Moriah looked around, confused. She hovered in the middle of the mining camp, Klierallan squatting before Hank a small distance ahead and below her. Moriah saw a spark of light enter the little gnome as the elf brushed his cheek. She puzzled at the sight as the black coils that held the small man together began to writhe as if in agony.

But she did not have time for the gnome. There were others much more interesting than that little creature. The elf for one. A light burned deep inside him, but around it coiled cruel black chains dripping acid. The light bled red down the length of those chains. The chains themselves raced away from out of his body, connecting him to something very far away, but whose utter vileness could still be felt like slimy ooze which burned. They were not chains that he bore willingly, she felt certain. He looked so very miserable. But then he moved into the shadows and was not there any longer. She wondered how he did that.

Others caught her attention briefly. The priestess Karen radiated a beautiful rainbow of wonderful brilliance, cool water and burning fire and refreshing winds laden with wildflower perfume washing over Moriah as she looked. Restorm held a fascinating blend of elegant dignity and roughhewn crystal, wood and fire. Corko towered as solid marble granite, wholly earthen. Jenna’s heart lay enshrouded all in thorny vines, but a timid, gentle light peeked from behind its concealing armor. Klorachamol also had a light shining dimly in the depths of his heart, but shadows ran every which way about his soul in black and crimson flashes. The perfume of fresh turned earth, as of a grave, permeated his essence. Jenjen was the most interesting, beside the elf. His essence radiated more solid even than Corko’s, his earth running deeper into the earth, towering higher into the stratosphere, great white arcing flares of blue and red, white and orange danced about him. Others in the room attracted her attention briefly, but none held it.

Then she appeared, as if reality blinked. She was an ugly woman. Crossed eyes, one slightly larger than the other, lay staggered on her face. Offset ears did not line up with a short and flat nose , a crease running down between her nostrils. The nose had been twisted a few degrees and did not run straight up and down on her face. She wore a drab, baggy gray gown over a sagging body. Her fingernails stretched nearly three inches long, more talons than fingernails.

The ugly creature looked up at the dreamer and spoke in a smoothly convincing tone, utterly at odds with her appearance. “Come, join us girl. You know you are not allowed out and about like that. It is your duty to stay in the mine and bring up crystal ore and all that is valuable. You have to fulfill your duty, is this not honorable? If you do not, you cannot possess honor, can you? How can you be what you wish, if you have no honor?”

“You’re ugly,” Moriah said, fully nine-year old honest.

The woman smiled at the child, her lips twisting sneer like. “Oh, what a charming child. But that does not matter. You must do your duty.” She rose to meet the dreamer and enveloped Moriah in her embrace. “You must do your duty, child. It is all that is important.”

Moriah felt herself being smothered. It was not entirely unpleasant. There was security in allowing someone else to dictate her responsibilities, to tell her what to do. Life would be much easier if she did not have to think on her own.

“But then I cannot be a warrior-knight,” Moriah whispered.

“Oh? Is that so important?” the crone crooned. “No, not really. Just put your trust in me and you will be content. You will always know what is expected and what you must do. There will be no mystery, only safety and security,” the hag crooned, petting Moriah’s head.

Moriah thought carefully for a moment. “No. I will be a warrior-knight.”

“There, there. Let it go. Nothing matters but your duty.” The hag tightened her grip.

Moriah struggled. “No! I will not fail again!” Light flashed and her armor returned, encasing her in its embrace and knocking the hag back screaming obscenities.

The scene changed and Moriah stood somewhere else. Dark surrounded her in all directions broken only by the light coming from her knightly armor. Something bound her arms and legs, wrapping around body and neck. Looking down at herself sent razor pain through her mind and down her back. Chains. Similar to those binding the elf, but different, being far less vile.

“You are mine already, Ker!” The hag cackled gleefully, using the child’s mine-given name. “I have had you bound tight for longer than you’ve been in the mine itself. You will never leave, because I shall never let you go!”

