Golly, it'd been a pain and a half getting here. So many dark areas, requiring constant lighting from Dimentio who tossed glowing boxes everywhere to stop her from walking into deep dark spiky pits. Also horrible spiders of all kinds. Eventually she gave up and turned on her anti-gravity, even though it doubled her energy intake, because she was so sick of having to watch her footing all the time.

But now she was here, and what did she see? A completely abandoned village.

Tendrils of webbing wove up and down through this cavern, one of the largest ones Mimi had seen. There was no sign of intelligent life. Only empty homes perched precariously on jutting bits of stone, with silk cable running up and down to form narrow pathways. The homes too were knit entirely from spider silk, and illuminated by flickering white motes.

The stench of infection was stronger than ever, and the slight breeze that rippled through the curtains of silk, owing to the size of the cavern, did nothing to disperse it. Besides the echo of spiders skittering on distant walls, the ambient drone of low wind and the murmur of running water, there was barely any sound. The water rippled far below, a dark and depthless pool. For those unable to fly, it would be a long climb back up if they lost their footing. Assuming they lived.

"This place is so depressing," Mimi said.

"Really? You don't appreciate the cobwebs covering every spare inch of space? And the spiders that can't seem to get enough of us?" Dimentio plucked a tiny spider from his hat and made it explode into tiny spider bits. "I thought you would, you know, being a—"

"For the last time, just because I'm a spider doesn't mean I have to like this place. This awful place. With awful home decor. And awful residents."

"You should see the whole thing before you judge! Give it a fair shake! I would encourage you to look into the home decor, Mimi. Experience it in full. How can you say you've experienced everything this lovely village has to offer if you haven't even entered the homes? There could be wonderful things in there. Perhaps even treasure."

"Gee, you think? Because I... okay, there could be something neat in there. Fine. Fine, we'll look, fine."

Mimi waved an arm at a random nearby building. A perfectly spherical nest woven from thickly layered strands of silk, something that might have taken ages to build. They entered cautiously, her ringed by a glowing circle of rubees, and Dimentio with a burning cube of light balanced on the tip of his hat. Show-off.

The smell hit her first.

Then the sight. She suddenly wished she had never been manufactured with eyes.

The inside was piled with corpses. A pile of dead bugs amassed on the ground, hollow-eyed bodies, and more spiders of various sizes skittering up and down the walls. The bodies weren't even strung up, just lying on the ground. Rotting. Partially eaten. Golly, they stank.

"I regret my decisions," Mimi announced, and tried not to retch. "Dimentio?"

He was already out of the building.


They peeked into each woven home in succession. Okay, she peeked and he stayed outside to offer "ancillary support", which meant waiting around and sniping spiders while she did the tough work. Didn't matter much, because in the end every home was filled with the same thing. Bodies, piled morbidly and without much care. Food? They must be food. What a horrible thought—this was no way to store your meals. She preferred the civility of refrigerators and butcher shops, which should be a constant across all dimensions.

She hated the darkness, she really did, and these piles were unseemly. Her inner desire was to sweep this place clean of cobwebs and scrub at the walls until they sparkled, as everything should. But at this point she was just tired. What would be the point? This place must've been a bustling village once, a nice place to visit and talk to people, perhaps buy clothes. You could do a lot with spider silk. But whoever had lived here was long gone, the buildings abandoned, their interiors piled with mouldering corpses.

At last they came to the central tenement, where silk arrayed across the walls in crazed patterns, covered the jutting stone platforms they walked on, and dangled off the edges. The largest building of all was a woven nest, with dark strands hanging above the long distant water. She looked inside. There were people here, all masked. People!

They also weren't attacking her immediately, which could only be a good sign.

"Hello?"

Then one of them spoke, and her hopes died.

"You should come in and rest," the first occupant said, in a perfect monotone.

"Uhhh?"

"I agree. Come in and rest."

"Come in and rest. You must be tired."

"Please come in and rest."

"Come in, visitor. You must be tired."

"Come in," they chorused. They swarmed to the door, stretching spindly arms towards her. She backed off. She wasn't doing this. She knew suspicious behavior when she saw it and this was the perfect definition, it was something she had fantasized about doing herself, setting up some hotel where actually everything was meant to trick the guests into a lifetime of debt working for her. It was only fun if you were the one kidnapping people.

"Not it," she declared to nobody in particular, and dodged out of the dodgy house.

"How did it go?" Dimentio asked.

She swiveled her head 360 degrees to give him a death glare. "This was completely not worth it and I'm never going in that creepy place again. Is there any place here that isn't full of dead bodies or suspicious bugs that want to murder me?"

