Zelaine had been in the bathroom for hours.
The crystal sat on the edge of the sink, catching the light in ways ordinary crystal did not, the faint pulse of yai inside it visible to her eyes if she looked at the right angle. She had been looking at it from every angle.
She had turned it over in her hands more times than she could count, pressing her fingers against its surface, feeling the energy beneath it the way you might press against a bruise to map its edges.
She wanted to crack it open.
'No. I must not.'
She pulled her hands back and set it down again and stared at it.
What had it been doing inside the well. What was the white light that had been so intense it nearly blinded her when she looked down. She did not have answers to either question and the not knowing sat in her chest like a splinter, small and persistently uncomfortable.
She was still turning it over in her mind when Ellamele's voice came through the house calling her name.
Zelaine pocketed the crystal, splashed water on her face, and headed out.
"What happened?"
Ellamele led her around to the piglet pen without much preamble. Zelaine followed and then stopped at the fence and looked.
One of the piglets lay on its side, still and clearly dead. She might have attributed it to any number of ordinary causes except for the thing growing from its midsection. An extra leg. Fully formed, pale and slightly too long, jutting from the body at an angle that made the stomach turn.
'What.'
Zelaine's frown settled deep.
'Was it because of the white light.'
She looked down at the pocket where the crystal sat and said nothing.
****
The situation outside was considerably quieter than the chaos they were leaving behind, and Atiya did not need to be told twice. He swung a leg over the broken window frame and began to climb through.
His foot found the wooden sill.
'Maybe I can use this chance to scarper.'
The thought arrived fully formed and immediately attractive. The barrier had been breached. The village was in disarray. In all this confusion, with everyone's attention pointed at spider-shaped problems, who would even notice one man slipping away into the disorder?
His expression shifted.
'How foolish am I.'
Even if he cleared the village, even if he made it past the outer edges without being spotted, Leishna had been very clear about the geography of this place. The village sat at the top of a snowy mountain. And the mountain was not empty. Whatever lived out there made the spider currently destroying a house behind him look like something you could step on. He would be alone, in the cold, with no shelter and no allies, surrounded by yai beasts of a caliber that apparently made seasoned villagers nervous.
He exhaled through his nose and let the fantasy go.
Then he turned back toward the house and remembered something.
"Leishna. She ran up the stairs."
Kellen went very still. In the urgency of getting Atiya out, in the singular focus of protecting the sacrifice, she had completely forgotten the girl. Leishna, who was arguably more important than him. The realization crossed her face plainly.
"I will go find her!"
"I will come too," Atiya said, already moving back toward the window. "I will not leave her behind."
He chose those words with some care.
Kellen paused for just a moment, looking at him, and something passed through her expression that she did not bother to conceal.
'He is brave and kind.'
Kellen stepped back inside and took stock quickly. Two guards still standing. The rest were on the floor. She and Atiya did not spare them more than a glance before moving quietly toward the stairs, using the noise of the ongoing fight to cover their movement.
The spider noticed them, she was certain of it, but the living opponents in front of it were more immediate and for the first time in what must have been a long while its hunger was being answered. It let them go.
They went up the stairs and found Leishna's door locked from the inside.
She's here.
"Leishna! Hey, open the door."
A short wait. Then the lock clicked and the door swung open and Leishna stood there, looking them both over with the calm assessment of someone who had been sitting quietly upstairs running probability calculations.
"I thought you had become its feast," she said, and smiled.
"Sorry to disappoint you. Let's run."
Leishna looked at him for a moment, genuinely uncertain what he meant by that.
The immediate danger. Or something further. Before she could decide, the answer became irrelevant.
A sound came from below. Loud, rhythmic, getting closer. Pounding and screeching both at once, rising up through the floorboards.
"Damn, it's here."
Kellen grabbed the door and slammed it shut, bracing her weight against it. It bought them less than three seconds. The door and a section of wall around it came apart simultaneously under the impact, the force of it throwing Kellen backwards across the room. She hit the bed frame hard and crumpled against it.
"Aggggh."
Blood was already coming from somewhere near her nape, dark and fast.
Atiya hit the wall too. He was back on his feet in under five seconds.
The spider filled the ruined doorway, what remained of it. Three limbs where there had been many more. It scanned the three of them with its twitching sensory cluster, unhurried now, like something that had already made its decisions.
On one of its remaining limbs, impaled and still, was Cid's sister. Or most of her. From the shoulders down.
Atiya's eyes moved to the creature's maw, which was slightly open.
He looked away.
The nausea hit the back of his throat and he swallowed it down hard and breathed through his nose and focused on the window instead. Outside, through the glass, a stream of guards was converging on the building from multiple directions, moving fast, well organized.
He took one glance at Kellen.
