Chapter 48: The Spider's Parlor

The darkness is absolute, but it is not empty.

I am held.

I am not falling, but I have not landed. My body is suspended in a void, my arms and legs splayed, my white hair floating as if in deep water. The sensation is not of a physical net, nothing so simple or crude as silk. It is a metaphysical stickiness. A cold, sentient gravity that has arrested my fall and now holds me immobile as a specimen.

I am in the web.

My senses, stripped of my chi and the Phoenix-flame, are raw, human, and screaming. I am cold, a chill that seems to emanze from the very fabric of this place. I am terrified, a primal, animalistic fear that locks my lungs. I try to move, a basic instinct to struggle, to flee. I cannot. The web holds me fast, a fly trapped in the conceptual amber of an ancient, patient predator.

The green, living light of the Hollow-God's Spire is a forgotten memory, a pinprick of a star a universe away. Down here, there is no light. There is no sound. There is no up or down. There is only presence.

INTERESTING.

The 'voice' is not a sound. It is a thought, cold and vast, that slides directly into my mind without invitation. It is the dispassionate thought of the spider who owns this web.

It is not the pained, pleading, living contact of the Hollow-God. This is different. This is the probing, detached curiosity of a biologist examining a new, strange insect before pinning it to a board. The Hollow-God was a victim. This is the void itself.

The presence unfurls. I cannot see it, but I can feel the shift in the dimensionless dark. A vast, geometric impossibility- a shape made of living shadow and ancient, patient hunger- turns its full attention to me.

It examines me.

I feel its mind touch mine. It is a dry, cold, slithering contact that makes my skin crawl and my soul want to recoil. It rifles through my memories, my emotions, my very being, with the casual, effortless indifference of a librarian turning a page. It feels my exhaustion. It tastes the dregs of my power. It notes the absence of the Phoenix-flame with a flicker of amusement.

It feels the ghost of the Hollow-God's energy clinging to me, the last trace of the other God I fought so desperately to save.

And then, it shows me.

It wants me to understand. It wants me to see the utter, absolute, crushing futility of my struggle. It wants me to despair.

My mind is ripped from my body. I am no longer a girl trapped in a web. I am everywhere.

I see it. The true web.

The darkness is not empty. It is full. It is a cosmic, three-dimensional tapestry of the Spinner King's design, stretching across infinities. And trapped within it, like dewdrops, like flies, are lights.

Thousands of them.

Millions.

Each light is a world. A sun. A God.

I see a star, a blazing blue giant, choked by strands of congealed shadow, its light dimming, its fusion dying. I see a planet of pure, crystalline life, its inhabitants sentient, singing shattering in slow motion as the web constricts. I see other Spire-like structures, other living Gods just like the Grak-ta's, all bound by countless Void-chains, all being drained of their essence, milked like cattle.

The Hollow-God is not special.

It is one of many.

The Grak-ta, the Hunters, my team, me- we are not a war. We are a minor infestation. A small, irritating patch of mold on one single apple in an infinite orchard belonging to this thing.

This is the truth.

This is despair.

The Spinner King is not a demon in a hell. It is a cosmic principle. It is entropy given sentience. It is the hunger at the end of all things.

YOU... FOUGHT... FOR... THIS?

The King's amused thought is a vile caress in my mind. It returns me to my body, to the cold, sticky web. The vision is gone, but the knowledge remains, a cancer in my soul.

YOU... GAVE... YOUR... LIGHT...

FOR... A... SINGLE... DYING... CATTLE?

It understands sacrifice. It finds the concept illogical. Pathetic.

It finds me delicious.

The shadow in the darkness moves.

It is no longer examining.

A shape, vast and jointed, blots out the non-existent light. It is coming for its new, fascinating meal.

YOU... ARE... NOT... A... WEAPON... the presence muses, its voice a symphony of cold hunger resonating in my bones.

YOU... ARE... FOOD...

AND... YOU... HAVE... FLOWN... DIRECTLY... TO... ME.

...

Far, far above.

The impact wakes him.

Yogawa's head slams back against the fleshy wall. His nose is a mask of dried blood. His grimoire is sprawled open several feet away, its pages fluttering in a nonexistent wind.

He wakes to a sound.

It is a sound he has never heard before. Not from him.

It is a roar of pure, unfiltered agony.

"NOOOOOO!"

Yogawa scrambles up, his vision swimming. His head spins. He sees a blur of motion.

Erima tackling Kizawa.

He sees them sprawled on the ground, dangerously near the edge of the abyss.

He sees Hachiro, still unconscious, his green chi-splint flickering like a dying candle.

He sees the vast emptiness.

And he sees Kizawa fighting Erima.

