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54. Tangled Webs


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#1 Guest_Oryx_*

Posted 18 July 2004 - 02:37 AM

54. Tangled Webs

Viconia, being elven after a fashion, was the lightest of the party and so Coran might have ridden with her, but remembering her exchange of death-threat laden pleasantries with Kivan dissuaded any of her allies from suggesting this elf ride with the drow on her midnight black mare. Coran rode instead with Garrick, also fortunate as the elf was proving nearly as garrulous as the bard but was thusly kept mostly preoccupied, though on many occasions, particularly when he had more outlandishly impressive yarns to relate, Coran would speak up to ensure the rest could hear.

Like the second act of a play his saddlemate noted, the forest grew increasingly more complex and treacherous as they passed west, following a stream they had crossed upon a bridge just after Aldeth’s house. They had intended to follow the water downstream to stay from the jagged, difficult land just under the cliff shearing the forest, but even so it grew rockier, much like the jagged sea cliffs of the Sword Coast. The stream had fed into the seawater inlet which Onyx and Imoen, exchanging yearning gazes and bittersweet sighs, knew to the same bordering Candlekeep’s small peninsula. They came out onto a treeless, bare-rock swath that the stream must have cut in rainier ages and now made a narrow last dash over the smooth rock, easily forded by the horses, then plummeted down sheer face in a waterfall that fed into the sea. There the children from Candlekeep caught a sight of their home, rising stoic and ageless from cliffs that in turn rose up from the ocean. Onyx and Imoen reached out to clasp hands, and Lance and Amalthea even nuzzled, sensing their riders’ homesickness and regret and loss of innocence.

That loss was far from avenged, though, and so soon both magical equines felt their riders’ desires and turned inland once more, and led their lesser brethren back into the woods. Not far beyond their stream, another dumped a waterfall over the cliffs, and they followed this one back upstream, the trees soon thickening. The ground was hilly and uneven but soon one unnaturally-round bulge blotted the topography before them. It was naked soil, and the packed quality of the earth suggested that it had been constructed. It looked rather crude for even the work of barbarians or druids, though; it resembled more the burrow of an animal. The thought of what animal could need so immense a dwelling had party members gulping.

Onyx looked intently at Coran, who shook his head. “Such as this houses not wyverns, friend, but giant spiders.”

“We go around,” the paladin spoke quickly after, “Wide around.”

Dynaheir cleared her throat. “There are several magical auras from within. Intense auras.”

Imoen’s tongue clattered within her mouth in a way Onyx had never heard before, saying things he couldn’t have even pronounced back much less understand, and then the girl nodded vigorously. She beamed proudly at the Wychalarn, her first cantrip.

Onyx looked over his shoulder at the others, only to find they were all looking to him. His mouth dried slightly, and he hesitated before speaking. “Coran, you boasted of your stealth?”

The elf smiled, the right corner of his mouth trailing particularly high and distorting his tattoos. “We elves are known to mystify the other kindreds in our degree of inborn grace and skill, and among them I am a rare artisan still in this. I shall scout.” He shot Viconia a chummy look which was anything but returned. The drow snorted while Coran slipped from behind Garrick off his saddle, and bowed with almost patronizing theatrics to Onyx before sauntering forth, winking at Imoen as he passed between Lance and Amalthea and approached the foul-smelling hole in the hill-sized burrow that passed for a door. As he passed between the last pair of coniferous trees flanking this entrance, though, he stopped with jarring suddenness; for a moment it almost seemed as if Viconia had in anger cast one of her holding spells upon him. The elf still struggled though, which caused sun-glinting movement in a nigh-invisible spider web stretched between the trees. Its scale, both in the sheer expanse and the spacing and thickness of the strands, though, demanded that if the proportions of a garden spider to its web were retrained, the architect of this woodland trap should be nearly as large as their horses.

In anticipation of such an oversized arachnid, party members frantically readied ranged weapons from atop their horses, save for Onyx who suddenly realized it was impossible for him to draw a bow with Safana practically in his lap. His sudden annoyance seemed obliged when the pirate flipped her flexible left leg over and horn of the saddle and made use of her curvaceous, smoothly leathered posterior to slide down. Her boots squashed in the grass and with a throaty chuckle, she sauntered up behind the elf and drew her serrated swords.

“What tangled webs we weave, Coran,” she snickered knowingly under her breath and made fast hacks, winding up and swiping at a high speed to keep the blades themselves from entangling. The cuts were clean and decisive, as if the edged steel had passed through like a spectral spirit, save that webbing would then fall away leaving part of Coran merely draped in sticky strands.

