Chapter 10: What LurksThe Altinian Woods did not welcome travelers; it swallowed them. Miz’ri was running on instinct and fury, her boots tearing through ferns that seemed designed to trip her. Behind her, the air was alive with the screams of the Rhean elves and the thwip-thwip-thwip of arrows cutting through the leaves. “Move, Marshmallow! Pick up your feet!” Miz’ri snarled, hacking at a wall of briars with her razor sharp sword.

  Talisa was not built for the gauntlet. She crashed through the undergrowth like a panicked bear, her heavy boots catching on every root, her breath coming in ragged, sobbing gasps. She stumbled, going down hard on one knee. “I can’t!” Talisa wheezed, clutching her side. “Even without the heavy robes, I’m not a runner!’

  An arrow hissed out of the gloom, aimed perfectly between Talisa’s shoulder bdes.

  CLACK.

  Herkel stepped into the path. The arrow shattered against his ribs, joining the collection already bristling from his coat. The skeleton grabbed Talisa by the back of her tunic and hauled her upright with a strength that belied his ck of muscle, shoving her forward after the Dark Elf. “Ow, ow, good Golly, Pappy, you too?”

  Miz’ri gnced up at the canopy. The sun was a mottled bruise behind the thick leaves, useless for precise navigation. She hated this. She hated the mud, the bugs, the screaming Rheans, and the fact that she was currently retreating rather than killing.

  “North,” she muttered, checking the moss on a tree trunk. “We just need to go North until the river bends back.” They burst into a clearing, and the atmosphere shifted. The trees here were older, their trunks twisted and gnarled. Carved into the bark were crude, violent sigils painted in ochre and sap.

  Talisa slowed, eyes widening. “Miz… what are those?” To Talisa, they looked like tribal nightmares—jagged lines and angry faces. To Miz’ri, the Tea’rhean script was clear, though the dialect was archaic.

  DANGER. BEAST. TURN BACK. Hanging from the lower branches were effigies made of twigs and twine—crude representations of creatures with too many legs. Carved into the wood of the trees were eyes. Hundreds of them. Staring in every direction.

  “Superstitious nonsense,” Miz’ri spat, not breaking stride. “They’re trying to scare us into a bottleneck. Keep moving!”

  “But the carvings!” Talisa panted, pointing at a particurly gruesome depiction of a man being eaten. “They look like warnings!”

  “They are scarecrows, you fool!” Miz’ri yelled back. “Do you want to stop and ask the mud dwellers with the bows if the scary pictures are real? Run!”

  They plunged deeper. The screams behind them grew louder, then suddenly… changed. The angry war cries of the Rhean elves shifted into shouts of arm.

  “Mir, mir, mir!” Miz shot a look over her shoulder and saw those on their heels were beginning to slow their pace. They motioned to others to hold their ground. Some knocked an arrow held back, simply shaking their heads at the fleeing women.

  She knew what ‘mir’ meant, hold. Miz’ri ignored them. She pushed through a dense curtain of vines, expecting more arrows. Instead, she stumbled into the strange, grey twilight. The forest floor here was different. The chaotic undergrowth was gone, repced by a smooth, uniform carpet of dead brown needles. The trees were spaced further apart, standing like pilrs in a cathedral, each carved with intricate runic marks up their trunks. And binding them together, catching the little light that filtered down, were thick, shimmering strands of silver.

  Webs. Not the dusty cobwebs of a celr, but thick, structural cables of silk that spanned fifty feet from tree to tree. The shouting behind them stopped. Dead silence crashed down on the forest. Miz’ri skids to a halt, her boots sliding on the slick pine needles. She held up a hand, fist clenched. “Mir, eh, excuse me, hold.”

  Talisa collided with Herkel, who had stopped a foot behind Miz’ri. The pilgrim doubled over, hands on her knees, gasping for air. “We… we lost them,” she choked out, a desperate, hopeful smile breaking through the sweat and dirt on her face. “Oh, thank the Saints, they stopped.” She pointed a trembling finger back the way they came. The woods were silent. No arrows. No shouting. Just the heavy, oppressive stillness.

  Miz’ri slowly turned in a circle, her red eyes narrowing behind her goggles. The silence in her head was back, but it was being drowned out by the screaming of her survival instincts. “They didn’t stop because they lost us,”she whispered, the hair on the back of her neck standing up. She looked at the thick, sticky cables binding the trees. She looked at the ck of bird song. She looked at the complete absence of life. “They stopped because they know who lives here.”

  “Who?” Talisa asked, standing up and wiping her face. “Is it a hermit? A druid?”

