Skill Hunter -Kill Monsters, Acquire Skills, Ascend to the Highest Rank!

What else was there to do? Ike looked at the graves for a little longer, then shrugged to himself and hopped down the cliffside toward the rolling hills below. Wisp followed silently, and Mag took to the air. Ike wasn't really sure the birdbrain understood what the gravestones meant, and he didn't think it was necessary to break the news to him, so he let it fly, as it were. He gazed at all the gravestones, feeling nothing and everything. Those stones were no one to him, and yet someone he knew intimately fell, being as they were, well… okay, not quite him, but pieces of the same person he was a piece of. Siblings? Maybe that was the closest analogue.

"Honestly, I'm just surprised that there's so many of them," Wisp said at last.

"Makes you wonder how much of the original being there is left. How many pieces did Brightbriar slice off?"

"And he's trying to make the original out of one-thousandth… less than one-thousandth of the original being's soul. Seems kinda stupid to me." Wisp glanced at Ike. "Why isn't he just using the whole soul, do you think?"

"Maybe he doesn't have the whole soul," Ike pointed out.

"Huh. But even so… wouldn't using all of it he had, get it the closest to complete as he could get?"

"He's obsessed with perfection. If he only took one shot at making 'that being,' what if he messed up? And then once he failed once, that fear would magnify in his mind… I don't think he couldn't, I just don't think he would," Ike argued.

Wisp shrugged. "I don't get this whole idea in the first place, honestly. Make a new friend, man. Come on. You've lived a long life. Met a lot of people. Watched a lot of them die. Eaten a few."

"I'm pretty sure Brightbriar hasn't eaten any people, but I won't swear to it," Ike interjected.

Wisp waved her hand, conceding the point. "Yeah, yeah. Missing out, just like the rest of you. The point is, surely he could meet a new bestie in his mage-length lifespan?"

"He spends all day in his house carving puppets. Are we sure he could?" Ike returned.

She chuckled at that one. "You got me there."

"I'm not sure we can really measure Brightbriar's decisions by an ordinary person's reasoning. He's insane, certifiably insane. If we try to say, 'well, I would never do something like that,' there's no point, because he's not able to think rationally," Ike argued.

Wisp nodded. "Not that we're super sane, either."

"I mean, we're sane, we're just feral. If you stopped talking about how tasty humans are, you could even pass for well raised."

Wisp gasped, taken aback. "But that's my one joy in life!"

Ike shook his head at her. "I didn't say you were going to do it, I just said you could do it."

Pressing her hand to her chest, Wisp let out a relieved sigh. "Almost worried you were going to start telling me to use 'prithee' and eat with my pinkies up."

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

Ike mentally reviewed the last time he'd seen Wisp eat something outsize, and reran the image with her pinkies raised. He shook his head, struggling a bit not to laugh. "I mean, it would be funny."

"Maybe I should do it next time. Just to stunt on our enemies," Wisp suggested.

"I'd love to see it."

They reached the bottom of the cliff. The whole time, Ike had been talking partially because he liked chatting with Wisp, but partially because the idea of getting so close to the graves of a thousand versions of him made his skin crawl. Something about it was abhorrent. Not just the idea of visiting his own grave, but the quantity of it. The waste. The total lack of necessity that went in to slaughtering so many for one deranged goal. Whatever Brightbriar's goal was, couldn't he see how pointless it was when he looked out on these innumerable stones?

Then again, Ike was under no illusion that Brightbriar had built these graves. This wasn't a hallowed site, like the Prince's resting place, nor was it a scorched-earth wasteland, as the place he'd found the King had been. This misty, rolling valley was the sole territory of the specter. However she found these pieces of him, he knew from just looking at the neat lines of identical gravestones that she was the one who'd buried them. Brightbriar didn't do things by half-measures. He built a hundreds of meters wide stone maze, or burned a region the size of a large city. Whether it was love or hate, he fully committed… which, Ike reflected, was probably why his obsession was so strong as to become blinding.

The point was, at the end of the day, Brightbriar wasn't the type to build these neat identical graves. If he had no interest with how these pieces were formed, born, whatever, then he would wholesale abandon them just as he fully committed to love or hate, not do this half-respectful, neat, sterile, empty field. A field with no meaning, that no one would visit; a field for one lone figure's mourning of Brightbriar's waste, rather than a monument to anything. That was all the field impressed upon the viewer. Not sympathy for these thousands of identical deceased, not futility, not hopelessness, but simply the vastness of Brightbriar's excesses, in daring… no dooming himself to this endless path with its unreachable goal.

Ike reached the first stone, and knelt. He didn't know what he'd expected, but the stone was unmarked, save a number: 48. The next one bore another numeral: 49. And so on, and so forth, only numbers to mar the otherwise identical stones.

"What a waste of effort," Wisp muttered.

Ike glanced at her. She'd felt that same thing he had, then?

She shook her head at the graves. "Going to all this effort to bury good food, and then put pretty little markers on top. I'll never understand you humans."

"It's usually done to honor the dead," Ike pointed out gently.

She crossed her arms. "What greater honor, than to fuel my body and empower me to greater heights?"

Ike scoffed. Spiders really were different. Then again, as omnivorous as Wisp was, he really wasn't surprised at all that she'd feel that way. "Yeah, yeah."

Her voice took on a surprisingly genuine tone, and she lifted her head, looking him in the eye. "Ike, know that your body will not be thrown away as waste. I will utilize its nutrients and aether, and make your life worth something. You won't just rot. Even if you die before you obtain your goal, I will take your life onto myself, and ensure that I have the greatest chance of obtaining it."

Ike had meant to riposte whatever she said next, so to hear something from the heart, meant earnestly—he deflated. Looking at the thousands of tiny white stones, he sighed aloud. What was the point of this field, after all? This lonely place no one would ever see, with no purpose, and no objective. If he was buried here, would his goals be furthered? No. He'd be forgotten. Nothing but a bleached pile of bone.

He looked at Wisp, meeting her gaze. "I think I'd like that."

"Of course you would. We spiders are the superior species, after all." Wisp nodded haughtily, but there was a different light in her eye than the usual mischievous glint. She'd tried to play it off, but she really had meant it. Everything she'd said.

"And you… I won't eat you, but… your goals, whatever they are, I'll…"

There was silence.

Mag fluttered down from overhead. "Why'd you guys stop for so long? Are there snacks?"

Both Wisp and Ike broke out laughing, the statement so far out of left field to their serious conversation that it shattered the tension of the moment. Ike ruffled Mag's head. "Come on. Let's get out of he—"

Something cold gripped his ankle. Ike yelped and leaped into the air.