[Flashback] Not only Spiders Spin Webs (Poison)

[Dhalvasha]

506 AV Fall 78

Symnestra were not made for hatred. Like love or joy, rage was a violent emotion. The Widow folk were temperate beings, fragile in body and soul. Such ponderous emotions would rattle their very frame, shake loose the poise and grace centuries had just attained. But hanging by his feet in the darkness just below Kalinor, Dhalvasha wrestled with fury black as poison...and thrice as virulent.

Logic dictated he assuage his anger, that the second son of Web Sulva was not to blame for what had happened. Certainly Dhalvasha had seemed crazed, his desperation mistaken for madness. It would have been well within the guard's right to deny him entrance to the Place of Purging, and understandable to not levy his request at old man Hellebore. Still, burning tar clung to the inside of his mind and engulfed his logic, boiled it alive. His surrogate was dead, hurled from the city to the darkness below...feeding the monsters there. Dhalvasha imagined he could hear them, creaking legs and chitinous joints cracking as spiders large as cows feasted on the refuse of the above. He did not want to think of her down there, consumed in nothingness and counted as little more than expendable in the scheme of things.

Had he made them listen, she might have still lived.

That thought alone would not shake itself free of his conscious, strangulating his logical process and casting his heart in bitter stone. Emotion was agonizing, connection was pointless, endearing entanglement had led him here despite his efforts and now they left him warped and frustrated.

Angry.

Closing his eyes, Dhalvasha tasted the darkness. While not the most accomplished hypnotist, his ability might convince the boy to follow him into the shadows below Kalinor. The guard may have superior combative prowess, but it would be surprise that Dhalvasha would count on. After all, it had not been brute force that allowed the ostracized Symenestra to climb the ranks within the Place of Purging. Manipulation, tactical friendships, and Hypnotism were his tools carving a place for him among the pale skinned people. Now...Now it seemed that he didn't want it, could not stand it. Days since he'd stepped into the Place of Purging and something about the rooms, the smells, the sterile environment sneering at his incompetence had alienated him. Wreathed in a perpetual gloom of his failure, his own emotional compromises, he could never return.

Why then did he find it so hard to leave?

Pale white spiders crawled along his legs and scuttled up his body, curious of the new resident in their domain. Gently, Dhalvasha cupped one and focused a small stream of Djed from his eyes into its little aura. The charmed creature swayed, balancing on eight legs and content to sit in his presence. How easily he could crush it now, and how trusting it was. In a certain sense, the nature of trust was to provide ones throat to the palm of another's hand...hoping that instinct be overridden in some heroic effort of will.

Why present ones throat at all?

Weakness was emotional, a redundant error perpetuated by the mind to sink importance into unimportant things. Survival had weeded out such complex and vestigial notions from creatures like this spider, so who indeed was superior? He, or it?

Wresting his mind from the flow of Djed, he let the tiny arachnid spin a thin thread from his hand, dropping silently into the shadows with little more than a whisper. Life, invariably, went on. His miniscule sorrows were no more important than the death of an insect caught in a web. Names were unimportant, people were unimportant. All that remained when bodies rotted to dust were the accomplishments they left behind.

Humanity...nay, all the races of Mizahar...they were vestigial. All that mattered was what they left behind, not who they were or what they were, only what they did.

Perhaps he wouldn't kill the boy, waste unnecessary time with plotting the downfall of someone so inconsequential. No. He would leave Kalinor and return at the head of change. Hellebore would be his first opponent, a casualty of personal disdain and a testament to an era of shifting values.

Only then could he be satisfied, only then could this black thorn in his heart be, perhaps, removed and discarded. Till then, his emotional integrity had weakened. He had allowed too many into his life, despite his efforts to remain ambivalent.

Kalinor was dangerous, a rotting whole of antiquated minds and too many emotions. Only in the wide world of the SkyCave could he hope to distance himself from all but himself.

There was only himself.

For when he closed his eyes, the only sound he heard was his heartbeat.

Nothing else.

