23. Escape

However vast the Lair-Mother's dominion was, it could not span the entirety of the subterranean world. Deeper into the bowels of the earth, where the air grew hot and heavy and swirls of strange fungi ornamented the cavern walls, there hid other realms. Of them, the Lair-Mother's children spoke rarely, when they did, in rumour only. After all, few, if any, of them could boast of ever having wandered the stalagmite forests where dark-skinned oreads blend with the living stone living stone, of having visited visited the silk-draped courts of the arachnid princes, or taken part in the slow martial waltzes of long dead royalty enthroned in the antediluvian necropoleis. Shard's siblings could, at most, trade in well-worn stories, exchange words of common warning, and sometimes—albeit rarely—express an indistinct longing for what hides below.

In all of those areas, Blood-Slick Thorn excelled like no one else in Shard's extended family.

"This way," it cheered, dragging Shard by the wrist, through water-slick tunnels long ago carved by the great underground wyrms. "We're near!"

However vast the Lair Mother's dominion was, it too had borders. Beyond the bend of the tunnel, a steep shaft opened, running near-vertically down, its bottom disappearing in a darkness that even Shard's keen senses could not pierce. Thorn skipped to the edge, pulling Shard behind itself.

"The edge of the world," it said, voice light with wonder.

"It's just a hole," Shard shrugged, but her sibling tugged at her arm, forcing her to sit down, perched at the precipice. "There's nothing there."

Thorn's hand darted to the side, claws slicing at the stone and plucking a pebble from the ground. It bounced it in its palm, and then chucked it down the shaft. Moments later, a splashing sound climbed back up, distorted by its echoes.

"A lake?" Shard asked, leaning curiously in, in spite of herself.

"Shh!" Thorn put a finger to her mouth.

Echoes of their words and motions faded slowly, until the perfect underground silence could reassert itself—almost. Distantly, a faint rustle marred it, reaching up from below, lurking at the edge of sound. But the more Shard focused on it, the more obvious the source became: at the bottom of the pit, water did not sit still. It flowed.

"Not a lake," Thorn whispered, as if afraid that its voice would scare that sound away. "A river! And you know what that means?"

Shard didn't, so she allowed Thorn to pull her back from the edge, and explain. She watched her sibling's face, painted into carpets of surface flowers, and immersed herself in its lovely, excited voice. The details mattered less than the timbre and cadence; she barely followed as it piled details upon details on the significance of there being a river. A river which, apparently, had to flow for a source to a sea, and so clearly made for a ready-made trail that one could easily follow, without the risk of ever getting lost in the immense labyrinth left behind by the old wyrms. Who knew, Thorn kept asking, what awaited at the end of that river? What sort of strange and alien realms could they find there, so far away from their spawning chambers, and the cruel decrees of their mother?

"We could escape, Shard," Thorn finished, tapping its claw on Shard's chest. "This is our way out."

At first, the significance of those words failed to register with Shard; what Thorn was suggesting exceeded what she was used to imagining. Instead, she glanced behind herself again, at the sheer drop, and the water-slick walls. Teeth-marks criss-crossed them, but ages of erosion smoothed them too much to make for good hand-holds.

"You would have to climb down, first," she observed, trying to think if her claws could bite into this stone securely enough. What if she missed a hold, and tumbled down? The drop felt long enough that her shell would easily shatter at the meeting with the water's surface below. Shard could almost hear that awful wet crack. She shuddered.

"This is why I brought this," Thorn pointed at the long coils of rope wrapped around its waist, a hook attached at both ends.

The rope, obviously, could snap, and there probably wouldn't be enough of it in the first place. Shard pointed that out, and Thorn quickly found out some new explanation for how they absolutely could descend down to the river, and go with its flow, wherever it may take them. There was a sweet back-and-forth in the conversation, the increasingly ludicrous ideas posited by Thorn drawing out stifled laughter from Shard.

"We don't drown easily," Thorn would say, miming swimming with its hands. "I can hold my breath!"

