Non-Pokémon What Salvage Remains [Silksong]

[love]

What Salvage Remains

On an errand to secure her independence from Hornet, Lace meets a construct yet more ephemeral than she.

Thanks to @Eal Tides and Slink34884 for beta reading.
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Lace woke still numb with exhaustion. Her refuge offered but a thin cross of dusty light to see by, and she did not try to look around. There were sounds, coming distorted through the throats of the bell. Spirited conversation, the clinking of cups, laughter. After a few minutes trying to tune them out, she gave in and moved, reaching for the entrance hatch. Some void-addled part of her mind expected the sudden light to sting, but she felt only a banal ache in her eyes. On a plank outside the door someone had set out a bowl of water, an ornate handheld mirror, and a small spool of silk. “Until a better alternative is found, I will provide,” Hornet had said on their trek back to the diving bell. It seemed she hadn’t yet reneged. The water and mirror were unnecessary, though. Lace preferred not to look at herself, and she’d rather not wash here. She took the spool and the bowl, emptied, and walked briskly west, head down.

But for the chirps and splashes of creatures unknown, Shellwood was quiet. Lace filled the bowl, picked out a few weeds, and began to wash. It would have been difficult to be thorough with only the moonlight as illumination, and Lace did not really try. As she settled into the routine, recollections came. The black of the void. Screams that numbed the body with vibration. Silken tresses dwindling as her m—

She dug her claw into her arm. Stop. Stop. You made your choice. You cast her out. She is gone. She deserved it.

A melody whispered through the treetops. Silken strings, plucked. Lace stilled, listening despite herself. The musician was inexperienced, their tempo inconsistent and dynamics more or less arbitrary. Lace recalled her own fledgling steps into music, devouring the vault’s scores with stumbling voice, too entranced to notice the darkness and dust; and she felt as though some warm, wet parasite were squirming in her chest. That was before she’d grown desperate. How long ago it seemed.

For an hour she stood transfixed, the squirming never abating, until at last the music stopped. She slumped to the ground, somehow exhausted. A minute later, someone approached, footsteps silent on the wood of the platform.

“Are you well, child?” Hornet asked.

“I’m fine.”

She glanced at the spool. “Would you like me to mend you? It would be quick, and I would not have to touch you.”

“Hmph. I can do it myself.”

“I don’t doubt that. I only thought to spare you the effort.”

“Shouldn’t you dedicate your efforts to the living?”

“Child,” Hornet said, kneeling.

“Just go,” Lace forced out, just before her throat tightened too much to speak.

Passed the briefest of pauses, then Hornet then stood and walked into the dark beyond the archway. “Tomorrow,” came her voice, “I will begin seeking means to secure your independence. I will leave at mid-morning. Accompany me if you like.”

She could have led with that, Lace thought.

***​

The next day saw them at the border between the moors and chaparral. Water trickled down the walls and dripped from long beards of moss, pooling between chunks of gray rock. The smell of peat suffused the air. There was little other vegetation, only a few stubborn weeds, and no signs that the place had ever felt the clutch of civilization.

“Here,” called Hornet, hanging four stories up from a ledge. “You will see the opening once you ascend.”

Ascend Lace did, bounding up the wall in four quick jumps, and though she nearly slipped on the last it still gave her some small measure of satisfaction to know she had ascended faster than Hornet. Perched atop the ledge, she could now see the slit just beside it, barely wider than she, and dark as pitch. From inside spilled a stream. “Not a welcoming entrance,” she said.

“It widens deeper in. But do proceed with caution. There is no guarantee the gas killed all within, and the weavers may have set traps.”

Hornet had mentioned the gas before they’d set out. Likely it had found its way in from the magma pools below. She’d only been able to proceed about a half hour into the nest proper before growing woozy, at about the same time the silkeater she’d brought had died. Of course Lace, contrivance that she was, would have no such problem.

“Spare me the lecture,” Lace said. “I’ll not end somewhere so dreary.”

“All right. Here.” Hornet gave a lamp that, judging by the construction of its casing, must have been salvaged from a weaver automaton.

“Good. Try not to miss me too much.”

