The Unmaker

"Guard us, great wind deity," the whispers rise,

from Sharaji towns to star-filled skies,

and at month's dark end, the men brave the sands,

with gifts and prayers in trembling hands.

Fifteen figs, thirteen dates,

Ten pomegranates, and eight lutes of fate.

It is no monster, nor devil, they seek to sway,

But the hand that keeps destruction at bay.

"... Spare us, great deity," and so they plead,

in fear and hope, their voices lead,

“Beast of dread, the desert’s king,”

“Madamaron, The Destroyer sings.”

- Poem of ‘Madamaron, The Destroyer’

The little girl who was their guide ran fast and low, keeping to the alleys, making it difficult for Dahlia and Alice to follow her on foot. Thankfully, Alice’s comb-like moth antennae were sensitive to all sounds—they could just barely keep up by the flutters of the little girl’s cloak, rounding corner after corner as Dahlia noted where they were headed.

The northern end of the Sharaji Oasis Town.

“What are we doing, exactly?” Dahlia asked mid-run, vaulting a small crate, and Alice beamed at her as they ducked under a slanted pallet.

“I told you,” Alice said. “The older townsfolk don’t actually trust me and uncle Safi all that much, Hasharana and our infamy across the continent. They won’t listen to any request I make at the expense of their age-old traditions, and that means I couldn’t get access to the murdered people’s houses. After all, the Oasis Town believes a deceased’s house cannot be entered for at least a year after their passing—some sort of mystic belief—but I bet we’ll find some clues about Madamaron if we can poke around inside.”

“Why?”

Alice tilted her head at her like she was stupid, and Eria reminded her promptly.

[She told us that in all three murder cases, the victims in question were never seen leaving their houses at night,] Eria explained. [If we are to believe it is no act of god or spirit, the Mutant preying on the Oasis Town is likely capable of manipulating people’s senses on a mass scale. After all, people cannot just ‘disappear’ from a sealed room. The guards’ perception must have been altered while the Mutant grabbed its victim from their houses. In that case, there should be traces of the Mutant in their houses that we can use to determine what insect, exactly, we are hunting.]

“Your Archive is correct,” Alice said, not missing a beat as they rounded one last corner, finally breaking out of the alley as they raced after the little girl. “To be frank, there are plenty of giant insects and Mutants capable of creating illusions and the like, but none that I know of living in the desert. I need to get inside one of those houses. Preferably, I don’t get thrown out of town with uncle Safi while I do so!”

…

Most of the plan made sense to her, but the final part only clicked in place when Alice yanked her behind a crate, pulling her out of sight of two guards standing outside a small sandstone house at the northern edge of the town. She’d never been this far north before, but just the dreary atmosphere in the air told her it was the house of the woman she’d found dead in an alley a week ago; the guards, then, were probably there to stop people like Alice from barging in, claiming she was simply doing as the Hasharana requested.

Not that Dahlia didn’t think Alice couldn’t barge in with pure brute force alone, but the Hasharana didn’t seem to work that way, at least. Violence against the locals was out of the question—hence, the small twist in her stomach when the little girl they’d been following ran up to the guards and started chatting them up, making their conversation as loud and obnoxious as humanly possible.

The two of them watched the guards relax and take their hands off their saifs for a moment.

Then Alice turned to her, shushed her with a finger to her lips, and dragged her around the back where several crates were already stacked like a set of stairs.

Alice bowed slightly and gestured up the crates, pointing at the small circular window at the top of the wall that usually served as additional ventilation on extremely hot days.

“After you,” the Hasharana whispered. “And feel free to cut the window open. It’s locked from the inside, but I can fix it if you don’t cut it too messily.”

… So this is why she’s been playing Risha ball with the kids the entire past week, she thought, hunching her back and climbing the crates slowly, careful not to make too much noise as she reached the top. She manipulated the girl into helping her break tradition.

[Yet the little girl would most certainly not have agreed to help without your presence the past week,] Eria added. [If Alice is the town’s hated outsider, then you are the town’s favoured outsider. The bad bug and the good bug. The bad four-arms and the good four-arms. If Alice had asked alone, she would most likely have run off in fear, but you are trustworthy at the very least—now you are in this together.]

I’m an accomplice, then?

Eria, the tiny black bug, shrugged on her shoulders. [The children had fun, and you had your training. Does it matter if it means you can figure out what sort of Mutant the townsfolk are up against?]

