Knocking noises echoed out from one of the stone walls, reverberating through the fruit-eating spider’s den. On reflex, Niko’s feathers lifted as he felt the barest touch of adrenaline, wondering if something was coming through the stone.

Suddenly, the arachnid began moving, scuttling past the pair to the entrance and pulling the string upwards. It did so quietly, holding it in place with a few of its legs once it was in position and twisted it sharply, grooved stone sliding into place along with an abundant amount of webbing that appeared to form something of an airtight seal.

“Wait, shouldn’t we lea–” Niko paused mid question, hearing the vibration from the wall fade. ‘Uhm… okay?’ He blinked, confusion setting in as his gaze shifted from the wall itself and the slow moving spider.

Unceremoniously, it splayed out wide on the floor, its legs flat against the stone and its antennae gently tapping along the material as well. It was… a strange sight, if Niko had to admit, and he found himself glad that he wasn’t an arachnophobe, otherwise he imagined he’d be climbing the walls right about then.

Skye knelt down, slowly, before placing her palms against the stone of the nest. Niko opened his mouth to ask what she was doing, but a sharp shake of her head dissuaded him from speaking aloud.

“What’s going on?” He asked through their mental connection, but automatically began lowering himself to the ground.

“The spider’s feeling the stone,” Skye gave an inward shrug, “So I figured I would, too.”

Niko looked back up at the spider, noting that it seemed to be wholly concentrated on whatever it was doing, ‘Sensing vibrations, apparently.’ Niko shrugged. He knew spiders and most insects could sense vibrations more easily through their legs and furs, or at least such was his understanding. Whether that was the case here or not, he didn’t know.

Personally, Niko began to focus on his eyes, trying to peer through the stone and the essence of the forest. Regrettably, he had less range than usual, as the solid substance, intermixed with the much stronger essence, made perception difficult. Still, whatever was going on, he hoped to be able to catch at least a glimpse of it.

Silently they sat in position, neither Skye nor Niko moving even after nothing seemed to be happening. They weren’t natives to this place, the spider was, and given how it’d just awoken from a hefty slumber previously, they doubted that the insect was asleep. Straining his eyes, Niko made sure to keep his head on a swivel, rotating about, before looking through the wall that had been making noise.

A tree spread its roots through the stone and soil past the wall, rather unlike what he’d expected to see. Niko followed the trunk upwards, wondering what had been making the knocking sound, when he noticed that there was a slightly off-color bit of essence in the wood.

‘Oh? Something lives in the tree, maybe?’ The sight explained the knocking, and as he spent the time focusing on the image, it gradually became clear. It looked like a living thing, but it remained unmoving in what Niko thought might have been a tunnel in the wood. He couldn’t quite tell through the interspersed essence, but that explained where the noise had been coming from.

‘But still not the why of it.’ Bemused, he decided to refocus his gaze farther afield.

And then got a jolt from Skye’s side of the connection, “There’s movement.”

Niko frowned, trying to feel any vibrations through his feet, but couldn’t seem to do so. The Phorus instead turned his head slowly, looking for anything out of place.

Over the next few minutes, Niko had to double check his vision, detecting movement in the essence outside, farther away. He wouldn’t have noticed it at all, were it not for the fact that essence curled and flowed around whatever the source was en masse. Niko frowned in concentration, waiting and watching as the rippling wave moved slowly closer.

As it did, he finally began seeing in better definition. Small and large creatures, most of the same profile, moved alongside larger ones that were very clearly higher in power, essence-wise. The smaller of them ranged from simple tier two’s – wildly out of place on the forest floor, much like themselves – to an abundant quantity of tier threes, with the large signatures clearly tier four. Niko also saw another energy signature, one that resonated with what was within him, and that he and the rest of the Wyldwalkers knew all too well.

“I feel some of that blood energy the Bant cult goblins had,” He immediately said to Skye, “There’s a bunch of tier twos, some tier threes – probably hobs – and some bigger tier fours that I don’t know.”

Grimly, Skye nodded, both knowing that their hopes that the objects here in the spider’s den were simply random finds had been completely dashed with the discovery. And, it seemed that it was fairly common, if the spider’s still form was anything to be relied upon.

Niko never stopped watching, and thus didn’t miss the moment when he realized that there were other essence signatures descending upon what was likely the Dawr Goblins. That was the last that he could see clearly, though, as suddenly vibrations and shaking began to thunder through the ground, and essence cast off into the air in huge plumes. Through the thick stone, neither could hear anything, but Niko imagined that there was a fierce battle going on outside.

