Rusty woke screaming, sweating, and swaying.

The screaming, that made sense.

Before this little adventure, before he'd jammed a chunk of pure magic into his arm, he had slept like most any child he knew. Occasionally he'd have dreams, and occasionally he'd remember a few of them. Sometimes they were nightmares, and that was bad, but as he'd grown older he'd learned to deal with them. They didn't trouble him much...

...up until the point where he'd given himself eidetic memory and total recall.

Last night had been hell, pure and simple. He'd spent the bulk of it watching the warped surroundings of his dreams flowing and darting between images like a malfunctioning television. He'd watched the deaths of the Grach that Terathon had dismembered multiple times from multiple angles. And there had been a few times where Terathon had missed, and taken HIM apart. He'd seen his family die in horrible ways as Tarquals and Grach and other things killed them, or dragged them screaming into the swamp. And he'd felt what it was like to die in a dream, over and over again.

Then, the tenor of the dreams had shifted. For the last third of things, they'd involved being too close to a fire, or being outside in the high Texas afternoon, with the sun beating down. Fire ants were streaming towards him and he ran, but he was too slow and they picked their way up him and chewed holes in his cheeks, and poured down his gullet, and they WERE fire, and he was cooking from the inside out.

Mercifully, Rusty woke up then. But he was sweating, and sweating hard.

That took a moment to figure out. For a little while, he thought he was still dreaming. There was something snug and tight all around him, soft as blankets, and he thought he was remembering being back in the hayloft at home, trying to nap during summer. There was a dim light filtering in, and it was stuffy, the air was thick with his unwashed scent. He hadn't had a bath or shower, the closest he'd come was the dip in the pit with the dead kid.

But even with the cloth wrapped tightly around him, he felt too hot for that. Felt... off.

I'm sick, he realized.

“Oh this isn't good,” Roz whispered, half-visible as Rusty blinked his eyes, tried to clear his vision. He was breathing through cloth, and he smelled himself, and... no, there was something more. Sour milk? Maybe. It made his stomach roil and burn. He felt sweat pool under his borrowed clothing, made the world wobble...

No. No, the smell wasn't what was making the world wobble back and forth. The world was swaying of its own accord. He could hear the creaking of branches, and the rustling of leaves as a great wind stirred them up in bursts, repeatedly.

Then the light brightened, and Rusty understood what was happening, as he looked up and saw faded shapes through the cloth around him.

It wasn't cloth. It was a cocoon, a pouch of webbing. And he was being carried under a great, many-legged form, slung under the abdomen of some enormous thing that was too close to a spider to be called anything else. The hissing and shushing of leaves came as the thing strode through the treetops, its great, thin legs seeking and finding purchase on the leaf-laden branches.

From his angle, Rusty couldn't see the head of the thing. He was glad for that.

But he could see three or four other cocoons dangling from the thing's abdomen. They weren't far away. One of them had something like a lizard's tail poking out. That particular cocoon was red with blood, and little black bugs chased after it, the same sort of bugs that had eaten the kid's corpse yesterday.

That memory was the final tipping point, and Rusty felt his stomach clench, and his guts heave upward. He spewed bile into the cocoon in front of him.

By the time he stopped heaving and got control of himself, tears and mucus streaming down his face, he realized that he could breathe easier. He opened his eyes to see the open sky in front of him, and melted remains of the cocoon around his face. The bile had cleared it away... but only a small patch. Still, the air was cool, and Rusty gasped it in greedily, spitting every now and then to try and get the taste of vomit out of his mouth.

“Shelob,” Rusty whispered. “This is just like Shelob,” he told Roz. “But there's no Sam to save me.”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Sam? Um, hang on.”

In his haze, Rusty thought he could feel Roz rummaging through his memories, feel the prickling on his scalp as the familiar tried to make sense of fantasy fiction from another world. “Oh. Yeah, sorry, I'm not much of a Sam.” Roz said. “But hey, on the upside, we have a pretty good view of our surroundings, now.”

Rusty blinked, tearing his gaze away from the big spider thing that loomed above him, peering out through the bile-carved slit in the cocoon at the world around him. He pressed his face against the webbing; it wasn't sticky at all, and the crisp, cool air helped him get the smell of his own vomit out of his sinuses.