[Poison]

It was a strange no man’s land, here below Kalinor. Few ever explored the darkness below the coccoon like dwellings of the Symenestra. Few ever dared to. It was dangerous here. Countless stories about men and women that had left to explore the tunnels below, that sought to reach the bottom of the cave and gotten lost circulated in the city, brave explorers, or maybe desperate furious people like Dhalvasha himself. Most of them had not come back, but been killed by whatever was down there. And those that had returned, sometimes months after they had left, had been scarred for life, wounded, driven mad by whatever lurked down there.

It was dangerous, even just outside Kalinor, but a few metres below the city, but at the same time it was strangely peaceful and quiet. Few things but the little white spiders that lived here disturbed Dhalvasha as he hung there and interrupted his thoughts. But they made no sound, even as they crawled across the body, curious to find out more about the first new arrival in their doman in what seemed like an eterinity.

The loudest sound that he could hear was the sound of his own breathing, the beating of his heart in his chest. And then there was the smell. Even so close to Kalinor the air smelled different. There was of course the musky smell of earth and rocks, the smell of a place that had never seen fresh air, that had never seen the light of day, but beyond it there was something strange and unpleasant.

For a moment it would seem to him as if he could smell the countless surrogates that had been thrown into the abyss as they decayed, decades, centuries of dead bodies, human excrements and garbage, piled high on the cave floor. For a moment it would almost seem to him as if he could see them, horrors, feasting on decaying flesh, but then the smell and everything else was gone again, and there was nothing but quietness and solitude once more.

Until he heard the voice. It was hard to tell how much time had passed, whether it had been seconds, minutes or something more, but after a while he could hear a whisper in the darkness, a voice that was familiar to him. It was her voice, the voice of the woman that had just died, the voice of the surrogate whose body had fallen into the darkness below, cast away like trash. She was crying. „Help me ...“ he could hear her. „Please, in the name of the gods, help me ...“

[Dhalvasha]

There can be no words quite so encompassing as to explain his emotional fragility at that moment. By nature he was a stiff wind from ruin, but always existed just beyond the edge of annihilation. His emotional entanglement with Khaljishi had tipped that tenuous balance, sending him spiraling over the lip of disaster into darkness and scorn. Now as he tried to clear his mind of murder, of irrelevancies, her voice shattered his logic and lodged into his sinking heart.

It was impossible, of course. He had examined her body thoroughly after the operation. Her heart had ceased beating. Every spark, every breath of life animating her into what she was had fled. Her body had only been committed to the refuse below Kalinor after Dhalvasha had exhausted every effort to preserver her, reanimate her, recall her from that void he refused to understand.

Now she called to him, mocking his failure from her tomb of rot and digestion. The darkness below him was inviting, promising a false illusion of nothingness below the gently shimmering city of the Widows. Certainly his mind was cracking, fractures born of stress and dwelling concocting this vicious illusion.

Still, a part of him had to know.

The realm of the beyond was not a tangible thing. He had heard of ghosts before, perhaps seen one at one point, and was it so difficult to believe that she would not leave some vestige of spirit as well? The thought did not follow his usual lines of logic, his own ordered web of conciousness. But certainly he could not be expected to perform optimally under such conditions...could he? The emotional damage already crippling his mannerisms had either shattered his grasp on reality or given him the bravery to venture into nothing.

Just to see her.

Apologize.

Creeping down the wall, Dhalvasha descended into the cavern. Rot and disease had coexisted here for centuries, and somehow the smell was not as vile as he had imagined. There was a tranquility to this darkness, a promise of swift repose and eternal rest without the confines of a coffin. Pausing above the ground, still likely a good deal above it, Dhalvasha squinted into the shadows suspiciously.

"Khaljishi?"

His own voice surprised him, thick with dust and lack of use. Had he been so silent? Since the incident, he had voiced his opinions only in thought...as though speaking were a right reserved for a better man. It echoed strangely, like a drunken human bouncing across the cave walls.

This was madness, this entire venture. She could not live, could not speak.

And for an unsure instant, Dhalvasha was afraid he'd lost his mind.

[Poison]

As he pondered the impossibility of it all, the impossibility of her still being alive somewhere, far below Kalinor or at least existing as a ghost, he would feel as if he were being watched. There was the distinct feeling as if there was some kind of presence there for a moment, as if there were a hand, reaching out to him from the world beyond, something just at the edge of his awareness, and then that most peculiar feeling was gone again. It returned though, stronger than before, as he descended into the cavern where her body had supposedly found its final rest.

