The passage above was a shadow of the ones she had passed. Where those had been maintained, waiting for trade to begin again, these had been left to time. Where there had been furniture before, were the memories of outlines in dust, long past remembering what they were.

No trace of creatures or life of any kind disturbed the calm. Odd for the deep caves, where a fresh water source like the portal was too valuable to ever be abandoned.

The office corridor opened into a large, low-ceilinged chamber, its walls ringed with arches and doorways of various sizes. A massive gate loomed in the far wall, directly opposite Daar’zel’s entry point. Two sheer panels of giant bivalve shells, inlaid with delicate metalwork and inscribed with magical runes from a long-forgotten art.

Despite the absence of physical remains, she could almost hear the jingle of pack harnesses and the everyday bustle of longshoremen at work.

As she approached the gate, the power radiating from it made the hairs on the nape of her neck rise in a primal response. The mages who inscribed these gates were long dead, but the dweomers that guarded this entrance were very much alive and would not welcome intruders.

The pearl began to sing softly. A gentle echo of the song of the people, and the gate recognized her right to pass.

One of the largest clam shells eased open on its hinge, revealing an opening into the true deep caves beyond.

She had to meet quota, or the Masters would be displeased.

Thralls should never displease the Masters. Thralls who did deserved punishment, and needing punishment was inefficient.

The last time she missed quota, the Masters had pulled off all of her fingers and left her writhing in the pits for a week before she was allowed to serve them again.

The pain was fine. She deserved that for displeasing the Masters. But the shame of being unable to serve while injured would last through many harvests.

She worked in Resource Processing. Her department sorted the belongings of newly harvested thralls.

A proper thrall needed nothing from their former lives, and the ones chosen for the honour of feeding the Masters needed nothing at all.

She was pleased to have a job not just any thrall could do. The wisdom of the Masters was clear in how efficiently they used their thralls' abilities.

Her magesight let her separate enchanted items from mundane supplies.

The Masters had little use for the magic of thrall races. They were Masters of the Mind, and what others called power was a mere shadow of their might.

Arcane items were sent to the Extractors to be unbound, their power reclaimed for the glory of the Masters.

Clerical items were tagged for destruction. Their magic was polluted, incompatible with the purity of the Great Ones.

The harvesters had found a ripe crop of dwarves a few weeks ago and her department had been busy processing the equipment and supplies from their storehouses and workshops.

Their rock-like minds were barely acceptable as food, but their bodies fed the thrall pits well and they forged powerful items for the Masters to repurpose.

The bulk had been weapons and armor, most worthless except for their base metals, but now she assessed the jewelry crafted by the artisans. The dwarves used little magic themselves but often partnered with other races to create powerful charms.

The ring she was holding didn’t look like dwarven craftsmanship. The delicate silver spider was much more like a dark elf piece than anything a digger would create. She had spotted it wedged in a corner of the transfer container. She had assumed it was part of the current shipment, but it may have been in there for some time.

Dark elf harvestings were rare. They were a prized and dangerous delicacy and only the luckiest harvest groups survived an encounter. Years had passed since she last processed anything of theirs.

Her magesight had shown only the faintest glimmer and she was about to relegate it to the melting chutes, when it suddenly shifted and slipped from her grip.

The tiny silver spider scurried up her finger, its shining legs wrapping tight before it sank its fangs into her finger, where an old crescent shaped scar showed below the ravages of her Masters.

Daar’zel remembered.

Her last conscious memory was in the Yss-Kareth ruins. She had been attempting to translate glyphs so old that the constant flow of souls in the Great Temple would have struggled to reach a spirit old enough to know them.

She had done something, something significant. Her memories were there, but fragmented, blurring among her decades as a thrall. But she knew she had been searching for clues to explain what she had done.

Her wards alerted her when a small group entered the main cavern, and she retreated to a refuge she had prepared in a side cave for just this kind of emergency.

Daar’zel scried them investigating the ruins over the next few days. An oddly mixed group of races, but they appeared to be cooperating and performed a thorough search before they retreated the way they came.

