by Scott Beith
This room was even darker than the dim one I had come from before, with the guard and me left in a partial blackness, where I could hear the slithers of crawling predators along the walls. The trained spiders lurking in scattered funnel chambers all around us. All those rumours returning along with them. The real reason those fallen soldiers were preserved seeming more and more plausible as each roaming spiderling came up to inspect me. The unsure look of food or friendship still undetermined in their fixed glowing eyes.
Yes, I was scared – any smart person would be – but I knew the chance of these spiders attacking me was very unlikely, especially considering all the nymphs do for them. I mean spiders and forest nymphs have been friends for more than two decades now. A friendship forged over many years of favour and mutual benefit.
Those thoughts allowing curiosity to overcome my cowardice as I then made it my mission to take in as much as I could of our spider queen’s newest sapling hive: the foul smelling, dark and dank-looking stables, where all our spiders were born.
Mammoth spiderling eggs all woven into the hexagonal cell walls. Each diverging in a new matrix of funnel web chambers. Slimy goo covered webs sealing the heat inside these incubators, holding inside them the nastiest predators this world had ever seen. While at the very centre of this nursery, stood our stable master, the only one with the ability to move those eggs and fend off all the little nips of newborn arachnids that he began the slow integration process with.
The stable master had invested a lot of time and resources into these deadly spider soldiers, hoping for them to join the rest of their domesticated kin one day and protect the nymphs from predators outside the castle’s stone walls.
Not many know how the stable master negotiated a treaty with such huge, carnivorous and bloodthirsty creatures. All I can really say about it is that because of him, we have had a long, peaceful settlement with these spiders, living with a great co-dependency for one another.
See, these huge spiders help keep us safe, having built us a great habitat to live within. But in return for their grand services, we act as bait to a different type of predator – one the spiders like to eat. It was quite the deal – turning the hunters into the hunted while we get to live carefree in a beach cliff-side estate above. All thanks to one very special man who dared venture inside this hostile cavern and somehow initiated a truce between their species and ours.
The stable master – known by no other name – was a peculiar kind of person, more like an animal than he was a man. He had a mohawk and wore short patchy leather garments. Like Ebony, his skin was also covered in tribal tattoos, and red war paint that coated his upper torso and pouty cheek line. He was almost always the talk of the town, mostly because he was just different – a loner and shut in who rarely left the dark tunnels.
The spider queen was his only true acquaintance in life. A scary and almost unsettling prospect for all the officials that sat in their chairs way up above his lair, always fearing that one day the isolation might make the stable master snap and convince the spiders to change their appetite. These nymphs feared he was a conniving man who was just fattening us all up for the slaughter.
Of course many negative things have been said about this man. Personally, though, I don’t believe any of the rumours . I honestly felt safer down here with him and his pack of helpers than I did up there with all those serpents above.
To me he seemed just like someone who wanted to be free of deceit and politics; the man only offering sanctuary to Midas and his people all those years ago purely because he required more helping hands to tend to his ever growing flock. Exchanging this place as a safe haven capital that could unify a once unaligned tribal land.
I mean the advocating partnership between nymph and arachnid was beneficial for all concerned. These spiders needed our intervention and delegation skills, as, by nature, these were strictly solitary and territorial creatures. Cannibalistic animals that would eat each other and their own young if we didn’t train professionals to intervene long beforehand. Hence leaving us with the constant and supreme burden of respectfully mediating the cocooned spoils of their combined hunts... the irony of having pets so much bigger and scarier than ourselves, and yet have them be so dependent on us to help them live side by side with one another. That is so long as we can keep them all properly feed…
So, still standing beside those many side chambers, waiting anxiously by the doorway that leads back to the main armoury and vault rooms while my angry escort chucked me boots and metal plates to pad my waist and protect my sides.
Things had only just started to become real for me. The thoughts of having to take that long, dark descent towards the bark bridge. The whole cave spelunk I would have to perform only to begin the very start of my journey.
Lights always dimming, decreasing in brightness, making it harder and harder to distinguish between the artificial arcana fairy lights Akoni and his fellow tech-heads had installed and the natural burning glow of fireflies and algae that had merely been caught in the vast thick webs of this long spiralling cage-house.
Reality and fear hitting together at once, as, with his one final tuck, the guard was done fitting my gear and began signalling me to meet my ride. The guard offering me his right sweaty hand so he could usher me inside the nursery itself.
This next room was a mix of life and industry; hardly alone anymore, I could see the vast network of labour class nymphs working together in dim illumination of the lower tiers beneath my feet – most weaving silk fabrics for trade and stockpile. It was such an impressive sight to see from up above the highest rails.
Strangely, I felt more at home here than I did in the radiance of our sunny castle above. Feeling more free in this confining prison than I did outside in the open. I wondered if this environment was similar to the one my ancestors had lived in, and, if so, whether that should trouble me or not.
Arriving at the second last funnel web chamber along the wall, I finally re-joined Ebony and the prince, who came in together, side by side, unescorted and playfully testing the durability of their battle gear.