It continued for a few minutes, surprisingly longer than Niko had expected, before finally subsiding. A large amount of essence had built in the air, and Niko could see by the way it shifted that it was being prevented from dispersing into the atmosphere. He frowned at that, sensing surges of the blood energy coalescing alongside it, as if it were caging the essence. Niko felt the essence even further around tug towards the mass, suctioning inwards before it compacted enough that Niko was able to start making out vague forms and individuals again. He ignored them for the moment, watching as a ball began to form – or was revealed – as it collected the energy. It was still clearly tier four essence, but it carried blood energy with it, something that Niko didn’t know was a bad thing or not. For him, he doubted it would be much of an issue, but for something else?

Before his thoughts could wander further, the collection began to retreat, their essence signatures fading into the distance like through fog.

“I think they left,” Niko said, still through their mental connection in spite of his relative certainty that they were in the clear.

Skye nodded, but she, too, didn’t rise. Based on the numbers Niko had seen and the shaking, neither of them liked their odds of escaping if the assembled numbers discovered them. A minute or two passed before the spider began to move as well, and Niko watched through his sight as essence signatures, sparse and disparate, began to move outside.

The arachnid clacked its pedipalps together to get their attention as it began to remove the screw-door. Skye and Niko, interested, moved over closer, and no sooner than the door was open did their host jump down, scuttling off at speed.

“I guess we follow.” Skye shrugged, before hopping down as well. Niko followed, bending his legs while activating his Strider pattern for stealth. The two followed the skulking form of the arachnid, interweaving itself through rapidly regenerating and lush plant life. Bioluminescence once more cast the otherwise dark forest floor in fluorescent colors, and now that Niko was outside, he could much more clearly see the tides of essence in the air.

It was clear to him that the available energy felt anemic, as compared to earlier, but at the same time he could feel the surroundings flow inwards. Essence would stabilize here, but Niko couldn’t help but wonder if that was damaging to the environment in some way.

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As they came upon the site of the battle, though, Niko filed those worries away, seeing Dawr Goblin bodies scattered across the ground. Several dozens of tier two goblins lay across the ground, some of them having been cut to pieces, others appearing partly melted through. Thimurge bodies lay scattered, too, but none that Niko could tell had been especially large.

If it weren’t for the fact that he also saw much larger severed limbs belonging to Thimurge that must have been at least double their size, Niko might have thought that the goblins had been outclassed by other tier twos in spite of their numbers.

In any case, Niko could see a scant few Thimurge still descending from the trees, drawn no doubt to the scent of the remains below. A few beasts darted forward from between the trees, snatching up prey items from the clearing. It took only moments for him to realize the goblin corpses were being utterly ignored, and on a closer inspection, Niko realized why. They’d been utterly stripped of essence, and their corpses lacked the abundant gore he had expected to see.

“Blood energy,” He mumbled to himself, figuring that they’d used their fallen to help fuel whatever essence-cage he’d seen being used.

Sky didn’t hear him, her eyes and attention instead on the many still living things around them. The spider scooped up items, the only thing shared between them being how shiny they were, scuttling between the bodies with a barely inhibited glee. It almost made him wonder if the greedy spider even realized how shameless it appeared.

‘Then again…’ Niko immediately reconsidered, given how apparently plenty of beasts liked to collect treasures of some variety or another. ‘It’s not like I made a bird-throne out of ‘repossessed’ weapons in my first nest…’

Together they moved forward, Niko and Skye not terribly interested in any of the loot, save for grabbing evidence of what appeared to be a tribal banner from the dead. They glanced over the bodies, while also trying to keep distance from the monster corpses that were still edible. None of them wanted to start a fight over a kill that wouldn’t even have much essence left in it.

It was when he stepped over the corpse of one of the few Dawr Hobgoblins that he suddenly paused. “Hey, Skye?” He called out, kneeling over and dragging a surprisingly well made leather satchel off of the nearly bisected grey-skinned creature.

The half-elf stepped over, curiously eyeing the bag before taking it from him when he offered it.

“Huh… some junk in here, but a few things that are usable.” Skye commented, pulling out a few trinkets that may as well have been random rocks from the ground, but settling on a book and what looked like a folded, rough, worn paper.

The two clustered around the paper as Skye unfolded it, revealing a scrabble of lines, shapes, and markings that Niko knew Skye wouldn’t recognize.

