Chapter 61 - To the Spider

The door to Nennia’s lair had silk on the iron-barred window again. It wasn’t much: several strands that had been spun between the bars, only to be left hanging, lightly swaying in a breeze that wasn’t there.
Someone had partially wrapped the door and then lost interest.
Lillia stood in front of the door with Hooke in one hand and the other resting on the clasp of the Usurper’s Cloak.
Tomorrow, theoretically, she could have Cathria remove the cursed item, but that would only happen if tomorrow was the day they fought Eisel. And tomorrow was only the day they fought Eisel if Nennia was willing to listen.
The day would come when the clasp wouldn’t be weighing on her throat, but that day hadn’t come.
Yet.
The cloak was still feeding Eisel. Every fight. Every success. Every hard-won bit of progress gave itself to him. Lillia had been dying, bleeding, screaming, and somehow still dragging herself forward. All the while Eisel had been sipping from her victories like wine at a banquet.
Lillia should have been level thirty.
Level thirty.
She was going to be furious about that later. She was already furious about it now, but later she planned to do a much better job.
Right now, she had a door.
A door, and the choking feeling that even if this was a plan, it was a horrible plan.
Havoc had been clear that he thought it was a horrible plan. He had used several words to describe it: stupid, suicidal, and “something I don’t want to be a part of.” The last part was fair. While Lillia would have wanted Havoc beside her if she were going into Nennia’s lair looking for a fight, she wasn’t confident he would be helpful in negotiation.
At least, if she died in this room and then escaped back to the Hearth, Havoc would come back as an adventurer. That was a risk she’d mitigated. That counted as forethought, right?
Lillia took another small step forward, not quite enough to reach the door.
No time like the present?
It wasn’t as if she was getting any younger. Or any stronger. Thanks, Eisel.
Lillia squeezed her eyes shut and looked away from the door as she knocked. The sound of her knocking boomed across the third floor, through the walls and the flagstones beneath her feet. Knuckle on metal echoed back to her from every direction.
She waited. Nothing answered.
Lillia tried again. After all, the first step to proper negotiation would be an invitation. If she were going to negotiate with a monster, she needed to put her best, polite foot forward.
The second knock sounded nothing like the first. It was a hollow sound.
“Hello? Nennia?” Lillia asked.
Just as she spoke, Lillia heard the twang of strings being pulled tight above. The loose threads over the barred window weren’t drifting in the windless air anymore.
The door groaned. A gasp-like breath escaped the door as stale air poured out onto the landing. Metal ground against stone with each inch the door opened, white gouges in the flagstone marking its path. It stopped opening when it was barely wide enough to allow Lillia through.
How did it know how big she was?
Lillia swallowed spit and closed her eyes. The dungeon was doing it again. Each time she thought she had seen the worst of what it offered, she ended up in front of another door she hated.
Three floors ago, Lillia might have stood and wondered if following Eisel was really the worst option. She would have made excuses. Called him agreeable. Said that he was nice to look at. Said anything she could to herself to avoid walking through an iron door covered in silk. She knew what silk meant.
Now? After her short time in the dungeon, she knew she had to do this, even if she didn’t want to.
Character development sucked.
Lillia took a deep, steadying breath and squeezed through the opening.
Cold air brushed across Lillia’s face as she passed the door. It smelled of damp stone, old straw, rust, and something faintly sweet beneath the rot. Mournflowers that someone had left in a crypt.
Looking around her, that comparison might have been too exact. The area just past the door was a small landing. Just dark enough that Lillia needed to strain her eyes to see anything past her nose—when she did, all she could see were stairs.
Of course. The door hadn’t been enough; she needed to go further down into the creepy basement.
Lillia took a small step forward. Something brushed against her ankle. She froze.
Havoc would have been proud of her for not screaming.
Lillia looked down. There was a thin strand of silk across the landing. In fact, there were dozens of them, all criss-crossing around Lillia’s feet. The strands continued down the stairs, all within an inch of the ground like a thousand tripwires that wouldn’t stop her.
“Hello, Nennia?” Lillia said in the vain hope she would come up to the entrance to meet her. “I’m Princess Lillia. I’ve come to talk.”
