Chapter 22: Chapter Twenty One
And she had come to Amalica's home just as she had then for many more weeks, leading to another year of blissful communication with the bard, for she redirected her hands gently, a sensation that caused her heart to feel as if it was tied in little knots, the feeling still strangely comforting despite its alarming description. Arachne would do anything to have that rapturous feeling within her, even for a brief amount of time not to be calculated by any stopwatch or clock. It was a sense of confusion that she desperately longed for, and Ristil had told her that it was a normal thing to feel when one was in love.
Speaking of the firebrand of a smith, he had gotten married in the past year to a woman he had been seeing for a while, who was a rare face in the underground cells of Eilistraee; an elf. But she was no regular elf, she was one that was considered a, "sun elf," to those of the surface, who had come to Cell Maccis on a quest to see the world around her, but had eventually set down roots in the small community in favor of spending time with Arachne's friend. She had quite the beautiful name, too. Tristesse was her name, but many simply called her Tris for simplicity, but even still the name she bore was beautiful with or without the nickname she had been given as a child.
What befuddled Arachne, however, was why she would wish to leave the beautiful home of which she came from, for she spoke very wistfully of the land up above, and of the sunlight in particular, for she called it a neverending ray of orange, red, and yellow, emitting rays of enlightenment. Tris told stories of the sunsets, which was a mix of the sun and moon, layers of mixed purples, oranges, blues, and reds lining the sky like books would on a table, all framing around the sun itself, a gleaming ball of flaxen shades. And as it fell, the moon would rise, the stars with it, only for the same thing to occur again, only to be called sunrise.
Tris had said that as a sun elf, the sun was important to her culture, as, before she converted her faith to that of the Church of Eilistraee, her race was known as the true knights of Corellon, or in fact any God of his pantheon, the Lady of Dance sadly not being part of it. This was for the fact that She had embraced exile with Her mother despite being tricked into almost killing Her father, the leader of the pantheon, and Tris's old patron God, by Lolth. However, in Her kindness and compassion for the drow, She went into exile in the Abyss with the Spider Queen to bring solace to the children of the underground. For this, Arachne was glad to have been following such a amiable Goddess, for, instead of being concerned of Her own glory and pride, She focused instead on the people She saw would be faced with abuse from Her mother's own hands, offering Herself as a guide to those seeking shelter from the onslaught of blood and suffering, and to those who wished to seek Her song as their refuge.
This had been one of the many things going on over the past year, for Amalica had become Arachne's primary lyre instructor, seeing as Miss Lualyrr could not manage to teach her no matter how hard she tried, which, of course, irritated her beyond compare, for it, in her words, "stained her name as a musician," although it was quite a strange way of saying that she was disappointed with her impatience. This was something else that the drow elf had learned how to recognize within herself; the ability to understand what others were thinking without worrying about herself in some way. That had been something the newlyweds had taught her, for Ristil was too scared that he would do something wrong, or even do something to trigger whatever primal urges those raised without Lolth's influence somehow had (it was a certain mindset within the community itself that anyone who converted to the church of Eilistraee from the church of Lolth were fighting against some form of instinct to kill.) It had taken, once again, Tris's new intake from the surface world to teach her something new, and in turn something beautiful. She called it empathy.
It was a beautiful thing, for she was able to identify the true meaning behind people's actions, and it made more sense to her, for she didn't need to worry about her over-analysis leading to someone getting hurt, and Arachne knew enough about her own faults leading to people getting hurt just as well as any one of her brethren back in the city of Abburth, and even some, and actually very many, of the converts in Cell Maccis. It almost made her feel more connected to those around her, and part of her already knew that if she had learned empathy beforehand, perhaps she would have made different decisions that could have saved someone.
This one person being Bemril, seeing as, in Arachne's own point of thinking, if she had not responded to Matron Aunerae's message, her brother would still be alive, and she would have found herself in the same place sooner, and she would have known Amalica sooner. That thought led her down rabbit holes she never thought she would ever go down, one of which being that she would never have learned about Cazna in the way she had, and therefore she would not have received the staff of dracolitch bone. She would never have met Kethan, nor would she have met Durdyn, and he was probably the best thing that had ever occurred to her, for he had a light within him that she prayed was never extinguished.