She had tracked them to a campsite just outside of the ruins and was investigating the remains. A quick spell confirmed no life within range, and she needed to know who they were.

Most of the supplies had been packed and taken, but the remains of their cookfire told her all she needed to know.

Vermementa!

The body of the small humanoid still hung from the spit, either a gnome or a child of some larger race. Most of its flesh had been carved off after it was cooked, but the contents of the skull had been torn out while it was alive.

A spray of blood at the fire’s edge and a perforated circle of bone beside it were distinctive of a feeding mind worm. They were an ancient enemy of her people and feared by every sentient race.

Daar’zel felt a chill as she raised her head. The Vermementa could shield themselves from her wards and spells. The nightmarish face staring at her from across the charred mushroom caps was the last she saw as herself.

One did not survive as an aspirant to the Spider Queen without becoming a master of shielding their thoughts against intrusive threats. The inherent duplicity of her society would serve her well.

She spent the day constructing mental walls and containers to hide her thoughts while her practiced hands sorted the pile of trinkets. They wouldn’t stand for long against a serious assault, but they should give her some freedom to think undetected.

The thrall knew the routines of the day.

Daar’zel had learned quickly that deviation from routine would mean the end of her thoughts and her life. She had hesitated only seconds as she left her assignment for the day.

The probes of the Overseer crawled over the surface of her mind like pallid, slimy worms. Daar’zel retreated behind her new defenses and let the thrall take the reins.

Had she not known that no dark elves had been captured recently, the thrall’s enthusiasm for the thin gruel’s tough, gristly meat might not have been enough to keep the Masters from noticing her. Her people fed their pits the same way, but at least the thralls were spared wondering about the source.

The days before her capture were still a jumble of images and sounds, but she knew two things. She needed to know if the pearl still existed, and she needed to escape.

She had no idea why, but the pearl had been central to whatever she had done at the Yss-Kareth ruins. If Daar’zel was going to reclaim what she had done there, she had to find the pearl if she could and get free from Vermementa control.

She knew the pearl hadn’t passed through the resources department. With no thoughts to occupy space or create interpretations, the thrall’s memories were a daily catalogue of processed items and physical atrocities. It remembered assessing her former possessions on its first day at work and neither the pearl, nor the ring had been among them.

The ring was small and inconspicuous enough that it could have been missed in the small crack she had found it in for ages. But the pearl was bright white and too large for a tiny crack like that. It wouldn’t have been missed easily. A thrall who was sloppy in their work didn’t avoid the kitchens for long.

New thralls were brought in stacked in slings hung between pack dwarves. The mental assault of the Vermementa left its victims in a deep unconscious so they could be transported and sorted for work or food.

She hadn’t been captured by a harvesting team. They were large, incredibly efficient forces that could strip a small city of any sign of habitation in days.

A hunting party would have been sent to investigate a problem or scout for new prey. They were small, mobile groups of thralls with a dedicated Master to serve. They had more independence of thought than most thralls. Their compliance was created through suicidal loyalty to their assigned commanders.

They required more frequent discipline than most thralls, but then most weren’t given more than one chance to make a mistake, and the thrall had observed the corrections many times.

The hunter thralls were barely animals, and like their kin, they liked to adorn their dens with trinkets and shiny things.

If the pearl was anywhere, it was in one of those caves, hidden well enough to have escaped detection for decades.

Most of Daar’zel’s memories had returned, although what she had done in the last few days before the hunting party had arrived was still stubbornly out of reach. She remembered the journey to the Yss-Kareth city and her early days exploring it.

Following the old trade route had been easy. Structures and markers in the caves left identifiable patterns long after the people who used them had been reduced to dust.

The journey wasn’t without challenges. She had to hide many times and fight more than once when she couldn’t. But she had made it safely and the occasional encounters with edible foes had provided a welcome break from dried fish.

She hadn’t recognized them from the Piscetet’s depiction. Her binocular eyes weren’t designed to perceive their art in its proper form and the dry-fish had been an indistinct shape on the worn murals.