The door swung shut behind her. It did not slam. That would have been too kind. It closed softly, with the careful click of a lock being set in place by someone who wanted her to hear it.
By the time Lillia turned around to try to see the door, it was gone. In its place was a black stone wall with more thin strands of silk draped over it.
“Oh boy.”
Lillia looked at the first several stairs in front of her as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. A chill ran down her spine, but there was no way but forward.
The staircase descended in a long, tight spiral. Each step had been cut from dark stone and worn smooth in the middle. Webs clung to the walls in fine layers, catching motes of dust in pale constellations.
The further Lillia descended, the more the air changed.
It first became colder. Then wetter. Then quieter.
The dungeon did not have the silence of the palace after battle or the silence of the Hearth when everyone else was sleeping. This silence was padded. Wrapped. Every step Lillia took was swallowed by silk before it could echo. By the time Lillia reached the bottom, she could barely hear her own breathing.
The staircase opened into a massive stone corridor.
No. A dungeon. A proper dungeon.
A castle dungeon in its worst, most theatrical form. So much worse than a sad little basement where a king kept political embarrassments. The ceiling rose high above her in arched ribs of black stone. Iron cages hung from chains overhead, swaying gently in the shadowed dark. Narrow cells lined both walls, each one barred with thick, rusted iron. Some had doors. Some had broken doors. Some had no doors at all because the webs had done a better job sealing them than iron ever could.
Silk covered everything.
It hung from the ceiling in long curtains. It wrapped the bars in white ropes. It filled the corners of cells until the shadows inside looked stuffed and swollen. It spread across the floor in patches that glistened faintly under the dull blue light burning in sconces along the walls.
Lillia raised one foot and almost stepped down on a thick, braided rope of silk that crossed the floor. She stopped.
The strand twitched.
“Absolutely not.”
Lillia put her foot down on the other side of the strand. As she stepped, something moved to her right.
She spun, raising Hooke and pointing it off toward the dark corner of one of the cells. The bulge in the corner twitched again, then squirmed.
Lillia’s stomach spun in several directions as her strained eyes put all the pieces together. Her sword was trained on a person-sized bundle wrapped completely in silk, suspended from the ceiling by a cord as thick as Lillia’s wrist.
It shifted again.
It went still.
There were more of them. As Lillia turned around, she realized they surrounded her. One in the next cell. Two in the cell after that. A dozen further down the corridor. Some hung from the ceiling. Some lay against walls. Some had been tucked carefully into corners like stored luggage.
Lillia went to take another step, but stopped herself again. The chitterpede battlegown was good for preventing surprise attacks, but it would draw every kind of attention to her. She should change dresses. She should switch to something quieter. She should…
No, she had come here to talk. She couldn’t talk to Nennia if she didn’t get her attention, as terrifying as that attention might be.
“Nennia,” Lillia said. The words were strangled by the damp air and silk around her.
This time, a whisper came back. Not words, but movement above Lillia.
The princess looked up. The hanging cages weren’t swaying, but the webs above them were. It was hard to tell how much the sea of white and silver shifted, but she could track that it had based on the occasional shine.
Further down the massive hallway, something moved on the ceiling. Lillia barely caught it. A shape. Too large to be a person. Too graceful to be a beast. Lillia saw a flash of pale limbs, a spill of dark hair, then the shape slipped behind a curtain of webbing and disappeared.
Lillia once again held back her screams. This time she only whimpered.
[Objective: Survive Nennia’s Lair.]
Oh, good. She had a goal.
The text faded.
Something laughed.
It came from everywhere. From the cells. From the ceiling. From behind the walls. A low, soft sound that might have been beautiful if Lillia had not been standing in a dungeon full of people-sized cocoons.
Just when Lillia was about to say something, there was movement to her right. The person-shaped bundle in the first cell crashed to the ground as the tether tying it to the ceiling broke. It writhed on the floor.
Lillia reached out, but stopped herself short of running over to help.
The thing rolled over itself again and again, winding itself tighter in more and more of the silk that coated everything within the dungeon. An arm split out as it writhed, still wrapped in silk but separate from the rest of the bundle. Other limbs followed. The limbs found purchase on the ground, and the thing twisted itself onto all fours.
A hole tore in the silk. A ghastly groan cut through the forced silence of the dungeon.
