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Its condition has gotten worse, so says the princess. She has noted how it is more lethargic, her finding it asleep more often than awake, despite its best efforts to remain alert. Sometimes it will drift off in the midst of her replacing its bandages—its injuries are still not healed, leaking void in time with the beating of its abyss-consumed heart, enough to soak the gauze beneath its bandages partway through the cycle—and she will struggle to get it to awaken. Furthermore, it has a new source of pain, though one it does not understand itself. Some aching sensation amidst its abdomen. Nothing like it recalls having ever experienced, though its memories have been cracked and warped by centuries spent confined in dreams.
The sibling has shown their own concern, bringing it small creatures that they managed to wrangle in their even smaller hands. They expressed their desire for it to harvest the soul from the animals. It is not required to heed their orders, and so it doesn’t. Their sister—but its princess, the daughter of its creator and king—would either shoo the lesser bugs out of the home or slaughter them quickly. She explained to the ghost that the critters could carry diseases with them that could worsen its state. They did not seem to understand, only bringing more to it, of which all met the same fates. The sibling always leaves for elsewhere when she kills one, and its eye follows their movement, body too stiff to manage more than a slight tilt of the head.
It has gotten difficult for it to move, which has proved burdensome. The spider struggles to get it upright to replace the bandages at its chest, even when it attempts to push itself up. It can hear its shell clicking and crackling with each slight shift, as if its very carapace rejects it moving. To remedy this, she’s taken to having it lie in a greater number of positions, attributing its stiffness to inactivity. She will help it rotate a few times per cycle, taking care to not position it in a way that will place any pressure on the thin, hollowed parts of its shell where it was eaten by Infection and rot. After these adjustments it is left strained and panting for breath—breath it did not require before being sealed in the Temple of the Black Egg, and it has no understanding of why it is required now—pain coursing through its body relentlessly. The spider seems to recognize this and will stay at its side for some time afterwards, speaking to it in a hushed voice and petting the side of its mask until it manages to settle these automatic responses to the stimuli.
The specter will occasionally see it in such a state and will do the same that the heiress does, their smaller, grub-like paws patting its false-mask. They will communicate with it through whatever connection they forcibly made during their first meeting, feeding it sentences about how they are worried and how it is sick and how they want it to heal. It refuses any reciprocal correspondence, blocking them from its consciousness as much as it is able. They will tell it that it is dying. It has no reaction.
The princess will see the ghost so near to it and sit at its side, too. Sometimes she will speak at great lengths about anything and nothing, other times she will be silent until she notices some maintenance that needs to be done on it, where she will spring into action and talk as she works, informing it about what she is doing and why. On these occasions the sibling will stop their communication and watch her with rapt attention, walking alongside her to see each step of whatever it is she is doing up close. Whatever she does to aid it does not stop the decay of its body, though. She informs it of that fact frequently, her tone shifted by something it cannot understand.
Cycles pass with this repeated behavior. It sleeps, awakens to the spider at its side, senses how its body has worsened in the time it spent unconscious, waits for her to rebind whatever injuries she is able, and drifts off somewhere in the middle of her treatment, maybe to be awoken by the Lord of Shades bringing it another creature or to the heiress commanding it to move into some other position.
It grows weaker. During one instance where it is awake, it tries to obey the princess’s command to move, and she aids it, pushing it upwards with her own might, only for it to collapse on itself, arm unable to support its weight. While she catches her breath and assesses the situation, it tries again. Fails. And again. Fails. Again. She orders it to stop, voice louder than she has ever gotten with it. It cannot ease itself down, so it simply is left to crumple again once its arm alone cannot hold it aloft.
Hornet—it is not sure that it should be referring to the heiress as such, but it does not necessarily have orders to do otherwise—looks at it pityingly before checking its arm for any new injuries. Something she finds must intrigue her enough to take pause, running a hand over some seam in its shell. She’s in its blind spot, it cannot know what she has found, but it keeps still nonetheless. It will be informed if it must know.
She starts speaking to it, but it cannot hear her past a ringing in its head. If she is able to sense its inattentiveness it cannot tell, but she does hurry out of the room, leaving it struggling for breath, trembling, where it is. It can hear the heavy door leading to the outside open, then close.
It would not fault her for giving up on its treatment. It is a failed vessel, purposeless and useless, not even able to do what it was created to. Perhaps she has deigned it appropriate to let it rot in this new confinement, or she has gone to fetch the King to allow him to determine its fate. It had taken it as a fact that he must have allowed her to try and treat it, but has chosen to not engage with it himself. It cannot fault this, either. There is surely no pride to be found in having created something so flawed. Should he come and kill it it would be a mercy.
It has no orders to move. Its most recent command was “stop”. It steadies itself, bracing against the cushions beneath it, and forces its body to still. Forces its breath to steady. It is difficult. Laborious.
