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Training was as long and arduous as ever for the Pure Vessel, yet its body never tired—it only had to leave the courtyard within which it trained with the kingdom's Great Knights to stand guard in the palace and await orders because all five had tired in the face of its neverending endurance. Its father was always proud of its progress, yet he never expressed that, for fear that a gesture so kind might sully the Pure Vessel and leave it incapable of fulfilling its purpose. It already knew itself flawed and broken, as much as it tried to suppress its thoughts and feelings. It had no speaking voice with which to admit that, and even if it did, it would not—it could never disappoint its father.
He left it to stand where it was, perhaps departing for more important matters than itself. Once he was out of sight, a little white mask with a pair of thick rounded horns peeked around a corner.
A young half-bug in a cloak of red revealed herself as she emerged from the corner, scampering across the ground towards the Pure Vessel at blinding speeds. She leapt at its leg and began climbing as quickly as she could, her sharp claws leaving not even the slightest pricking on its hardened shell, its perfectly stitched cloak, and its pale pauldrons.
Hornet laid between its pauldrons and its neck, and made a humming sound as she fussed with her mandibles. She found herself bored after spending so much time causing mischief with the royal Retainers who served the Pale King, and wanted to find and bother her tall friend who always listened to her. It lamented invisibly that it would never be able to see her grow up and become strong.
"Holly!" she finally spoke, happy as always to see the Pure Vessel. "Nobody knows where I am right now and said I can walk around anyway. I thought you could get snacks with me and watch me work on things! Come on, let's get ice cream!"
The Pure Vessel had been told on countless occasions by both Herrah and the Pale King that little Hornet was its responsibility as well. So long as she was with it, it must listen to her orders and ensure her safety as well as anyone else's. It had the justification that it needed to leisurely spend time with her, and to brush it off as simply following orders.
She leapt off of it and onto the polished stone floor, then sprinted off, expecting the Pure Vessel to follow her. Even for her minuscule size and stride, especially compared to the likes of it, she was fast; it had to walk faster and less formally than it typically would, just to keep up with her pace. Though it wished that it could suppress such blasphemous feelings of affection, it found itself feeling good that its sister enjoyed its presence for as cold as it was.
A fancy café had opened up recently in an unused portion of the Palace. Hornet hadn't any interest in the more savoury things, nor in anything overly expensive—she had eyes on sweeter treats and a limited allowance of geo, after all.
"I'll be getting us both ice cream! Let me list out some flavours for you. You nod if anything sounds interesting," Hornet said as they both slowed to a normal walk.
The Pure Vessel thought this to be unnecessary. She would always try to ensure that it could join in on her activities, be it snacks or projects of hers. It struggled with the skills necessary to help her in such refined tasks, as it had never been taught anything of the like, and it rarely found itself capable of understanding the treats that she gave it. They were appreciated and often up to its preferred taste—which it logically should not have had—but it struggled to justify showing any interest. Sometimes she would even read books or the news to it, but it did not see the point—there was a reason it was not taught to read.
It was interrupted out of its confused, and perhaps unnecessary, spiral. It had orders to follow, even if those orders were dependent on the assumption that it was a real individual and not a weapon.
"Chocolate?" she asked. She always enjoyed the products of plants harvested from the Queen's gardens, especially when sweetened by honey from the Hive. She would probably get chocolate for herself, with rainbow sprinkles. "Mint? Ginger? Woodgall? Cookie dough? Shellwood sap? Plain? Sherbet?"
It showed no visible interest. Though it would be glad to try each and every one of the flavours available, even those which Hornet did not list, it was not a real bug. It was a weapon, and a sacrifice.
"Maybe we can just give you cooked tiktik. You liked that, didn't you?"
The Pure Vessel would be a fool to admit that it did.
"Hmmmm… Oh! I know. You might like one of the fruit ice creams. I'll get you mango like the juice I shared with you. How does that sound?"
It hesitantly nodded its head.
"Okay!" Hornet jumped around. "They probably have options for which type of sweetener you want. You reaaaaally liked the honey I gave you a while ago, so let's go with that. Aspid sweetener is a bit weird, to me… I don't like it. Do you want me to get anything else for you?"
It shook its head 'no'. There was no purpose in getting anything else for it, nor in making its treat more visually and flavorfully complex.
"Plain mango for you and chocolate with sprinkles for me! I'll get you a biiiig bowl of it, because you're humongous compared to me. I hope I get as big as you someday!"
It disagreed. The height of its lithe frame and the scale of its horns were an inconvenience in places not built for it. It hoped that she would get the chance to grow tall and strong, too, but not to such an unnecessary level as itself.
By this point, the two had already made it to the café, and Hornet climbed up onto the desk in front of the cockroach who was currently working at the dessert section.
They looked between her and the Pure Vessel. "What can I get for you two?" they asked, assuming incorrectly that the tall bug would be the one to speak.
