Chapter Text
Hornet breathed deeply in time to the rocking of her cage. It was all she could do, for the soul bindings that twined around the cage’s gilded arches fed upon her Silk and pinned her in an uncomfortable fold. She could move only enough to shift her position from sitting to kneeling to sitting again.
Wind whipped through her exposed fur, bringing with it the scents of strange lands. If she tasted the air, she could taste the exertion-scent of the white-hooded bugs that carried her cage. Their small, round forms were close enough that if she were able to move freely, she would be able to grab them and escape. But she was trussed tight and her arms were bound firmly together.
Her captors had been thorough in relieving her of her belongings. She missed the warm familiarity of her cloak, the balanced heft of her needle.
It had been a long, long path. When Hornet had been captured in Hallownest, she’d been sure her captors would slip up, that their bindings would fail. Very little could contain a Weaver’s innate ability to form Silk. All it would take was a moment of freedom from her bindings to force out the Silk remaining within her and shatter the cage’s bars. No mortal bug’s enchantments could contain her for long.
Now, weeks after Hornet had been captured, she began despairing of her ability to escape before she was brought to whatever her fate would be. She was tired, her Silk stores scraped nearly dry, her stomach empty and cramping with hunger. Were she not of Pale blood, she would be starving by now. Her captors had not seen fit to feed her. Hornet wondered if she was meant to arrive at her final destination alive or dead.
They were far from home. Hornet, who had never ventured further from Hallownest than the surrounding wasteland, had long-since stopped recognising the lands they travelled through. Her captors were taking her eastwards—although to where, she didn’t know. They didn’t respond to her taunts and questions and stopped only for brief, silent rests before picking up her cage and continuing onwards with unfaltering rhythm.
The convoy trekked through deserts, through marshland and salt flats, through environments so strange Hornet had no words to describe them. She suspected there was an advance party clearing the way, for no foes or obstacles delayed them and the shells of dead bugs spotted their path at odd intervals.
Every so often, her shell crawled with the awareness she was nearing a higher being’s territory, her half-Pale blood warning her of the near trespasses. She wondered if any would take enough offense to her presence to attack the convoy. That, maybe, would be her chance to escape.
But no such attack came.
The jingling of the bells upon her captor’s staves were driving her half-mad. Hornet had been a creature of solitude for centuries as she guarded her decayed kingdom. To be trapped now, with the constant presence of her captors, was infuriating. If she could only move…! Even weak and hungry and Silk-starved as she was, she was faster and more agile than most mortal bugs. If something, anything, were to disrupt her bindings, she could break free.
Ahead, a higher being’s presence itched at her shell. She wondered if that being was behind her capture. It seemed plausible, but why would a higher being go so far out of their way for a half-Pale blooded bug? She was no monarch. She had no worshippers to turn, only dead lands.
Time slipped by and the convoy drew nearer to where the higher being lay in wait.
The convoy came to a swaying halt. Hornet cracked open an eye.
Before them stood a gilded door that opened with an earth-shaking groan of metal. Behind it arched a massive cavern—larger than the caverns of the City of Tears, larger than any Hornet had seen before. A shining citadel stood within, solid and hungry and waiting. Soul hung heavy in the air, so thick that Hornet’s bonds began to glow silver in response. What little freedom of movement she had began to disappear.
Hornet strained against her bonds. The sinking feeling in her gut told her that this was her final chance to escape.
Her carapace creaked warning as the soul bindings tightened. Hornet inhaled, gathered the remnants of her failing might and the thinnest scrape of silk she could produce, and threw herself forward. Her chains glowed and Hornet hissed in pain as the bindings crunched through her carapace. She trembled for a second, then tightened her mandibles together. She wouldn’t give her captors the satisfaction of seeing how hurt she was.
Her captors were moving faster now as they carried Hornet’s cage up a massive, gilded set of stairs and onto a high, thin bridge. Bugs of all shapes and sizes lined the bridge’s sides. Each and every one wore the same white hoods as her captors and chanted a foreign prayer as the convoy passed. She could feel the weight of hundreds of gazes upon her. What the watching bugs were thinking, she didn’t know.
Her broken carapace stabbed into her soft insides where the bonds pressed the jagged shards of chitin inwards. Every movement of the cage brought pain, the type that Hornet knew would take time and silk both to heal. She had neither time nor silk available to her. Every moment brought her closer to her final fate.
She struggled, unwilling to become the prisoner or plaything of whatever lay in wait for her. The bindings glowed again and snapped tighter still.
Something prideful and furious in Hornet wailed at the thought of her end being like this, caged like prey before rows of white-clad mortal bugs. She shrieked in agony as the cage jostled again, her hemolymph beginning to drip through the bars. Her vision was fading. Her mandibles splayed open behind her mask as she panted for air that didn’t come.
After her long, long life, was this how she died? Caged and on display?
Someone was keening, high and painful. As Hornet’s vision began to darken, she realised the noise was coming from her.
The world went black.