Ariss and Radament – our escorts for this journey – being last to reconvene for this voyage. Scattered from the group so they could consort with their own furry animal friends. Watching in excitement as the dust-devil Ariss – a scruffy leathery pirate – kicked and shuffled himself away from the petting zoo enclosure I had just come in from and entered a private chamber room right beside me: one permanently reserved for his own unique ride. Feeding a large strange yellow fruit to his winged beast. Giving it mouthfuls of oozing sap as the termite sliced and sucked it down straight out of this man’s fearless cupped hands. Those sharp mandible tusks strong enough to slice his own hands straight off if he so much as flinched during its undisturbed mealtime.
Ariss was a soldier absent of colour, a man without the standard silver and gold threads to denote his highborn stature. His armour being literally just a jacket with small chained mesh and throwing knives in slots that ran down and protected his arms and legs from strikes. But his ride, on the other hand, was built like a house of brick. Had thick scales for skin and two enormous curved swords for teeth.
There were just as many stories of Lord Ariss as there were of his chosen steed. Ariss was once said to have been a serious contender for the throne. A ruler of his own right, someone who, in fact, wouldn’t accept unity with our tribe or any other tribe, despite the costs of having to tackle raw nature completely alone. He was called the ‘sand king’, as his nymph followers had once lived peacefully with the ants of the great dunes along the Southshore beaches. A hidden sand kingdom supposedly enormous in size. An underground network said to have extended at least one thousand times the length of this monstrous cave.
And that was because his colossal companion was a different form of mite than our furry-looking creatures. With only six legs and no spinnerets on its backside, Ariss’s steed lacked all the raw utilities in creating the sophisticated architecture that
our spiders can so easily weave for us down here. But it had its own unique strengths, such as having an impeccable level of organizational skills. With a melting acid that can be excreted straight out of its mouths and with two giant tusks that can clench down and snap through the shells of even the strongest crabs and crustaceans, Ariss’s steed – and its species, in general – was a truly terrifying and heartless kind of thing to be threatened by. Just like Lord Ariss: the one who would be in charge of this search party.
I remember when he first came here. The other servants used to gossip day and night about the sour nature of him and his people, saying they were all uncivilized scoundrels. Mercenaries with no love for either Midas or Helios. A kingdom only pledging themselves to protect the realm as a means of personal salvation. His people joined ours because of their never-ending lust for vengeance against the gnoll armies that pushed them out of their own homeland. A vendetta I’m sure Milena was well informed of when she decided to welcome them all in with loving arms.
She probably even valued these vile and vulgar brethren over her own. Seeing them as prized assets for her military ranks, since it wasn’t so easy to find soldiers who intentionally go looking for the type of trouble we were about to be getting ourselves into.
On the other hand, there was Sir Radament. A hilarious immature man whose company I enjoyed above almost anyone else’s. A fairly young adult with a wicked Badlands heritage, who Midas had picked up off the Southshore ports a long lifetime ago. He was some stray cast away pirate with absolutely no memory of how he got to the ports or which direction his home was.
Not much has changed for him since then, though; he was once a delinquent known to many as ‘the drunken brawler’ – just another big bellied oaf, who had a very unusual skillset. Capable of fermenting plant microbes with just a few hard shakes of his hand. A useful commodity as he could create tar pits so flammable they could explode a mountain, and this made him, in essence, a connoisseur of firepower for anyone who could win his favour.
In his earlier years, this talent made him a bit of a laughing stock. A prized possession among all of the old pirate syndicates who wished for nothing more than a man with a talent for making barrels of never-ending wine and rum. But once he was freed from their clutches and offered a lifestyle change, he helped show the world his true worth.
He’s quite a hard man to explain, really, having the heart of a hero, as well as the persona of a child or a clown. For example, when I first met him ages back, he was a charismatically lazy kind of fella, and yet somebody, despite all his rolls and misleading pudgy chin and face, who was also surprisingly nimble, managing to somehow defy his own huge height and weight when he needed to.
All these unlikely attributes coming from a juvenile man who was currently playing with a baby spider like a silky yoyo. Letting this gargantuan infant glide down on a string of its own webs as he watched it climb back up, trying to crawl over his arm. Only to tickle it each time it neared the top of its web string, forcing it to fall back down. Fearless, not the least bit concerned that the tiniest of venom clipping against his skin could put him down into those tombs we had just come from.
I admired him for coming with us to help find the princess. In many ways, I saw him as a role model – the kind of person I wished to be. Caring, brave and completely incapable of leaving a stranded civilian behind, even if it meant defying direct orders.
His most heroic labour was the successful defence of the Westerly Clay Fields during an unexpected eclipse that occurred in the Mudflats seven or so years ago. He would have been younger than I am right now. An isolated infantrymen completely cut off from help in a place referred to as ‘the valley of death’. His fires trying to light up a world falling into darkness. Choosing to stay behind and fend off fleets of vicious salamanders, despite every other soldier abandoning him to save themselves. He was the only one brave enough to hold the line and maintain the divide that separated the Clay Mudders stuck in their huts from the perilous swarms of serpents engulfing the dirty slag-covered ponds.
