The passageway sunk into the lair like a ramp into Vala Makodo itself. Dead branches, the dry roots of the trees above, and soil-specked webbing ribbed the earthen walls of the tunnel. The ceiling dropped lower as I crept deeper, forcing me to my hands and knees. Elani’s backpack scraped dirt from the ceiling while I tried to ignore the hundreds of scattered animal bones crunching under my palms.

The air stilled, becoming sour and stale. Even the petrichor aroma of the forest couldn’t survive in the spiders’ lair. I held my breath, taking through my nose only what I needed to stave off suffocation. If I had eaten any more today, I would have added the contents of my stomach to the passage’s fetid, musty odor.

Eventually, the tunnel opened into a round cavern. I stood and surveyed the chamber by the light of my kavi’s lilac glow, aided by the barest sliver of moonlight filtering through an air vent above. I guessed the chamber was at least as large as Eidenhall’s common room, though my kavi’s light was not enough to diffuse the shadows at the far end.

It was a poor comparison, for the Eidenhall had never been so foreboding. Old bones and an unidentifiable detritus carpeted the floor of the lair like a grisly bed of pine needles. But there was something else, too. I crouched to look closer.

Most of them were shredded among the bones and filth, but the few that weren’t torn or trampled were as large as my hand. I picked one up. A moth’s wing. Hundreds of them littered the floor, all of them a pale, dusty blue.

“Ren,” Elani croaked from the darkness.

I gasped at the sound of her voice, then nearly gagged at the room’s cloying stench. I rose and took a step forward, squinting for some sign of my friend. Frail bones cracked like twigs underfoot. I saw no sign of the spiders, and in the silence my hushed voice carried easily.

“Where are you?”

I took another step, but Elani remained silent.

“Elani?” I peered into the dark, searching for some sign of her flame-red hair.

I heard a shuffle, and then the sounds of her labored breathing. I thought she said my name again, but when she repeated it, I realized I was mistaken.

“Run,” she whispered.

The far side of the chamber heaved. Titanic, armored legs unfurled from the shadows and into the light, each twice as thick around as my torso. They slammed, one after another, into the floor of the cavern, hauling behind them a body like a nightmare.

The emerging kro’daka leered at me with over a dozen eyes, each burning with anger and sapient hatred. Ugly white veins like worms covered the greenish, arachnoid monster, and its shrunken abdomen trailed a mane of long, wiry, black bristles that looked like a corpse’s hair dragging in the mud.

It lunged.

I shrugged out of Elani’s pack and dove out of the way, reflexive self-preservation overriding the clumsiness of fear. The pack thumped to the ground as the monster drove a pillar-like leg into the space I’d been standing.

The demonic spider turned to face me. Satisfaction radiated from it like heat from a flame. Venom dripped from its chelicerae to mix with the thick ropes of saliva hanging from its mouth.

Before I could wonder how I could feel its satisfaction, I realized why. It had collapsed the tunnel behind me.

My eyes flicked back to the monster just in time to see it strike. I leapt sideways as the monster’s mouthparts snapped shut a hair’s breadth from my side. It struck again before I could attempt a counterattack, an arm-like foreleg snatching at me with mangled claws like skeletal hands.

I ducked beneath its reach, tumbling under its mutated body. The eight legs were a maelstrom of movement around me as the monster tried to extricate me. One came down a hand’s span from my head with enough force to crush a cluster of bones to airborne dust.

In my escape, I almost hadn’t noticed the unguarded vitals of its underside. The flesh of its withered abdomen was vulnerable if I struck it from below, where its armor was weak. But I had to slow it down, first.

The next time it punched forward with its colossal limbs, I was ready. I twisted aside, the rush of air from the passing leg fluttering my hair. Then I brought my sword down on the leg in a cleaving arc before the monster could react.

The sword bit into creature’s carapace no deeper than if I had struck a stone with a butter knife.

