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Qerrali
I’ll find her
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Move… MOVE! Qerrali screeched, pointy feet click-clacking on the wooden docks as she twirled around making a loop with the large harbor-rat at its center. The rat tried to rush the Arachne but she skirted up a moldy post, hectic spinnerets spraying silk on the hairy creature’s legs and tripping it up.
Stay still… stupid smelly feet of clay! An easy to panic Qerrali shrieked landing behind the struggling to free itself rat. She used her chelicerae to nibble at its swinging tail drawing blood and then retreated nervously, jumping a full meter up with ease to check on the busy docks, performing another mid-air twirl and landing gracefully.
She made a spirit thread next using the rat’s poisoned blood, Qerrali had envenomed the creature just a tad in her panic but it wasn’t fatal. The Arachne used the glowing thread to enter the shuddering large rat’s mind, the mess inside unnerving her at first.
Qerrali let out a squeaky sound, then went to work squashing the creature’s weird memories and thoughts of stale cheese cabinets. Killed everything that caught her fancy but worked fast using the many shadows to move about undetected until it was safe.
When she was, Qerrali instilled the action the rat would take in its mind as a feeling first and unsure whether that would work in the little time she had available, the industrious Arachne manifested ghostly small rats that run about in the empty corridors she had created.
All the little phantom rats screaming at the top of their lungs tipping their hairy heads back.
Hit the road rat!
Be an otter and find a barrel’s water
And go sappily slap splat!
The rat shuddered with a whiner and broke free with a newfound surge of power. It dashed towards the nervously dancing on her tips Qerrali, the screaming Arachne jumping out of its way and then galloped towards the moored transport as fast it could.
Qerrali following after it, but keeping an eye at the bulky heh-mans and their heh-sharp weapons.
Sheesh!
The Arachne rushed after the crude fleshy automaton, taking care to dash behind stacked cases, coiled ropes and stinking rubbish. Eight pointy legs tapping at the paved ground, executing rapid bursts from point to point and stopping most times abruptly.
The leading the charge rat rushed a group of sailors and armed soldiers carrying supplies in the open. It was heading for one of the large water barrels a young man had finished topping up with a bucket. He was to bring them on the ship next via one of the narrow ramps that led to the deck.
A man spotted the manic rat coming at them with a curse. While only half the size of Qerrali, it was a good two-kilo harbor-rat this with a slim ugly snout, goofy white teeth and a gleaming black evil pair of eyes.
Balls for eyes, a guise for lies!
Qerrali screeched in excitement but the man’s roar covered all other sounds causing pandemonium.
“FUCKING RAT!”
Eh.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“SALTED SHITE!”
Uhm.
“IT’S HEADING FOR THE SHIP… NO THE BARREL!”
“WHERE? FUCK’S SAKE!”
He just told you!
“GET IT ‘LIMP’ JOHN!”
The peg-legged John dived for the ground heroically but the rat escaped him and he cut his head open on the concrete tiles. Another man swung wildly with a harpoon, the blade striking a sack with potatoes and splitting it open. The rat climbed up the barrel’s walls, reached its lip and dived inside under the curses of everyone present, none louder than the leader of the soldiers that shouted hoarse obscenities watching from the deck.
Qerrali turned towards the other ramp than the one the livid officer was sprinting down from, pointy legs sliding on smelly muck and rotting fish filth. She twirled, hedged and dodged, her soul jumping out of her skin.
Qerrali hated water.
There was no more water one could find but in the sea.
Yet a sea, the nervous Arachne was about to cross.
The name mattered little to her. All seas are but one thing, even if poor-legged creatures called it many.
I’ll find her kinfolk! She squealed narrowly avoiding a heavy boot with wooden bottom and iron nails on it, the screaming sailor jumping in the water scared out of his mind at a glimpse of what had sprinted under his legs.
Or thought he saw.
Gaze your sister race up a stringer!
Labored kinfolk soul in vain shall not linger!
The man coming after the splashing in the harbor’s waters sailor snapped his head right first to witness his friend’s spectacular tumble, the pandemonium caused by the men that had upturned the water barrel in front of the ship frenetic and by the time he looked down Qerrali had gone by him. The man heard the Arachne’s loud tapping and twisted on his axis alarmed, but she had tied his foot to the deck’s rails and mid-way through his turn the man went down with a pained yelp.
Qerrali skirted right, then left, zig-zagging on the narrow corridor, ducking behind trawl nets, coiled rope and discarded cases. A gasp and she leaped on the quarterdeck’s thin rail, lost her footing on the greasy surface but fired a long strand of silk on the mizzen mast, willed it to loop around twice and turn tight.
The next moment the ancient white Arachne found herself flying over the deck, momentum yanking her towards the ship’s center. She yipped half-scared half deliriously happy, for which realm’s creature does not wish to fly? Her keratinous, bony jointed legs spreading out as she twirled around in the air, her many eyes easily scanning everything about in a 360 radius.
The man holding his bleeding head down at the loading docks, the officer stabbing his boot on the dead rat with hatred turning its body into bloody paste and others using a harpoon to help their half-drown colleague out of the dirty water of the harbor.
At the edge of the Cofol docks more than a hundred meters away two muscular men were standing next to a short pink-haired girl. Twenty meters away from them another group watched the ship about to depart half-hidden under hooded cloaks. Something in one of the females auras familiar, even when shaded.
Hmm.
A whiff of mystery! She thought with a last glance at the oblivious Gish and her friends.
Squish and swish, she sang her lost creator’s favorite words, still twirling in the air like a creepy disk and heading towards the ship’s mast. Spare yer wish here’s a willowy Gish!
This sister is off to Jelin!
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read it at Royalroad : https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/46739/touch-o-luck-the-old-realms
& https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/47919/lure-o-war-the-old-realms
Scribblehub https://www.scribblehub.com/series/542002/touch-o-luck-the-old-realms/
& https://www.scribblehub.com/series/547709/the-old-realms/