The dry-fish were the Yss-Kareth. An ancient saurian race spoken of in the oldest legends of every race. History depicted them as savage, war-like lizards of furious aspect and pure ambition who had been slain by the gods for trying to remake the world in their image.

When she found the city, it was nothing like the grand edifice inlaid in the Piscetet murals. The remains of the once mighty gates lay scattered across the cavern floor like knucklebones abandoned after a game. Walls that could have held for centuries lay crumbled over deep chasms in the bedrock of the floor.

Anything organic had long since been reclaimed by time, but the memories held in the walls and secret places that she found spoke of a wise, civilized race, not savages or beasts.

A wave of fear and outrage from outside flooded her mind and shattered her musings. The thrall was already responding to the command while she was still sorting out what she had learned in the cloud of alien thoughts attached to it.

Routines were absolute in the heart of the hive and Daar’zel had had no choice but to ride inside the thrall’s mind, like a carter with a well-trained team. She became conscious at the same time, reported to her station and processed the possessions of captured prey. When she was done, she reported to the pit, ate thin gruel and lay down on a thin cot to sleep, in a mindless rhythm.

The Masters’ communications were silent, invisible to any physical sense. Instead, it was a continuous ebb and flow of thoughts, ideas, and concepts blended in alien ways. Infinitely complex, their thoughts wrapped and intertwined beyond understanding.

Daar’zel had learned to eavesdrop on the traces of thought woven into the commands sent to her thrall and the others by the Masters. Most times, she only caught whatever random surface thought occupied the Master’s mind. Whether male or female brains of thrall races had a better flavour. Considerations on how long a colony should be allowed to ripen before being harvested. Common thoughts for a people who viewed all others as food.

This command came not from a Master, but from the worm-god itself.

Every creche had a Vermerex at its heart. Quivering, squirming masses, they were the parasitic rulers of the Vermementa. Psychic leeches drawing nourishment from the minds they connected and commanded.

The Masters managed the hive’s daily functions, but the normally structured flow of thoughts had turned chaotic. The Vermerex was exerting its control directly.

Velthir. Only rumoured even to races as old as hers, the Dream Riders were the only creatures truly feared and hated by the Vermementa. A slug no larger than her smallest toe that lived undetected in the skull of its host. Feeding on both body and mind while granting health and protection in return.

The Velthir preferred not to control their hosts directly, although they could if the need arose. Instead, they influenced them through dreams and thoughts that felt like their own. If the symbiote had no reason to act, the host may never know it is there at all.

A carrier was not only immune to Vermementa control and attack. The slug made their brain toxic to consume and any psionic assault from the Masters was reflected with redoubled force. Velthir hunted Vermementa. Their living brains acting as incubators for Velthir eggs and food for the spawn.

The Harvesters had been led into a trap.

Hunters had confirmed reports of a gnome city that had never been harvested by the creche. Only a few of the first troupe had survived to report the find. Two thralls reached the city gates barely alive. They told a tale of battle with a merchant train. Their Master was gravely injured and had to be abandoned when it died on the way back to the hive.

They carried a map with a word of power inscribed on the back. It was the key to piercing the intricate enchantments that concealed the gnome cities. An unharvested city of powerful illusionists was a rare find.

The force sent to reap the crop and fill the pits was the largest deployed in years. There would losses among the thralls, but the harvest would more than justify the cost.

The plan was working flawlessly until the Masters launched their psychic attack.

A single Master’s mind was powerful enough to cripple most lesser beings. The combined might of the entire hive, focused through the Vermerex, unleashed a wave of mental force strong enough to render an army insensible with a single blow.

The force of that assault, reflected and magnified by the Velthir hidden in their diminutive hosts, shattered the minds of the Masters at the front. The weakest of those connected were reduced to mindless, drooling husks. The fate of the thralls was unknown. At best they had been slain, at worst they now carried Velthir of their own and would seek revenge.

 Hunter teams had returned from infested areas. They were kept isolated from other thralls but any of them could be carrying a slug. The Vermerex knew how to deal with vermin. It ordered the Hunters to slaughter each other in a berserker rage. The few remaining could be eliminated with puppet thralls afterwards.