Eventually, it awakens—it was not aware it went to sleep—to some heavy, wet fabric being tossed over it, dripping hot water onto its cloak and shell. It cannot see, not just out of its missing eye, but at all. Something moves at its side, hurried footsteps rounding its head to its left, where another slab of the fabric is cycled onto it. There is speaking, but it is muffled and difficult to parse.
The cloths are hot, hot enough, surely, to be steaming. The sensation bores into its shell. It struggles to try and get them off, but simply cannot move enough to do so. It can barely move at all. It feels cracking, its shell breaking when it tries. Heat, miserable heat, thrums through its carapace. It boils. Hot Infected fury scorches it, her howling rage focused onto it as she thrashes in her confines, forcing it to convulse. Her power is too much to hold—it cannot hold her—and she screams, piercing its consciousness. It is positive it hears her. And it realizes its mistake, and how easily it let itself get misled in this illusion of her design, and how it stupidly let itself start to believe this was real. All of this, from the breaking of the seals to escaping the Temple of the Black Egg to finding the heiress to being taken care of to seeing the sibling to now, has been nothing but another temptuous dream. A dream spun by the Old Light, the Ancient Enemy, the Radiance.
It will not tolerate this deception. Perhaps her worst trick upon it yet. It thrashes, understanding that she will feel the strain of the chains against its body and recall her own capture. It cannot care if she will retaliate, if she will twist the dream and make it worse, if she will destroy its body in some awful way. It will not allow her peace.
Some cold thing presses to its false-mask, a tiny pinprick of sensation. The thing taps against it, hitting it? Patting it? And some connection stretches into its consciousness, telling it that it is safe and that the Goddess is dead and that it should hate her and that they hate her too and that it needs to stop moving and that it will die if it does not comply. It will not be tricked any longer. It will not let her trick it. It will not.
It can hardly bear to move. It is trapped beneath its shell, this illusion working to ensure the feeling weighs heavily on it. But it still tries. It shakes and thrashes and bares its mandibles and strains against its body until it hears the air around it whip and feels dozens of strands of silk against it. And in an instant it is bound, forced to lie still, those hot sheets of fabric tied down onto it, cutting into its body in lines, the scorching water dribbling down its shell. Even in this dream she wants it to remember her blazing fury.
It tries to break the bindings, tries to lift its head, tries to move even in the slightest, but finds any action too strenuous. It has exhausted itself again, and in such a short time. She will make a wreck of its body while it is incapacitated, as she has done each time. It is familiar with her games.
It is tired. Each of its breaths is closer to a pant. No matter how it tries it cannot pull in enough air to satisfy its body. Its body is heavy. It feels claws pulling at the plating of its shell, tearing its rigid carapace off, and it cannot see any of it happening, nor can it be thankful that it cannot see it, and so it stays as it is. But it hurts, pain flooding it where nothing else will. She loves seeing it squirm and break over and over and over again. She finds its responses amusing, she once told it.
It senses the connection reaching out to it again, now more tentatively, now saying that they are sorry and that sister was frightened and that it should have listened and that they do not want it to hurt and that they want it to live and that it needs to listen this time please please please please please. It will not allow the Old Light to deceive it. They are not her, the connection insists, it is awake and it is free and it is scared and it is going to be okay and it needs to trust them. It hurts, and she only wishes for it to hurt worse. They agree, they hate her and they fought her and they killed her and they hope she suffered and now she is gone and it needs to at least pretend to believe and it needs to listen to them and sister.
It blinks, an action that means very little to it due to its current blindness, and it lets this into its consciousness. The heat is awful, her signature during the worst of the dreams she forces it into, a constant reminder that she is still here. And the connection must find something actionable in this as the threads around it snap a few at a time before the heat is gone from its body entirely, with little resistance. And it recalls that she has never been so accommodating towards it. So it deems fit to listen to the connection. It listens. It can do nothing but listen. And it stills the last of the tremors and quakes that it is able to.
The connection says that it is doing good. It feels more hands on it, still prying at its shell. It does not understand what is happening but this is a threat to itself and it is supposed to respond to protect itself, an ancient order proclaiming it so. It is told that it should not and that this is sister and that she is helping and that it will die unless she does this. So it stays still despite instinct screaming at it to do otherwise. And it is asked what they should do to help it because it is still trembling and it is clearly in pain and they want to help it. It cannot know what could help. It is not trained in such matters, whatever these matters are. But it is in pain.
Nothing passes through the connection for some time. All it senses at the movement of two figures in the room with it and the continued pulling at its shell. Parts of it feel soft and weak. It pauses. And notes that it was badly injured and that many bugs have the same response to such major injuries and that it must, without a shadow of a doubt, be molting. The connection affirms this.