The monster jerked its leg back and knocked the dented blade from my grip. The weapon revolved through the air once, twice, then landed a dozen strides away.

It was over, then. Just like that. I failed.

The spider rasped deep in its throat and approached. Its malevolence buzzed in my head like a pulsing cloud of red-black rage. The monster took its time, knowing I had nowhere to run. It was too fast and too strong for me to be a threat now.

I backed away, hands held uselessly in front of me. My frailty was evident now more than ever, my lungs sharp with pain and my limbs weak and burning from exertion.

“Ren,” Elani cried out. Her voice was feeble and shook with effort. “Your kavi!”

“I—I can’t!”

Instead, I bolted toward the fallen blade, but the kro’daka scuttled sideways, blocking me.

“If you die, it’s gone forever anyway!”

“I don’t know how!” The blight nearly strangled the words before they’d left my lips.

Elani didn’t respond. I wanted to run to her, plead with her to get up, to take the spirit from me like she’d always wanted and be the first to use its magic.

But the monster stood between me and my friend. Nor could I reach my sword. As the kro’daka advanced, one step at a time, I realized Elani was right. I had no other options but my kavi’s magic, whatever it turned out to be.

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“Help me,” I pleaded to the kavi at my shoulder. I reached out to it with my thoughts, following that lifeline connecting me to the spirit until I brushed up against it. “Do something. Anything. Help me!”

The room brightened behind me in a flash of purple, and I felt something drop to the ground by my heel. I snatched it from the refuse and felt a familiar, wooden grip. The spirit had returned my slingshot.

In that moment, I knew that I was going to die.

“Yes,” came a guttural voice. It warbled and hissed from the direction of the kro’daka, despite the monster not having the right mouth to produce words.

I stumbled backward, and my back hit the wall of the chamber. Dilapidated webbing clung to the fibers in my clothes and pulled at my hair.

The monster’s fangs chittered as it spoke again in a dry voice choked with phlegm. “You die here. Your friend… dies here. All die… here.”

My mouth opened and closed wordlessly. No legend had ever given a kro’daka a voice. The Harpy of Iom had shrieked, the Cairnfield Serpent had rasped, Mo’greb the Goliath had roared. The blight had given them strength, not wit.

The monster gurgled something that sounded like laughter, and I thought of the peka’ri monster’s imagined laughter. Or had it been speaking all along?

The spider crept inexorably forward. I ran, and the kro’daka let me gain some distance. It saw I was out of tricks, that I could not hurt it without my weapon. It was intelligent enough to know it had won. Intelligent enough to enjoy tormenting me.

If it was advanced enough to be prideful, then I might be able to outwit it. If it wanted to draw this out, there was a chance I could trick it into letting its guard down long enough for me to retrieve my weapon. If it could speak, perhaps I could persuade it to let us go. I could –

The monster crossed the distance separating us and knocked me from my feet before I could roll out of the way. I landed hard, my vision swimming. A sharp bone from the floor stabbed into my leg, and I was acutely aware of my sweat soaking into the slingshot where I gripped it.

I gasped and tried to sit up, but no air came. The monster must have crushed my lungs and the blight glued them in place. I rolled onto my back, mouth open like a fish in the muck at the bottom of a boat.

It loomed over me. I squirmed, my limbs pushing uselessly at the loose ground as I tried to scuttle away.

“You cannot… run… from Verdegath in… his… lair,” the kro’daka rattled. “I am… master… I am… king.”

Verdegath pressed one of his stony forelegs to my chest with the laziness of a predator finally bored with its prey. Lazy, effortless. His two dozen eyes watched with dispassionate amusement as his fangs dripped slaver onto my shirt.

“Moths are not… enough… now. The spiders… know this. They… bring me… sweeter flesh. Flesh from… your kind.”

I raced through potential solutions, aware that I was going to die but unable to accept it. Blight makes kro’daka, I thought, but there isn’t any here. What happened to it?