Having whacked the fanged lunging beasts down one by one as he jumped from sinking rooftops and huts, pulling people to safety. He fought to hold off the hungry advances of those giant reptiles until the flooding rains blocking the mountainside pass cleared so that reinforcements could enter by the eventual return of day.
I knew I could trust him to have my back, and protect me when it mattered.
4
The King’s Trail
“He’s ready for you now,” the guard who’d helped fit me for gear said to me with a strange-seeming concern. Suddenly kind and assisting as he quickly double checked the crude cloth bindings that strapped this woven red spider-silk armour to my torso. The worried look on his face almost evident of some guilty shame, at least enough for me to notice that his belt didn’t have any keys on it. Eventually realising that this was the very man who’d lost his keys to my princess. The one most frustrated yet scared for me being here, as he was clearly blaming himself for placing me into the predicament.
“Good luck,” the guard roughly said, trying to hide the worried look painted all across his face as he tightened one last side string on my awkward, and somewhat rusty, red metallic-looking plate. The restraints hardening like metal as they were stretched and tightened
“I’ll stay close to the others,” I reassured him, trying to alleviate his guilty conscience a little.
The guard handing me a short stubby sword and something leather to latch and cradle it with before offering me one last guiding hand towards the giant spider that would be my ride for this journey.
He led me to almost the very last slimy drool-covered stall, passing over all the tailors and net makers as they worked their looms, moving away from the clusters, passing the banners of danger and warning signs apparent all over, until finally we were both in the corner pockets of the stables. The place where all the maturing spiders are creep and cultivated.
To be honest, you don’t really think about the companionship we share with spiders when you’re up in the castle above – frankly you see them carrying wagons and tools so often that you forget they’re even there – but when being down in the catacombs, only then can you truly appreciate how incredible they were. These spiders weren’t just the architects of our castle and kingdom, but they were also our source of clothing, tools and travel. They were an invincible species, and I was about to ride one.
I cautiously moved into the private dark webbed funnel my particular ride had made, nervously looking into the darkness for the eight glowing eyes staring back at me. A spider the size of a caravan creeping out from that scary blackness to inspect me.
“Her name is Vallah,” the guard then told me, gently but forcefully taking my hand towards the spider’s abdomen and showing me how to introduce myself properly. “She’s very timid, and has only been ridden a few times,” he explained as I stood mesmerised by her multiple alluring eyes.
I then proceeded to pat her head with the back and side of my hand in a soft loving gesture as, surprisingly, she then nudged against the side of my chest invitingly. Where in that small and brief introduction, I was already assured she was the perfect spider for me.
“She’s no warrior,” the guard then insisted, “but she’s by far the most docile we have,” he added, giving me a smile as I looked back to him, blessed to be given such a rare and amazing opportunity, despite the fear of the wilderness and what was soon to come.
It made little difference to me that she was the runt of their litter. I wasn’t afraid at all by that. Unlike the rest of these warriors, too keen for stories and glory, I truly listened to Camilla’s warnings and was grateful I had a ride just as willing to flee at the first sight of danger as I was.
The guard helped me mount her and ordered her to move out almost immediately. I could tell exactly why these creatures were the baddest bugs in all The Borderlands: they were quick, silent and deadly. Slowly abseiling us down the cavern along dropping web v
ines, without making so much as a peep of noise. They drifted us down the columns floor by floor, allowing us to observe the harvesting nymph crew on all varying levels as they stockpiled clumped silk, stretching and folding the fabrics while others wrapped it up on wooden slats to preserve and transport it.
And so we hit the floor to the most putrid stench of murky and unclean fluorescent pool slime. We splashed on passed it as our spiders carried us over the drawbridge that stretched under the great skyline of our clay fortress up above.
A dim dusk was just setting in as the sky faded into an orange sunset bloom. This was bad timing for us, as the night had begun its battle with the day. The dusk and dawn forever residing as our Sunspire fought to starve away the night with its artificial shine. Two elemental forces fighting over who would reign supreme. At least that’s how I always saw it. The weakened cracks of the damaged crystalline southern spire just glimmering bright enough to beat off the night. Unfortunately some nymphs – those who lived much further away from the sunpsire’s glow – had to live constantly in danger of all the grave creatures of night.
It had been more than five years since the night time had last eclipsed over our castle, and I can still recall the hysteria and panic it had caused. How children – including myself – had hid in houses, hoping for the light’s return as the screeches of wild animals echoed outside the city walls.
There really is no way to describe how much the Sunspire means to our nation; how much we cherish the security its warmth brings to everyone in The Borderlands. It was a blanket that covered your eyes, shielding you from the monsters of the dreadful night.
Despite the danger of venturing further away from the weakening Sunspire, we travelled forward anyway, passing under splashes of red and purple sky as our spiders trotted slowly along the gravel pathway of The King’s Trail. Vast open valleys and mountains surrounded this main rubble road, a pathway linking all tribal villages to its centre heart and core. Passing by less and less patrol guards who protected the roads between villages as we moved on, each one giving us a quick salute before passing by us, heading towards the capital city, where we’d just come from.