For a moment he could see her – or a vision of her – hovering in front of the rocks that surrounded him. She looked much as she had been in life, before she had been captured, before her body had been heavy with child, before she had been cut open. She was a Chaktawe in her prime, with copper skin and long, glossy, jet black hair that fell over her shoulders and framed her face. Her eyes were a strange, solid black. She wasn’t wearing the clothes she had received in Kalinor, but traditional Chaktawe dress, and she was looking straight at him. Her eyes were filled with pain, yearning and accusation at the same time.

„Dhalvasha ...“ she whispered. „Why did you not help me? Why did you not save me after I had given birth to our son? Why did you let them throw me away? Why did you let them do that? I hate them, Dhalvasha. Why did they do this to me? It’s so dark down here. I can’t see anything. I’m afraid, Dhalvasha. I think they are coming for me. I think they want to hurt me. Please, Dhalvahsa, come to me. Come and save me from the darkness.“

She looked at him for a moment longer, and then she stopped her desperate pleas, and the vision, the apparition – if that was what it was – was gone again.

[Dhalvasha]

He remained still for a time after, hoping if he didn't move, she might return. The vision of her, in a manner so alien to how he had seen her, it jarred him. That was how she would have looked if her life had not been snatched away by his child. It took a few more moments before the Symnestra realized he had been shaking, quailing like a new leaf on a limb.

He had never gotten over her. No matter how thick he'd layered his emotions, followed every cleansing or purging protocol...she lay there in the back of his heart, scouring reason clean.

He was her murdered, and for once that MEANT something. How ludicrous, how absolutely ludicrous. He...HE, Dhalvasha Hysel, commanded by the memory of a surrogate.

A hand unconsciously gripped the Chaktawe necklace around his neck. He mouthed the syllables to her name, closed his eyes, and climbed into the darkness.

It was low, lower than he had descended before. Each descending limb was placed carefully, wary of slime or ooze that would lose his grip and plummet the surgeon to an early grave.

He knew the dangers of Hypnotism, how it could warp a mind and feed it delusions...was that what this was? Had his forays into the art stripped him of his sanity?

No. The image had been too real, too visceral to be anything but an informed vision. The trick of it was her clothes...he had never seen her in traditional Chaktawe dress. That had been stripped from her before she entered Kalinor. Someone knew, someone sought to muddle him.

He had to think, thought was the great predator of weakness. Rationality, not stumbling emotion, would see him through this facade, this conjured phantom.

"You could not have survived," he found himself speaking, quietly, regardless of his detailed self instructions. A part of him, perhaps, wanted to speak to her...to rationalize it all.

His mind quailed at the prospect. "Near complete deterioration of vital organs, life ceased roughly three minuets after birth. I counted the seconds."

Break.

"I COUNTED THE SECONDS!"

[Poison]

„But I survived!“ she called out to him from the shadows, from somewhere below. Her voice seemed to come from further and further away, as if she were moving down, towards the cave floor. „Is the fact that you hear my voice not proof of that?“ He could hear her sob, and when she spoke again, the tone of her voice had changed. She was pleading now, desperately asking him to believe her. „I am here, Dhalvasha! And I need you, even more than I needed you when I gave birth to our son! Why do you believe them and not me? I’m not dead. I never was!“

„There are things here, Dhalvasha, beasts that feed off the flesh of the living. Don’t let them take me! In the name of the gods, don’t let them take me!“ She sounded scared now. „If you counted the seconds, then you counted wrong. There was still a spark of life within me. I woke up again after they had discarded my body like a piece of trash. I woke up on a pile of corpses! I screamed your name, Dhalvasha. I wanted you to come and save me. I couldn’t climb the rocks alone, but you never came, and I was forced to live in utter darkness!“

Utter darkness was what surrounded Dhalvahsa now. Nobody had gone as deep as he was now in recent times. His surroundings looked the same no matter which way he turned. It wouldn‘t be hard to forget where Kalinor was, where left and right was. It wouldn’t be hard to get lost forever. The only thing that stood out in the all encompassing darkness as her voice, filled with despair. It was fading faster now as if she were running from something or somebody, running for her life.

