It was a sunny day when the gardener first arrived the world. Into the stillness, out of the blue, she appeared in a quiet, charming meadow of gently waving flowers and tall grass. A tall, slender woman, she had light brown eyes, a light dusting of freckles, and wore a long work coat. In many ways reminiscent of a lab coat, it was of a more durable tan-colored material and saw more use amongst the soil and plants than it ever did in a laboratory. Indeed, the bottom hem was still stained with loamy fresh detritus, and her dull blonde hair had a couple straws of long grass stowed away where it ended at her lower back.
She straightened and checked her satchel but found that it was empty. Stranger still, she was not certain what she was looking for, or even what she had been doing. She just... was. She knew who she was, what she did for her profession, had vague memories of working and knowledge of what plants did best in what areas, but not so much as a whisper of when any of that had happened, or where she lived when it did. As strange as it seemed, she had the clearest impression that she had been here forever. Whatever her memories told her, however (or did not, in this case) she knew that waiting around would bring her no closer to the truth.
Scanning the area, she was surrounded on three sides by forest, and in one direction the meadow extended into the distance, before disappearing over the horizon. Distantly, she could make out mountains in that direction, but she decided that she was more at home in amongst the trees and forest and decided to start gathering wood for tools and a fire, and hopefully somewhere cozy to curl up come nightfall.
A short distance into the woods she found a small lake, and she spent some time gathering wood and using some smaller, harder pieces of rock to chip away at a piece of stone suitable for a primitive pick. Once satisfied, she began to enter a nearby cave to test it out when she heard something moving around within.
Moving very quietly, she peeked around the corner. She couldn’t see anything there so far, so she slowly crept inward, keeping close to the wall. As the darkness closed in, her eyes began to adjust, and she saw that the cave continued down a fair distance. Deciding that she was likely safe for the moment from whatever it was, she began mining into the wall to get at the coal and iron ore that was there. She had just begun to get excited at how well her pick was working, when a horrible screeching tore up the dark path into the depths.
Leaping in surprise, she whirled in the direction of the sound just in time to see two massive spiders charging at her, one on the floor, and the other on the ceiling. The one on the ceiling began to descend the wall closest to the exit to block her off while the other leapt at her, knocking her precious loot away and leaving her surrounded with her back against the wall.
Despite the immediate urge to simply flee mindlessly past them, something else awoke in her mind in that moment. Something that she kept locked away in polite society; a dark, foreign wrath that flooded her veins with strength born of refusal and indignance. If she ran, she might make it past them, but she would leave her stuff behind, and she would be turning her back on something clearly able to leap and move quickly.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
“Graaaaahhh!” she yelled, striking quickly. A strong downward swing of her pick rent an ugly gash through the attacking spider’s eyes, blinding and stunning it briefly as it began to bleed. Whirling round, she grabbed her ores from the floor and dashed at the ambushing spider. “MINE,” she growled viscerally as she leapt upon it and drove her pick into its middle, causing it to curl up with a spasm as it died instantly.
As she wrenched her pick from its corpse, however, she was overtaken by the other monstrous spider, which leapt upon her back and sank its fangs deep into her shoulder. A scream barely escaped her as she was rapidly crushed between the corpse and the very heavy giant spider on her back. A few terrifyingly long moments were lost to sheer spider-induced terror as she flailed mindlessly for any escape, before once more desperation overcame her other emotions and allowed her to think of a plan.
Squirming in such a way as to roll over away from the monster's fangs allowed her to quickly spin and grab them before they had a chance to bite again. Knowing that she didn’t have the strength to resist when it tried to bite, she instead used her grip to control how it landed, driving it into the knotty midsection of the other spider where her own pick had gotten stuck. Once it was there, she shimmied down and grabbed her sharp stick from earlier to stab it repeatedly in its bulbous abdomen. When it finally yanked its fangs free of its dead kin, she used the gap to quickly scramble over the body and into the entrance of the cave.
Standing with her back to the open air, she prepared to catch its next attack on her improvised weapon, but there was no need. The spider was mortally wounded now, and already its legs were beginning to curl and spasm slightly as it tried to drag itself over its dead companion. Before it managed, it shuddered and went limp, the eerie red gleam fading away as life left it.
Once confident that the spider was no longer a threat, she shoved it to the side and freed her pick from the mess of the other spider’s ruined body. Its eyes were like crushed glass bulbs mixed with squishy old grapes, and its body had holes where it had been stabbed by both her and its companion. The other corpse was somewhat more intact, at least on top. Its eyes, while dim, gleamed slightly as the light passed over them. Thinking they might be useful for something, especially if she could figure out how they had glowed, she attempted to cut them out. She managed to get one of the bigger ones without shredding it and placed it inside her pack along with her other treasures.
Stepping outside the cave, the exhaustion hit her all at once. With the adrenaline fading, she realized that she was actually in a great deal of pain, the scrapes from falling, the bruises from being almost crushed, and most of all the massive spider bite in her shoulder all rushing to the forefront of her mind now that she was no longer fighting for her life.
Stumbling over to the copse of trees where she had been crafting her tool earlier, she hastily gathered up a small pile of leaves and softer branches into a makeshift cushion. As she gingerly lowered herself onto her new mattress, she realized that she had nothing with which to tend her wounds. She also did not have anything to eat, which was an odd thought to have when a spider bite took up a fourth of her back, but she was too exhausted and hungry to really care about thinking rationally.
She laid down and covered herself with some of the leaves, trying to hide her wounded body from whatever else might be out there while she rested. Closing her eyes, she realized that while physically painful, the bite miraculously did not seem to bear any of the hallmarks of being toxic. With the hopeful thought that she might just survive this, she drifted off to sleep.