  Miz’ri didn't answer. She was listening. Above the sound of Talisa’s heavy breathing, there was a sound. A soft, wet click-click-slide. It was coming from above. Miz’ri slowly tilted her head back and Talisa followed her gaze. High in the canopy, where the branches knit together to block out the sky, a shadow was moving. It was massive—easily the size of a carriage. It descended slowly, smoothly, upside down on a single, thick thread of silk that glistened like a diamond rope.

  It had eight legs, thick with coarse bck hair. It had mandibles that dripped with a clear, viscous fluid, each little drop burning into the forest floor below. And it had eyes—six of its eight remaining, shiny and bck, reflecting the terrified faces of the two women and the skeleton standing in its dining room.

  “Oh,” Talisa whispered, her voice tiny. The Giant Arachnid stopped its descent ten feet above their heads. It didn't screech. It didn't roar. It simply hung there, suspended in the silence, watching them with a terrifying, alien intelligence.

  “Don’t. Move,” Miz’ri breathed, her hand hovering over her sword hilt, though she knew steel would do little against a carapace that thick. The silence stretched, thin and agonizing, like a violin string about to snap. The spider’s palps twitched, tasting the air. It shifted slightly, its massive bulk swinging like a pendulum. A drop of viscous fluid fell from its maw, nding on the pine needles between Miz’ri and Talisa with a heavy, wet spt. The acidic hiss as it ate into the dead leaves broke the spell.

  Talisa’s composure shattered. “Spiiiiiddeeerr!!!!” Talisa shrieked, the sound high and piercing. She spun on her heel, her boots kicking up showers of needles as she bolted blindly toward the tree line. The sudden movement triggered the predator. The spider dropped the st ten feet in a blur of bck fur and chitin, nding with an earth-shaking thud that knocked Herkel off bance. It ignored the skeleton and the elf, skittering sideways with terrifying speed, its legs blurring as it chased the screaming, fleshy prey.

  “No! You idiot!” Miz’ri yelled, but she didn’t chase. Instead, she sheathed her sword. “Void keep me, I hope I remember how it sounds…” She stood tall, took a deep breath, and made a sound deep in her throat. It wasn't a word. It was a series of sharp, rhythmic clicks and a low, chittering hiss.

  The spider skidded to a halt, inches from Talisa’s retreating form. It froze, its body lowering defensively. Slowly, painfully slowly, the massive creature turned its cluster of bck eyes away from the sobbing pilgrim and back toward the dark figure standing in the center of the clearing.

  It chittered back—a scraping sound of confusion.

  Miz’ri walked forward, hands open and low. She ignored Talisa, who was now huddled in a ball against a tree root, hyperventiting. Miz’ri walked straight up to the nightmare. Up close, the horror faded, repced by detail. Miz’ri saw the dullness in the creature’s chitin. She saw the scars on its legs where chains had once been. How its two destroyed eyes still had the Rhean arrows in them. And then she looked past the spider, at the trees surrounding the clearing.

  “Look,” Miz’ri said softly, her voice carrying over the clearing. “Talisa, stop sniveling and look.” Talisa peeked out from behind her hands, trembling. “It’s going to eat us, Miz! Kill it!”

  “No,” Miz’ri murmured, reaching out. The spider flinched, then leaned into her hand, its palps trembling against her glove. “Look at the trees. Those aren’t warning signs. They’re wards. Binding runes. This isn’t it’s ir, Talisa, it’s a cage.”

  Miz’ri gestured to the dark recesses of the web. “And look there.”

  Scattered around the base of the massive trees were dozens of white, papery sacks. They were torn open, ragged and empty. There was no movement of tiny legs. No swarm of hatchlings.

  “Matriarch, where are your babies?” Miz’ri asked the spider, reverting to the soft, clicking tongue. “Why are you not swarming with life?”

  The creature let out a low, vibrating keen that shook Miz’ri’s bones.

  Miz’ri turned back to Talisa, her face twisted in a sneer of pure disgust. “Your precious ‘Keepers of the Cycle,’” she spat. “They trapped this mother here, seemingly forcing her to give birth, warding these trees to keep her in, and all so they could steal her eggs. Probably for silk. Or poison.”

  Talisa slowly lowered her hands. “They made her give birth…and…and…stole her children?” Talisa whispered, pulling herself up from the mud. The thought seemed to sink into her stomach like she ate something foul. Her face curled into a painful knot at the thought. She looked at the monster—really looked at it. She saw the way it slumped, the way it leaned into Miz’ri’s touch not with hunger, but with exhaustion. She saw the empty nursery behind it. The fear in Talisa’s eyes began to recede, repced by a deep, theological horror. The empty egg sacs were a tragedy that transcended species. She walked slowly back toward them, her fear forgotten in the face of the injustice. “This is wrong, even we Julisians let our animals roam free in a field, not penned up in a cage.”