"For hours?" Shard would reply, smiling against her better judgment. "Days?"

Somewhere between the petty practicalities of their impossible escape, other images sneaked in. Thorn would take a pause from arguing about the rope to talk of it and Shard taking on an oread maid or three, or about showing the arachnid princes what real predation looked like. Those ideas, completely unmoored from the world they knew flowed at once dreamlike and strangely tangible; at times, Shard caught herself peeking over the edge, as if expecting to see the lights of distant kingdoms shimmer from below, inviting her in. The thread of Thorn’s dreams kept reeling her in; the more it talked, the less focused its imagination was on hunts, or treasuries pried from decrepit, undead hands, and more on abstract impossibilities. Words like "freedom" flickered on and off in its speech, dancing between what it had to know: that it was all only ever a dream. That they were never going to leave their mother's dominion, that even if they managed to climb down this perilous shaft, even if they managed to swim the river to distant realms, that it would not be enough.

When Shard spoke, her voice was small and harsh, but honest. She tried to explain to her sibling—without breaking its heart—that the oreads would not go into their service, but hunt them in turn through their stone forests, that the arachnid princes would ensnare them and suck the life out of their shells, to later pass them on as gifts to long-dead monarchs in the deepest tombs. It was all a guess, of course, but Shard understood on some visceral level that she and all her siblings belonged to a race of monsters, unwelcome anywhere but in the domains under their mother's sway. And so, all those fugitive fancies were good for a laugh or two, but nothing more. It would be good for Thorn, she stressed, if itremembered that.

Her sibling listened to her attentively, and accepted nothing that Shard was saying.

"Run away with me," it pleaded, reaching for the rope.

Shard grabbed it by the wrist, pulled it away from the spooled cord. Thorn didn't resist the touch; for a moment, Shard almost felt as if it welcomed it.

"Tomorrow," she lied out a promise, hoping that it would be enough to dissuade Thorn from throwing itself away.

Her sibling sighed, then nodded its head in quiet surrender.

"Tomorrow," it repeated, standing up.

They spoke little on the long road back to the central chambers of their mother's dominion. Thorn would sometimes break out into a quiet hum, repeating some melody it brought from the surface. Shard, meanwhile, thought hard about how to make sure that her sibling would abandon its stupid dreams. She kept glancing at it, and each look reminded her that she would rather not surrender herself to a world where Thorn was not present to keep her company. But she knew it well enough to understand that left to its own devices it would, sooner or later, go through with its dreams—and it terrified Shard to realize that she was no longer certain if she had it in herself what it took to refuse to follow in its footsteps, down whatever dark pit Thorn would decide to descend.

Later, finally alone in her nook, Shard finally put a name on the way she was feeling. It was fear; fear of what would happen to Thorn, but no less important of what would happen to herself. She imagined breaking her body after a fall from a slippery hand-hold; she imagined drowning at the bottom of an underground river; she imagined falling victim to foreign kingdoms; she imagined a thousand and deaths lurking outside of the known world, laid in ambush for her and Thorn.

At first, those images were easy to turn away and rebuke, but for each one sent away, two new arose, swarming Shard with catastrophic visions of shared failure. Sleep did not come easily, then not at all all; she crawled out of her little stone niche and wandered the central corridors idly, irately. It was difficult to precisely pinpoint the moment when she arrived at her decision, at that one solution which seemed, however briefly, to serve as an oasis of hope for her and Thorn. They had a mother, did they not? A mother that could teach them to do better.

In hindsight, Shard had to admit that she was deceiving herself, and the lies she spun for her own protection came easily. But in the moment, it felt so very sincere. The Lair-Mother listened to her confession with rapt attention, and though each word Shard said reeked of a tragic mistake, by the time it fell out of her mouth it was already too late.

"I'm just worried for it," she croaked, hiding her face from her mother's gaze.

"Of course you are," the Lair-Mother replied, her voice warm and comforting. "You have done well to come to me. I will take care of both of you."