It can feel something fiddling with its cloak, pinning little notches into the frayed fabric. And then there is a wave of relief. It had not realized how much pain it was in until it was all gone and, certainly, it is gone now. Its body slumps, fully relaxed, and it is as if the world has regained some clarity. Beside it, it can hear Hornet—the princess, the heiress, its sister, it cannot parse one moniker from the other in this moment, which should be cause for concern, but it too caught up relishing in just how good it feels to care—hissing at the source of the connection, the sibling and Ghost and specter that haunted Hallownest: “Why would you put those charms on it? Do you know how dreadful that substance is? Lifeblood is not something to be tampered with, Little Ghost!”
There is some shuffling, some tapping, some poking from one of their small digits to its large head, before she sighs. “Yes, I do suppose it seems more relaxed. But given the present circumstances that could be detrimental. I advise that you remove those charms, unless you firmly believe them to be beneficial, as I know not how it could affect creatures of the Abyss such as yourselves.”
So long ago, when it was called to climb and seek the beacon of light at the crest of the birthplace, it remembers seeing the Lifeblood taking root in the cavern’s walls. At the time it had no frame of reference for what the substance could have been. Only when it was sealed did it learn, looking beyond the bounds of the Temple with the sight of the world gifted to it by Father-King. It was a vivid blue that consumed, much like the void, but also controlled, like the Old Light. It does not believe it ought to appreciate the substance. But if it is what has taken away its pain then it must be amenable for it to tolerate it. It has no orders to avoid the substance, at the very least.
Time passes it by in relative silence, other than the occasional words from Princess-Sister-Hornet-Heiress and some ripping and binding of its discarded cuticle, the one it is molting. It cannot feel what is being done to it anymore. It has no physical sensation but for some pressure, when it feels the Sibling-Ghost-Specter poking it or patting it or when Sister-Heiress-Princess-Hornet pulls off more of its stubborn shell. The pressure is a cause of a great deal of discomfort, but its most recent order is “stop” in the context of movement, and as such it will remain still until told otherwise to do so. It ignores its recent failure in this regard.
It blinks—it still cannot see, so the gesture is still of no meaning, but it blinks nonetheless, likely as a result of a still present exhaustion weighing heavily upon it—and senses Hornet-Princess-Sister-Heiress at the side of its head, the Ghost-Sibling-Specter having crawled onto its false-mask entirely. They are fiddling with something to do with the void of its intact eye, their paws pressing gently at the area. It is still panting for air, but finds no more resistance from the old carapace. Now, the softness of the teneral shell is exposed fully to the air, weak and fragile. It can feel where bindings have been stitched into them in many locations, injuries old and new held together by silken threads. Cavities where Infection pulsed still hang open alongside some smaller gashes caused by the ripping of the old shell so suddenly and violently from the new. Feebly, naively, it tries to flex its left hand, hoping for some sort of miracle to have occurred. But, still, there is nothing, the right arm alone in its operation.
It can feel the Sibling-Specter-Ghost sit up, more alert, and peel something back from its eye. It looks up at them—looks, its sight has been restored in their remaining eye socket—and watches as they triumphantly hold up an eye cap, a blinding material some bugs develop during a proper molt, itself included.
“Very good, Ghost. Now ease down gently. We wish not to injure it any further than it already is.” She speaks to them gently, as if they are not as old as it and as if they are not more powerful than her.
They look down at it, something jovial, perhaps almost joking, passing through their connection. Something about how it is more communicative when under the effects of Lifeblood. It cannot feel any pain due to the substance. It cannot feel anything at all. It cannot feel anything at all, as it always should have been. They hop down to the floor, a flash of concern passing to it from them, but it does not follow their movements afterwards, wherever they may go. They do leave the room it is confined in, though. It can hear them going.
Sister-Hornet-Heiress-Princess watches them leave before returning her attention to it, a hand stroking the apex of one of its horns. “You certainly gave us a scare with how subtle the signs of the molt were. It explains much of your recent symptoms. I hope to see your state improve with this behind you, but I understand such things take time.” She stops her ministrations and rounds its body until she is at its left side, hands fidgeting with the charms pinned onto its cloak. “It seems unwise to leave all of these on, but I can concede the point that they do seem to be helping you, at least somewhat. I will seek to strike a compromise with Ghost, but tell me now if they are causing you to ail, Hollow, and I shall see them removed immediately.” She looks at it expectantly. It has no response for her. And she seems content with that, backing away toward the door, left ajar after the Sibling-Specter-Ghost left. “Very well. I will leave you to rest.”
She leaves so quickly it can hardly watch her go. Simply there one moment and gone the next. Or it is so tired as to miss her movements. Perhaps it could be the Lifeblood, too, fogging its perception. There is a whole host of causes to its folly.
It breathes, allowing itself to simply feel the passing of air into and out of its spiracles. And it falls asleep, as simply as that.