Spiderlight

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Dion led them, infused with the radiant power of her faith. Each of them had sworn to her cause to bring down the blight on the world that was the man-god Darvezian but they were a disparate lot who followed for their own reasons.

Cunning Lief thought there would be profit in it. Vengeful Harathes the shieldman loathed all creatures of the Dark with a passion, while the archer Cyrene served to expiate some long-hidden guilt, some action or inaction of hers that had driven her to this bloody and dangerous atonement. Of Penthos, the fifth member of their desperate band, whose hands even now crackled and roared with ethereal fire, Dion had no idea why he had come. Right now she was only glad he had.

“Magic knows not light or darkness. It is the Power Elemental, that predates any such concerns,” he told her archly, somewhat sabotaged by the smug smirk that always crept onto his face when he was pontificating. “Besides, what need we fear the Dark, when we have you to show us the way to the Light?”

When Dion considered the world, her chief question was, Is this of Light or Dark? Penthos’s main interest was usually, Is this flammable?

Behind them all, Penthos stood with the utterly serene expression of a man who will set things on fire the moment the word is given.

Were all beings just a thin skin of volition floating on a sea of drives and directives they could not control?

Who would live at the top of a tower? Have you seen how many fucking stairs there are?”

“All I wanted to be was a spider. I was happy as a spider. Or what a spider thinks is happy. Your prophecy. They made me into this for your prophecy. And you have killed the only man who could make it right. Not a spider. Not a man. Not any thing.”