"She is GONE, Kizawa!" Erima screams in his face. She is shaking him, her own face a mask of terror. "You cannot follow! You cannot save her! WE... ARE... TRAPPED!"

Kizawa's hands lock on her shoulders. The blue in his eyes is gone. It is replaced by a storm of pure, unfiltered madness.

He does not see Erima. He does not see the Spire.

He only sees the darkness that swallowed her.

He throws his head back and ROARS.

It is not a sound of a warrior. It is the sound of a soul being torn in half.

The psychic force of his grief is a physical blow. It slaps Yogawa awake.

It slams into Hachiro.

Hachiro's eyes snap open. He wakes from a nightmare of pain into a worse one.

"Kizawa...?" he croaks, his voice raw.

He sees them. He sees the empty platform.

He feels it.

The song.

The Hollow-God's song.

It is still there. It is quieter, yes. Three chains are gone.

But the hope is gone.

The music is no longer a plea for freedom. It is a rising scream of pure, abject PANIC.

The God is alone.

Its Savior is gone.

It knows it is going to die.

And Hachiro, the conduit, feels all of it. The panic floods him, a tidal wave of psychic terror.

"She is gone?" Hachiro whispers, his own tears instantly welling, his face crumpling. "No... no... she cannot be gone... she..."

"Mizuki fell."

Yogawa's voice is a dead, flat thing. He is a man of logic. He is stating a fact.

The fact hits Kizawa harder than Erima's tackle.

He stops fighting.

He collapses.

He folds in on himself. He curls up on the fleshy stone, his hands locked in his own blue hair, his body racked with silent, agonized sobs.

The Blade is shattered.

The Anchor is gone.

There is only a boy. A broken, empty boy in a cold room at the top of the world.

Erima gets to her feet. She is shaking. Her pragmatism is a shield, the only one she has. She is the only one left standing.

"Yogawa. Hachiro. Up."

Her voice is a whip-crack, sharp and brittle.

"We are alive. We are trapped. The God is panicking."

She is right. The Spire itself is shuddering. The fleshy walls are pulsing with a rapid, fearful heartbeat.

The God's panic is making the Spire unstable.

"The exit?" Yogawa asks, his voice hoarse, clutching his grimoire to his chest like a shield. "The door we came in through?"

Erima stalks over to it. The fused stone that Vor-Kin opened. She kicks it.

"It is sealed. Melted shut. Krell did that. We are quarantined."

"Then we are TRAPPED!" Hachiro cries, his one good hand clutching his glowing chi-splint. "We are trapped in a dying God that is having a panic attack!"

"YES!" Erima snaps, whirling on him. "So stop crying and THINK! What is the objective?"

"The objective FELL!" Hachiro yells back, his own grief and terror lashing out.

"The objective has CHANGED!" Erima roars, her voice cracking. "The objective is SURVIVAL! Krell is down there. The city is down there. We need to get DOWN!"

She points at the abyss.

The same abyss that Mizuki fell into.

"You are insane," Yogawa whispers, his eyes wide with horror. "We have no ropes. We have no way down. That is suicide."

"It is a faster death than this room," Erima counters, her voice cold, brittle.

"No."

The voice is a growl.

Kizawa is on his feet.

His face is a ruin. It is puffy, tear-streaked, blotchy. But his eyes...

His eyes are not empty anymore.

They are filled with a cold, terrible light. A vacuum.

"We are not surviving," he says, his voice a low, gravelly wreck.

He walks over to his swords. He picks up both of them, his movements stiff, jerky.

"Kizawa... what are you doing?" Erima asks, her voice losing its edge, replaced by a new fear. This Kizawa is wrong.

"He took her," Kizawa whispers.

He walks to the edge of the platform. He stares into the darkness.

"The Spinner King. He is down there. He took her."

"Kizawa, no," Hachiro pleads, stumbling to his own feet. "She is gone. We cannot..."

"She is NOT gone," Kizawa snarls, his voice breaking with a terrible certainty. "She is DOWN THERE."

He looks at Yogawa.

"Magician. Your book. How do we fly?"

"Fly?!" Yogawa shrieks, his own panic rising. "I cannot FLY! I have a turbulence cantrip and a minor shield! I am a SCHOLAR!"

"Then find a way down," Kizawa orders. He is not asking.

The chasm in his soul has not closed. It has found a new purpose.

It is not grief.

It is revenge.

"He is down there," Kizawa repeats, his knuckles white on his hilts. "And he has her.

He turns to face them, his shadow a long, broken thing in the green light.

"I am going down there. Who is coming with me?"

My true nightmare hasD begun.

And their desperate descent is about to start.