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This silken construction spoke of arachnids. The Shaira worked with weavers. Bred them. Taught them. Harvested silk and venom, and studied both. Barbarthara had helped — had touched the silk, drawn out the venom, had been forced to feed on their bodies and intrude on their instincts.
That knowledge now tethered her to reason.
Barbarthara’s roots reached out — to touch, her only true sense. These threads were thick and strong, of something much bigger than the common weaver. Something grand had settled here.
Barbarthara had to move. Now. Quickly, before whatever spun this came to inspect its catch.
But first — assessment.
She probed her roots. The cold had sunk deep into her form. Extremities withered, stiffened. They ached — which meant they were not yet beyond recovery. Her liquids had greatly thickened but had not hardened to the point of shattering. Judging by the depth of chill, she could not have been unconscious more than an hour. Two at most. A short fall into long darkness.
Taking so much from the ork before the fall had bought her time, enough sustenance to last for another half hour, she reckoned.
Orientation came next.
The threads stretched out in every direction. No pattern. No gravity-defined geometry.
She extended her roots — parting, thinning, elongating. Fine fibres unfurled and reached into the web, weaving through strands, anchoring, reading.
The silk reminded her of flesh — tendons and fascia, the fibrous nets that laced muscle and viscera. She had worked through such matter before. Had eased herself into veins and nerves like fungus threading into rot, drawing maps from within a host’s body.
This was no different. Through the net, she could orient herself. Every contact brought more information. The web spoke. At first, it was too much. A mass of signals. But Barbarthara filtered — one thread, then another, then another — until the chaos resolved into structure. Not a spiral. Not a crude surface-cave construct. Not a trap spun by a common weaver. This was vast. Balanced. Precise. Stable, with tension distributed evenly from all directions. Anchored to many points with no central tension, meaning Barbarthara hung somewhere near the core. Some of the threads pulsed faintly with movement — her own. Nothing else. No other weight. No other motion. She was alone. For now.
Simultaneously, she began to secrete. A slow, measured neutraliser. Not enough to weaken the structure — just enough to suppress the stick without weakening the threads’ tension. Slowly, carefully, Barbarthara shifted her form and entangled herself. One movement too sudden, and the whole web would tremble. Once free, she inched her weight forward, blindly choosing a direction. There was no up or down. No left or right. No out. The threads gave no such truths.
But then — sound.
--------From somewhere above.
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-----------------------------------------------------------------------------A breath.
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-------------------------------------------------------------------Silence.
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Silence.
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Another.
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--------------------------A brush
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
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-----------------------------------------A scrape
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Not loud.
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But enough.
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---------------------------Grunting
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------------A voice —
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---------------------guttural, rough
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Not a beast?
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--------------------Words?
--------------------Slurred, incomprehensible,
----------------------------but the tone —
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--The ork?
She had no way to be certain.
But Barbarthara needed it to be him.
She advanced, faster now. Traversing the net like an errant spider, her roots spread across the web, constantly adjusting, analysing, mapping. Testing each thread — structure or snare? The load-bearers were thick, rigid. The others were delicate, twitch-responsive, fine as breath. Built to sense and react, they gave in to the slightest pressure. Barbarthara moved between them, clinging to the rigid and avoiding the fine.
She moved with precision. And fear. Directly or indirectly, all threads were connected. A shift in one echoed through the rest. Pull wrong, and the whole net spoke. It did shift and speak — but only when Barbarthara moved.
-------------------No foreign weight.
--------No pulse.
-----No other body.
------------------As far as her senses reached,
---------------------------she was still alone.
But the cold clawed deeper. And with it, dread returned — sharp, viscous, creeping under her bark like oil. It ate into her. Drained her reserves. Paralysed. She would not be able to walk the threads much longer. She strained to produce more secretions — barely enough to keep moving. Focus wavered. Motion turned erratic. Rushed. She had to move even faster. She climbed as if drowning in stone. As if the mountain was closing and collapsing around her — inside her.
Barbarthara drove herself upward.
------------Always upward.
------------------Toward the voice.
--------The only thing she could still believe in.
-----------Let. it. BE. HIM.
---------------Let it be the ork.
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-------Let escape still be real.
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Let the swamplands still lie at the foot of this mountain prison, the realms she remembered so vaguely from her first sapling years — lands of warm rot and shifting mud, beyond reach of web or witch. Let them exist. Let them never have been taken. She needed to believe that.
The breathing above grew clearer.
Louder.
-------Closer.
-More real.
---She was so close.
She needed to claim him now.
--------She reached —
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----------------The DARK erupted.
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and
)
I would love to share with you two versions of Dwellers in Darkness, the song which appeared within the Albweiss at the end of .
This is not how the sprites sound — still, I hope this rendering gives a bit of heart and spirit to the text.
Please click to
LISTEN TO DWELLERS IN DARKNESS — LIGHT VERSION
You might also enjoy this second version:
LISTEN TO DWELLERS IN DARKNESS — DARK VERSION
Thank you for listening.
The Duckman