Indeed the cave widened, but not by much. With no space to go around the stream, Lace had to walk through it. She swept the lamplight along the walls as she went, checking for traps—which, she told herself, she would be doing anyway, regardless of Hornet’s advice—but she saw only gray-blue stone. For all her time studying, she’d never achieved an education in geology, and she somewhat regretted that now. It was the only thing that might have made this walk engaging.

After a couple hours, or maybe the whole afternoon, who could tell in this gloom—her path intersected a corridor. Here the leaking groundwater had been tamed, guided along the ceiling and walls by claw-wide channels, flowing into stone tubs, dripping from their drain holes, finally ending in sunken gutters. Given the large puddle and chunks of debris, Lace suspected this entrance had probably not been part of the original layout. Such brute force struck her as exemplary for the spider.

Lace, her body burdened with moisture, nearly misjudged her jump over the puddle. Once clear, she set to drying herself, gently wringing her thread and warming her wettest spots with the lamp, which gave off far more heat than she’d have expected. The chore slowed her, forcing her eyes downward, and likely it was only for this that she saw the construct. At first she did quite recognize it, lying bare on the ground, but some faint resonance of memory compelled her to look more closely. It was small enough to hold in her claw and unexpectedly light. Lenses studded the metallic skeleton, and circuitry laced it, connecting to a central plate—a motherboard, she remembered. Encompassing the assembly was a hard light shield, a weak one, easily punctured with a clawtip. One socket on the motherboard was conspicuously empty; the battery lay a few inches away, a glass cylinder filled about a third of the way with white fluid. Lace applied the lamp bulb until all seemed reasonably dry, plugged the battery in—and started at the sudden flash of orange. She was still gathering her wits, claw on the hilt of her pin, when it spoke.

“Hello! This one is construct WK-EL-ZMLYC3. It thanks you for restoring it. Maintaining its atmospheric shield had nearly drained the rest of its auxiliary power.”

Lace blinked. Before her hovered the form of a clearwing moth projected in hard light, just large enough to encompass the hardware. The sight connected the final puzzle piece in her head. She hadn’t studied the architects’ work thoroughly, but she knew that they once had experimented with circuitry and the means to power it. These projects had seen some success, evinced by the drone before her, but to produce the batteries required such intensive silk processing that only a few dozen were ever made.

“This one is curious about your nature,” it continued, hovering closer. “It senses a density of silk. Are you a construct as well?”

“I am of the Citadel,” she growled. “Beyond that is none of your business.”

The drone distanced itself with the swiftness of the bug it resembled. “This one begs forgiveness. It did not mean to pry.”

“Whatever. I’m looking for silk stores here. Do you know of them?”

“This one wishes to see them as well!” It rose a few inches, wingbeats accelerating in apparent excitement. “It can sense them—and a fine sensation it is!—but its orders require it to return to the architect. According to its internal clock, it is already decades late.”

“The Citadel is fallen, and its caste with it. You may disregard those orders.”

“Override requires elevated privileges.”

“The password is rosebud.”

“Yes!” It flew dizzying circles around her, wings whistling like a very distant firework. “To be in the presence of such densities of silk will be like a heavenly choir to this one’s senses! Bless you, stranger!” Suddenly it landed, white vapor hissing from its head. “It forgot,” it said, voice undulating in what for all Lace knew could have been genuine wooziness, “thermal efficiency has consistently subceeded benchmarks.”

She stared. What the hell did they do to this thing? A construct shouldn’t be so cheerful. “Try not to excite yourself to death, then,” she said. “Let’s go.”

“It”—it paused—“cannot safely fly. It must cool.”

Lace sighed and picked it up. It proved even hotter than she’d expected, forcing her to constantly adjust her grip to avoid being burned. “Then just tell me where to go.”

The corridors kinked and branched bizarrely, their builders having been forced to account for the structure of the caves. “How did you end up here?” Lace asked. “Your ilk was supposed to help guide pilgrims. Don’t tell me the weavers were attached to you.”