This was, of course, a lie.

Her siblings dragged Thorn in not long after; at first, it seemed confused by why it was pulled out of its sleep by a swarm of angry, white hands. Then, it noticed Shard prostrated before their mother, and understood at once.

If it said anything then, if it gave voice to the feeling of betrayal, if it cursed its sister for what had to come next, Shard managed to scrub that from her memory since, just as she had attempted with the rest of the night. Unfortunately for her, some things could not be forgotten—easily, or at all.

What stuck in her memory, then? Her mother's inscrutable face; the soft touch of her fingers on the side of her cheek. Thorn's grim silence. The small flock of their siblings come to see the beautiful spectacle of a fall from grace.

"So I am told you dreamed of escape?" the Lair-Mother asked then, stepping back from both of them. "I am told you had a plan?"

Thorn's silence was defiant, or terrified. Perhaps both.

"Call the family," the Lair-Mother instructed one of her children. "There will be a sermon soon. All are expected to attend."

She and her sibling knelt together, without giving a single word. Before them, their mother weighed in her hands implements of execution, and in the depths of her soul, past all the guilt and all the fear, Shard desperately hoped that she would be spared them. She kept glancing at Thorn, expecting to see in it some sign of the same; expecting to hear it beg, or shift blame. It stayed silent.

"And what should I do with such disobedience?" the Lair-Mother added a new question, a chisel in her hand. "Shard, beloved daughter, what should I do with your sibling?"

Once again, Shard tried to see if Thorn would make some gesture, some sound; once again, she saw nothing. Only a tense body passively awaiting its fate.

"Would you disrespect me with this quiet, too?" the Lair-Mother's words strangled with softness. "Please, tell me, what am I supposed to do with this little Thorn in my side?"

Her hand cupped Shard's chin; it pulled it up, forcing her to stare straight into her mother's face.

"You have until the count of five to tell me," she smiled. "Or I will assume you were in league with it."

The easiest way to break someone, Shard found, was to give them a choice.

"One."

Guilt was never a feeling Shard was prone to, and now as she was experiencing its wretched grip, she wished for nothing but to be done with it. Was this really her fault? She had to know what was going to happen, once she brought the matter to the Lair-Mother. Thorn was going to die, and it was her fault.

"Two."

No, it was not. It could not be—it was Thorn's own idiocy that brought it here. If it did not get lost in daydreams, none of it would happen. They could stay together, hunt together, they could outlive the Lair-Mother and find this outlandish dream of freedom some other time. Thorn had no one to blame but itself.

"Three."

All of it was a lie. Shard stared at the chisel in the Lair-Mother's hand, and could not keep herself from imagining it being driven into her shell, splitting her open like a rotten egg. She could not help herself from imagining the pain. It was not going to be brief. And she did not want to die.

"Four?"

Shard opened her mouth to plead.

"We can still escape," Thorn gasped out. "Together."

Its sister understood at once what it was suggesting, and the thought was so terrifying that her own words came out as a panicked shout.

"Thorn must be punished!"

The Lair-Mother's grip on her chin closed like a vice; she did not let Shard look away as she smiled and asked one final question.

"And by who?"

And then, it was done, and all that remained were the inevitable consequences, falling into place one by one, each unavoidably announced by what came before. The string of images, of feelings, and of words, burned itself forever into Shard's memory. She could not forget the hammer and the chisel, and the revolting sense of relief letting her know that she would not be paying for Thorn's dreams. But everything else could still be lost. In the days that follow, she worked to prune herself off the days before the sermon, rendering them first into a blur, and then a nightmare, swiftly dismissed moments after waking. Even regret, blissfully abated with time, waning enough so that she could pretend herself free of it.

It was not until she lay shattered on a steel table, awaiting the inevitable, that she managed to realize—in the brief moments when the waves of pain receded enough to let some of her consciousness rise to the surface—that Thorn was right.

She could have escaped.

She should have escaped.