A Forest Of Threads

Flying through the air into a nigh invisible blender was not a pleasant experience the first time I did it and a repeat did not make it any better. There is nothing quite like the feeling of being utterly helpless and knowing that you absolutely are in danger, that you absolutely can die at any second, and that you absolutely cannot do anything about it.

I don't think I've ever hated a feeling more.

I watched the threads whipping about around me as I flew through the air, contorting myself wildly to avoid or mitigate damage from wires flying my way. More than a few shallow cuts opened up across my body as I flew, the wires so thin I didn't even feel the wounds (outside the total bodily awareness granted to me by my Paranoid trait) until I got the notification I had been injured and the pain set in. Fortunately, I managed to keep from losing my tail this time.

As I flew through the rapidly closing hole in the wall of webbing, I had to admit it was interesting to see these inky black webs shifting about, like seeing thin strands of solid darkness writhing through the air; the sight made all the more interesting given I no longer perceived darkness at all outside of the secondary ability Bend Shadow had seemingly given me to sense it so I can manipulate it. Were I not in horrible and obvious danger at the moment, I would love to simply sit and watch this tapestry of shadow stitch itself together. As is, I couldn't quite get the thought of how ungodly sharp they were out of my mind as they lashed about around me and the air got ever so slightly thinner by the second.

The air on the other side of the wall was, unsurprisingly, choked full of strands of this deadly black web; none of it was quite so thickly woven as that making up the interwoven threads creating the wall rapidly sealing itself shut behind me, but that didn't make it not dangerous. The fact that I had to twist and contort myself even more to avoid the stationary threads riddling the air inside the tunnel than I did to avoid being sliced to pieces by the writhing wall was… uncomfortable to say the least. Though, my significantly greater success in dodging the stationary threads was somewhat encouraging.

If I had any other option that wouldn't definitely kill me, I would have taken it; throwing myself into extreme danger to avoid certain death is not my idea of a good time. Despite all evidence to the contrary.

Finding a large enough clear spot to land amongst the thread covered ground was only mildly difficult considering my size, though I couldn't have done much to change my trajectory even if there were no safe spaces. Not for the first time I was grudgingly thankful for how small I was, anything larger and I would already be dead.

The stone on the other side was oddly cold considering the fires raging not fifty feet away; something gives me the impression this chill in the earth is not entirely natural. Then again, I'm fairly certain nothing about this place is at all natural.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

I managed to keep myself from skidding across the cool earth, netting me an Agility point in the process of not killing myself. The ground was, unsurprisingly, almost wholly covered in an interwoven forest of threads going off in every direction. Though, they were noticeably less and less dense as I went on, as if whoever made them was increasingly less concerned with density and just with having something down as they went further in.

Picking my way through the webbing as quickly as I safely could, I advanced at a pace just above infuriatingly slow. The rumbling became muted as the layers of webbing all around muffled the not so distant sounds of this entire place falling apart, only the distant roar of flames growing closer (likely meeting the wall by now) loud enough to truly testify to the danger I was in.

My senses, wired with stress and fear as they were, quickly picked up an odd, almost musical sound above the roar of the not nearly distant enough fires. It took me a second to process why the sound was so familiar, it was like the discordant plucking of an untuned string instrument. The moment that thought registered, a shot of fear lanced down my spine before I suppressed it; there’s only one thing nearby that could be producing a sound like that, and I have no desire to run into it.

Alas, my Fortune was not so great as to bypass the creator of this cutting web completely. The darkness did nothing to inhibit my vision, though the forest of threads certainly made up for this deficit by reducing visibility to less than a foot unobstructed. Being unable to actually see what was approaching as the sound of plucking threads echoed about around me had me nearly twitching with expectation of attack from any direction.

Were this place not cloaked in pure darkness, I would have been bending shadows to cloak not only myself but random places around me in some hope to distract; of course, basic knowledge of how spiders operate told me this would do nothing. Every thread I cut myself on was like a little ping on a vast radar telling my unseen but undoubtedly very real enemies where I was.

The lack of a ping from Paranoia told me even the system didn’t think I was unjustified in my caution, though that in and of itself almost inclined me to believe I was safe from sheer distrust of the system…

Paranoia +1

And that burst of power expanding my field of awareness was just enough to reveal something skittering along the edges of my awareness. A single, blade like chitinous leg of the starkest white I had ever perceived, stepped on a thread for the briefest moment before moving on, presumably heading towards my none too subtle entrance.

I went still, my entire body locking up in an instinctive attempt to hide myself from danger. I had seen many things here, wicked and terrible things of such deranged design that even the staunchest of believers would say no sane god could have had a hand their creation; and yet not a one of them had struck me with such instinctive dread and terror as the barest glimpse of whatever that was.

It was not some hideous, oozing horror or some incarnation of suffering ever weeping as I had seen before; hell, it was almost beautiful from the single scant glimpse I had gotten, appearing almost as if formed of some unearthly white crystal that radiated grace. No, though its appearance was vastly out of place, it was not that that set off the long buried feelings of horror dredged up from the days when primitive man lurked in shallow caves praying to nameless gods to keep them safe from the things that lurked beyond their sight.

It was an aura of sheer wrongness that clung to the beast, a shroud of hideous malice wrapping its elegant form and warping its beauty from the unending hate it projected into the very air around it. This thing did not belong on this world, did not belong on any world; it hated me, it hated itself, it hated life in general. It wanted to die, but first it wanted everything else to die and unlike so many creatures down here longing for death and inflicting their pain on all they could find, this creature had the patience and power to see it through.

If this creature found me, I would never escape here alive.

Skill Gained: Danger Sense: Lvl 3

...Lovely.