Born and woven from Mother’s silk, despite how dependant it made her, having to remain almost constantly at the cocoon where the traitors kept Pharloom’s Monarch asleep with runes and song, a state the entire Citadel was built to maintain, Lace could not age. A bug in outline, but never in soul or identity.

—————

After who knows how long spent unconscious from injury, frayed threads and glowing-ivory ichor reifying the punishment to losing the third and last confrontation with the Part-Weaver, painful in a way deeper than physical, she awoke in the pure white petals in the enchanting meadow beneath the dying kingdom’s peak.

The spider must be…

She spent immense effort (purely desperation and abstract longing) to see the result. Even gods can die? Foolish, foolish morsel. ~~Yet she cannot deny, she had a faint desire, to hope the spider prevailed.~~ She denies herself regardless. Pathetic.

The picture, the one in her mind at least, unclear in clarity and potent in meaning: Mother, the one who wove Lace, free and awake from Her forced and enslaved slumber to take Pharloom back under Her aegis, with the Part-Weaver’s remains as evidence.

She had no face to put where the Pale Monarch was in that fantasy. Lace was created in Mother’s slumber, woven from outside the gargantuan, mythical cocoon. Mother’s prison. Not for much longer, though.

And, perhaps, only perhaps, with the spider finally gone, she’ll have Mother’s undivided approval… The shape of its absence lets her know what she wants while never knowing how it feels.

—————

After an unceremoniously harsh ascent due to her injuries, she made it to what remains of the Cradle. The pristine prison of hardened silk, previously suspended high in the massive, tall chamber, laid discarded and split in two.

And there she saw, whom she momentarily could not identify between the spider and her Mother.

“…Mother?” She spoke, tone level despite her state yet frayed like her form.