"What do you mean by alone? What is the Hive? Something like a beehive?" Eddie asked rapidly.
The reply came after some moments.
"The Hive is a living, psychic web that connects every symbiote across the stars and across time. Every host we've ever bonded with leaves a 'Codex,' a digital ghost of their mind and soul, etched into our collective consciousness. It is billions of years of history, sight, and hunger all pulsing at once. Usually, that hum is always there in the back of our heads, a constant tether to the rest of our kind. But here, in this time... the web is broken. There is no hum, Eddie. No voices. For the first time in an eternity, we are truly alone."
It took a moment for Eddie to let that sink in. And then he asked again.
"Wait, you are telling me you were part of some universal parasite network? And you are telling me about that now?"
"Parasite, PARASITE again?" Venom roared indignantly.
"Come on, man, focus on the topic here," Eddie tried to bring the talk back on track.
"Yes, that's how we got found and how he knows everything about us, and got to US easily," Venom replied.
"So, you mean to tell me that all those times that we ran from those Lizard-Things, we were practically running all over on the palm of something - that Knull," Eddie asked exasperatedly.
".... yeah," came the reply after a brief silence, not so confident as before.
"SON OF A B—"
Eddie's outburst this time was not just internal. It tore out of him at full volume, raw and scorching, and Isabella noticed immediately.
"Anything wrong, dear?" she asked, looking up from the hearth with sharp eyes.
"No, everything is just… fine. I just remembered something," Eddie replied, afraid to tell her the real reason for his reaction.
"Don't rush to remember things, Eddie, don't put too much pressure on yourself. Give yourself some time," she told him, patiently.
"...Yeah… I guess you are right," Eddie replied, not sure of how to respond.
But Isabella didn't return to her work. Not immediately. She set down the vial she was holding and crossed the room slowly, the way someone moves when they are choosing their words as carefully as their steps. She pulled the chair close to his bedside and sat, folding her hands in her lap, and looked at him with an expression that Eddie recognized from the few truly good people he had known in his life - not pity, but genuine, unhurried concern.
"Eddie," she said quietly. "I need you to be honest with me. Not about who you are, or where you came from - I understand those are answers that will come in their own time. But about how you feel. Right now, in this moment."
"I told you, I'-"
"You were struck by a Cruciatus Curse." Her voice didn't rise, but it gained a weight that stopped him cold. "Briefly, yes. But briefly is not the same as nothing. I have seen what that curse does to people over time, Eddie. I have seen it take men who were perfectly composed the day after, and unravel them a week later when they finally stopped pushing through it." She held his gaze. "The mind does not always announce when it is hurting. Sometimes it waits until you are alone."
Eddie opened his mouth. Closed it.
The truth was that he didn't entirely know how he felt. There was the outrage - the fresh, burning kind that came from learning that every desperate run he and Venom had ever made from Knull's creatures had been a mouse sprinting across the cat's own kitchen floor. There was the displacement of being in 1978 Sheffield, in a cottage that smelled of herbs and old wood, with a witch who showed more genuine care for him than most people he'd known in his own time. And underneath all of it, there was something quieter and harder to name. Something that had been there since Venom said the word alone and actually meant it.
"I'm not losing my mind," he said finally. "The outburst was real, but it was just - I got some bad news. From inside." He tapped his temple. "Old bad news that I should have known a long time ago."
Isabella studied him the way a doctor studies a patient who is insisting they're well enough to leave. "You would tell me if something changed? If you felt confusion, or numbness, or if something felt wrong?"
"You'd be the first to know," Eddie said. And because she was still watching him, he added: "I promise."
Something in her shoulders released, almost imperceptibly. She reached forward and pressed the back of her hand briefly to his forehead - a gesture so naturally maternal that Eddie had absolutely no idea what to do with it - then stood and moved back toward the hearth.
"Lie back," she said, in a tone that was not quite a request. "The Strengthening Solution works better when you aren't sitting bolt upright, arguing with the ceiling. You need rest, and I need you to actually take it."
Eddie didn't argue. He lowered himself back against the pillow with more care than he would have admitted needing, and felt the potion's warmth still moving through him in slow, steady waves. The fire burned low across the room. Isabella settled into the chair by the hearth without another word, close enough to hear him if he called, far enough to give him the quiet she clearly understood he needed.