"Holly can't talk," Hornet informed the cockroach. "I'll be getting me a small chocolate ice cream with so many sprinkles, and they want a big bowl of mango ice cream. With honey for both of us, not aspid sweetener! Aspid sweetener is weird."
They wrote into a sheet of silk-woven paper with a black quill, adding together the cost of their orders. "That will be 340 geo," they said, showing the paper as proof.
"Okay!" Hornet brought out a bag from under her cloak and began counting. "I'm missing 50… Holly, do you have any? Can you look for some?"
The Pure Vessel, at her command, searched through its inventory for any money. It found several large geo, two of which were enough to cover the remaining cost, and discreetly pulled the necessary amount out from the void beneath its shell. Residual beads of liquid darkness were wiped off on the natural cloak hidden beneath its cape and armour, and it added the slightly dulled golden geo to Hornet's pile.
"There! Thank you!" she exclaimed as the cockroach took the payment into a compartment below the desk.
"I'll have your ice creams ready in just a bit." They grabbed out two ceramic bowls, both unique in glazing colours and of greatly different sizes, then began scooping into them the two's requested flavours. A bowl of rainbow-coloured sprinkles was brought out, and the cockroach gently tipped it to decorate Hornet's ice cream. Two spoons of fitting size were added to their snacks.
"There you two go. Enjoy," the cockroach said.
Hornet immediately took her bowl of ice cream and the Pure Vessel hesitantly—and gingerly—took its own. The little half-bug bounded away joyously in the direction of her room, and the Pure Vessel did as best as it could to keep up with her impressive pace. Thankfully, the place in which she resided during her visits to the Palace was not far.
She reached to pull her door open by the handle. The doorway was just barely tall enough that the Pure Vessel could get through by hunching its back, and so it followed. In the past, it had been much smaller—enough so that it could more easily do things with her. Hornet liked when the Pure Vessel listened to and looked over her presentations and projects for the multiple educations in which she had to partake, thanks to her complicated origins. Demonstration and repetition always helped her to solidify ideas in her head. The time it willingly took out of its duties was deeply appreciated and loved.
The Pure Vessel pulled the door shut behind itself. It began to relax, but it could not allow itself to relax too much. If it did, it would become too comfortable expressing itself as something other than the perfection that it was—that it should have been.
"You're holding your nail really tight," Hornet commented.
So it was. It stared at her.
"You should put it away and sit down! Try the ice cream and watch me when I'm done. Maybe I can teach you more things, too."
It had nothing better to do until another came and overrode the orders given to it by little Hornet, so it kept doing what she told it to. It leaned its nail against the wall next to the door and sat on its legs, lifting the bowl of ice cream in front of its chest. Even as without flaw its body was, it still found itself struggling to manipulate something as small and fine as this spoon.
So, it watched Hornet, attempting to take note of how she lifted the spoon in her claw up to the area below her mask encircled in many countless sharp mouthparts. The Pure Vessel's own anatomy was similar enough. Though it was not a bug in any part, the void exposed in the same area below its false mask of an oddly root-like material was positioned fairly the same. The area typically formed into a set of fangs and a tendril not dissimilar from some species' proboscises, though it had far more flexibility to it.
"Before I saw you today, I was playing with our father's servants. But they're getting to be so boring and predictable now, and they're not as scared by me as they used to be!" Hornet groaned. "I made one trip over a web, but they didn't react??"
The Pure Vessel attempted to replicate the motion of using the spoon's curved shape to carve out a portion of the ice cream. Its hand tremored. Its hand should not be tremoring during such a basic task, but it always seemed to, even as relaxed as it was around Hornet.
"I tried to chase some others around. They didn't run away, so it's no fun! It's like they know I'm messing with them or something!" Hornet paused to take a breath and finish the rest of her ice cream. She was a ravenous eater at times—she was still growing, after all. "So I got bored of them, and started looking for you. I'm lucky you weren't busy anymore when I saw you!"
Somehow, the Pure Vessel managed to get its dark, half-liquid mouthparts around the spoon to dissolve that cut of its treat. Taste was of little importance to it, being something that could consume any matter and required little sustenance other than soul at this point in its life, but it still found itself pleased. It repeated the process.
Hornet tapped her claws together. "Yay! You like the ice cream! I'm going to make you watch me sew now."
She jumped up onto her workspace's chair and spun tough silk from the glands on her back and tail-abdomen—a strange, segmented combination of arachnid and Wyrm anatomy—to thread into a small needle. Her project seemed to be something similar to the red cloak that she was currently wearing, albeit in a slightly brighter shade, with some decorative stitching present at its neck.
"They wanted me to make more clothes for myself, but this time prettier," Hornet explained. "Hey, I know! Maybe when I'm big, I can make a pretty cloak for you, Holly. Maybe we can have matching cloaks too."