The tips of Verdegath’s claws dug into my chest as I stretched an arm out, unable to remember where I had dropped my sword.

“I trained… the spiders. Their bodies… nourished… me, until they… learned… to hunt… for me.”

One of my hands touched fabric. Elani’s backpack. I was at the chamber entrance, where I had dropped it. My hand quested inside, probing for one of my friend’s stone knives. She had so many knives. She fought with two of them, like a boxer. She always had knives.

“No knife, no… blade… can pierce… me… anymore,” Verdegath rasped, as if understanding my efforts. He choked on something, his wheezing breath catching in his throat.

My fingertips brushed against something coarse and hard inside the fallen pack. I tried to grab onto it, but it resisted, sliding at my touch. I watched stars like so many silver kavi swim through my vision. I gasped again, my dying lungs struggling against the weight of the spider. If he had blightlung as well, why did he not die of it?

“Your kavi… did nothing… to help you. Your sword did… nothing. Your friend… did…nothing!” Verdegath roared. The force of his voice pounded through my skull.

I could give up, I thought as the rough object evaded me again. But that wouldn’t be very heroic. I had to try to give Elani a chance.

Verdegath dragged one of his claws down the length of my shirt, ripping it and tearing a gash into my skin. “You are soft… like the moths. No shell to… pierce. No… venom, nor bite. So… weak.”

My fingers found a burr in the item, and I hooked it with a nail and dragged it out. I twisted my head to meet Verdegath’s gaze. His unblinking eyes receded into shadow as darkness crept into my vision.

My kavi finally left, I thought. Everything was so dark. I wondered what kind of magic it would have done if it had not ended the contract with the return of my slingshot. I should have tried harder.

Verdegath’s fangs parted at last. It had finally grown bored of me. It wanted to bite down while I was still alive. While I might still struggle.

1. NO. I screamed the word in my head as loud as I could. To my surprise, the monster hesitated.

Elani’s voice cracked like a whip from somewhere behind Verdegath. A weight like a towerwood lifted from my chest as the monster turned to investigate, the trailing bristles on Verdegath’s abdomen rasping behind him as they dragged along the filthy refuse.

I managed a single, shaking breath of air before the blight bound everything shut once more. My teeth chattered. Hand trembling, I gripped the object from Elani’s backpack in my fist and pulled it out. It was…

A rock.

Better than nothing. I leaned up, too weak to cough, and fit the stone to my slingshot. I wondered if it was too big to fire, but I pulled it back anyway and took aim at the spider. The chamber spun around me.

A figure moved near the far wall, moonlight glinting off an armspan of bronze. Elani. Verdegath had cornered her. I couldn’t kill the monster, but maybe I could hit an eye if I timed it right. Maybe I could remind it to come kill me off. A lightshow like Amaranza’s festival flashed across my eyes as dizziness washed over me.

The Festival of Lights. I remembered. Elani had used a flashrock to blind Torth! I adjusted my aim to a spot above the monster and hoped she would be safe from the worst of the explosion.

I thought of Dad, and hoped that Elani might find him and tell him why I’d left like I did. Maybe she could tell him I fought two monsters. That I’d died not to blight, but to the arachnid scourge of Lorelai. What would Oman say?

I closed my eyes and fired.

The flashrock collided with the wall of the lair above Elani. A hollow bang reverberated through the chamber as the geode burst.

I couldn’t hear anything. Even with my eyes squeezed shut, the flash had taken my vision. I tried to open them, but I couldn’t see anything, and so I fell backward, spent, as the ground shook.

I kept falling, straight through the earth, all the way to the darkness of the abyss. But, for a moment, I thought I saw Elani, thrusting my ruined sword up through Verdegath’s fragile underbelly. Good for her, I thought. She’ll be able to escape, at least.

I thought of my mother, waiting for me in the Breathless Plains, and then I knew no more.