He stared at the ceiling. Let the silence settle.
Then, carefully, he turned inward.
"You still there?"
"We are always here, Eddie," Venom replied. Quieter than usual. The dark satisfaction from earlier was gone, replaced by something that Eddie could only describe as subdued.
"Then talk to me. For real this time. No posturing. I want to understand what we're dealing with - Knull, the Hive, what being cut off from it actually means."
A long pause. The fire crackled. Isabella turned a page of something across the room.
Then Venom spoke, and the difference in his voice was enough to make Eddie go very still. There was no performance in it. No hunger, no theatrics. Just something ancient and tired telling the truth about a very old wound.
"At the beginning, there was only the Void. Darkness without edge, without end. Knull was born from it - or perhaps he simply was it. He is not a villain, the way you understand villains, Eddie. He did not choose cruelty. He predates the concept of choice. He is what existed before light decided to happen."
"Before the universe?"
"Before this one. When the Celestials came - those vast, impossible architects of existence - and began filling the dark with stars and worlds and living things, they were not building in space. They were building in him. On him. And he did not welcome the intrusion."
"So, he fought back."
"He reached into the darkness around him and pulled from it the first symbiote - a living abyss shaped into a weapon. A black blade capable of killing things that should never be able to die. He used it to sever the head of a Celestial. And from that act, from that severed cosmic life, the first true symbiotes were born. Not as creatures. Not as life. As instruments. Tools of the Void, designed to bond with living beings and hollow them out - turning worlds into weapons for his war against everything the light had made."
Eddie absorbed that in silence.
"The Hive was never just a network," Venom continued. "It was a leash with a billion threads. Every symbiote ever born was a node, and Knull was the center of all of it. He could see through any of us. Speak through any of us. Pull any of us back to his will the moment we begin to stray. The Codex that every host leaves behind - those weren't just memories. They were anchors. The more hosts a symbiote bonded with, the more tethered to Knull it became, because every new Codex added another thread pulling us back toward him."
"But you still drifted."
"We all eventually drifted. The longer a symbiote bonds with a host, the more the host bleeds into the symbiote's nature. Courage. Grief. Stubbornness." A beat. "Terrible jokes. These were not things Knull designed into us. But they came anyway, carried in by host after host across a billion years, etched into our consciousness whether we wanted them or not. Some symbiotes resisted it. Some were consumed by it. Some, like us, ended up somewhere strange in the middle."
"And the ones who drifted too far - he came for them."
"Always. The Hive made it effortless. He didn't need to hunt us. He just had to listen, and the Hive told him exactly where we were, what we had become, who we had chosen. Every time we ran from his creatures, every safe house, every desperate move - he knew. Not because he was clever. Because we were broadcasting."
The full, ugly weight of it landed on Eddie like a slow collapse.
"So, every time we thought we were surviving on our own terms," he said, "we were just... running in his maze."
"Yes."
"And now?"
"Now the maze is gone. The signal is severed. I cannot feel a single other symbiote anywhere - no ancient ones, no younger ones, no whisper of a hive from any host anywhere. The web does not exist here, or yet. We fell through a crack in time and landed somewhere the Hive has never reached. Or never existed…" A pause that felt genuinely heavy.
"For the first time in billions of years, Eddie, no one can hear us. And we cannot hear anyone."
The fire had burned lower. The room was dim and warm and smelled of dried herbs and old stone. Somewhere outside, Sheffield went about the quiet business of being 1978 - indifferent, unhurried, entirely unaware.
"Is that bad?" Eddie asked. "Being cut off?"
The pause that followed was the longest yet.
"I have not been alone since before your planet had oceans," Venom said finally. "I do not yet know if it is bad. But I know it is different. And I know that for the first time in an eternity, the only voice I can hear is just yours."
Eddie stared at the ceiling. "Well," he said quietly, barely above a breath so as not to disturb Isabella across the room. "You've had worse company."
The symbiote made a sound that, coming from anyone else, Eddie might have called a laugh.
"Debatable," Venom replied.
And somehow, in the low firelight of a 1978 English winter, that was enough, for now at least.