It shook its head.
"Why?" she asked, before suddenly correcting her course. "Oh. Wait. You can't tell me. You can't read either, so you just can't. Sorry."
She paused her work. "Our father keeps telling me that I shouldn't be nice to you. He says I'm wasting my time teaching you things, calling you Holly, and showing my work, because you're not 'a real bug,' whatever that means. I don't understand."
It was not a real bug, and she was indeed wasting her breath on it. She should find a real friend, it thought. It would not care if she hated it; she was under its protection by their shared sire's orders, and it would follow that order so long as it was beyond the tomb prepared for it.
"Even if you were just following orders, because they say I'm your responsibility too, it doesn't change that I care and you help me remember things. The teachers here say it's good I teach others! Maybe not the Weavers, but they don't like most other bugs." She sighed deeply. "I think I just don't understand. You do things outside of orders all the time. They say you don't think, but you respond to questions. From me. Maybe thinking is your secret. I can keep secrets!"
It knew already that she knew that it was disgusting and broken. It did not need any reminder.
Hornet's mood suddenly shifted back to that energetic one, once she finished thinking such complicated thoughts out loud. "Anyways, when you're done with the ice cream, I can teach you about sewing and embroidery stitches! I think I showed you a little bit some other times, but it's been a loooooooong time since I last got to."
The Pure Vessel stared at the liquid void that dripped from the black-coated spoon. Both the bowl and spoon were immediately deemed unusable by any mortal bug, for fear that they might be consumed by the starving emptiness. Even the light reflecting off of the metal seemed to be devoured. It decided, suddenly, that it did not care, and assimilated the ice cream into itself—bowl, spoon, and all.
"You're funny." Hornet giggled at the absurd act.
Perhaps it was funny, though it knew that any normal bug would react with abject horror at its nature where she reacted with whimsical amusement. It knew also, thankfully, that she was well aware of how incomprehensibly alien and deadly its body was—and that such did not change her fond feelings towards it in the slightest.
She dug around beneath her desk for a box that she brought over to the Pure Vessel. "I know you can't make silk, and tiny needles are even harder after your last moults, so I brought some thread!" Hornet opened the box, gesturing across each colourful spool with a little 'tada.' "What colour do you want? I'll find random fabric for you to try things I teach you on."
Light blue. It found itself drawn to that colour, and so it pointed there. The Pure Vessel adjusted its position to be more comfortable; less of a kneel, more of an awkward cross-legged sitting position thanks to its long limbs.
"Okay!" Hornet responded, picking up a device consisting of a pair of blades. Scissors, the Pure Vessel identified it as. "Your claws are too big to do it, so I'll cut the thread for you."
She grabbed the spool and cut two threads of decent length for her and her big sibling's use, then two needles of different size, one much larger than the other. The larger needle was handed to the Pure Vessel, who took it and held it in front of its own face to be inspected.
"So, to use the thread, you want to get it into the needle hole liiiiiiiiiiiike—" Hornet easily and precisely manipulated the tools in her claws, pulling the thread through the needle's eye. "—this. Just try! If you can't, I can."
The Pure Vessel took its own thread. Its hands remained unsteady in function, even as healthy as it was. It sometimes wondered if it had fallen ill without anyone's knowledge, as Hornet always made these things—tasks that were so intricate and complicated—look so easy compared to what it was capable of. Perhaps it was too large, or its body and blasphemous mind were too untrained in these civilian matters. It tried several times to thread its needle, missing on every attempt.
"It's okay! Here, let me do it for you." Hornet set her needle down and scooted over, taking some saliva from her mouthparts to adhere the frayed strands back together before effortlessly doing what the Pure Vessel could not. She took the long side of the thread over one of her claws, rolling and pulling it to form a small knot.
It didn't understand why she was willing to do these things for it, but it knew that she would be sad were it to prevent her from assisting. Was her goal not to teach it these things, or was it just to repeat and perfect tasks while giving attention to the weapon she mistakenly thought of as a sibling?
It would be lying were it to say that it did not, equally mistakenly, think of her the same way. Sometimes she begged to spar and learn to fight with it. It knew that it should not do that.
"Make sure the side with the knot is longer," Hornet said, quietly, as she pulled on the long side of the thread. She grabbed out several vaguely rectangular pieces of black scrap fabric, giving two to the Pure Vessel and two to herself, then shoving the rest back under her workspace. The Pure Vessel touched the fabric.
Hornet jumped up onto her desk to get something, then jumped down, bringing over a pin-cushion designed after a fat little beetle. "I don't know if you can do it, so I'll make you watch me put pins in your fabric."
She pulled out several pins, and started with the centre in holding the two pieces together. The pin's sharp side poked into the fabric, and she grunted with very mild frustration as she manipulated the fabric so that she could push the pin back through onto the starting side. She repeated the process to anchor down each corner of the Pure Vessel's fabric, then did the same with her own means of demonstration.