She was in a terrible state. Slumped against the bed, one hand pressed to the wound at her nape, blood seeping between her fingers. She was conscious but her eyes were not fully tracking.
'The plan was always Leishna,' he thought. 'She knows the layout. She knows the ways out. Kellen would have been a complication eventually.'
Fate had handled that neatly enough. But the guards outside were going to arrive in less than a minute and once they did the window closed entirely.
He needed to move now.
Ascension one, initial stages at most. He had clocked them during the fight, the output levels, the technique quality. The spider, for all the damage it had done, was not a threat to him. Not really. Not at his level.
He exhaled once, steady and quiet.
"Space yaicraft."
He let the words sit in the air a moment.
"Portal creation."
The air in the room changed. Something opened, or began to, a distortion that pulled at the edges of the visible world like a seam coming apart.
The room went silent except for the spider's breathing.
Leishna stared.
Kellen's eyes focused all at once with a sharpness that had nothing to do with her injury. She looked at the distortion. Then she looked at Atiya. Her face had gone past surprise and into something quieter and considerably more frightened.
"Why." Her voice came out low. Not a demand. Almost a question she did not want answered. "Why do you have..."
'If he is a yai user.'
The thought completed itself without her finishing the sentence. She did not need to finish it. If he was a yai user of that caliber, hiding it, here, in this village, then whatever danger the yai beasts outside represented was perhaps not the largest problem Inumaki Village was currently facing.
Three magenta portals materialized in the space between him and the spider, each one roughly ten centimeters across, hovering in a loose triangle formation.
[12% yai consumed. 74% remaining.]
"Open. Sajibu."
The weapon came to his hand. One of the twelve month series, solid and familiar in his grip, the sickle-hook at its crown catching the dim light of the ruined room.
The spider did not wait. It lurched forward and released its volleys in the same motion, multiple sharp projectiles cutting through the air toward him. Two of them passed clean through two of the portals and redirected, emerging from the third and burying themselves into the creature's own maw.
It screeched and stumbled.
Atiya moved sideways but not fast enough. One of the remaining shots caught him near the gut and punched through.
"Uggghhh."
He did not stop.
There were three skills available to him through Sajibu and he reached for the one he needed now.
"Tremetus."
He swung the staff. From the sickle-hook at its top a magenta arc of yai launched outward, the color vivid and wrong-looking against the wrecked interior of the room.
It moved fast and wide, curving as it went, and before the spider could register what was happening the arc had wrapped around it completely, its two ends meeting, sealing.
A ring formed then turn to a disk.
Then the disk contracted and the spider's head came off cleanly and the disk vanished and the room was suddenly very quiet.
[60% yai remaining.]
"Huff. Huff."
He stood there for a moment breathing, one hand pressed loosely to the wound at his side. Then he turned and crossed to where Kellen lay against the bed, and when he spoke his voice had shed everything warm from it.
"Don't lie to me. Am I a sacrifice?"
Kellen looked up at him. Her instincts fired all at once and she had nowhere to go, her body refusing the commands she was sending it, blood still moving steadily through her fingers.
She did not answer immediately.
How many years had it been. She could not remember the number anymore, not with any real feeling attached to it. But she remembered exactly how many years they had lived like this. Unable to leave. Unable to quench it, that thirst that was not quite thirst, the hunger that was not quite hunger. The longing for touch, for sensation, for something that was not the village and the ritual and the waiting.
She remembered the vow she had made to herself about never returning to that state. She remembered every human she had helped prepare. The fattening, the comfort, the careful tending, the fulfillment of every desire so that they arrived at the ritual soft and full and unsuspecting. She remembered wanting to protect the village more than she had ever wanted anything.
And here was this man who was going to ruin all of it.
"Fuck you," she said.
"Good enough."
His cheeks were wet. She noticed that distantly, with some confusion, before his hand closed around her throat.
It was quick and it was not clean and he made sure of the latter deliberately. When it was done his hands were shaking and red and he gathered what remained of her against him and wept. Loudly. Genuinely. The sounds coming out of him were not performed, exactly, even if the embrace was.
He had needed her dead before she could speak about what she had seen. That was the logic and the logic was sound and it sat in his chest right next to something that felt like it was dissolving him from the inside out.
The guilt did not care about the logic. It arrived anyway, full weight, and his tears were real even if their purpose was not.
The guards came through what remained of the doorway and stopped.
Atiya knelt on the floor, hunched over Kellen's body, shoulders shaking, hands still dripping. The spider's corpse dominated the far side of the room. The evidence arranged itself into a single readable story without him having to say a word.
Leishna stood apart from it all, very still, watching him with an expression that moved through shock and settled somewhere more complex.
'As long as you are here, she thought, such interesting things will happen.'
'Thank you, Atiya.'