“No, this one was dispatched from the Citadel. It was only ever ordered to seek weaver presence. Although it recalls that the architect didn’t seem too pleased to have issued those orders…”

Of course. Why wouldn’t She manipulate the architects? If anything, Lace should be surprised She hadn’t leaned more on the twelfth. Perhaps her own creation had had to do with that. She’d been the shiny new toy, until something newer and shinier had come along…

“Ah well,” the construct continued. “No sense dwelling on that now. This one would rather hear what you’ve been up to. You must have seen more of Pharloom than this one. Tell all!”

“Ugh. You flatter yourself, to think I’ve any interest in educating you. Besides, you’ll forget it all soon enough.”

“Oh. Okay.”

In the silence echoed the brush of silken clawtips on stone.

“So, uh, is there anything you do want to talk about? Anything at all?”

Lace sighed loudly, but she had to admit she was getting bored too. And nothing she said to this silly ephemera would be preserved anyway. “Since you’re so desperate, I suppose I’ll indulge. What do you want to hear about?”

“Anything! What’s the prettiest place you’ve been to?”

It had been some time since she’d looked at Pharloom with an eye for beauty; most of the time, if she left the Citadel, it was with a mission. “A good question,” she admitted, feeling old cobwebs stir in the back of her mind. “Depends how wild you like it. The lowlands are green, the wetlands floral, and both are messy. Aesthetics aside, you wouldn’t last in the heat of the moors. But you might like Mount Fay.”

She liked Mount Fay, she remembered suddenly. She remembered the water dark blue and shining, the down tinged blue by the stone, the sky an arc of clear and bracing blue; she remembered springing high off the heads of driftlin, a crown jewel in a trove of white, soaring till the foothills yielded to haze. So distractable she’d been in those youthful days, when all had been new and her mother’s stifling presence still faint. Not so unlike her companion, she thought, watching it skim the water.

As they proceeded, the original character of the weavenest began to assert itself. Increasingly, the ceiling lights began to work, warm light tempering the blue of the stone. The tubs began to fill with algae, and in some places the neglected agricultural plants still clung to life. The construct spent less time questioning and more time oohing and aahing.

It had returned to her claws to cool down again when it spoke. “Miss,” it said, gesturing with its beak toward a jaundiced dropberry plant, “can you bring this one up to that flower? It would like to see it more closely.”

“Shouldn’t you—” She stopped herself. Distractions—why not try? “Fine.”

In contrast to rest of the plant, the flower was pretty, a perfect violet globe like a blown glass ornament. “Wow,” said the construct, nestling inside. “So cozy.” It stuck out its head and presented its long proboscis.

“So it is,” she said, momentarily amused—but then she thought of the roses in the Citadel, and with that thought came a rush of memories too thick to untangle, and she dug her claw into her arm until it hurt.

“Miss?”

“Never mind,” she said sullenly. “Let’s just go.”

“Oh, but—Okay!”

Shortly they entered a round room. A skylight underlooked gray waters. Caustics lapped at silken hammocks and lore tablets stacked on tables and shelves. The construct beelined for one table in particular, or really for the dulcimer that lay upon it. “An instrument! How delightful.” It plucked the strings with its proboscis, and the notes came out sharp, distorted. Lace winced as though it were her own threads that had been so abused and rushed to snatch the construct away. “No,” she said, as one might reprimand an errant pet. “Don’t pick so hard.”

“Forgive this one,” it said. “It was never taught. It only wanted to experiment.”

“Then experiment with respect. And try to tune it first, at least.” She demonstrated, surprised at how well the instrument had retained its sound in such a humid environment. It was a teardrop baritone dulcimer with eight silk strings and nacre arabesque embellished along the fretboard, and closer inspection revealed protective runes carved into the body. It must have pained the weavers to leave this behind. Strangely, the thought brought Lace no satisfaction.

She finished tuning. “Now do as you like,” she said, her voice coming out unexpectedly quiet. “I’m going to dry myself, now that we’re somewhere that isn’t dripping.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

It played with an incompetent curiosity that precluded even the most basic familiarity with rhythm and melody, stirring memories even older than Hornet had. It was as if…

“You’ve never heard a song before?” Lace asked, frozen in place with the lamp still aimed at her sodden head.