Her thrall was to report to the Hunter caves and use her spells to detect any remaining life and ensure complete sterilization.

Most thralls with any kind of magic were consumed or destroyed. Mages were nutritious but clerics caused indigestion for the Masters. A few with both skills, like her, were kept for special assignments.

Daar’zel would have to be careful not to get noticed by the Vermerex or any of the few Masters unaffected by the blast. She could guide the thrall to ensure the search was thorough and take control if she found anything other than Velthir larva.

The thrall was refusing to check the alcove. Every other cave had been searched with practiced efficiency, but the thrall had retreated before investigating the small opening and was reluctant to approach it now.

She could feel the effect of whatever was in there, not on her, but on the thrall’s connection to the Vermementa hive. A gentle influence that whispered that there was nothing to see, nothing to find. This spot is of no interest, and you should not look here.

Daar’zel thrust the thrall into a mental maze created for just this kind of need. She took control while it wandered through an illusion of continuing its search, unaware that what it saw was just an idea.

The deception wouldn’t last, but it was enough to reach into the hole and grab the contents. She grasped the shamans pearl and hid it deep in her rags as she released the thrall and tumbled headlong into the memories it unlocked.

She had found the chamber below the ruins at the heart of the Yss-Kareth city.

A sound had caught her attention while she investigated the rubble, and a series of small drops and crawlspaces had led her towards its source. A break in the tumbled stone provided a narrow passage along the frame of what was once a massive window.

The room she dropped into belonged at the top of a shining tower, not buried below it’s shattered remains. An arched ceiling and intricately inlaid floor were surrounded by windows meant to provide an unobstructed view of the wonder at its center.

An egg of shimmering diamond hovered in the middle of the space. Taller than Daar’zel and covered in a near infinite profusion of tiny facets, it should have reflected any light it absorbed into a sparkling display of colours. This diamond had a dark cloud swirling under its surface, muting its wonder and absorbing any light that reached its depths.

The sound that had drawn her came from a strange, saurian instrument that resembled a harp in function, if not in form.

It was covered in arcane symbols and radiated enough power to blind her magesight from seeing more than a blur. The lowest note plucked itself again as its echoes faded away, like a slow deliberate heartbeat counting the ages.

Each note was met with a pulse of darkness in the heart of the diamond, the cloud reacting like a vampire syphoning blood.

Hoping that physical connection would let her understand more of the magics at play, Daar’zel reached out and touched the frame of the Yss-Kareth harp.

The deep note vibrated though her body and the pearl at her neck answered with a call of its own. The highest strings of the harp reacted first, beginning to mirror the gentle, complexities of the pearl’s song. The cloud reacted angrily within the diamond egg, swirling and billowing against the surface in impotent rage.

As the harp learned the Piscetet’s melodies, the diamond began to vibrate in sympathy and the darkness compressed into a single line of inky darkness. When the deepest string became the heart of the music instead of its own sinister beat, the diamond egg split as if hit with a perfect strike of a jeweler’s hammer along a faultline exposed.

 The room echoed with the force of the explosion. An ethereal silver thread left where the crystal egg had hung vibrated in sympathy before fading from view and leaving the room empty of the power it had contained.

She was searching the city for clues about what she had just released when the Vermementa had found her.

Order had been restored by the time she was aware of her surroundings again.

Thralls had already been strapped down to incubating tables and new grubs were burrowing into their skulls as they screamed. The hive would be at full strength in no time.

The harvesting teams that remained had been dispatched to cull any ripe thralls from known crops. Hunters had been selected from the more capable puppets and were once again searching for prey.

The only remaining sign of the infestation was a new set of wards around the hive demesne to detect any Velthir that might seek to invade. She recognized some of the work as her own and had to admire the thrall’s efficiency. Bypassing them would be almost impossible for her, much less anything else.

