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It had been countless generations of bugs since Hornet’s first unwilling visit to Pharloom, and what happened in that distant kingdom still weighed heavy in her thoughts. In that way it had become like Hallownest— in many ways, a second home, and more home these days than Hallownest’s ruin could ever be, despite the new life sprouting in it and what remained of the old flourishing once more. She had meant what she had said in that distant time, that she had no desire to once more stand sentinel over a dying kingdom, and thus far she had kept to that and more, also refusing to guard the rebuilding scraps for so long that she became a fixture.
Instead, she journeyed to new kingdoms. She was aware that her legend was growing— The Last Weaver, itinerant hero, solver of problems, slayer of the occasional God. Though, most of the stories she had heard tended to greatly exaggerate both the number of slain Gods and her own stature, which made it convenient to move within new kingdoms relatively unmolested. It did, however, make it inconvenient when she needed foolish bugs to heed her and she could not invoke her own reputation. If Hornet had learned one thing in her long life, it was that no boon came free.
Hornet was in one such kingdom now, a vast blue thing of water and weed. This is what had drawn her thoughts back to Pharloom, the memory of a memory of a similar kingdom of coral, long passed into nothingness, destroyed by the mere whim of the servants of that which named itself a God. Light danced down through waving fronds as Hornet rested on a rock within a bubble of air, and listened to Eva’s song echoing within her silk.
Eva, the other reason Pharloom would never be far from her thoughts. In all her travels, there had never been another like her. Hornet had bound several crests after her journey through Pharloom (never as many at a time as that reverent kingdom had provided), but never again had she had cause to take another’s entire being into her own. It was… strange. Strange, to hear another’s singing echoing within herself whenever she had cause to rest. Strange to feel it vibrating through her soul, speeding her regeneration of Silk. Strange how it all remained strange even after so long, never losing the feeling of another being within her, even in so reduced a form.
Hornet had hoped, when she first bound Eva, that they would both be wrong. That Hornet would be able to feel some sense of Eva's thoughts within her, that perhaps they could even converse in some way. She was not surprised when all that was left was the Sylphsong. In some ways, even that was better than she had any right to expect. She was eternally grateful that she could still hear some semblance of Eva’s voice so that it could never fade from her memory, as even her own mother’s mask had. What she had expected, and what she had believed Eva had expected, was at most an expansion of her Vesticrest, more likely some vague sense of change that faded with time. At worst, a significant alteration of her personality.
That last could not be entirely counted out. Before Pharloom, Hornet had no inclination to be any sort of wanderer, let alone a hero. She was content to guard Hallownest’s remnants from those who would defile it, and nurture those who would seek to make it again a home— the expanding town of Dirtmouth, growing steadily richer off of scavenging the ruins of her father’s civilization below, the mosskin of Greenpath reforgeing their own civilization with the patient guidance of Unn, and of course the Mantises, who once again worked in harmony with the fungi of their caverns and continued their eternal guard against Deepnest, which maintained its fraught relationship with the concept of civilization as it recovered from the infection. Now she journeyed far and wide, helping as she went. The seeds of this transformation were planted well before she bound Eva. She had already remembered the warm feeling that came from helping others for no particular reason besides that they needed aid and she possessed the ability to give it to them. But she had thought that she would return to Hallownest after.
And she had returned. Of course she had. But then… she left again, under her own power, wondering if she was driven by her own desire or Eva’s. Every journey through the wastes between kingdoms had her ceaselessly dwelling on this question, and she never could settle on an answer. It was disturbing to have such a fundamental aspect of her nature be unknowable to her. But for now, she had to get up from her bench and find her way to the center of this coral tangle and confront whatever awaited her there.
In time, Hornet freed that kingdom of water and weed from the terror plaguing it— no being of higher caste, but a pretender, using the fear of their puppeted monster to consolidate power as an ordinary bug. She exposed the ruse, she accepted tokens of thanks, and she slipped quietly away into the howling caverns beyond to navigate back to Pharloom. It had, after all, been too long since her last visit. And as she rested on the road, deep in a crack in the rock that sheltered her from the wind, she felt the echo of Eva once more within her shell, strengthening her for the journey.
It had been a very long time since Hornet had taken a mate. She usually tried not to think about it, but this new kingdom appeared particularly obsessed with the concept. There were endless elaborate courting rituals, complicated mating arrangements, and one’s social standing depended on the “fitness of one’s match” (judged by some arcane standards Hornet could not bring herself to deduce) even more than one’s occupation or one’s parentage. A baffling arrangement all around, and a severely aggravating one given that her own status of “currently unmated but having taken several lifelong mates in the past” left some bugs treating her with extreme reverence and others with sheer disdain, depending on how they each evaluated her impossible situation by their inscrutable rules. Normally she would simply leave— she had refused to deal with kingdoms before— but from the stirrings in her Silk and the rumors swirling around, she suspected that the kingdom’s Tyrant was of Weaver descent, if not a direct creation of Grand Mother Silk herself.