Dimentio, with his somehow perfect eye for detail, pointed out a section of the village where something gleamed in the light of a... was that a streetlamp? She squinted for details, but mega-strands of silk just happened to separate her and whatever he was pointing to. "Perhaps over there?"

"I can't see over there, there's too many cobwebs."

"Then there's only one way to find out, isn't there? We have to get closer."

"Goodie, another trap we'll have to slog through. I can't wait."


Closer up, the something revealed itself to be a real building instead of one of those weird woven spider places. A real building made of real materials like metal, with real building things like an arching ceiling and fluted columns etched with strange decorative patterns.

She didn't get her hopes up. This building, whatever it was, had clearly fallen from its heights of glory. The interior was choked with silk. To the side what looked like some pavillon or carousel (did they have those things in uncivilized places such as this?) laid tangled and dented in a mass of silken strands, hopelessly emeshed. Signs proclaimed something in a language she couldn't read.

"There's some weird picture on that sign," Mimi said.

"How mysterious! I suppose we'll discover its provenance shortly."

She sighed and drifted into the building. Spiders and dark shapes skittered in the shadows as she entered, and her rubees quivered, but nothing attacked.

Somehow the inside looked even worse than the outside. She ducked through a thick, formless tangle of spider silk that looked as if it had grown organically from the building, choking out the finely wrought metalwork and swaddling it all in an impenetrable layer of webbing. A once-grand hall now in ruins. Rows of shattered benches and inaccessible corridors where the ceiling had collapsed, or where a clot of cobwebs blocked any way forward. The ground was strewn with rebar and gray bulges she took for rocks, but then realized were shells of some sort. Possibly corpses. She gave them a wide berth.

Silken spools clustered in the place where columns or statues had once stood, each many times her height, gleaming bronze. She touched a silk-covered spool. Fine material, that stuff, would be excellent for manufacturing clothing. But also there was no way she could take anything that large and heavy with her, and the spool was webbed to the floor.

At the far end, the hall opened into a vast and dark tunnel. A lamppost strung with incomprehensible signs provided dim illumination. Not powered by electricity or magic, they had no such things here. She floated up top to peer at the light source trapped inside the lamp, a pretty glowing insect like some of the glitterbugs she'd known back home.

What had this place been used for?

"Look here." Dimentio looked eerie in the lamplight, his mask half-hidden in the shadows. Somehow he was in the perfect position for the lamplight to reflect off his cloak and mask and set them glittering against the somber backdrop.

"Your gift for dramatic poses is wasted on you," Mimi told him.

"Airheaded as usual. I was referring to this." He pointed at a large gilt bell hanging from a wrought-iron post. Whoever these people were, they had decent taste in architecture, unlike the horrid spiders outside. "Curiouser and curiouser, no? What do you think it does?"

"Are you going to—"

Snap. A light flared, and the bell jangled with surprising force. The peal rang loud and clear, and Mimi certainly did not clap her hands over her ears due to the surprising volume. The sound echoed through the dead hall, then further down the dark tunnel, somehow not muffled by the enormous quantities of silk. Faint echoes came to her as the sound bounced down the dark tunnel.

"What did you do that for?"

"Because it was there. Look at that bell. So solitary. It was just begging to be used, don't you agree?"

A trampling sound came from the tunnel. The sound of a stampede, or an amassed army, many tiny feet scrabbling down the enormous tunnel. The ceiling shuddered. Mimi readied her swarm of rubees to attack.

The beast that charged from the tunnel at rapid speed halted just before them. It was a horned creature with a gleaming harness, etched with elegant patterns like so much else in this building. Also there were two chairs on the harness, for some reason. Mimi kept her rubees circling around her just in case but it tilted its head inquisitively and said normal comprehensible words like a civilized being!

"I heard the bell, and so I came. Though this is not a station I am familiar with, and you are not the traveler I expected."

"Who are you?" Mimi asked.

"I am a stag of the old ways... I carry passengers. There used to be many more like me, but they have succumbed to time or illness. Or more violent fates."

That checked out. There were so many murderous bugs here, it was a miracle anyone was still alive.

"And where do you take them to?" Dimentio asked, as Mimi was about to pipe in and defend the honor of her newfound pet.

"There are stag stations all over the kingdom. The stagways wind up and down through Hallownest, even beyond... I used to know them all, though time has dulled my memory. Shall I recite a list?"