[Dhalvasha]

Dhalvasha bit into his tongue, hard enough to draw blood into the back of his mouth and fill his head with a moment of painful clarity. He remembered the day, completely, he remembered the way her stomach had looked...a bloody wound oozing the running remains of her respiratory system...her heart a half digested lump of flesh in the post mortem. They had taken her from him, the body, that limp thing that was no longer the surrogate he had grown so attached to.

Eyes closed, eyes open, none of it mattered. Darkness speared his vision from every direction. Kalinor was somewhere far above, hanging quietly in the shadows. Here he was, clinging to the uneven cave walls as the darkness waited with hungry maw and unseen teeth. His father's warnings were here words without voice hanging in each thread of shadow. Monsters, gargantuan spiders, unseen horrors lived beneath Kalinor.

A notion occurred to him, placed in his mind as though it crawled into his ear. He imagined all the corpses moving, a sea of graying arms and rotting flesh. He saw them stitched together, some abomination of joints and teeth...a rattling mass of horror all waiting for him to reach the cave floor.

Unbidden, despite himself, he descended still farther...uneven hand over uneven hand. The darkness was all there was and even if Khaljisi had been here, he would not perceive her even inches from his face.

This was pointless.

"Post traumatic stress," the Symenestra whispered to himself, "Acute delusion brought on by a state of hyper-acute distress." He was loathe to admit those doctors who had locked him up for a month were right, but there could be no other explanation. He was alone here, alone with shadows and corpses.

He smelled them...or thought he smelled them, the distinct uneasy odor of purifying flesh, or disease growing in the pits of useless stomachs, of far worse things that cared far less.

"You are dead." He tried to make his voice sound more assured, "You have been for weeks. Survival from such a distance is impossible, even with your superior frame. Furthermore the conditions down here are impossible for survival...don't toy with me."

He scuttled backwards, letting one arm hang limp to show him the direction he hung and reorienting himself. He had to climb...hand over hand and as fast as he was able. Where he was now was ludicrously dangerous, the product of mad imaginings and an unsafe mind.

Still, he hesitated, even if an illusion he tried to conjure her voice again...a measure of the faith that did not save her, but that she never stopped believing in.

He would need it to keep from coming undone.Every part of him was fractured...waiting to burst at the seems.

He could not afford to lose his mind down here.

He climbed.

[Poison]

As he climbed, desperate to get back to Kalinor, he could hear screams somewhere below him. The surrogate he had grown so attached to screamed in pain, as if those things, those monsters that lived at the bottom of the cave had finally reached her. And then, all of a sudden, it was eerily quiet again, and the only sound he could hear was his own heartbeat, his own breathing. The silence lasted for a few seconds – or were it minutes, hours even? - it was hard to tell in the darkness below Kalinor - and then another sound cut through the silence, a deep, masculine laughter, and somebody clapped his hands.

„Bravo, Dhalvasha Hysal, bravo! You just condemned the woman you love to a painful death!“ If Dhalvasha turned his head, he would see a man, sitting casually on a nearby rock, as if he were in a house somewhere on the surface and not in a cave filled with monsters. The man was human, one of the desert dwellers, old, with a grey beard, dressed in worn out, threadbare clothing. „What a magnificent feat!“ The human’s voice was filled with sarcasm. He laughed again and applauded once more, but then his face took on a more serious expression.

„No, honestly, I’m impressed. Most would have fallen for this illusion, for this ghost of a woman. She looked quite real, didn’t she?“ He paused for a moment, as if he were thinking about something. „Truth to be told, there was a time when you could really have saved her. You would only have had to do a tiny thing differently, and she would have lived. Hellebore never told you about his experiments, didn’t he? They considered your attachment to a walking incubator inappropriate. They were perfectly happy to let her die, even though they managed to save a few other women. Not many, to be honest, just four or five, but four or five are a lot if you consider how potent a newborn Symenestra’s venom is.“

„What do you think about that? Surely a man as intelligent as you is able to draw the right conclusions from it.“

[Dhalvasha]

Impossibilities were bred in the darkness beneath Kalinor. Only once had Hysal descended to such depths and already he'd born witness to the phantom of a surrogate he allowed to die and now...now he was having a conversation with a human who defied gravity. At once the thought of insanity crossed the Symenestra's mind, perhaps too much Hypnotism and only now did he feel the effects of overgiving. Impossible...or rather, improbable. The thought itself, of the broken minded creatures left behind was almost more than he could bare to think on. He could not be one of those drooling wastes of time, he wouldn't be.

