Alex pushed, and the door opened before his fingers could even graze its surface. Cautiously, the three entered. The girl's expression beneath her wrappings grew increasingly concerned with each step.
Then the door slammed shut behind them, and an overload of bright colours, sounds, tastes, and smells assaulted their senses.
For a heartbeat, silence reigned.
Alex leaned into the stillness, shock consuming him. Momentarily blinded by the shift in light, he tried to parse the overload of information that lay before him.
A woman, at the far corner of the large space they found themselves in.
At the end of the room she drifted.
At first, he thought she was floating in the air, suspended high above at the end of the chamber.
Until the luminous Moss variants entered, a congregation.
They surrounded her, glowing like fallen stars. Each one a beacon of unnatural life. They were like living trees, exoskeletons spongy, pulsing with bioluminescent life. The moss, a key to their path of evolution.
They circled the chamber like ghostly forest spirits. Some vanished into distant chambers, silent as the dark itself. Lighting the paths ahead.
The ones that remained, circled the floating woman. Illuminated in sudden light, a grotesque form loomed. The extent of the floating ‘woman’ became clear.
Eight legs, thick like tree trunks, stretched to reach the corners of the chamber. Deeply rooted, they held aloft the true breadth of her towering torso.
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A womb far larger than should be possible, enough to fill a corner of the chamber. Enough to fill a house to bursting. But filled with eggs, teeming with life beneath a mother's suspended bosom.
A giant arachnid, a blend of human and spider, made manifest. Almost human, but not quite.
She smiled with delight at the sight of her visitors.
Carapace glistened, doll-like in the bright light. Her many eyes held mirth, glinting as sinister jewels would.
In shadows deep, other figures appeared where some vanished, silent and unseen. Humans. Victims. Workers. Cores. Each second stretching like an eternity. Then, a swift, brutal act.
She ate them. It ate them all.
A subordinate Arachnae dared to speak.
It ate that, too
Its protests cut short. A swift motion. The subordinate's body, crushed. It's core, consumed.
A splatter, muted. Ichor and blood hit the ground in melded rains, an end to dissent. An end to protest.
It advanced, a nightmare given form. Legs like twisted pillars supported its half-human, half-arachnid body.
With deceptive beauty, It smiled at its visitors once more.
The sound of its movement, a chilling scrape. Eyes, numerous and unblinking, fixated on the group ahead.
Clicks resounded, chitin scraping stone.
Click. Click. The sound, relentless. A rhythm of impending doom.
A medley of death.
The matriarch, clothed and fearsome, moved with deadly purpose. Eight arms, each holding a meal. Several holding Arachnae, several more holding humans.
Its mouth, a black abyss, issued commanding rhythms. Voice cold as death.
The Queen, a grim monarch. Authority absolute.
In her midst, more figures. Humanoid, two-legged, yet unmistakably Arachnae. Closer to the ground than the towering worker companions, armoured in natural chitinous plates. Slightly larger than human men, they stood at attention, stoic gazes beneath natural chitinous visors. Their stoic forms commanded the spaces in which they stood. Their faces shifting mosaics of exoskeleton, each resembling a knight's helm, hard and angular. Venomous fangs peeked from large mandibles. Six eyes, Six swords, and arms six — warrior casts, soldiers of the swarm.
Alex, John, and the girl were frozen in stunned inaction at the sight. The three of them stood before the soldiers and the Hidden Queen’s Chamber.
The ‘Entrance’.
John gulped, and sliced through their statuesque and shocked senses with shaky words,
“Uh… guys. I don't think this is the way out.”