Moriah struggle, but the hag just laughed at the futility.

Something filled Moriah’s left hand. A weapon. A sword. When she touched a chain with its blade, the chain chattered. She began to shatter all of the chains. She giggled. Fun.

“No. You will not escape that easily, Ker.” The hag leaned toward the shimmering armor and held her hands splayed outward. More chains snaked out of the darkness to take the place of the ones shattered.

She was not getting anywhere, Moriah realized after some time. The chains were not the real problem. She needed some way to attack the hag directly.

The sword changed, becoming a gun. Moriah laughed and fired it at the hag, hitting her squarely. The hag screamed and the scene shifted again. Now Moriah stood in a tunnel surrounded by a million weeds on floor, walls, ceiling. Slowly and with meticulous care, she began to uproot those weeds. Small versions of the hag screamed at her to stop, ever trying to restrain her, but they no longer had any real power, only able to hinder, never stop. Every once in a while, Moriah became irritated with the interference and shot several of the pests. They would withdraw for a short time, but then return, but always weaker than before.

Moriah did not know how long she uprooted the evil weeds, but abruptly there were no more. It surprised her. The tunnel faded and she knelt in yet another place. Aromas of plants and life enlivened Moriah’s mind, though there was nothing really to be seen - just living greenness and a peaceful aura. The dreamer relaxed and submerged into that tranquility.

Moriah jerked awake, pain lancing up her arms and piercing her shoulders. Glowing strands of fenguar coiled around her outstretched arms in cocooning strands. The walls inched past her as the fungus drew her towards its main body. Moriah jerked back in panic, but had no strength to resist.

“What am I going to do?” she whispered, her heart fluttering on the verge of terror as her voice cracked from long disuse, coupled with recent abuse. Her throat hurt, but her confused mind worked in a surreal field of numb calm. She could not pull back and she thought it would be stupid to push forward. She tried to raise her head as high as she could, to see how far the plant went, but it closed the passage a short distance from her.

She hesitated. Had the fungus reacted to her light just then? It had looked like the plant had pulled back. Frowning, her confused thoughts churned the false calm. They were at a stalemate at the moment, she not able to move with her arms and body bound tight, but the progress toward the heart of the fenguar colony’s heart halted.

She decided to try turning her light off, since she did not need her hands to do so. The light responded to will-commands. The light vanished, allowing the glow of the plant colony to fill the tunnel unhindered. After several moments, Moriah noticed that the glow had brightened and the coils were moving up her arms. Even some of the plant she was laying on seemed to be moving under her again, tickling her stomach.

Before she fully realized anything else had changed, she submerged into the fenguar’s heart, the glowing mold pressed against her face mask. It was only a matter of time before one of the mold fibers found a weakness in her protective garb.

Desperately, Moriah turned her light on full brightness. She felt a strange stab of pain in her head and the plant shudder, pulling away from the brightness, freeing her head and shoulders. The coils loosened from her arms and she managed to pull one of her hands free.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

She squirmed in the tight tunnel, contorting her arm from over her head, down her body to where her lesion knife lay holstered. Fumbling with it until it pulled free, she brought her hand back over her head and ahead of her in the tunnel. She activated it and began hacking. The plant thrashed violently, pulling away from her more.

She glared down the tunnel at her adversary. She cut it, but it did not die and spore spewed into the enclosed space with each incision. She needed a way of killing it all at one time.

Knowledge flooded her. Things about mining and the life down in this underworld. Things the owners of the mine had forced into her mind in preparation for her job. Things about the lesion knife’s blade, such as its ability to adjust to different needs, though there would be few chances to use anything but the low, rock cutting blade in her work. Now Moriah paused and decided to try some of those other settings.

After several different non-helpful blade manifestations, she tried a globe like pattern which emitted a great deal of heat. The plant began to burn and curled into a tight defensive ball. The fumes choked Moriah even through her mask, burning her nose and throat. Tears trickled from stinging, fiercely shut eyes. Having enough room in the wide area where the fungus had grown and now abandoned, Moriah turned so she could kick at the burning mass.

