This time, I did not faint. It took every ounce of effort I had to keep myself awake and lucid, but I knew if I succumbed I might never wake back up.

At some point my kavi had vanished to whatever place inside the body that nature spirits dwelled. The torch was useless. My chest seemed hollowed out as though by a desert sandstorm and my lungs replaced with splintered wood.

I thought of Elani immediately, and I was proud of that. Then came the jolt of fear as I remembered my own immediate danger. Yet despite my vulnerability, nothing had attacked me. The spiders were gone.

I took a pathetically shallow breath and held it five seconds before pain stopped me. Five seconds only, like I had but half of a single lung through which to drink the air. The blight even now felt as though it clawed its way into the lower reaches of my throat. I let the breath out in a whoosh, then summoned my spirit.

The forest around me brightened as the calming lavender glow returned. I almost laughed – I was using the world’s rarest entity as little more than a lantern. A bad one.

The tranquility lasted less than a second. The light revealed corpses of over half a dozen spiders littering the trampled glade. One of the spiders twitched, a curled leg quivering. Another arachnid held, barely, onto life, its legs reaching toward the sky then curling again as it lay on its back. My sword lay beside one which, thankfully, did not move so much as a hair.

I stood on shaky legs, trying to think of the tether holding my spirit to me as anything but a strand of spider’s silk. I was alive, despite everything, and so I knelt briefly beside the length of bronze and signed a prayer of thankfulness – first to Tesamet for my good fortune, then to Gala for my health, and finally to En for his strength.

Something chittered. I started, but made no noise. A spider struggled nearby, upright but unable to support its weight. Five sets of claws scraped at the dirt and leaves as I stepped up to it.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I plunged my sword into it, and the legs retracted.

The forest was silent, then, but for the squeaking of distant featherbats. Overhead, the wind strolled through the Lorelai canopy, so much closer to the forest floor than the Pebblewood’s lofty ceiling.

Elani was out there, somewhere, captured by one of the feral spiders. Why had I not gone after her? I struggled to remember, but the last few moments of the battle were blurry and disjointed.

I thumbed the grip of my weapon, where it had been wrapped in strips of leaves treated for toughness like leather. It reminded me of my slingshot, of faking bravery in the Pebblewood, of playing pretend and affecting the personas of heroes who wouldn’t have blanched at mere fangs and claws.

Well, I had a claw of my own, now.

I stalked into the woods where I had seen Elani dragged away. Tesamet willing, the spiders hadn’t horribly injured her. And, Tesamet willing, of course, I didn’t die of blightlung before I found either of them.

~*~

Oman had always decried my weak tracking skills. As I picked my way through the forest I wondered again if I had made a mistake running away without him. Luckily, even my lamentable skills were enough; Elani had put up a fight, and her struggles left chaotic furrows in the earth. My eyes strained to see in the dim light of the kavi, but after some practice I could follow where she had snapped fronds from the plants along her path. In one place she had even ripped an entire length of hunter’s robe from the soil.

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Several times, I came upon the corpse of a spider that had been unfortunate enough to cross paths with her, even as she was dragged away. I stopped to check each; the first had been killed with shallow slashes scattered along the carapace and abdomen. The next was dispatched with a deep puncture.

I almost stopped to inspect a third spider before its front legs waved in the air.

I was no Dero the Dark, but I thought of him as I marched unflinching to the adversary, thrusting my sword deep between its eyes before it could register me as a threat. The spider sputtered, and I ripped my sword back out and moved on without checking if it was dead.

Elani’s daggers were just beyond. I scooped them up, wiped the metal on my pants, and stowed them in my waist. Elani’s pack lay discarded a dozen strides away. I slung it over my shoulder, moved the knives to its pockets, and delved deeper.

The lost daggers indicated Elani had stopped struggling, I realized, and her pack had slid off when her arms went limp. The implication quickened my steps.

It was not much further before I stopped. Some kind of wall rose in front of my path, huge and misshapen. A dingy, grey substance that could only be spiders’ webbing lashed several trees together like columns. The webbing was so taut that the bare, dead trees bent inwards.

They’d made a nest.

The sensation I’d discovered in the Udoro godstone hit me like a gale from a monsoon. Something more dangerous than rabid spiders waited within. The odd sixth sense was like looking at a field of rocks and knowing which one hid a coiled viper. I knew where it was, but not what it looked like, nor how venomous; only that it was directly in my path.

I padded along the outside the lair in search of the way in. I kept my sword raised in case of ambush but, surprisingly, the lair seemed unguarded. Abandoned, even, but for a few scattered grey-blue kavi, like miniature storm clouds drifting about the lair.

I suppressed a shiver. Grey kavi loved cold places, even causing it themselves as a sky kavi makes wind. The forest had been pleasantly warm, but here the temperature dropped. The chill I felt, though, had little to do with the slight drop in temperature.

Grey spirits were drawn not just to cold, but to death.

I rounded a tree, the trunk of which had been absorbed almost entirely into the spiders’ wall-like structure, and found where Elani had been dragged.

The lair’s entrance sunk into the earth like a tunnel, large enough for even an Isvir to fit through. It sloped into the ground at an angle, and I remembered the burrows my mother would show me in her garden where a spider could retreat for rest or safety. A place of last resort or of refuge.

Purple light from my kavi spilled onto the walls of the lair, painting them a grotesque mauve like the throat of some jungle beast. Such lairs, I remembered, were also places for the spider to feed.

How long it had been since the spider had dragged Elani through here – what if she had already escaped? Elani was capable – dangerous, even. She might already be circling back around to where we had been separated.

No, I knew that wasn’t true. I had to go in there or else live with the certainty that I let her die.

Dero the Dark would storm the lair. He wouldn’t wait, hoping that his allies had escaped on their own. He was a hero – he didn’t wait for others to solve problems. Besides, if I was going to die anyway, I might as well use my last hour saving someone else.

I didn’t wait to consider that I wasn’t a hero, or anything more than a kid who had yet to earn his sword. Someone needed me, so I descended into the tunnel with a sword in my hand and a kavi at my back.