“No. It… It had no need to. It was dispatched from the workshop, and its course never brought it near the choristers.”

Lace’s claws curled around the lamp as though it were a throat to strangle. “Fine then,” she said, more to herself than to the construct, and made for the dulcimer.

“Miss?”

“Listen.”

Her claw encountered a familiar psychosomatic resistance as she reached for the strings, but she forced herself past it. Her mind was a bramble of thorns now and perhaps forever, so what was one more prick? It’s not like she hadn’t done this a thousand times, played a thousand different scores on a hundred different instruments, seeking the right timbre and melody to wake Her, yearning for another god to supplicate…

“Miss?”

She began to play, practice arpeggios and scales, and because she couldn’t tell if the construct was getting it yet, she tried a melody. She’d meant to play a Citadel hymn, something that might have sunk into the construct’s silk before refinement, but at the last moment her memory-sick mind veered as though magnetically repulsed, and she began to improvise, a mournful dirge hovering between related keys, tinged with accidentals, grave phrases with long rests between; meandering, searching, stumbling; then slowing, like a music box winding down; and then finally ending in a somber iv chord that she did not resolve.

“Oh, miss,” the construct said, and there was something in its voice, a certain pity, that caused her to smack it. It clattered to the ground and did not move, its projection gone. Lace froze. The only sound was the faint trickling of water.

Right, she thought, standing. I don’t need it. I can find the stores myself. She walked quickly through the corridors, still not fully dry, looking at nothing, picking a direction randomly when the way forked. Minutes passed. A faint sunlike glow began to illuminate the corridors. She followed it because she had nothing else to follow. After passing through three more doorways, she entered a room so bright it stung her eyes. The light came from a frosted glass fixture that resembled a skylight and illuminated every corner of the—she blinked—the conservatory. Flowers wound around silken arbors, blooming in colorful profusion like spilled sugar candies. Along the walls spanned silken lattices that might make a playground for a small, flying bug. On the other end of the room, a water-powered drum spun, looping through a cheerful melody. She felt as though a craw had reached into her chest and ripped out a talonful of thread.

The run back to the common room took only a minute or two, little time to think about why she’d chosen to return. Why did she care? she thought as she scanned the construct for damage. She’d killed before, real bugs with flesh and lymph, although she hadn’t thought of it that way, not really, because really it was She who’d consigned them, divine judgment beyond reproach from mortals; and more importantly, she thought, the construct’s palpable wonder still fresh in her head, she’d never seen herself in them. What these priorities said about her, positive and negative, she’d contemplate eventually, in a place more comfortable physically and with a mind more at ease with itself, but for now this was the extent of her insight.

The crack in the motherboard was fine but intersected two signal traces. It could be mended, she thought, maybe, but not here.

***​

The bugs of Bellhart, tired from the day’s work and yesterday’s festivities, had by and large retired early. Only one light remained on.

“Hornet!” Lace called, bursting into her bellhome. “Soldering tools. Something needs repaired.”

Hornet put down her tools and looked up from the half-finished cogfly she’d been working on as though she’d been expecting the intrusion. “Lay it on the mat,” she said, clearing a space on the floor amidst clusters of cogs, shell shards, and scraps.

Lace did as suggested. When Hornet leaned in close to look, she felt a faint indignance, as though it were she being scrutinized by those unreadable eyes. “Such a design,” Hornet said, “I’ve never seen before. You say it needs soldering?” She pointed out the hairline crack in the circuitry. “Here?”

Lace knew she couldn’t have reasonably expected Hornet—even with her countless years—to be familiar with Citadel circuitry. Yet her stomach sank. “Yes,” she said. “I can do it. I—” She looked at her claws, which after most of a day’s use had unraveled to loose thread at the tips.

“I will do it,” Hornet said. “If you’re sure it’s those spots that need to be done.”

“I don’t know,” said Lace, more indignantly than was fair. “But that’s the best I’ve thought of. If it works…” She slumped against the doorframe. “If it works, I will repay you. It’s important.”

“What is it?”

“A Citadel construct,” she said. “It may be my only way of finding the silk stores.” The explanation wasn’t strictly a lie, even if it had the spirit of one.