However, one thing that her new found skill in empathy could not decipher was Amalica's feelings for her, for Arachne still knew very little about what Ristil had called, "the signs," as Tris had simply said that she would understand it one day. She didn't know what to do with that advice, as it seemed irrelevant to the current event, and maybe even for the future, as she needed to know whether or not the bard felt the same way for her. It had been eating at her for years, almost as if a small part of her was banging against a wall telling her to speak her mind, and over the years it had gotten louder and louder, and now it had become overwhelming.
It had led her to begin avoiding certain moments with Amalica, which was heartbreaking enough, as it had been those touches that had rejuvenated her from her depressed state only two years prior, despite the fact that it had felt like it had been half that time. Arachne remembered that in Abburth, each year felt like an accomplishment, marking another passage of time of which she had not lost her life, but now it felt as if she was continuing on, just with a different number on the date. It felt as if she was moving on from whatever had occurred in the previous year, akin to a reptile shedding its skin, albeit in a less distasteful way, instead of having to look into the past to ensure that nothing would come back to haunt her in later years; for there would be no loose ends when it came to the drow.
Today was one of the days that she and Amalica were to spend time together, although, since it had been two years to the day that Arachne had met the bard they were celebrating just on the edge of the cell itself, sitting against the stone and gazing upon the luminescent spores in the cavern leading to the surface. Ristil had been prodding her for a year to tell her friend about her feelings now that she grasped them and why she had them, for it deviated from simple attraction, seeing as she was quite beautiful, radiant even, but it had been deeper, forming into a true kind of love that was something she so craved for.
She thought about Amalica and how she was kind to all, save for the neighboring Duergar cult who had tried to strike quite the horrid deal with Mother Maccis not too long ago, to which she promptly refused. But that was beside the point, for her vigilance against the dwarves was purely due to the truest form of compassion Arachne had ever heard tell of, let alone seen, and as such it captivated her like everything else about the rest of her. For of course there was her honesty, her willingness to embrace her imperfectiveness while also remaining earnest. It was for these reasons that Arachne seemed to fall even more in love with her each day.
She made her way to the place Amalica had designated for their small, "picnic," as she called it, holding a basket of Adulanna's specialty pastries, coated in the most piquant flavor that Arachne had by far ever experienced, coupled with her almost fruity icing, of which she had requested for purple and red, the representation of, of course, their eyes. Inside of their soft confines of cake held a delicious cream the color of clouds, the pure ones of course, not the knotted gray and evil ones found in storms. All of this together made it almost perfect for the confession of feeling, and also something to chew on if it all went awry and she embarrassed herself in front of her dearest friend.
It was quite the quaint and beautiful thing that Amalica had set up, small and simple, and it captured her personality quite nicely, for below them was a soft woolen blanket that could hold them and possibly one more person the size of Eylavin, a very large drow man who had a stomach as round as the clock upon the crown of the highest pillar on the roof of the temple, as well as a stomach as thick as one of Ristil's finely crafted sickles, which, in hindsight, were rather small compared to the stomachs of some human men that Arachne had caught sight of in the farmland near the moondance site.
Despite this, she had pressed a gentle hand to her friend's shoulder with a warm smile on her face, her stomach already clenching up from a feeling of fear from what she did plan to do, a fear that she had never thought she would feel within her own heart. Arachne had known real fear, and as such she expected to only feel that experience in its truest form, but it had been there that she realized that there were different variations of fear and that she had been feeling a kind of fear that was not to be avoided, but to be embraced. It was a natural thing, and it would be something that she would conquer, this was something Arachne kept telling herself as she began to sit down on the woolen blanket, pressing her knees against her chest as she sat with her friend.
"Hi there, purple eyes!" Amalica cheered, extending her arms outwards and gently hitting her in the shoulders, "You ready for this? I just heard something from Baltana about your lyre playing last night, and do you wanna know what he said?" She paused, almost as if she wanted Arachne to make her own guess, and so she did.
"That I sounded like a deformed bat straight out of the Abyss?"