It wondered how their father would react, should he find out that it sincerely enjoyed its time spent with little Hornet. The Pure Vessel found its hands trembling just a little bit more. Such an issue could not be worked with. Its body needlessly betrayed its impurity whenever it was around its sister. It scolded itself for feeling so comfortable in being as genuine as its voiceless self could be.
"So you just start wherever. I like starting at corners. It just makes sense." Hornet gestured for the Pure Vessel to watch as she pulled the needle through the corner of the fabric, the knot at the thread's end preventing it from completely slipping through. She waited for it to imitate the step before continuing.
It pinched the part of the fabric that it aimed to pierce the needle into in order to stabilize it, flinching not even the slightest bit at the nearly unnoticeable pricking of the point against its sharp fingertip. Despite all odds—despite being a weapon, not an artist, not even a bug—it managed to complete the first step.
"Yay! Good job!" she congratulated it, her voice like a warm smile.
It was always a sucker for any kind of congratulations or compliments on its capabilities, especially from those it held close. It should not hold anybody close—it should not have had a mind to do so in the first place, yet it clung onto those it unfortunately called "family" and "friends." It wished that the circumstances that wrought its cursed existence had never come to be. Perhaps the soul it should not have would have gone to a real bug who would have had the opportunity to love and be loved, without anybody's guilt.
Hornet had said and done something, but she did not notice that the Pure Vessel was not listening. It was perfect at concealing its thoughts and emotions, after all. It had trained itself to do so ever since its emergence from those blackened pits where it abandoned the siblings it could have—should have—died with.
"Holly? Are you hearing?" she asked, tilting her head.
Mentally, it flinched, while it physically only turned its head to look at her. It had found itself often slipping into these distracting self-destructive thoughts whenever she showed the slightest undeserving affection to it. It had no reason to work on that, when it would be buried and gone not long from now.
It nodded its head at her to let her know that it was now listening.
"Okay. Good. I'll say that again to you. You move your needle a little bit to the side, then poke it down, then pull, then do it again but poke it up again." Hornet did as she described. "You try!"
The Pure Vessel did as she described, trying to make its work as clean as it could physically muster with its awkwardly large form and its inexperience in these intricate artistic matters. It looked away from its work at her for a response after a few stitches.
"Good job again! Now keep doing that with me and the things will be together!"
Yes, the rhythm and regularity of the task was soothing. It was able to do something with its hands other than clutching cold pale metal and forming ethereal weapons from reserves of soul granted to it, and it found that the tremoring from its shouldn't-ever-have-been anxiety had begun to lessen. It wondered if Hornet would be able to find someone else to do this with, once it left to be eternally chained.
Maybe the Old Light would choke in its darkness, and it would be free, able to live—or, perhaps, it would be discarded, for it would have no use. It found that the latter was more likely. It was not a bug, and something mindless would be better off rotting in the deepest depths of this world or standing guard in accompanied solitude with those automatons—those Moulds—born of the same shadow given form.
It was a mistake for Hornet to grow attached to it. It had been given orders, though, so it would not be its fault if she came to regret that childish decision of hers.
Perhaps it should return to its training and continue standing guard, soon. It wondered where in the Palace its father could be. Perhaps he was meeting, and that was why Hornet was unaccompanied. Things as they were would be ending for it soon, after all.
It suddenly stopped its work and stood up after completing two sides of the square. It was running out of thread, and it had combat and spells to perfect.
"Are you done?" Hornet asked.
It nodded.
"I'll make a knot in this for you. Can we do this again tomorrow? I'll be here for a few more days before they make me visit the Hive again!"
It nodded once more, for it had little other means to communicate.
"Okay. Maybe I can even show you embroidery, and we can get snacks again. I'm sure you have things to do right now, you're a knight!" She paused for a long period, thinking about how best to phrase what she wanted to say. "…They're lying about you, aren't they? Saying you can't think? It's a secret. Maybe you don't want them to know. I won't tell them, I promise!"
The Pure Vessel hesitated. No matter how it responded, it would betray itself—it already had, countless times. It took the easy way out, simply nodding again. It trusted her not to tell.
"I knew— um. Sorry if I said anything uncomfortable or things that made you sad. You seemed not to listen a few times. I don't know how to handle things like that. It's hard for me but I hope you're still able to do your job, with so much pressure… I don't really know it. I know it's important."
It picked up its nail and began to open the door to leave.
"Oh, right, busy. Bye! I'll see you tomorrow!" Hornet waved at her tall sibling as it left, closing the door behind itself.
She wasn't ignorant. She knew from her overhearing of discussions and from the words spoken to her by her mother that its job was one of great sacrifice, but nonetheless, she still wondered for what purpose it all was.
She would miss it when it was gone.