  “They serve themselves,” Miz’ri corrected, stroking the spider’s coarse leg. “They call us monsters, ste’kol. They call us takers. And yet here they are, ensving a queen of the night to make their bowstrings.” Talisa stopped a few feet away. The spider shifted, watching her, but Miz’ri’s hand on its leg kept it calm. Talisa looked into the creature’s many eyes and didn’t see a beast anymore. She saw a mother grieving in a cage made of magic and hypocrisy.

  “It’s cruel,” Talisa said, her voice trembling with a new kind of emotion—anger. “It’s a viotion of the sanctity of life. Father Yuith would not stand for this. She… she should be free to mourn. She should be free to go home, wherever that is.”

  Miz’ri looked at the pilgrim, surprised by the steel in her voice. Then she looked around the clearing. She looked at the dry, ancient pine needles covering the floor. She looked at the thick, fmmable webs stretching from tree to tree. She looked at the Rhean wards carved into the bark—wards that held the spider in, but not the fire out.

  A slow, wicked smile spread across Miz’ri’s face. The silence in her head was gone, completely obliterated by the roaring, chaotic possibility of what came next.

  “You’re right,” Miz’ri purred. “She should be free. And those hypocrites in the woods… they deserve a lesson in the true nature of the Cycle. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” She turned to Talisa, her red eyes gleaming with the reflection of the spider’s obsidian gaze and a manic delight. “Tell me, Pilgrim,” Miz’ri asked, “Do you know how to start a fire?”

  “No?” Talisa said, pulling her arms close to her body. “I could have been a firekeeper but I prefer the scent of the grave to the scent of the pyre.” Not overly getting what the elf was getting at quite yet.

  “Dry needles,” Miz’ri muttered, kicking a pile of brown pine straw. “High resin content in the silk. Wind is coming from the south-east.” She turned in a slow circle, her red eyes scanning the perimeter not as a panicked fugitive, but as an engineer of destruction.

  “Miz?” Talisa whispered, her voice trembling. She was clutching her holy symbol, eyeing the massive spider that was currently chittering softly at the Dark Elf. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m looking for the fuse,” Miz’ri replied absently. She walked over to one of the massive anchor trees, where the thickest cables of silk were knotted around the runic wards. She ran a gloved hand over the bark. It was dry as a bone. Perfect. “If we light it here,” Miz’ri pointed to a dense cluster of webs near the roots, “the draft will pull the fme straight up the trunk. It’ll hit the canopy in under a minute.” She looked at the spider, then at the Rhean sigils glowing faintly in the twilight. “Fire breaks the wards. Chaos breaks the line of sight. Fear breaks the pursuit. It’s a perfect trifecta.”

  Talisa’s eyes went wide. She looked around at the endless expanse of the Altinian Woods—ancient, dark, and very fmmable. “But… the fire won’t stop at the clearing,” she stammered. “If the canopy catches… Miz, by golly we could burn down the entire forest! The animals… the ecosystem…”

  Miz’ri scoffed, a sharp, dismissive sound. “Oh, please. These hypocrites surely have druids on standby for controlled burns. They love nature so much, let them save it.”

  “I… I suppose they would,” Talisa murmured, though she looked unconvinced.

  “Come on Pilgrim, have a little faith,” Miz’ri said with a wink as she knelt in the dirt, her movements shifting. The nguid, bored posture of the city-dwelling hedonist vanished. In its pce was the sharp, economical efficiency of the dark elf who had survived the climb from the void below alone. She pulled a pouch from her belt, extracting a striker and a pinch of cloth. She built a small pyramid of dry twigs and moss at the base of the web-covered tree, her hands moving with a speed and precision Talisa had never seen before.

  “Stand back,” Miz’ri commanded. She struck the steel. A spark jumped, bright and hot. The char-cloth caught. She blew on it gently, feeding it into the kindling. The fme raced up the strand like a living thing, hungry and fast. It hit the main cable and expanded instantly, a wave of orange heat washing over them.

  As the fire licked at the carved bark, the magic reacted. The air in the clearing shuddered. The glowing runes on the tree trunks fred violently, then began to flicker and spit sparks.Above them, the Spider Matriarch let out a screech that sounded like tearing metal. She smmed her massive front legs against the invisible barrier between the trees. The air rippled. The cage was weakening.

  The heat was already rising, pushing the chill of the forest away. Tendrils of smoke snaking into the air. But as the roar of the fire began to build, Miz’ri’s ears swiveled. Under the crackle of burning wood, she heard it. “Chath!” The whisper carried on the wind. Then another. “Chath!”