…

Before Alice could nag her to hurry up, she sliced the window open with her claws and slipped through, landing on the tip of her toes with her fingers touching the floor.

Her first impression of the house was ‘small’. Like her own room on the second floor of Grandma Ramaba’s general store, the decor here was quiet and cosy. There was an old chair and table wedged against the wall on her left, a quilted bed and small cabinet on her right, and a wide fire pit circled by stones in the middle of the room. Like most other houses, palm was the wood of choice for lining the ceiling, and there was a towel placed before the front door to stop sand from blowing in. The only thing that stood out was the semi-kitchen next to the front door; there were cutting boards sitting on a protruding counter, a bunch of spice jars sitting on shelves, and a giant, old-fashioned baker’s oven carved into the walls that reminded her of Smith Jaleel’s furnace.

The lady who’d lived here must’ve liked cooking.

“... Well, I’m glad the kid’s good at yammering on and on about how much she likes making makeshift desert flares,” Alice said, half-laughing, half-muttering as she dropped into the room behind Dahlia, landing and staying on her tiptoes just as well. “You take the left half, I’ll take the right half. Find anything suspicious, we’re taking it out of here and investigating it in uncle Safi’s tavern. She’s probably going to run out of breath in about ten minutes or so.”

Dahlia nodded back, and the two of them parted to search through the furniture. For a brief moment she felt that twist in her stomach again—guilt from disrespecting and desecrating the house of the dead—but she told herself more would die if they didn’t learn anything Madamaron in here.

Compared to what she’d done to Instructor Biem and her dad’s bodies, this was neither as hands-on nor as visceral.

She’d pull through.

But what, exactly, am I supposed to look out for?

While Alice retreated into the washroom, the storage room, and whatever else was through the doorway off to the side, she didn’t even know where to begin her investigation. She crept over to the cabinet, and nothing was on the surface apart from dust and bronze jewellery yet to be set in vanity boxes. Back to the bed, desk, and chair, they were each perfectly aligned in their own little corners of the room, not looking a single inch out of place. She moved closer to the semi-kitchen, then, careful not to make the sandstone flooring crack, keeping her head low so the guards outside couldn’t peer in through the windows—but there was nothing special about the knives and bowls and the utensils hanging off the wall hooks, either.

She raised her head and sniffed, letting the spice and herbal scents fill her up. The smell of musty old fabrics and what seemed to be perfume from the quilted bedding made her nose tingle, but there wasn’t anything distinctly out of place like a bombardier beetle’s explosive extract. Nothing particularly pungent. Nothing particularly dewy or earthy, even though…

…

… The sandstone wall next to the bed caught her eye.

“Alice,” she whispered, and the Hasharana poked her head out of the doorway, ears craned. “You’re sure the guards said nobody walked in or out of the houses on the nights of murder, right?”

Alice nodded firmly. “I’m sure. And it wasn’t just the guards—the nearby townsfolk corroborated their claims, saying they didn’t hear any front door bells ringing those nights. From their perspective, no doors were ever opened.”

“And you think it’s because Madamaron is an insect that can affect senses with… some sort of chemical? Maybe like small, poisonous scales that can wash over the entire town, stopping people from noticing it just walking into the house and grabbing the victim?”

“Yep.”

“But the windows were locked from the inside before we broke in, and the horizontal slit underneath the front door is still blocked by a towel,” she said, pointing at the towel in question. Alice skittered back out into the living room, kneeling next to her to hear her better. “The room is also extremely tidy. It’s like there wasn’t even a scuffle here. If Madamaron really altered everyone’s perceptions and walked in to snatch the poor lady, wouldn’t something have been knocked over? Is it smart enough to know to pull the towel back in place after opening the front door?”

Alice’s frown was immediate. “I’m not following.”

“Look.”

The Hasharana fixed her with a befuddled gaze as she placed her palm on the sandstone wall next to the bed, rubbing coarse grains off the wall as easily as old paint with a sheet of sandpaper—and then Alice raised a brow in amusement, both of them turning to face this one particular section of the wall where, conveniently, there was no furniture sitting in front of it.

“... The patterning of this wall is warped,” Alice said. “Almost like it’d been drenched in water.”

Dahlia’s gaze lingered on the wall, twirling a claw along the circular ripple pattern to carve off more grains of sand. “The wall’s also weaker and looser than usual. At least, the walls in my room don’t crumble like this even when you rub it really hard.”

