Spidersilk and Bandages
Chapter 3
Posted January 23, 2026
The Human’s anatomical similarities to elven creatures goes deeper than I had thought. In fact, the structure of our endoskeletal parts is nearly identical. Does this indicate a shared origin of our people? I suspect she would know more about it than I, but I cannot bring myself to ask.
[…]
She says she hails from a strange gathering of humans, which she calls a city. It seems to be some sort of perpetual Althing. What craft must have gone into such a structure? Is it the product of these gods she speaks of? More remains to be seen, but I must be sure not to test her patience.
-Notes of Ursula, First Panacea, on the third day of the forty-fourth week, in the twenty-third year of this Age.
~~~
Second day after injury:
Helena swore as she undid the last clasp, letting her breastplate fall to the ground alongside the rest of her armor. She had only been on her feet for a few minutes, but the sweat on her back was already seeping through her undershirt.
The task done, she slowly lowered herself back down to a sitting position, being careful to put as little pressure on her core as possible. As soon as she was seated, she flopped back and let out a deep sigh.
Ursula stood to the side, trying not to think about how much smaller the knight looked without her armor. She wasn’t doing very well. It was distracting, how the human could look so vulnerable, while still being so untouchably vast.
Raising her voice, she called out to Helena. “You’re doing well! Just make sure not to push yourself too hard!”
Helena sighed again. Ursula noted her chest rising and falling visibly. It almost looked exaggerated, now there was no armor to obscure the motion. “Can hardly consider it pushing myself just to stand up for a minute.”
“You absolutely can when you’ve been grievously wounded. Now lay down and let yourself rest.”
Helena grumbled something intentionally nondescript, but relaxed into her position nonetheless.
Ursula sighed. In the past day or so, it had become clear that Helena would only sit and rest if she was firmly told to do so. It felt strange, having to put her foot down before this titan, but also exhilarating. If she worded something as a command, Helena would invariably do as she was told.
Satisfied, Ursula turned to the supplies she had amassed. It had taken several trips of hauling food, but she finally had a decent buffer, at least enough to last for a few days. She had even rigged a contraption to help with condensing water. It was simple, just some sild lines set up and held taut, leading into the mouth of Helena’s waterskin, but with her spellcraft, it would make enough to keep the human hydrated.
Finally convinced everything was as it should be, Ursula turned back to her notes.
It took seventeen minutes for Helena to grow restless.
The fidgeting started as a finger-tapping. A small movement that Ursula would hear a mile away.
Then, it grew.
Helena slowly reached out an arm, swinging it over Ursula’s workspace to land on the recently-discarded armor. There she stayed for a moment, before slowly dragging the breastplate towards herself.
Ursula watched this process bemused. It wasn’t until Helena started to sit up that she spoke up.
“What are you doing?”
Helena tensed, seeming like a scolded child, but continued to rise, rolling up onto one side. “I’ve just got to check the breastplate for damage. It’ll be quick.”
Ursula groaned. She had been told she was stubborn, but that stubbornness paled in comparison to this. “You can check it over just as well tomorrow.”
Fully sitting now, Helena brought the breastplate up onto her lap. “maybe so, but I won’t be able to rest until I see it. This suit is literally irreplaceable.”
Ursula’s back right arm twitched. “Well, that can’t possibly be true.”
Helena shrugged, turning her head down to the armor. “Can’t say I know the details, but I was told very clearly when I was given the armor that there would never be another like it. The knowledge to make it went with the elves.”
Ursula froze. “What do you mean by that?”
Helena looked up from the inspection, furrowing her brow and scratching the back of her neck. “Okay, so an elf is a type of person, like humans, but-”
“No, no, I know what elves are. I mean, I’m interested in hearing that description, but we can loop around to that later. What do you mean by ‘went with them’?” Ursula bent her back-arms in time with the paraphrased question.
Helena sat in silence for a moment, regarding Ursula in a way that she hadn’t before. Bewilderment and curiosity rolled together. “Okay, I’m not sure how much you know, but… some time ago, most of the elves in the city just up and left.”
Ursula stood up and started pacing. A pen practically leaping into her hand. “What do you mean left? Left where?”
“No one really knows. We think they went north?” Helena gestured vaguely into the forest, in a direction that may or may not have been north. “I was only nine years old when it happened, so I don’t remember much.”
“You were there for it? What was it like?” Ursula hopped up on Helena’s ankle and walked up to her knee, glancing up at her face in between the lines written frantically in her notebook. “Please, tell me anything you can remember. No one followed them, or asked where they were going?”
Helena glanced up at the sky, obscured as it was by leaves. The sun was somewhere overhead. “No-one had a chance to. I remember it was sudden. One morning, there was this stream of light in the sky, flowing north. Then, the elves sort of… dissolved into it.”
Ursula’s thoughts were outpacing her pencil. She dropped off her perch on Helena’s knee, and dashed through the grass to her little campsite. She tore several pages out of her notes and spread them across the ground.