It rolled a few feet down the tunnel. Fully free of its influence, Moriah scrambled back along her route. However, when she had only gone a short distance, the tunnel ended. She stared at the rock wall, stomach clenching. I got turned around? Her thoughts numbed. She had been so sure she had needed to back away in order to escape the fungus and return to the others.

Scooting on her butt feet first back to the fenguar mass, Moriah kicked it again. It rolled ahead of her as she scooched forward to kick it again and again, sometimes it took several kicks to free it from tight spaces or move it around a corner, but she persevered thinking she could not give up. But something tugged at the corner of her mind. She did not remember these tight places and sharp corners. The small fluttering wings in her stomach and tingling of adrenaline in her arms grew more and more insistent. She did not think she was scared, exactly, just a little worried.

She had been scooting down the tunnel for she did not know how long, when the fenguar vanished. Startled, Moriah crawled back to a wider area and turned around again. Approaching the spot where it had vanished head first , she found a hole looking down into a huge bubble, similar to the Mother Lode claim.

But this sphere had occupants, her light revealing a swarming mass of confusion. The creatures were quadrupeds with the long, supple bodies and heads of ferrets, twin oversized hook-like claws on each forepaw and long badger claws on the rear. Crystal ore and metallic spikes jutted out of their metallic bodies in many colored, jagged splendor.

Their eyes were set wide on their heads and moved independent of each other, but could focus forward like a predator’s when necessary. Powerful jaws containing multiple rows of canines and molars could bite into rock much as Moriah would a steak. Glands hidden under their jaws excreted a strange venom which both softened rock and crystal, but could also crystalize organic matter without killing its victim.

Some of this information Moriah saw graphically displayed before her. However, much of it surfaced in her mind from her forced knowledge base. She knew that crystal spiders were not arachnids - they were called spiders because they wove a thick cord of silk-soft metal which they strung in large caverns to move freely from side to side and entrance to entrance. However, they did not ‘spin webs’ nor did they need too as they primarily ate rock, ore and crystal.

However, they did eat flesh after processing it with their magical venom. Once injected into a victim, it started crystallizing the base cellular structures that made up the victim’s biology. Those unfortunates turned into what were known as crystal zombies. They would hunt and consume anything living, except the spiders themselves. However, they did not usually wander far from their ‘master,’ following their master around until the spider grew hungry.

Crystal spiders lived exclusively underground and were able to burrow, passing earth into their bodies and then regurgitating it outside the burrow. Spider tunnels were smooth and all miners avoided them unless they had access to some special, non-metallic armor. Processed metals tended to attract the creatures as fine sources of food.

Moriah stared into the bubble, frozen. Not good, she thought, her stomach beginning to churn and a wave of cold adrenaline sending shivers into the base of her skull. She let out a startled screech as a pair of hooks snagged the edge of the hole and a ferret-like head hove into view to stare into her lights. Without thinking, Moriah slashed with her lesion knife and the spider fell from its perch with a squeal of pain.

Moriah held her knife in front of her and hit each spider that tried to come through the hole, sending it crashing back into the bubble below. She had been doing it for several minutes before they stopped coming. Peeking over the side again, she felt certain the mass of monsters had dwindled from when she had first looked, though she could not see any corpses.

Where did they all go? she wondered, shining her light all around the bubble. About twenty of the dangerous creatures remained, attacking the fenguar ball with great caution. Moriah could see the rear quarters of one spider already half submerged in the plant’s body. Observing the cleanup crew off to one side, a single spider of enormous size crouched , easily ten times the size of the next largest and about the same size as Moriah herself. To either side of that one crouched two other large spiders, a third smaller than the huge one.