The elf exhaled dismissively, and protested in a similarly low voice, “You've been dominating my thoughts recently, Safana. It's distracting my work."

The pirate laughed somewhat sadistically as she now cut out the strands between the elf’s legs and veered up with calculating closeness before pulling her blade back. “I assume, Coran, that you think that your elven charms are considerable. Let me enlighten you, they aren't!"

“Admit it Safana, you sometimes have been finding me to your liking.” Coran licked his lips, only to get his tongue stuck on a strand and confirm that they tasted as horrid as the smelled in such restrictive proximity.

“You have about as much appeal as a rotting owl bear!" Safana laughed, and finished freeing the elf by planting a square booted kick in the lithe, almost feminine small of his elf’s back, ripping him out from the last stands. He ought to have gone sprawling on his face, but instead went into an artful little roll. When he sprang up though attempting to splay his arms out in applause-drawing presentation, he found one hand stuck to its shoulder, and it flailed like a chicken’s wing. Murmuring Elvish curses, he drew with his other hand the same knife that had been peeling apples, and cut its mate free.

The web now fell away in two halves, gathering in the needles of the trees. The rest of the party was dismounting and arming, and almost like the parents of a brood Lance and Amalthea led back the other four horses, who all seemed instinctively disquieted by the strange mound and eager to retreat back into thick woods. “Keep scouting, stealth-master,” Safana snickered and winked at Coran as the others fanned out to the sides of the hole, and in his thin elvish boots he paced into the entry of the hole, hugging the side cast in shadow by the after-lunch sun, but soon was consumed in darkness. The hole was shallow, little longer than a doorway, and within was a sight so repulsive that, even in all his long years, he could count on one hand those worse.

The hemispherical chamber had a dirt floor that sloped downward to a pit in the center, all spun over with a large radial spider web but covered with much dirt and debris and rotted leaves, piled high in the center leveling off the pit some, and creating a large, foul nest. There roosted a half-dozen spiders the size of crocodiles with bodies as bright green, deathly still as such creatures can be. With them were a pair of ettercaps, odd creatures Coran had become reluctantly familiar with in the Cloakwood. Bipedal quasi-humanoids with mottled brown flesh, impossibly distended stomachs, and alien heads with a pair of long puncturing fangs which secreted a poison like the spiders’, which Eldoth had purportedly favored for his wicked arrows and thus ventured into the Cloakwood at all.

Foulest of all though was that they surrounded, a bloated mass of oily pink flesh. For a moment Coran was sure it was a massacred beast the spiders now fed upon, but soon his elvish eyes made out in the dark just what it was – an impossibly obese, monstrous humanoid female, wearing only her own filth and fat. Head disfigured and comically tiny atop the bloated body and pudgy, useless limbs, she sat in the filth and Coran wondered how much was her own making, or if she even still had the ability to move. He nearly gave himself away in an overpowering urge to retch, and retreated back up the hole and into the outdoor Cloakwood, as pristine as Arvundor itself in comparison. His companions must have seen his fazing disgust and were mercifully patient while he cycled the air in his lungs, and relayed his intelligence.

“Melee,” Onyx stated after thinking a moment, and Dynaheir nodded. “Minsc, Viccy, Saf, myself.” Before he’d even gotten this far, Minsc had eagerly drawn his terrifying berserking claymore, its wide spiked golden guard glinting fiendishly between the nearly a foot of handle and four of wide silver blade. “Coran, Garrick, archery, Imoen, Dyna, same or spells.” Imoen’s eyes lit up and she slid from her thigh the curling orange dragon-headed wand she’d finally learned how to trigger during her last shared dream with Onyx. Garrick cast now, his verbal components musical and valorous, and Viconia’s snickers halted as she felt her muscles hardening within their borrowed exoskeleton, and Safana a moment later was rubbing her bicep through her leather and purring. She drew her shortswords again while Onyx fastened his torso-sized shield to his forearm and drew Varscona. Also shielded, Viconia enjoyed the new ease with which she flipped her hammer of thunderbolts around in her arm. She hissed with delight, slipping into a dark chant, one uncannily foul that had Onyx and Imoen had never heard before. They looked skittishly at one another, expecting some heretical blessing, but were treated instead to five gray puffs of smoke just before the hole, which dissipated to reveal a quintet of clattering skeletons.