She wrote frantically, filling the paper with shorthand notes. After a few moments of silence, she was dimly aware of Helena setting down the armor and returning to rest, somewhere far away.
~~~
The human has said that the city from which she hails has a surviving elven population, though greatly diminished by what she describes as a mass migration some years ago. The discovery of other remaining elves is, of course, monumental. A more detailed report and interview will follow.
Another note: the description and time of this departure might align with the great lights that marked the beginning of this Age, though the exact date of the happening is not known.
-Notes of Ursula, First Panacea, on the fifth day of the forty-fourth week, in the twenty-third year of this Age.
~~~
Fourth day after injury:
“So the elves that are still around, what do they do, usually?”
Helena looked over at Ursula, and her rapidly growing stack of notes. “What exactly do you mean by that?”
Ursula shifted her position, moving her current notebook to a different hand. “I mean their callings. Do they make art? Are they mostly craftspeople?”
Helena hummed, considering. “I’m not sure there are really any patterns. They have the same jobs as anyone else in the city, mostly.”
“And what does that entail? Have you met any elves? What do they do?”
“Well, most of the ones I know, I met in my training to become a cleric. They were healers, to a one.”
Ursula’s eyes snapped up from the page for the first time in quite a while. “You trained under healers?”
Helena shrugged as well as she could, while lying down. “Not very much, only enough to do basic healing in an emergency.”
Sighing, Ursula turned to a page of reminders, and scrawled “compare notes on healing practice” into the next entry.
~~~
Seventh day after the injury:
Ursula’s lungs were burning by the time she dragged the coil of rope back to camp. It was a strange thing, thick and coarse, made from thousands of overlapping threads. Each strand was incredibly weak, but together, they made something as strong to the humans as Ursula’s thread was to her. Apparently they had kept a great deal of the stuff with them on their travels.
Helena didn’t react to her approach for a time, absorbed as she was in her stretches. Ursula was glad for the moment to breathe, which she spent looking over the larger woman’s exercises. With each movement her massive form swung up and around, before returning to a neutral resting position.
It was graceful, in its way. The motions were smooth, with barely a tremor in Helena’s immense frame. Ursula appreciated the intense effort that must go into maintaining such incredibly control and power.
When she finally stopped for a rest, the knight turned to face Ursula, rolling onto her side and regarding the rope. “Thanks much, this’ll do nicely.”
Ursula, still winded, simply stepped back from the rope as Helena picked it up, taking it onto her lap and starting on a simple knot.
It was the most bizarre thing Ursula had ever seen.
It certainly looked like a knot, and Ursula could recognize the motions in it, but it was a strange parody of the art she knew. Helena’s gargantuan fingers haphazardly pushed, pulled and contorted the rope into a loose tangle.
Ursula realized she was laughing before she could stop herself.
Helena’s head whipped upwards, her work forgotten. “What is it? What’s wrong?” Her brows came together in a concerned look.
It took several seconds for the laughter to die down. She held out a hand to forestall Helena’s worries, while wiping the tears from her eyes with two more.
When she got her breath back, she finally spoke. “It’s nothing important, I was just thinking of what my mother would say if she ever saw a knot tied like that.”
Helena glanced down at the loose series of loops tied in her hands, then back at Ursula’s spot on the ground. The tension plain on her face had been replaced by bafflement. “Like what?”
“It’s just… I shouldn’t judge, given your, ah, stature, but the way you feed the lead through a loop is clumsy, and your tension is inconsistent.”
Helena snorted lightly. Her wry smile wasn’t visible, but it was clear in her voice. “Was your mother particularly strict about these things?”
“Oh, yes, very. It is vital for every child to be able to craft with the utmost precision and speed.” Ursula adopted a mock chiding tone.
At that, Helena smiled earnestly. It was faint, just a narrowing of the eyes and an upturn of the lips, but to Ursula it spoke volumes. “That must have made for a stressful childhood.”
Ursula giggled, turning away from the human and starting to walk back to her campsite. “You could certainly say that.” There was a pause, a moment of quiet. “So how about yourself? What were your parents like?”
Helena looked away from Ursula, reaching a hand up to scratch the back of her neck. “Well, truth be told, I don’t remember very much of them.”
“How do you mean that?” Ursula tilted her head as she fetched her notes and sat down.
Helena’s voice got quiet. “Well, I was separated from them when I was pretty young.”
Ursula’s back right arm twitched. “Oh, my goodness. That must have been difficult.”
“Not as much as you might think. I was hardly the first orphan in the city.” Helena’s eyes landed on a spot far away between the trees, lingered there for a moment, and then swung back around to Ursula. Her smile flickered, but only for a moment. “But enough about that. What can I do to fix that tension you were talking about?”
Ursula smiled, finishing a quick note about the conversation, and turned back up to the human. “Mostly, it’s a matter of practice…”
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