The bundle shambled up onto two legs. It hunched over, twitching all the while.
It looked up.
Lillia held Hooke at the ready and wished she had something that could keep that thing further away.
The silk-wrapped man charged. The tear in the silk flapped wildly as it ran. A scream escaped that sounded somewhere between the howling winter wind and the last gasps of a dying parent.
It was fast.
“Stop! Just let me talk! I wanna negotiate!”
[Lillia used Indignance! Level 3 - Highly Effective against the Webbed Shambler.]
The Shambler stumbled after being stunned, its momentum carrying it most of the way to Lillia even as it was falling over. Its scream stuttered and broke as it fell. Lillia swung Hooke in an uppercut, catching it by the chin.
The steel tore through some of the silk and pulled some of it along Lillia’s swing. There was nothing to offer resistance within the bundle, but shadow splashed out in the echo of the swing, spraying like blood across the far wall.
A pile of empty silk crumpled at Lillia’s feet. She danced half a step backward to avoid touching it. Darkness bled out between the strands.
[Webbed Shambler defeated! Yay!]
[Gained - Ensnaring Silk]
The scream of the first Shambler had faded quickly, but more followed it further down the hall. Bundles wrapped against the ceiling thrashed against the strands that held them there. Lillia heard the thump of bodies hitting the floor in further cells.
She had been eager to come here and had known that death wouldn’t be the end. She hadn’t slept before. Hadn’t bothered to reset Cathria before an encounter she didn’t want to be a fight.
Lillia had regretted her lack of preparation multiple times in the dungeon. She knew she wasn’t an adventurer, and hindsight was usually embarrassing.
It just wasn’t typically this quick to arrive.
One bundle snapped free from the ceiling in front of Lillia. It had already torn its limbs from the central cocoon. It landed hands first, then twisted itself over in a way that would have broken Lillia’s spine so it could run at her.
A thick cord of silk shot from the ceiling and caught the shambler by the legs. Just as fast as it had dropped, it rocketed back up into the ceiling, disappearing into the silk above.
Lillia looked up.
“My,” a woman’s voice said. “You knocked.”
Up in the darkness, from one of the black stone arches, a pair of pale hands emerged from the layered silk. They each reached out, stretching their fingers wide.
The hair on Lillia’s neck stood on end.
Nennia lowered herself from the ceiling.
The upper half of her body was almost painfully elegant. A woman with long black hair that fell around her shoulders in straight curtains, skin as pale as moonlight, and dark eyes that reflected the blue light in tiny points. She wore a gown of silk so fine it might have been mist, wrapped around her torso and arms in layers that shifted with every careful motion.
Below the waist, she became something else.
A spider’s body, massive and black, polished like lacquer. Eight long legs guided her descent with impossible delicacy. The abdomen behind her was enormous, marked with faint silver patterns that looked too much like embroidery to be natural and too much like scars to be beautiful.
Lillia backed up. Nennia ended up right in front of her. Each leg ended in a sharp point that clicked softly against the floor. She impaled the shambler that had torn itself from the ceiling on one of them without breaking her stride.
Nennia spoke. Her voice was softer than Lillia had expected, but no less threatening.
“Princess Lillia Ashvalin. Our new dungeoneer.” Nennia bent her legs to lower herself somewhere close to Lillia’s height. She must have been at least ten feet tall between her torso and the massive spider body underneath. “The scared little girl.”
“Woman.”
Nennia’s smile widened by the smallest amount. “Of course.”
Lillia lifted her chin to meet Nennia’s gaze. It was all she could do to appear brave.
“I had so much fun with the last knight who was here. I wonder what makes you different. What makes you unique? What fun we are going to have?”
Lillia swallowed. “I came here to negotiate.”
“I know. You knocked,” Nennia said. One of her hind legs twitched as she spoke. “It’s a novel strategy. How very royal of you.”
Lillia was trying to find some sort of footing to begin a back and forth on. “Is the royalty part going to be a problem?”
“Hardly, Princess. I’d be a hypocrite. You came here to speak to the spider queen.”
She leaned in close. Close enough that Lillia could smell the iron on her breath.
“I wonder what you have to offer my kingdom aside from your death?”