So Hornet was stuck, attempting to untangle yet another plot while simultaneously dealing with her own long-muted but now re-awakening longing for a mate. The primary issue is and would always be one of lifespan. While Hornet was still growing, and therefore presumably was not truly ageless, there were actual rocks outside of Hallownest that were weathering faster than she gained height, and she had not molted in uncounted generations. That left her options for mates almost entirely limited to other Pale beings, or at least those of higher caste. Sadly, she was more likely to seek to hunt and kill those she found than she was to seek to mate with them. Her peers continued to have an… unfortunate tendency towards violence and domination, and few were tempered with an upbringing like hers.
It was unsurprising, then, that as she laid down to rest in an inn and the Sylphsong began thrumming gently in her shell that her thoughts once more turned to Eva. Created to be a rival and successor to Grand Mother Silk, she had some aspects of the higher caste— agelessness, needing little to no sustenance, powers beyond a bug— and in others could not be more different. Regardless, she remained the only ageless or near-ageless being Hornet had encountered in her long life that she was neither kin to nor repulsed by.
And yet she had killed her. By Eva’s own request, to fulfill Eva’s last and dearest wish. But still, by her claw and by her Silk, Eva’s thinking mind was gone from this world. The only being Hornet might have considered taking for a mate, bound within her very shell, her very soul, at the height of intimacy, but still, fundamentally, dead. Unthinking. Nothing but a comforting song and a font of Silk.
She had not let herself think of Eva in these terms before. She had not even had the thought of Eva as a mate during Pharloom’s near fall— only afterwards, on her return journey to Hallownest, had that idea crossed her mind, and she had quickly resolved to cease thinking about impossibilities. And it had worked, for generations, until this infuriating kingdom brought it back. Generations too late, nothing to be done, and Hornet could not stop herself from thinking of the terrible what if. But for now, she had an arsenal to refine for the new threats she faced and a shell to give some long-delayed rest.
In time, Hornet slew Aphra, the self-proclaimed Weaver of Love, and left that kingdom to sort out what was to become of its culture now freed of its heretofore mysterious ruler and her subtle, hidden Silk. It would no doubt continue to be insufferable even after the fall of its Tyrant, but hopefully its arc would bend towards a kind love rather than a cruel one. And Hornet would continue to be not quite alone, and both comforted and tormented for it.
The snails had caused no end of trouble in Hallownest, and had nearly doomed Pharloom. It was perhaps unsurprising that a kingdom dominated by snail nobility was one of the most dangerous places Hornet had ever visited.
Hornet could protect her shell. She could do this better than any bug alive, perhaps any being alive. She had killed a god at a fraction of her current age and experience, and that hadn’t even been the hard part of that particular ordeal. Hornet could protect her mind. Her Pale nature lent her some resistance, but very few had the harrowing experience of staving off a higher being’s infection through the long collapse of a kingdom which gave Hornet a skill against mental intrusion greater than any she knew save the White Lady. What she was significantly less skilled at was protecting her soul.
This was largely due to a lack of training and practice. Snail shamans were as a rule secretive and unhelpful except in only the most dire of circumstances, so it was surpassingly rare for her to find one that was willing to teach her, or even hold a reasonable conversation. While she could do quite a bit with Soul channeled through Silk, the effects tended to be rather direct, and the more subtle manipulations required for most forms of defense still eluded her. Far more problematic was the lack of enemies to train against. Attacks on her shell were common, and could be sought out in a controlled manner to sharpen her skills. Attacks on her Soul had happened only twice before, both times from the influence of Grand Mother Silk, both relatively simple but effective cages.
Hornet survived through preparation. She was absolutely not prepared for this kingdom, and she was unable to retreat due to the powerful bindings upon it.
As bad as the many curses strewn throughout the kingdom were, as underprepared as she was to face them, they were still not anywhere close to the dangers of Pharloom— nothing ever was. She had her full power available to her, she had her armory of tools packed neatly into her cloak, and she had the deadliest needle in the known world, recently honed by a pinmaster in Plinney’s craft-heritage, his line of apprentices now revered and continuing to service Pharloom’s blades to the present time. But the kingdom of Everspirit had her more wary than Pharloom ever had, for one reason: Eva.
Every cursed blow resonated strangely against her Silk. Just now, when she had sat down to rest in some tiny hidden nook, the Sylphsong had wavered for the first time in Hornet’s memory before quickly recovering. Eva might be dead, but keeping her presence within her was the only way Hornet could fulfill Eva’s last wish. She could not betray her memory by allowing this last remnant to come to harm.
But even that conjured a sad thought: even without outside intervention, would Eva’s remnant continue to echo through her Silk forever? Or would it fade with time as much as her memories of her mother? Did she even know for sure whether or not this had already started?
She didn’t know. She couldn’t know. She was changed, but she wasn’t sure by how much. She had loved, or at least the first stirrings of that emotion, but she only realized it after it became an impossibility. She wanted to carry Eva’s song forever, but she knew eventually something— these damnable snails, her own death, the plodding passage of time, something— would happen, and Eva would sing her final note.
So Hornet planned: she would seek out a snail willing to help her prepare against these curses. She would find a snail who would teach her to ward her Soul. In all the shelled nobility of this accursed kingdom, she would find one who would help her, and she would pay whatever cost was needed. She would live. Eva would persist. Another kingdom would fall, hopefully to be rebuilt.
And Hornet would continue to see the world, one kingdom at a time. It was what she wanted.