"That would be delight—" And Mimi pushed past him to holler, "Do you have any way to get to a cavern full of gems? Big ones? Shiny ones? Because a certain someone told me there would be treasure here, and so far it's been a lie."

"You wound me. I assure you if I could have gotten us there without all this trouble I would have done so. I detest spiders just as much as the next person."

The stag stomped its feet and shifted. The seats clinked together atop its back. "I do remember a way. Not within the actual mines... I recall that region was too unstable for the tunnels to be built... but there is a station located nearby. I can bring you there."

Mimi cheered.


She wasn't one for fast transportation. Dimentio wasn't either, from the way he was grasping onto the seat for dear life and looking less than comfortable. "Sucks to be you," she said somewhat gleefully, to which he responded with a glare. Or probably a glare. As usual his expressions were somewhat hard to discern behind that mask.

In the beginning cobwebs dissuaded them. Sometimes their escort had to charge through, stabbing to and fro with his oversized head. She reached out and felt gently billowing silk collapse in her fingertips.

The cobwebs grew less frequent as they traveled. The tunnels rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and plummeted. The stag raced up and down slanted passageways that spiraled in the dark. She had pretty good nightvision, but this darkness was killing her. Dimentio summoned a glowing box for light, and its white glow cast rapidly changing shadows. Sometimes she saw things clinging to the walls, creatures flashing past, but they disappeared too quickly for her to identify them.

Sometimes she saw other passages, openings that weren't taken, and felt strange winds. A tunnel redolent with greenery, coupled with a whiff of wild, grassy fragrance. A tunnel blanketed by low swirls of fog. A tunnel choked with the familiar earthen smell of spores. The tunnels were mostly of uniform size, but sometimes they opened briefly into larger caverns, purpose unknown. Had they been there when the tunnels were constructed or were they built specifically for something? She saw shining rocks studded on their ceilings, stalactites jeweled with minerals. A false semblance of stars, the closest you could get this far underground.

The tunnels were wide enough to accommodate multiple creatures like the one who carried them. The station must've had more than one in its heyday. She couldn't imagine building all this for just one creature unless the royalty was even dumber than she'd thought.

Eventually the queasiness faded down and she could grab onto the seat for dear life and enjoy the ride. Dimentio still looked like he was not particularly enjoying the ride. She relished the non-look on his non-face. Finally payback for once.

Sometimes they exchanged brief conversation on places they passed, tunnels trammeled with mushrooms or dripping with water or carved with strange whorls and repetitive circles. Patterns, names and words in a language neither of them could recognize, etched into the walls as primitive graffiti. But mostly they rode through the silent darkness. The ground blurred past them. Clouds of dust and grime were kicked up by their passing. They were crossing territory that had not been crossed in many years.

The soft lull, and the rushing darkness, was enough to lull her to sleep.

Or was something pulling her into sleep? Into blistering dreams.


Vast glittering visions stretched out before her, flashing at lightspeed, each a luxury, a delusion, something beautiful. Riches amassed in towers. She focused in and saw moths, warming their hands at luminous crystalline bonfires, with lovely handsewn outfits.

You could have this.

Her inner consciousness tied itself into knots. Diagonal lines skewed across her dreamscape, which billowed into the endless gold expanse of the sky. Tangerine flavored, shot through with white clouds.

She fell through.

The towers grew and shrank. Cities swelled and she swelled with them, watching her insides fill with all manner of moths. They filed into specially-prepared rooms. They decorated lodging areas with amber and gold glass. Elegant stone carvings in every corner. Art and music flourished.

Pale light turned these cities to ash. A white incandescence suffused the buildings and they crumbled. White light swelled from the ground, waves raged, torrents of light crashed over the towers again and again.

She felt ill. Little scrambly figures scrambled in her vision. Dark bugs, foul beetles, desecrated cities abandoned by their rightful owners. She was a bug. She was a ball of black twine. A churning sea of black twine. Beyond the first void is another void, and another. A pinprick of light muffled by darkness. The void between worlds ripped open a fabric in reality, the dimensional tissue of all the world. None were spared. Families and children and friends held each other as the world dissolved.

What would it be like to lose everything? Did this thought issue from her own internal mechanisms or some outer voice, guiding, poking and prodding at her? Don't you want to erase a vulgar world and create something more pure and beautiful? Don't you see all this suffering and desire something new? And better?

No. Not like this.

The sea rose like sludge. A fetid tide polluted the space between worlds, the space between dreams. The squares that dominated her dreamspace were shifting. Their edges softened out. They became circles. Woven circles filled with intricate everlasting patterns. Falling into a pattern. The kaleidescope consumed her.