“It’s a map,” Skye’s eyes lit up, “I can’t read this, though.”

Niko leaned in, staring at the words and focusing in them, searching down into the confines of his soul for Alterra’s gift. He tried to remember the sensation he felt when he first learned the common tongue from the sign outside of Greenleaf, and when he was roaming Riizen and looking at the shops.

A warm strand of energy began to grow forth from where he knew his blessing was, and reached outwards to the shell of his soul. Niko followed it, guiding his attention to the words on the map, trying his best to analyze the event as it happened.

He lost track of it at the last second as his consciousness blurred, the reaching tendril of warmth scratching into the shell of his soul. A headache bloomed into being, but he could sense something had moved through the strand, scouring into the shell. He’d missed the moment, but he could actually see where the change had taken place, now that he knew what to look for.

‘Something to examine more in depth later,’ Niko mused to himself, not sure how much that would help him currently, ‘Lets see if it worked.’

Staring at the paper, Niko let his eyes refocus on the letters, little more than what looked like random scratches of ink. They seemed to coalesce into meaning, far more gradually than what he’d experienced before.

He couldn’t help but frown at what he was seeing, though.

“It’s not a very good map.” Niko pouted, leaving Skye laughing.

“Well, they are goblins.” She explained, shrugging one shoulder, “I’d be surprised if it was halfway decent.”

Niko shook his head disappointedly, “Well, these words indicate different clan names, but unless this goblin doesn’t know how to count, there’s a lot of them out there. No idea on sizes though.”

“At any other time, I wouldn’t be that worried about it. Dawr Goblins are as much a threat to each other as they are to anyone else. But now?” She sighed, before looking hopefully between the map and Niko, “Any landmarks? Ways to the higher canopies?”

Niko chirped, looking more closely at the markings and symbols. There were a few possibilities, but even his translation ability seemed to have trouble with some of the words. Still, he smiled as he looked at a few noted areas, “Yeah, there might be. That or they’re highly dangerous zones. I’m not positive. There’s a lot of emphasis on a few locations, and they don’t seem to be camps.”

“So, either those are dangerous areas, or ways up?” Skye nodded, then muttered, “Or down, I guess. They do live underground after all.”

Begrudgingly, Niko nodded at that, not at all entertaining the idea of going underground ever again if he could help it.

They turned around to the sound of something dropping on the ground next to them, both coming to a defensive stance as it did so.

“Oi, don’t scare someone like that,” Niko chastised the arachnid, who had apparently finished with what it was doing and had dropped a heavy bundle of lightly webbed material on the ground.

Utterly flummoxed, the spider chittered happily, antennae tapping away at the sack of goodies as if to show off.

“Good loot,” Skye smirked, “Guess you’ve been at this for a while, then.”

Niko trilled at the arachnid, which only seemed to encourage it more. Then, he sighed, “Well… we should probably be leaving. It’s been fun.”

The spider’s movement slowed at that, and its fuzzy antennae drooped. Niko inwardly cringed, feeling somehow guilty that they were going to be leaving the creature behind, but it wasn’t like they could just stay there.

“Look… Maybe we can visit sometime?” Niko said, looking to Skye in the corner of his eye, who was just as helpless as he was.

The spider perked up a bit, drumming its forward legs a little bit excitedly. In spite of himself, Niko couldn’t help but chuckle at the thing’s antics.

“Maybe we should give it a name?” Skye pondered aloud, “It’s going to be weird if we wait to name it later.”

“Hmm… How about Charlotte?” Niko asked, to which Skye hummed thoughtfully. She nodded, and Niko turned his attention to the spider, “Okay, your name is Charlotte!”

Charlotte paused at that, before Niko felt something… odd, happen to it. For some reason, its entire body vibrated, and then it seemed to move preternaturally quickly, scooping up its haul while chittering at them. They weren’t words, and Niko had difficulty parsing any meaning, but as it vanished, he almost felt like it had been shy, or embarrassed.

“Uhhh… Did it not like the name?” Skye frowned, confusion apparent in her expression.

Niko shared the sentiment, “Somehow, I don’t think that’s the case… But, well, I guess we can start on our way, then?”

Thoroughly confused, the two started to move through the forest, keeping to the shadows when they could. With any luck, they could find some kind of landmark the map shared and work from there. If nothing else, Skye left small marks as they went, so they could at least find their way back.

‘Such a weird few days…’ A bewildered Niko thought to himself, doing his best not to think about what might be looming in the fog over their heads as they traveled.