He looked out onto a solid sea of leafy green, bulging upward in some places and dipping down in others. The canopy went as far as the eye could see to what he thought were the north and west. To the east, it tapered off into a vast glittering plain that he thought might be an ocean, or something like a great lake. Islands of green dotted it, broke it up here and there.

If Rusty's memories and navigational guesses were right, they were heading south. And south seemed to be the most interesting by far.

Jutting fingers of stone rose from the canopy further south, bare and blackened. Something like a network of roots, or cables secured several of them, forming a pattern to the central peak. There was a structure up there, lost in the clouds. Flickers and flashes of what looked like a very localized storm danced around the highest peak. It was a little hard to make out, because three huge beams of light pierced the clouds and highlighted three of the mountains below the structure.

The spider didn't seem to be heading directly toward it, but it did look like it was moving in a generally southward pattern. And in the distance, to all sides, Rusty could see things further away that looked like more spiders, their blackish limbs and white chitinous frames strolling across the treetops like water skeeters on a stagnant pond. And all had feathery white bits under them that flashed in the sun, and blew back and forth gently as they went.

And then the spider stopped. The cocoon swayed, and Rusty closed his eyes, feeling himself rock through the air, and back. The strand he was on was at least thirty feet long, it took a while to come to a stop.

When it did, Rusty twisted it as best he could, and looked to the front of the spider.

It was dipping low. He could see huge mandibles from his vantage point, a mouth that would easily be able to pick up a cow between its pincers. It was actually fairly small compared to the rest of its body.

“Why does it want me?” Rusty asked, as the spider rummaged around in the canopy, its head out of sight in the green leaves. “I'm not even a mouthful to it.”

“Well it didn't eat us, so that's something,” Roz said. “But it wants us for something. I'm not sure I want to know what.”

“Yeah...” Rusty worked an arm up, sliding it across the webbing. It wasn't sticky at all. It was tough, but he knew his Hole rune could take care of it, if he needed to escape. But the problem with that, was that he was pretty far up in the air. The canopy was at least twenty or thirty feet below him, and he had no guarantees of landing on a branch. Even then, if he did, what would stop the spider from grabbing him again?

So for now, Rusty watched and waited, and tried to ignore the fever that was boiling his guts. He didn't have time to be sick.

The thing rummaged around in the canopy, eerily silent for all of its bulk. Then there was a thrashing, and Rusty felt his cocoon shake and vibrate as the spider danced backward suddenly. He caught a flash of dark green through the leaves, then the spider reared up, with a scaly form between its mandibles. Rusty shoved his hand into his mouth to keep from screaming, as the thing lashed in all directions, snapped a maw with far too many teeth at the cocoons, and got jerked back, whiplashed as the spider shook it. What had to be bones snapped and crackled, as the spider's prey died. The creature went still after that.

A Juvenile Lashtak has died within your chakral radius!

Consuming chakra...

You have increased your chakra by 2.

Committed chakra: 14/44

Remaining free chakra: 30/44

Rusty gasped, as he saw it clearly. It was built like a snake with stubs along its sides, somewhat like the leg-stumps of a caterpillar. But it was as thick around as a telephone pole, and long enough to encircle Rusty's house with length left over. It was big... but not as big as Rusty's captor. And as he watched, the spider raised two shorter legs to hold it steady, and began to inhale the thing down its gullet. Foot by foot vanished as the large insect ate it whole.

“Okay, so that's what it eats,” Roz said. “We're too small for it to bother with so why does it have us?”

“Maybe it has babies,” Rusty said. “Maybe we're not too small for its kids to bother with.”

“I don't like that idea. Can we get out of here?”

Rusty closed his eyes, as the world wobbled and his head throbbed. “Maybe. I need to figure out how to do this safely. It's a long way down.”

“Maybe. But it beats being eaten alive... oh! What's that?”

Rusty watched from the darkness of his eyelids as Ros hurried over and pointed to the right. He opened his eyes and tried to swing that way, managed to twist the cocoon around to peer at the back end of the spider.

One of its rear legs was rummaging down in the canopy, and something was screaming.

The snake hadn't screamed, Rusty thought. Come to think of it, the whole forest around them was eerily silent. That made sense, they were trying to avoid the attention of the giant spider. What was different here?

Then the leg raised up, twisting, its joints sliding like a carpenter's measure folding together, and a long strand of webbing rose up with the leg.

And on the end of that strand, thrashing and screaming and sawing at it, was a girl.