“All right. I’ll see if I can repair it. In the meantime you are welcome to rest in the bed.”

Instead she just sank to the floor. She still had to repair her claws, she thought. But a day of walking in the damp had her so very tired…

***​

Hornet’s claws were steady and her tools good, but to repair signal traces by soldering would be a small miracle. So while she did about as well as any bug could have done, the damaged traces remained dysfunctional. But neither she nor Lace could have known that those traces only mediated power for the construct’s hard light projection, nor that the deeper problem—in short, excess charge in capacitors that expected zero watts at startup—had been fixed already by time. All this to say that, despite all apparent odds, when Hornet finally sat up and flipped the power switch, she was greeted by a chipper synthetic voice.

***​

Lace woke just in time to hear what sounded like the end of a conversation.

“—have to ask her yourself.”

She looked over. “What’s…”

Hornet turned and presented the construct. “It is without its projection,” she said, “but it functions otherwise.”

“Hello, miss,” it said. “This one is obligated to recommend that we set out forthwith, as its battery will not last much longer, and it is not sure if it can be turned on again, if turned off.”

Lace looked around. There were no marionette strings trailing from her limbs, nor was her silk stained black, nor were there arachnoid eyes ghosting the walls along her peripheral vision, nor any of the other telltale signifiers that usually accompanied her dreams. “Uh,” she said, gathering her wits, “right. You still want to see the silk stores?”

“It doubts it would make it quite that far. A shame. So close they were.”

“Then where would you like to go?”

Lace noticed a quizzical tilt to Hornet’s head, but the older bug said nothing.

“Where would it—Oh! The red one was just telling it more about Shellwood. It would like to see the wetlands. Plus, it will not take long to reach.”

“Then let’s go.” She grabbed it from Hornet. On her way out the door, she turned her head. “Thanks,” she muttered, and left without waiting for a response.

She showed the construct Shellwood. She showed it the sticky purple flowers high in the trees; the florid mazes of willow racemes; the fireflied ponds; the particolored lichens and mosses; the marbled wetlands and the night-black streams; and then finally settled high in the canopy, where starlight streamed faintly through a crack in the earth above.

“Wow,” said the construct, its voice crackling now, like an electronic death rattle. “That was amazing. This one thanks you greatly.”

“It is good that you enjoyed it. But don’t strain yourself talking too much.”

“Okay.”

A moment passed. The construct’s power light held steady. Nearby, a cricket joined the night’s thrumming chorus.

“There is one thing I would like to ask you,” said the construct, “if it is not too much intrusion.”

“What is it?”

“Why are you sad?”

Yesterday, had she wanted, and had the inquirer been different, she could have answered readily. She thought about it all the time. But tonight, sitting with this creature expiring and strange, even stranger than her, and minding all that had transpired since they’d met, she found herself lost.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. “There’s… Much has happened recently. I’ve never liked myself. But I used to think about it less. Maybe sometime soon I can overlook it again. Salvage something out of this…” She tried to think of a word, couldn’t. “I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you like yourself?”

“It’s arduous to explain,” she said, the threads of her cheeks faintly glowing with embarrassment. “Besides, you haven’t much time. Please just enjoy what’s left.”

“Okay. Thanks, miss.”

“It’s nothing. Nothing at all.”

They stayed there a few minutes without talking, Lace looking at the construct and the construct looking, she supposed, at the stars; then the construct’s power light turned off, and it was nothing more than a piece of cooling metal in her claws.

Though Lace’s culture had spurned death, even she knew that a companion who died should be commemorated with a song. Would that she still had the dulcimer, but there was one instrument, at least, that she would never lack.

Her voice came out hesitant at first, groping. But as she recalled its time with her, she picked up momentum, interjecting clusters of eighths every two or three measures; then every one; then escalating until she was streaming through bright allegro phrases and stopping only to linger on the notes between; and then escalating still further in a voice that replied to and interrupted itself in lonely imitations of rounds, ascending in dizzying spirals; then finally, without warning, ending on one long, high tonic C.

The crickets resumed. But she fell asleep with the song still resonating in her mind.