Onyx glared ferociously at Viconia, grabbing the golden chain around his neck with his shield-arm hand, and threatening to yank. The drow’s laugh was guttural and coy. “Who has seen more than I just how sapping and disfiguring the rakes of a spider may be?” she purred, and glanced Safana’s way before returning her smug dark eyes to the paladin, “But if you’re prefer the unarmored wench to absorb them, by all means.” She extended one slender hand, spidery in itself, at her skeletal minions, the wrist poised for a dismissive gesture.

Onyx released his chain and lowered his hand. “See that they return promptly to deserved rest, Lossmaiden.”

Viconia grinned. “Once you see spiders at combat, you shall feel assured.”

He nodded to her, and she to the skeletons, which ambled in a cluster into the hole and soon disappeared, her infravision doing nothing to keep them in sight. Onyx and Minsc marched as quietly as they could, which wasn’t very, swords at guard. With less camaraderie but an efficient alliance Viconia and Safana crept just behind, then Garrick with crossbow and Coran with long, finally Imoen with her wand and Dynaheir palming powders of sulfur and guano.

The moment a skeleton’s bony ‘foot’ tapped the webbing that lined the dirt floor of the earthen dome, indiscernibly minute vibrations ran to the many feet of the spiders clustered in the pitted central nest, and they skittered off the rotten bedding and fanned out before the skeletons, mandibles and front legs wavering in the air like sabres. The ettercaps lumbered forth flanking the thing that sat and quivered in the center of the hive. It was the worst possible kind of horror – alien, and yet just barely recognizable as a perversion of themselves, a humanoid freak. The most mutated it could be, and still cause the party members to glimpse that possibility of such desecration done themselves or their loved. Each wondered what twisted, soulless monster could have begot such a thing.

Nothing Coran had said or could have said prepared the others, except perhaps Viconia with her very long life exposed to the celebrated horrors of drow society and the unspeakable customs of the priestesshood enacted upon their lowers or one another or themselves. Summoning demons only to subjugate themselves to their utterly evil whims, carrying a child for two years knowing they would sacrifice it upon birth, expertly prolonging the life of paladins and elvish champions for days and tendays while they were tortured and mutilated, bodies and spirits painstakingly taken apart. For just a moment Viconia’s eyes refocused in on the paladin and ranger shielding her before the monsters, and something stirred in her chest. She would relish such sacrifice to her true Goddess, any use they might possess here would only make them more worthy offerings, and yet…still, it seemed a waste. Perhaps because their power was growing, better to fatten the lambs first, to corrupt or to put unknowingly to Her work in this world that their souls might not escape Her grasp in the next. This, she told herself, this and survival allowed, nay demanded, her continued consorting. To curb the amassing of power by this Throne was to hobble a later would-be competitor of her own church; in such ways, Viconia knew, letting would-be heroes quest against other dark organization was in Shar’s interest, for good victors would later prove so much more pliable to the Nightsinger’s will and wiles, much as Onyx had unquestioningly already taken her alliance and wellbeing among his concerns.

“Ssssssssssss….” the echo was all too familiar and conspicuous in her dark elven ears, breaking the familiar train of thought that had taken less than one second in her sharp mind, it was like that of giant spider, and yet not, and Viconia was horrified, a rarity in itself, to reveal it was the bloated mass, quivering as its hiss echoed unevenly from its focal point under the crude dome, “My spidersssss! Kill them, kill them all! Kill the meat, my petsssss!”

“Hey wait!” Onyx shouted, echoing more crisply as the lines of skeletons and spiders skittered up nearer one another, “We come here to…to…to benefit from your divine wisdom! Let us speak.”

“Hhhhhhh…..” the corpulent freak tittered, “Come here to learn from my infinite wisssssdom. Sssssspeak quickly!”

“Uh, how came you to dwell here, in this earthen abode?”

“Hhhhhhh…I Centeol am cursssed. The arch mage, Jon Icarus, cursed me for indignities done to him and his wife by me. I loved Jan, but now I hate him, as I hate you and everything. Spiderssss….kill them all.”

Each of the six spiders scuttle-charged and slashed its legs up each skeleton, which raked back feebly with the grating finger-bones. This did little save spare the party immediate assault of the spiders, save the central two which almost as fast as they could scuttle forth collapsed the middle skeleton, tearing out its leg bones and kicking the others apart with so many feet, then scuttling on to engage Onyx and Minsc, dropping their bodies at the warriors’ low sweeps and using their heights against them, lashing out underneath and at legs while Safana and Viconia already fanned around the men each dropped almost to a knee to slash and hammer the creatures.