  “Company,” Miz’ri hissed, standing up and drawing her sword. The smoke was beginning to fill the clearing, a thick, acrid grey fog that burned the eyes.

  “Who's Chath?” Talisa whispered.

  “Not who, what. It means ‘fire’, they were probably waiting for us to run back out, if we survived, and saw the plume.” Through the trees, she saw movement. Shadows detaching themselves from the gloom. Their Rhean pursuers had not given up the chase. They smelled the smoke. They knew what it meant.

  Talisa grabbed Miz’ri’s arm. “We have to run! Before they get here!”

  “No,” Miz’ri snapped, holding her ground. “The wards are flickering, not broken. If we run now, they’ll catch us in the open. We need chaos. We need the Mother loose.” She looked at the approaching shapes. “We hold them here. Buy the fire time to do its work.” Two Rhean scouts burst through the undergrowth, bows drawn. They froze, staring at the burning webs, then at the trio standing in the center of the inferno.

  “Ergg Mina!” one shouted in Tea’rhean, raising his bow.

  “Pappy!” Miz’ri barked. The skeleton surged forward, his long, bony legs eating up the distance. The elf loosed an arrow. It struck Herkel dead center in the sternum—and passed straight through the empty ribcage, cttering harmlessly against his spine. The rhean elf’s eyes went wide. Before he could draw a second arrow, Herkel smmed into him. He grabbed the elf by the shoulders and drove him backward into a tree, absorbing the panicked dagger thrusts of the second scout with his forearms. Cng. Cng. Metal on bone. Herkel just rattled, an impcable wall of death as he continually bodied the elf into the splintering tree behind it.

  “Hey! Over here!” Talisa screamed, grabbing a handful of burning pine straw and dirt. With a shriek of effort, she flung it straight at the second scout’s face. It was crude. It was undignified. And it was perfect. The elf flinched, throwing up an arm to shield his eyes from the hot ash.

  That split second of blindness was all Miz’ri needed. She moved like smoke. She came in low, sliding on her knees across the slick needles. Her sword fshed upward in a vicious arc, catching the distracted elf under the armpit, where the bark-armor had a gap. Her sword found his heart with little struggle. She let the body slip off her bde as the Rhean's life slipped away from him.

  Miz’ri scrambled up, spinning to check the perimeter. Herkel had the first scout pinned and unconscious. Talisa was panting, her chest heaving, but she was unharmed. For a single, crystalline heartbeat, the three of them stood in unison in the center of the burning clearing.Miz’ri looked at Talisa, a smudge of soot on her cheek, eyes wide with adrenaline. Miz’ri grinned, a wild, sharp-toothed expression of pure approval.

  “Miz! Look out!” Talisa screamed, pointing upward. A massive, burning branch, thick as a man’s torso, finally succumbed to the heat. It cracked with a sound like a thundercp and plummeted from the canopy, trailing sparks like a comet. It crashed into the center of the web network, instantly igniting the vertical fuse Miz’ri had identified. A pilr of fme shot straight up into the roof of the forest, turning the twilight into a blinding, orange noon.

  Above them, the air shattered. The invisible pressure of the Rhean wards finally snapped under the growing bze. There was a sound like breaking gss that echoed inside their skulls, followed by a shockwave of raw, unadulterated mana dispersing into the smoke.

  SCREEEEEEEEECH!

  The Spider Matriarch was free.

  With the barrier gone, the massive arachnid descended on the remaining Rhean reinforcements who were scrambling through the brush. She moved with a terrifying, liquid grace, her legs stabbing down like spears. She wasn't hunting for food; she was hunting for vengeance.

  Miz’ri watched as the spider snatched a screaming archer from the ground, wrapping him in silk in seconds, before turning her mandibles on a second warrior. The forest elves broke. Their discipline shattered against the primal horror of their own prisoner turned jailer.

  “Now!” Miz’ri grabbed Talisa’s arm, her grip bruising. “Go! While they’re busy dying!”They turned and ran, not away from the danger, but parallel to it, using the chaos as a shield. Miz’ri was ughing—a high, manic sound that mixed with the roar of the fire. The silence in her head was gone, obliterated by the beautiful, deafening noise of survival.

  “That’s how you handle a grievance, Talisa!” Miz’ri shouted, hauling Talisa over a burning log. “You burn the goddamn whole house down!” The elf let out a cackling victory ugh as they ran, but Talisa didn't answer. She was just running, her lungs burning, her eyes fixed on Miz’ri’s red scarf bobbing ahead of her in the smoke. They sprinted until the screams of the elves faded, repced only by the distant, hungry roar of the fire consuming the prison. Their tired legs carried them far, they ran for what felt like hours. The adrenaline that had fueled their escape burned hot and bright, but like the webs, it eventually turned to ash.