Queen

Now alone, Alice Desare moved through the twisted metal trees, her silk-wrapped feet silent on the smooth and cold ground of the forest.

Once deep inside the crystal thicket, the sounds of the arguing spiders on the outside had warped into a discordant undertone, like a sonic breeze that whistled through the contorted structures and bounced on their irregular, reflective edges.

As she delved further in, the metallic protrusions became larger and more complex. The elongated growths of before were now tangled formations that branched and connected to their neighbors, forming arches and tendrils that snaked through the air, far over her head like the circulatory system of a misshapen, invisible giant.

Piles of glowing blue mold blended with her own green and gold light, giving life to an uncountable number of reflections and refractions on the thousands metallic, leaf-like slabs that grew out of the crystals’ main frames.

She watched everything in a gentle, hushed awe that grew deeper with each step she took in that bright and alien landscape, her enhanced eyes struggling to take note of the numberless details. At least until a single, deep and loud click echoed from somewhere in front of her, an undulation in the metal forming the ground and the trees that made the soles of her feet tingle and the abstract compositions above her head further twist and bend, the many lights reflected on them moving together with the changes in a dizzying display of wild abandon that would have made the Mad Hatter and The Caterpillar at once both proud and envious.

Alice stopped, her eyes trying to follow the sudden metamorphosis while her heart resumed its frenetic beating in her chest.

She stood still, even when the ripple had already disappeared behind her and the structures had stilled again.

“Is it a sign?” she asked aloud, dreading an actual answer “do I need to go back? Or was it a hello? Cause it sure as heck didn’t sound like a hello”.

She waited a couple more instants before taking a tentative step forward, ready to bolt away at the first sign of displeasure from the environment.

Everything was still. She took it as an acceptance and proceeded further in, following the rapidly increasing heaps of glowing mold, ignoring the enraged clicks and hisses now echoing behind her, warping as they bounced against the metal but slowly getting closer to her position. Her bodyguards had noticed her disappearance and probably hadn’t taken it well.

Eventually, after crossing a final, complex arch of crystalline alloy while silently admiring its tangled and multiplex system, the very anxious guest found herself in the hall of the caverns’ queen.

It was a crescent moon-shaped clearing in the forest of metal trees, illuminated by the soft blue light of the mold. At the center of the glade, supported by the cavern wall behind it, stood a huge structure of silvery silk.

It was a hugely oversized version of the resting spots she had had the chance to see both in Skitter’s nest and in the tunnel-nest just above her head.

Large curtains of grey and pearlescent silk had been carefully sewn together to form a funnel-shaped hole with a thick, cushioned floor on which easily stood out large dark splatters of long-dried out blood.

Now able to perfectly hear the number of crashes, hisses and plinks resounding from between the crystals behind her, Alice turned just in time to see three hissing spiders weave through the abstract structures and a fourth, loudly hissing one, simply barreling through them, her lucent exoskeleton covered in a glittering coating of metallic residue.

She stared back as a total of 31 eyes fixated on her form.

“Ha! That would honestly be quite funny if it wasn’t so goddamn scary” she cackled somewhat hysterically.

She would have kept laughing and probably gotten a few somewhat undeserved pokes from the pissed-off spiders if another, sudden sound hadn’t stilled both the arachnids and the human girl. A loud, rumbling hiss echoed from the funneling burrow, making the crystals of the forest jingle and the ground and silk vibrate in unison.

As the thunderous noise ended, a huge, lucent spiked limb emerged from the darkness of the lair; the creaking of the exoskeleton mixed with the sound of the highly-pressurized fluids that allowed the burnished pillar of living metal and flesh to move.

A long, keening hiss soon followed the limb as, behind it, a titanic body of metal slowly pushed itself in the light for them all to see.

Two more limbs, on the opposite side, pushed forward the behemoth until it collapsed on the huge silken cushion in front of it, the deep, prolonged whimper finally ending as the Spear Spider Queen laid to rest.

The colossal spider easily dwarfed every living thing she had ever seen, in this world or the previous one; sure, one could argue that a whale would easily be longer, and the titanic millipede she had witnessed emerge from the depths of the system of caves could potentially raise itself to be taller than the queen, but the sheer size of the creature? Unmatched.

The body alone was easily over nine meters in height, with legs as thick as a tree, ending in sharp-edged spikes that she knew would easily sink in any surface, even the hardest one.