Chanting in her rich voice, Dynaheir threw the yellow and black powers together with clapped palms, twisted her hands and blew between them with the final evocative syllables. Her hands snapped apart, fingers curling around a sphere of air within which the powder seemed almost to float for a moment before igniting into a flaming orb the size of a grape, an apple, a cantaloupe, then her hands drew back and the orb arced through the musky air, and just as it hurtled noiselessly between the ettercaps being skewered by Coran’s arrows and Garrick’s bolts. Before their doubly-distended mistress Centeol it blossomed into a cabin-sized hemisphere of glowing orange flame. Nearly fluid in consistency, it consumed the three monsters and billowied back toward the party, streaking over the two nearest spiders and tapering just short of the skeletons they dueled.

Before it dissipated a second fireball had been breathed from the draconic mouth of Imoen’s wand, exploding just short of the other and consuming all these five monsters, but the two skeletons as well. “Oopsie…” Imoen garbled and glanced sheepishly at the more tactfully-aiming Dynaheir as the dissipating of the dual fireballs left only blackened piles of bones. The spiders too had been reduced to shrunken burst husks, and the oily flesh of the ettercaps and Centeol was black and boiling and amorphous even in compare to what they made been before.

Proving a disturbing intimacy with spiderkin, a strengthened Viconia landed the spike of her hammer into a green hexagon upon the abdomen of the spider lunging at Minsc, nailing a modest hole that stopped the creature at once. Its body sank the last inch to the webbed floor and the angular legs sprawling randomly. The two furthest-flank spiders minced their hapless skeletons, vindicating the promised swift return to the hereafter, and scuttled in the party. A Minsc thoroughly invigorated by his witch’s festive display at the dark witch’s antiarachnidan acumen, charged that one his flank, diving into a kneel with a great sweeping blow that sent it hurtling up into the air, eight legs wiggling spastically until its body splattered against the earthen dome like a rotten egg against a brick wall. .

The spider first training on Onyx had dashed under sword and shield and latched itself to the paladin’s right leg, furiously trying to bite through the exoskeleton of a superior arthropod until Safana’s serrated swords sawed six of its legs, and it fall back helpless and upside down while the pirate plunged a blade down into its less chitinous belly and twisted, ceasing the writhing. Onyx freed just in time moved to engage the skeleton-dismantling spider from the other far flank. Like Minsc he now lunged to a kneel, ramming his shield at the creature to block off its many-legged attack. It skittered back with almost preemptive reflexes, and the paladin timed his counter-thrust with his long sword to skewer it right in the mandibles upon its second lunge, using its own momentum to pierce what little brains it had.

With a long, hard exhale, Onyx rose to his feet and glanced around at the de facto arena for any lingering signs of hostile life – or prolonged unlife – but found none. Rather, it found him first, from the direction he failed to consider – up.

At their first entry to the burrow, Viconia all too familiar with three dimensional combat had surveyed the vaulted dome for climbing crawlers, but one had hid all this time in the shadows, body coursing with cold ichor only. A sword spider hung over the paladin and now dropped soundlessly. Its legs pierced his armored back like speartips and caught hold in the most painful of ways, and its mandibles sank into the back of his neck, scissoring blades threatening to shear off his head or at least clip his spine. Onyx snapped his head forward, tucking his chin, but in a more vicious reflect threw his body not forth but back, driving the sharp legs deeper as he landed atop the spider, but squishing it flat as a rat between a wagon wheel and a cobblestone. Dimly aware of Imoen shrieking, Safana snarling, and Viconia swearing unusually outraged heresy against Lolth, he rolled sideways now, feeling the mercifully-unhooked feet of the sword spider leaving his back with their last lacerations. He lifted his arms aside his head as he fell prostrate, crossing hands again the back of his neck and willing out his paladinic healing. The sudden rush of comfort was almost as disorienting as the pain and he wondered how close to a severing of his spinal cord he had come.

Still feeling lesser stab wounds in his back, painful in their own right, he winced as he stood and pulling off his helm looked for Viconia. He found three of her and his last thought was to wonder when she had learned the arcane mirror image spell. He felt a cool hand on his throat and “Green! Poison!” the trio of drow shouted in unison, then they rotated away rapidly to reveal the shadowed dome of the burrow. He felt a blunt strike at the back of his head and knew no more.

Pressing one ebony hand over his heart and the other to his throat, Viconia closed her eyes and whispered until a pale blue-white light wreathed her fingers and flowed down into the poisoned paladin. Imoen cradled his bleeding head in her lap, holding his nose and draining an antidote vial down his throat, happily washing down the papery acrid herbs that Dynaheir placed upon his tongue. Viconia cast too a spell of physical healing for his back, nodded to the others, then slapped Onyx’s cheek, shrieking, “Come to, weakling! Some paragon of fortitude you prove, rivvil sargtlin. I swore never again to leave a sacrifice to the spider queen; betray me in this, paladin, and I shall eviscerate you hollow over the course of a tenday!”