And yet the human seemed so real.

At first, Dhalvasha chose only to rub the tips of his fingers against his forehead and eyes, willing the phantom to discoporate and leave his upward climb in peace. Nothing banished him, and furthermore what he spoke...what he spoke...

A grimace tore its way across the Symenestra's face, reminding him of his failure, the details he could have changed to make the surgery successful, the way the doctors looked down on him...how they refused him the right to operate.

His crime.

Their crime.

Hellebore.

"You're lying," he accused first, biting off the end of the reply in silence, crimson eyes holding the god in narrowed suspicion, "How could you possibly know, human?" He spat the last word harder than he would have liked. Dhalvasha did not hold himself a racist person, but somehow all humans seemed to fill him with a sense of guilty apprehension...as though failing one had marked him a failure to the rest.

No...it was just his guilt, the wild fluctuations of his heart hammering in his chest.

This was not natural.

"You are the product of stress and overgiving," he muttered, hand over hand climbing above the God, "A phantasm of mental concoction, muttering the fearful paranoia I hold secret...you cannot be real." It was safer to write the god off as an illusion, a figment. The truth would be too strange to bare, humans beneath Kalinor sitting idly on the rocks. Some master illusionist here to personally steal the purpose from the Symenestra's movements, his role.

How else could he know so many details?

He could not be real.

But there was...doubt.

Dhalvasha paused, his heart quavering. He wanted someone to blame besides himself, someone to direct his flailing hatred toward. Looking down at the god, he swallowed, mentally chastising himself for engaging in conversation with an imaginary friend. "Hellebore knows experiments are forbidden, his domain is the Place of Purging...he wouldn't put newborns at risk for chanced operations." It sounded right, but somehow...

Hellebore had denied even the possibility of Dhalvasha trying to remove the child surgically. He was barred from the Place of Purging prior to his actions to release her.

Why?

"Who are you?" The question was quiet, almost nothing in the shadows surrounding them...but deafeningly loud in the nothing between them. "What are you?"

[Poison]

„Lying?“ The human laughed out loud. Dhalvasha’s accusation seemed to amuse him rather than anger him. „Why should I be lying? What would I have to gain from it?“ He tilted his head ever so slightly to the side and regarded the Symenestra that stood before him as if he hadn’t entirely decided what to make of him or what to say to him yet. „As for how I know what I know, that’s a good question, isn’t it? Of course you would like to know that. By the way, no, you haven’t overgiven, at least not yet, although you will end up just like that Sanairas Larkspur if you aren’t careful.“ He said that in a very matter of fact tone.

The name ‚Sanairas Larkspur‘ would be known to Dhalvasha. She had been a hypnotist, just like him, powerful, experienced, arrogant. She had used her magic frequently, and eventually she had lost her mind. She had suffered from hallucinations, had thought that she was surrounded by enemies, had become violent only to act like a frightened little girl a few moments later. Once Web Larkspur had been admired, by the Symenestra tended to avoid them wherever they could now. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with them anymore.

„And why would you have hallucinations of an old human sitting in a cave when you are a Symenestra, surrounded by other Symenestra?“ the man asked, still amused. „People in your state usually have hallucinations about people they know or about their victims. It’s so much more painful that way, you know? Being confronted by a stranger doesn’t hurt as much.“

„Everybody has a few skeletons in the closet“, he remarked, somewhat indifferently as Dhalvahsa talked about how Hellebore knew that experiments were forbidden. „Just like you. That’s what drew me to you. You are interesting. Ambitious. You aren’t content with the status quo, and you’d do anything to achieve your goals.“

„They call me Sagallius, the Puppeteer“, he introduced himself. „And I can give you the tools to achieve your goals.“ His voice, was calm and confident as he said this. He stood up and looked directly at Dhalvasha. „I can help you change Kalinor. I can help you avenge that woman.“ He pointed down, where her screams had last been heard. „I can even help you save your people if that’s what you want. It will be interesting to see how far you are willing to go.“