with red hair and freckles, Stanley it had to be, watched the display below us with a sallow expression. "You said his name was Thorne?" Stanley asked. "As in the Duke and Duchess Thorne of Brittany?"
"Yes," I said and shook my head. "We need to get down there and help him!"
Stanley continued like he hadn't heard me, or more likely, like he just didn't fucking care what I'd said. "Some of the families who produce hunters or soldiers, anyone who might qualify to be knighted someday, they introduce a Narrative to their children as young as possible," Stanley said. "The womb even, in some cases. I've heard it never holds for much longer than a year or two, just enough to introduce certain… predispositions."
"Predispositions?" Iroha asked. I wanted to run down there, to help Sylas fight off the Alke spiders, but it was becoming clear that he didn't need me. The creatures seemed to almost shrivel beneath his gaze and he sliced them down, one after another.
"For battle mostly," Stanley said. "I've never heard of one holding on this thoroughly before."
"What do you mean?" I asked. "Wait, no, we have to get down there and help him!"
A girl with olive skin and black hair who had to be Eleanor laid a hand on my shoulder. "A reasonable point," she said. "Let's establish a Circle first, then we'll make a run to your friends. Hopefully, our joined power will help compensate for what little mana we have remaining. It'd be nice if we could establish a circuit ourselves but—"
Iroha snapped her hand into mine on one side and Eleanor took my other. Stanley joined one of his hands with Iroha.
"Focus on my words," Eleanor said. "Feel the mana and the story of our Circle as it connects. Four coming together. A circle of wizards.
Four coming together. A Circle of wizards.
The Narrative snapped into place without me even needing to put in the barest effort into the spell. Mana sang inside my channels and responded to the push and pull of Eleanor, Iroha, and Stanely's own channels. Each one of us compensated for what each other lacked.
Circle of four.
"Now," Eleanor said, licking her lips. "Why don't we help that dashingly handsome friend of yours?"
Alke silk might absorb spells and mana not woven into artifice or potions, but it quickly became clear the giant spider monsters themselves did, in fact, not.
Eleanor directed the Circle's spells as we ran down the non-sticky tendrils of the giant spiders' web-nest thing. Blasts of fire hit the Alke, and they made awful shrieking hisses. Blades sliced through the carapace on one side and flames burned spiders to ash on the other. Caught between us and Sylas Thorne, those bastards didn't stand a chance.
When we reached Sylas and the others, we joined our Circles together with Sylas taking a grateful slap on the back from Eleanor.
She turned back toward the Alke and spoke a single word aloud. "Brennen."
Balor's eye shall incinerate all that it sees.
Fire swept over the Alke in a torrent that made my channels burn as the mana left me. Sylas watched the flames with a blank look on his face.
I touched his arm. "Sylas?" I said.
He shook himself like a dog.
"Theo, sorry," he blinked, and his brow furrowed. "Are you alright?"
Before I could answer, there was a hiss of rage from the inferno behind us and I turned while some of the Alke shook off the flames and were charging at us again.
There was another blast of flames from Eleanor and I wanted to pass out from the amount of mana she took from us. My channels ached, and I tasted blood in my mouth.
"I'd advise that we run now," she said, and with that, the seven of us began a long and admittedly desperate run away from the giant spider monsters.