Chapter Text
Part One: Origin
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Under the boughs of the gnarled Wyrmwood trees, a clutch of eggs nestled in a mossy hollow.
They were light brown in color, blending into the deep brown wood and shadow. The thick canopy overhead kept all but the barest glimmer of sunlight off of them.
In the shadow of the forest, these eggs began to hatch.
Creeping out of those soft eggs came translucent brown spiderlings, stumbling over their own legs, delicately exploring the aging trees, the soft ferns and pillows of damp moss.
Several of these spiders glittered in the darkness, a soft dusted gold. One of the last-hatched was such, tiny legs a pale yellow-green, abdomen covered in silvery patches like mirrors that glinted in the low light. She looked around at this new world, this tiny golden spiderling, and found that it lacked something, but she did not know what. Something within the wood, and within her, hurt.
She could not speak the words she did not know she wanted to say, so she turned and scuttled into the undergrowth.
The Wyrmwood was a deep and verdant place, filled with life and death – plenty of things for the young spiders to hunt, and plenty that hunted them in return. Long-legged birds stalked through the undergrowth, catching small mammals to eat with their huge serrated beaks; panthers stepped velvet-soft along the crooked tree limbs, mirror-sheen eyes piercing the shadows in which the spiders sought refuge.
More than once the golden spiderling narrowly escaped danger by a hair’s breadth; once a panther’s claws nicked her abdomen as she skittered through an open clearing, once a snapping turtle nearly took one of her legs off as she crouched to seize a minnow from a still pond, once a wide-winged hawk brushed her with its talons as she hung spinning a haphazard web between two branches.
She, and her siblings, were too small to have much of a defense against anything that wished to harm them. But she did have an advantage over her unfortunate clutchmates; compensation, perhaps, for being visible in the gray-green-brown wood with her golden body.
A foraging mink came across her as she hunkered over her latest kill, a half-meter long lacewing. The mink’s lean body matched hers in size. It hissed at her; she hissed back, and it lunged at her, teeth bared, black slime glistening on its soft brown coat.
The golden spiderling drew herself up and refused the attack, and the mink bounced off a golden waver in the air: a shield, granted to her by her birth. She was a golden spiderling, after all, and thus the magic of the Wyrmwood was open to her.
The mink circled her and she turned to follow its movements. She could see the dark lines creeping into its eyes; it was crazed and half-blind, and she was rightfully frightened of it. It lunged at her again, and this time she did not shield – she dodged out of the way, then struck forwards with her fangs, raking them across the mink’s flank. It screamed and leaped to the side.
The golden spiderling shielded herself again. The mink saw this waver and gave up - it slunk away, nursing its wounds. The spiderling ate her kill and hurried off.
She did not know that her power was innate. She did not know that her siblings lacked it; and so she did not intervene when one of them was cornered by a hunting bird that struck and killed it with its sharp beak. She watched it shatter her clutchmate’s exoskeleton and was silent; why had he failed to protect himself? Could he not?
She watched a cat pounce on one and waited for it to shield, but it did not; the cat, glistening oil-like slime dripping from its claws, dragged her sibling off a branch and tore them apart.
They could not protect themselves. She realized that she was the only one who could – and as she did not know of the other golden spiderlings, did not know where they were or if they lived, she thought she was the only one who ever could. A single golden spiderling, alone in the vast Wyrmwood, and the only spiderling who was not defenseless. She knew now her siblings could not stand against greater creatures; she, if she were able, would have to protect them from predators.
And not all predators were the same. The golden spiderling knew this; some were birds, some were cats, some were reptiles.
But there were ones that were different in a very specific way. Some of them felt like that hollow swelling she got when she touched a patch of withering mushrooms, or brushed past a plant whose leaves were wilting, veins black and filled with poison. They felt the same as that deep hungry feeling in her heart.
These were far more dangerous than the simple predators that hunted for food. These were creatures whose very touch corrupted; the stain of some deathly force ate at them from within, from below, from the magic of the Wyrmwood itself.
It did not affect the golden spiderling, or any of her siblings who shared her coloration and power, but the tainted beasts hunted for them specially – and her ordinary clutchmates were susceptible to this corruption, and thus, to betrayal.
She was forced to kill two of her brothers before she could speak. They attacked her on sight, fangs stained with black ichor, dark swirls creeping through their bodies beneath wounded carapaces. She fought them with magic, not wanting to touch their affected forms; it was dangerous, she surmised, to do so.
Sunlight was rare in the shadowed deep forest; so rare, in fact, that the golden spiderling did not understand what she saw when a fallen tree branch let a beam of gold spill down to the forest floor.
She stopped and stared at it. The light was beautiful, alluring, seeming to whisper to her. She crept closer until her front feet touched the edge of the patch of light – and drew back, startled. It was warm. But it was a kind warmth, bright and soft, and as she crept forwards into it she felt that deep hollow discomfort ease just a bit.
The light blinded her. She looked up to the source and could see nothing; but she had to know what cast such a strange and wonderful brilliance into her home. Was there something above the dark, rustling sky?
The only way up was the tree nearby, one of the tallest in the forest, though she did not know it at the time. She turned and began to climb.
She fought her way towards that radiance, through branches and vines and moss, past a sleeping hawk as quietly as she could and the limp form of a dead pine martin, stained black with corruption.
But she made it, and emerged through the canopy into a brilliant windy afternoon. When she clambered through the last few leaves she was struck by the realization that this was not the edge of the world above – this was just the tops of the trees, and beyond them, she could see a sky of flawless blue, too blue to look at and dotted with splotches of perfect white and gray. In the center of it all the sun blazed down, casting that brilliant light over the trees of the Wyrmwood – and oh, how she could see them now, laid out around her in a blanket of churning, wind-tossed green, swells that matched the forms of the land below! How she could see them gloriously green and colorful, alive with the breeze and the movements of creatures within! How they stretched for further than she could see in all directions – all directions save one: east.
East, she could see, went to the ocean. It was miles away but even from here she could see where the forest faded to grassland that in turn became cliffs that dropped into the sea.
And she could see, from this high point, the tendrils of darkness twisting through the Wyrmwood, tainting and killing the trees that they touched.
And she could see these tendrils spreading from the east, from the sea.
She thought.
That dark stain upon the land felt the same as the hollow feeling in her heart; it ate at her and drained her magic and her very being. It was wearying.
She looked up to the sun above, and back out to the forest. That darkness, she realized, was not of the Wyrmwood. It was not something her home simply had. That slick, sticky oil came from somewhere. It came from the east.
And in that moment, she knew the darkness as her enemy and she defied it.
Whatever it was – whatever caused it – was hurting her, hurting her defenseless siblings, killing the creatures of the Wyrmwood and leaving nothing behind. Sickness and death and malady; that is what it was. She was small, but she had power. She could protect herself – could she not protect others as well? Protect more than just her siblings scurrying swiftly beneath the mossy canopy? Could she not try to reach a bit further, and protect perhaps a territory – perhaps part of the Wyrmwood, though she was but one small spider?
She could try. She had to try.
East, then, to fight the darkness. To fight its source. She regretfully left the light of the canopy behind and climbed back down into the forest. When she reached the forest floor, she turned in a circle, orienting herself.
And then she went east.