“Because they’re superheated and hardened by the sun.”

“Right,” she breathed, closing her eyes for a brief second before snapping over to look at Alice, mouth grim. “I’m not sure if it’s just fiction, but… um, my mom used to have this insect encyclopaedia. I have every insect on it memorised, and supposedly they’re all real insects that exist on the surface, though I never figured out if that was actually true or not–”

“–most likely not–”

“–but there’s a species of beetle called ‘Fog-basks’ that live exclusively in the desert, capable of collecting water from early morning fogs on its elytra,” she continued, glancing at Eria for confirmation. “The complicated name is… um, ‘Stenocara Gracilipes’. I think. The little bumps on their elytra are water-loving, which means water sticks to them, so its insect parts are sometimes used for water collection down in Alshifa as well, but… I think this is what happened here.”

She poked the centre of the ripples with a single claw, drawing attention there.

“There were no illusions. There were no alterations of any perceptions. The front door bells never rang and the towels never moved, because Madamaron didn’t come in through the front door… or any of the windows for that matter,” she said, miming pushing her entire arm through the ripples to the other side of the wall. “If the fog-bask Beetle can use its collected water to soften the sandstone wall, then it can just reach through, grab its victim sleeping on the bed, and then pull them out through the mud-like wall. Then they kill the victim so there’s no struggle, no sound. The wall is never fully destroyed in this scenario. The pattern is just warped and rippled like this because that’s where its arm reached through, and when daybreak arrives, the sun just reheats the wall and makes it appear like the victim vanished without ever going through the front door.”

“...”

“... That’s what I think, anyways,” she said, scratching her ear and averting her eyes as she did. “I’m not sure if a Mutant fog-bask beetle can do something as intricate as releasing its collected water whenever it pleases, but… the Mutant firefly in Alshifa could throw lightning bolts, and that’s pretty magical to me, so–”

“You are a genius,” Alice breathed, clasping all four hands on Dahlia’s shoulders with a wide grin. “You know, that makes way more sense than my ‘making the entire town hallucinate’ theory. If you think it’s a… a what? A fog-bask beetle? If you think it can collect and release concentrated water at will to soften up sandstone, then it also explains how sandstorms are less frequent after a successful hunt. Assuming it goes dormant for an entire year after filling its stomach with three people, that means it’s not collecting water from the atmosphere, which means sandstorms don’t happen quite as often. It makes sense!”

Dahlia felt her cheeks redden as she started biting her claws. “It could still be… something else. We shouldn’t be so sure we’re looking for a beetle. If we start thinking it’s one thing and it turns out to be something else, we’ll–”

“We’ll die to it in battle, simple as that. It’s a Mutant, after all,” Alice agreed with a nod, and then she started dragging Dahlia back towards the window they’d crawled in through. “The girl sounds like she’s running out of topics to distract the guards with. She’s talking about oasis reeds now. Heh. She’s hungry.”

“But don’t we need to–”

“Just knowing it has the ability to potentially walk through walls is enough of a start,” Alice interrupted, climbing out the window before peeking through, offering her a helping hand. “I’ll ask uncle Safi if he knows anything about how to lure a desert beetle out of hiding later. In the meantime, we can go get dinner together. How’s that for a plan?”

“...”

She had no complaints.

It wasn’t like she wanted to desecrate the poor lady’s house any further.

Quickly, she accepted Alice’s helping hand and crawled out the window as well, landing with a quiet poomf. By the time she turned around to ask what they’d do about the window, the Hasharana was already hanging off the edge of the roof with two hands, stitching the cutout circular pane back onto the window with her other hands. The entire process took no more than ten seconds—Alice dropped down just as quickly and snatched her wrist, pulling her away from the house and back out onto the main street where they could simply walk like normal people.

There, Alice glanced around and gave the little girl a casual, playful wink; the signal that they were done with their investigations.

The little girl waved the guards goodbye before running off herself, leaving the two men scratching their heads, confused about the whole ordeal.

… Eria.

[I do not know what type of moth she is, either–]

I saw it.

Her eyes hardened on Alice’s hand as the Hasharana continued pulling her down the street.

Her blood-red nails are silk.

Do you know any moth that can create silk even after they reach their adult phase?

A pause.

But not without an answer to follow.

[... I suspect her insect species is much like yours,] Eria said plainly. [A species that, according to the Archive of Altered Swarmsteel Systems, should no longer exist.]