Moriah guessed the large one to be the queen and the two slightly smaller ones her personal guard. The small girl swallowed. Supposedly, if the queen died, the colony perished as well. Moriah rejected the idea forming in her mind. No way now way no way.

One of the worker spiders attacked the fenguar and the bulb burst, its compressed spores billowing out in a massive, rolling cloud of yellow and black that covered the entire bottom of the bubble. A moment later the workers on the floor of the bubble began staggering this way and that.

The queen and her guardians sprang into the air, catching a hold of the cords stretched across the cavern and climbing high out of reach of the spore, chittering loudly. Those spiders not already affected by the spores also jumped up and escaped the cloud.

“Wow. They’re pretty smart,” Moriah breathed aloud. It took the spores a full half hour to settle to the floor of the bubble. The spiders descended, careful not to raise spore clouds, and began licking up the spore. One of the first areas cleared was directly under Moriah’s hole and the queen descended to stand there.

Moriah stared. If she could drop on top of the queen and kill her, the rest of the colony would die and she would be safe for a while. The only problem, aside from attacking a fast, powerful, smart, deadly crystal spider that was as big as she was herself, was that the drop was almost forty feet. The spider wouldn’t need to exert itself at all to kill her.

“What am I thinking? Stop it,” Moriah whispered to herself and bonked herself on the head.

Noise from the tunnel behind her caught her attention. A moment later more noise from the tunnel ahead of her, on the other side of the hole leading into the bubble. Moriah glanced down her body between her legs, confused. Could something be coming? Had she missed some passage? She was sure she had been paying close enough attention not to have missed one.

Returning her gaze and light in front of her, she flinched at the spider swarming towards her down the tunnel. Scraping from behind her told her she had been flanked. No time for thought, the small girl panicked and scrambled through the hole, throwing herself downward.

Falling a short distance, she saw and automatically grabbed one of the spider cords. Dangling for a moment, she swung her body in an attempt to reach the queen, who had moved. Falling again, Moriah arced true, but the queen had turned and raised her snout, jaws open, fangs bared.

With a squeak of dismay, the child struck out with her lesions knife, wishing it was a lot longer. With a flash, the knife changed it configuration, extending its length to over five feet, and split the queen’s head in half. Her body whipped in reaction, catching the girl and throwing her across the bubble. Slamming against the wall, Moriah slid downward, dazed and numb, leaving a skid trail in the fenguar spore.

In a strange parody of time and swirling light, made stranger by Moriah’s dazed and warped vision, the crystalline spiders paused, turning as one towards their queen. That great spider thrashed and convulsed, destroying anything within its reach. It continued for a long eternity, each of its subjects watching in frozen immobility.

As the seconds ticked past, Moriah’s head cleared enough to realize something obscured her vision. She tried to reach up and remove the offending object, but pain shot through her arm and shoulder and she blacked out.

Chaos and noise greeted her awakening. Confused and irritated by the noise, she forced her eyes open. Bedlam reigned among the spiders, each attacking anything which moved, the skewed scene illuminated by her head lamp lying on a rock a distance from her. Spider devoured spider. Amidst horrified terror, irritation lay forgotten. If any of them decided to attack her, she had no way to defend herself. She had lost the lesion knife when the queen had hit her. Closing her eyes, she waited to die.

But she did not want to die. She opened her eyes, a determined look crossing her face for none to see. She looked around trying to find the knife in the spore-glow, to no avail. But what she did see was a spider advancing on her.

With a screech, the spider charged, only to be sideswiped by yet another one. The two bodies rolled over the light, extinguishing it. The clash of metal bodies, liberally smattered with snarling, gnashing, crunching and other assorted sounds of frantic fighting raged around her for the longest time. Rough carapaces scrapped against her too many times to count, tearing clothes and skin alike. But all things end and finally the clashing subsided and then all movement in the bubble ceased.

Closing her eyes in utter exhaustion, Moriah slept in the light of the dim glowing of crystal stones, surrounded by fenguar spore and dead spiders.