“Yeah, but…” Garrick twisted his mouth, “That means he’d already be dead...”

Viconia hissed, “Silence, fruity bandier of words!”

While divinity, alchemy, and herbalism allied to drive the foreign poison from the paladin’s veins, kaleidoscopic refraction of memory and emotion swirled in his consciousness as a neurotoxin seared his nerves still. Himself and his twin sister drawing bows only to be gripped by a magical horror from the eastern lady and true terror from the armored man with the gold glowing eyes. He faced the man in some elder form upon the bridge of iron, steeling himself against the gale of fright. Rolling in the dirt with Greywolf, strangling one another until now he commanded the fear, and set the grizzled bounty hunter to a doomed flight. Pacing down the sand after the bared form of Safana, only for her to splash through the foam and emerge a sirine and set him against his truest ally Imoen. He wandered on, down the beach to the nereids, observing with a mind now cool and impassive before their charms.

The waking Onyx sputtered as Imoen accidentally poured the lat of the antidote up his nose. He sat up and would have cracked heads with Viconia had the drow not recoiled with the same reflexes as the spider, blinked and looked dumbly at them both and Dynaheir with the warm eyes of mortal gratitude, and rose. His eyes focused, and a red halo outlined the quivering, boiled mass upon the now-ashen nest in the burrow. “She lives,” he mumbled, but held up a hand as Coran raised his bow, and walked a little unsteadily at first until he stood before the quivering, mortally burned mass of now truly warped flesh that was Centeol. “What are you?” he gasped.

“It isss not your concern,” Centeol rasped, a bubbling, sizzling-bacon quality to her voice now.

Onyx’s vision blurred again, sirines and nereids bursting up from foamy waves before his eyes, and the voice, ever the voice.

Use the tools you are given.

Listen to what is bred in the bone.

You will learn.


Onyx raised his right hand in a genteel gesture, and passed it slowly before his view of the dying Centeol. “What...are...you?” he asked again, voice fluid and calm.

“Hhhhhhh…..” Centeol wheezed, flesh-hooded eyes dilating, mouth drooling blood, “I can tell you of my curse, for that is all I remember any more. I used to be beautiful and powerful. An exotic sorceress, with many powers at my command and suitors at my door. But I only had eyes for one man, Jon Icarus. He was a great and powerful wizard, the only man worthy of my affections, or so I thought. Though I lusted for Jon, he cared little for me, for he had another to whom he was married, lady Tanova. So I plotted and schemed, and finally came up with a plan to rid the world of Tanova. When the deed was done, and Tanova lay dead I was exultant, but not for long. Jon went mad with fury, and divined the identity of his wife’s murderer. He arrived at my tower, and I allowed him entry, desirous to finally consummate our love. Jon disabled me with his spells, and then he cursed me to this body, and set spiders to feed me and keep me alive. So you see, if you were my friend, you would kill me…”

Onyx stumbled back, looking as ill as when poisoned, and he was scarcely alone. Garrick and Coran stopped still in their looting of a poorly hidden treasure stash across the nest, and the others merely stood, and looked at once another as if hoping for reassurance not that would they saw and heard was real, but that it was not. Needing no blow of mercy Centeol gave out in her quivering and completed the descent of her pathetic latter life if it could even be called such, and the others could only hope that this wizard had not also somehow maligned her soul. Coran was palest of all beneath his tattoos, not from his elven complexion, but from a dreadful look of puzzlement that also crossed his face. “Icarus….Icarus…Jon Icarus, no…” At length, he spoke. “Though it was not for me, I hail from the Forest of Tethir. In this forest there is a city which only elves may see, where only elves may go. Suldanesselar, City of the Tree of Life. You humans with your fleeting memories have legend of a boy Icarus

Garrick picked up fluidly, “….who made wings of wax and flew too close to the sun…”

Viconia glanced at Onyx, even tapping the golden chain about his neck with a fingernail, and smirking.

As the bard appraised a greatsword with a spiked guard and a ruby hilt and pommel, he went on, “Icarus is an abridgement of an Elvish name…”

Coran rejoined, “A bastardization of name and myth descending from Elvish history; a Suldanesselari wizard who would have tapped too deeply of the Tree…”

Onyx lifted his eyes from the new sword to Coran’s tattooed visage. “What was his name?”




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