Riding in the thrall’s mind must have been eroding the Masters’ control slowly. Daar’zel found herself having to pay more and more attention to the thrall’s daily routines. Small pauses were cropping up in the middle of rote tasks, and moments of hesitation when it was time to move on.

She knew the patterns well and likely could have passed for a thrall for as long as she chose if not for the latest prize from the Hunters.

She recognized the work of dark elf slave crafters in the supplies she processed after the successful capture of an adventuring party. There were no clerical items, so likely a group of foolish males who had escaped from a patrol and believed themselves strong enough to survive.

Mealtimes were best left to the thrall as much as possible. There was nothing to enjoy in the tasteless gruel and it didn’t do to dwell on where exactly the shapeless lumps bobbing below its surface were from.

It wasn’t until the piece of cartilage floating in the middle of her bowl rolled over that she saw the distinctive shape and scraps of skin that she recognized from her own ears.

She was practiced at keeping her thoughts from showing on the thrall’s face, but the moment of visceral disgust bubbled out of her thoughts like methane from a long sealed well.

Daar’zel forced the thrall to spill its portion and save her from having to watch it eat. Clumsy thralls received no seconds, and she would be spared for tonight at least.

She felt the slimy tendrils of the Masters crawling through the psychic net, searching for the source of the disturbance. Daar’zel hid deep in the thrall’s mind, burying herself under memories of normalcy and compliance.

Daar’zel had survived by living like a rodent, squeezing through cracks in the foundation of the thrall’s mind. Small hiding places hidden in mazes of old memories and dead-end thoughts.

She hid in her deepest hole and stilled her mind while the Masters sniffed and stalked nearby. Like cats that had smelled a mouse, they scratched at the walls of her mind in hopes that their prey would run.

Daar’zel felt their presence weaken as they moved on to test another mind. For now, she was safe, but the Vermementa would not forget her slip.

She didn’t realize the cats were still prowling until she went looking for a memory that was gone.

The thrall’s memories of its work were encyclopedic, and she had seen the listings for the dark elf possessions recently. The equipment had had makers marks on some of it and if she could recall those, she might be able to determine what city they escaped from.

Where they should have been was a raw psychic wound, as if the memory had been torn physically out of the thrall’s mind.

So much of every day was the same routine that she hadn’t noticed the attrition until now. As she searched for answers, she found more and more holes in the most recent memories of the thrall.

She was in the memories of mealtimes, a spot she normally avoided, when she felt the thrall lose the taste of last night’s supper. Meals from the last few days disappeared soon after, and Daar’zel retreated to deeper territory.

The Vermementa had known where she was all along, but they wanted to capture her, not just destroy her. They were peeling away layers of memory trying to root Daar’zel out, and the thrall’s were the first to go.

The core of what made her Daar’zel was stored in the deepest reaches of her mind. Well into the spaces that lesser races occupied with suppressed memories and pointless emotion. But even those places would only hide her for so long.

Layer by layer the thrall was being stripped away. It stopped working and just stood there as it forgot how to perform its tasks. Daar’zel felt her senses begin to fail, first taste, then smell touch and sound. When she lost access to the thrall’s sight, she retreated as deep as she could and pulled her defenses tight.

The last shreds of the thrall being stripped from her mind were like the gates crashing from a fortress walls. There was no where left to hide. No way to fight back.

She was waiting in stillness, knowing it was only delaying the inevitable, when she heard the echo of the Piscetet song.

Daar’zel remembered that she was not alone in the deepest vaults of her mind. There was something there that she had locked and marked as so dangerous that it could never be thought of.

The racial memory of the Piscetet people had almost killed her when the ancient one had tried to share it with her. She had had months to understand their people, and she had a body that was at least vaguely like their own.

Opening the vault and letting that out might kill her this time, but the Vermementa should suffer at least as much.

She had closed and sealed it for a reason, and she had to fight against her deepest instincts to approach it now.

The song of the pearl increased in strength and bolstered her resolve as she reached out and cast it open. She curled as small and tight as she could as the flood of living experiences of untold generations of the Piscetet people flooded out of the vault and into the mind of the hive.