The Queen’s entire body was metal, a dull silvery alloy that composed her exoskeleton and external organs; her titanic form, however, was marred by long, dark streaks of some kind of necrotic corruption, most of which seemed to start from both her left side, and the five, wide, oozing stumps where her other five legs should have been.

As her eyes gazed into hers, the fledgling biomancer of symbiosis, on the verge of a panic attack, still noticed that three of the eight silver orbs were squashed and blackened cavities that oozed brownish pus while void-black veins snaked their way on the beautiful platinum, ruining it.

Alice wished there was a way to be more immobile than still. Since there wasn’t, she elected to find it in her free time as the massive silver monster eyed her, the fridge-sized pedipalps on her face slowly moving on their own, sometimes showing a hint of two, gleaming fangs covered in a uncountable small droplets of grey fluid.

Suddenly, the two hind legs of the spider moved, raising high in the air. Extending on the first one, gently swaying in the air, was a single, finger-thin wire that was still being extruded from the Queen’s spinnerets.

Gently but with a fluidity only possessed by someone with an absolute certainty of their ability, the huge spider passed the thread’s starting point to the second rear limb and, from there, to the only frontal leg she had at her disposal, slowly bringing it to her maw and covering its tip with some of the dull grey substance on her fangs.

Less than a heartbeat later the wire was flying forth, towards a petrified Alice and just past her ear, hitting the metal lake below and causing hundreds of concentric waves to ripple outwards before stilling again, the immobile thread perfectly taut.

Keeping one of the long, spiked hind legs raised, the Titanic Queen started gently passing the sharpest edge of her frontal limb on the line of metallic silk, a somewhat discordant melody being vibrated out of the cord.

The more the limb moved over the wire, however, the more the sound warped and distorted, losing most of its musicality and, in exchange, obtaining a cadence, an intensity and a flow.

Sounds rose and fell, sometimes interrupted by silence and other times by simple vibrations.

At last, under all the discordance and confusion, Alice Desare heard the first phrase uttered by another sapient being on this new world.

“❄︎♓︎ ♐︎♋︎♍︎♍︎♓︎□︎ ✋︎ ❍︎♓︎♏︎♓︎ ⬧︎♋︎●︎◆︎⧫︎♓︎📪︎ ✌︎📫︎●︎♓︎⬧︎📪︎ ◻︎◆︎□︎♓︎ ♍︎♒︎♓︎♋︎❍︎♋︎❒︎❍︎♓︎ 💣︎♋︎♋︎⧫︎♒︎📪︎ □︎ 💣︎♋︎♎︎❒︎♏︎📬︎ ❄︎♓︎ ⬧︎□︎■︎□︎ ⬧︎⧫︎♋︎⧫︎♏︎ ♑︎♋︎❒︎♋︎■︎⧫︎♓︎⧫︎♏︎ ♎︎♓︎❍︎□︎❒︎♋︎ ♏︎ ◻︎❒︎□︎⧫︎♏︎⌘︎♓︎□︎■︎♏︎ ■︎♏︎●︎●︎♋︎ ♍︎◆︎●︎●︎♋︎ ♎︎♏︎●︎●︎♋︎ ⬧︎◻︎♏︎♍︎♓︎♏︎ ♍︎♒︎♏︎ ♓︎□︎ ⬧︎⧫︎♏︎⬧︎⬧︎♋︎ ♒︎□︎ ♍︎❒︎♏︎♋︎⧫︎□︎📬︎ ☼︎♓︎◆︎⬧︎♍︎♓︎❒︎♋︎♓︎ ♋︎ ♍︎◆︎❒︎♋︎❒︎♏︎ ♓︎●︎ ❍︎♓︎□︎ ♍︎□︎❒︎◻︎□︎ ♎︎♏︎⧫︎◆︎❒︎◻︎♋︎⧫︎□︎ ♓︎■︎ ♍︎♋︎❍︎♌︎♓︎□︎ ♎︎♓︎ ❑︎◆︎♏︎⬧︎⧫︎♓︎ ◻︎❒︎♓︎❖︎♓︎●︎♏︎♑︎♓︎✍︎”

The long phrase ended in silence, every single one of the many eyes in the clearing focused on the still immobile form of the Biomancer of Symbiosis.

Alice looked straight into the eyes of the Queen of Spear Spiders before uttering back a single word.

“What?”.

For the first time since finding herself stranded in that crazy, horror-filled system of tunnels and caves, Alice had met her first talking being. Too bad she didn’t understand a word of what she was saying.

*****

This chapter is officially sponsored by Victor!