Amalica seemed to be taken aback, flipping her hair dramatically, "Oh, you wound me so! And your own self esteem! Have some hope, girl!" She grabbed her by the shoulders, shaking her back and forth, causing Arachne to lose her balance in her fetal position, falling to the ground as she did so, laughing with her friend as she did so. Gods, was she wonderful. "He said that you sounded like an angel from the Celestial Realm, actually, Miss Wordy. He also said that you got him to go straight to sleep and we all know that man likes to drink himself into a sleepless stupor." They laughed again.
Arachne smiled, taking deep breaths from the crippling laughter, catching herself as she rose again, this time sitting on her knees before she shifted away from doing it due to a sudden uncomfortable wave, instead opting to sit with her legs at her body's side, knees bent so that she could still stay on the narrow blanket. "Well, clearly," she jeered, "he has another screw loose. When I was practicing with that thing I sounded absolutely horrible. A very poor attempt at vibrato, I must add." She winked playfully.
"Bullshit!" Amalica cried breathlessly, taking a large bite out of a pastry that Arachne had brought in her basket, swallowing it and savoring the flavor for a moment, as evident on her face, before she began to speak again, "Your vibrato is a work-in-progress, not a, 'poor attempt.' Give it another year or two and you'll be just as good as me." She paused for a moment in thought before making yet another sly remark, "Actually… nevermind. No one can be as good as me."
Arachne sighed dramatically, throwing herself onto the ground,using her arms to cradle her head, Amalica following suit, "You have a fair point. I mean, let's be honest, you've been a musician for, what, twenty five years? I'm running on two!"
Amalica scoffed, "You're pretty good for two years! To think you didn't know how to read music when we started! Look at you now! The greatest musician in all of Cell Maccis's prodigy!"
Arachne rolled her eyes, "You're not the best musician. Come on." She said it with a very sarcastic tone of voice that she thought perfectly encapsulated her own attitude that had surfaced upon her joining the Dawn Guard's community, and, frankly, she quite liked it.
"I'm better than you!"
The two of them began to laugh again, Amalica rolling on her back from side to side with a wide smile on her face, white teeth making themselves known as her mouth was wide open from the joy that they shared through their jokes. There hadn't been a time with her that Arachne had not laughed, and that was quite the remarkable thing, for she had yet to surface from the experiences of her life before, but her salvation within the arms of both the Dawn Guard, her friends, and the Lady Eilistraee had been the best change she had ever experienced.
When they caught their breath, there was an almost awkward silence, as if both of them had forgotten what they were going to say, although for Arachne's case it was the absolute opposite, for she knew what she was going to say, although she lacked the knowledge of how to say it, for she had gone into this picnic knowing that her feelings would be known either way, and she could only hope that she figured out how to say the right thing instead of hiding away from smart remarks that she knew her friend would not understand, for she had admitted to reading less than what she was supposed to.
However, instead of it being she who broke the silence, it had been Amalica, the two of them staring upwards at the glimmering underground fungus glowing in the dark, "I have a question for you, if you'll listen."
Arachne looked at Amalica with curiosity peeking through her expressive lavender eyes, shrugging, "You know I will."
She cleared her throat, "Have you ever had that feeling where there's a burning in you that has never been stopped just because you're around someone? Like when they laugh or smile, or even just do something weird, like mess with their hair by accident?" Amalica turned to her side, looking at her with scarlet eyes as deep and as strong as the most formidable amaranthine.
"Um-" Arachne cut herself off, reminding herself that she was meant to stand her ground. "Yeah, I have. Only once, though."
"Because that's how I feel around you." Amalica muttered, looking at her again before looking down as she blushed. "I love you, Arachne."
Her blush was just as prominent, perhaps even more so than that of her friend, if she could even be considered that anymore, her eyes no doubt spilling her heart's secret, for it had been somewhat of a curse she had been noted for in her family, and still remaining a bit of nuisance when it came to lying. But Arachne allowed the feeling of these words sink into her mind, before realizing their weight, as she barely knew the weight of her own feelings, but instead she looked back into Amalica's eyes, grabbing her hand, assuming that was something that couples did, as she had seen both Tris and Ristil do it during their wedding, as well as many times before and after, smiling gently.
"Me too."
She cleared her throat again, pressing her hand gingerly against her cheek, her thumb stroking the bottom of her chin. "Can I kiss you, then?"
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