Night fell upon the world, shrouding Irevia in warm, comfortable, darkness, and Aknos in cold winds that could break rocks and tear skin from bone.
The other two continents, Eva, hugging Rodar, were instead greeted by warm rays of light that hugged faces from windows and caused many a young soldiers and workers to curse the beginning of a new day. On Rodar approximately seventy seven percent of the population began its day by stabbing their toes against something. Of these, only seven percent had taken precautions for such scenarios, wrapping something soft around most corners in their rooms. Their pain was much reduced.
And so, while some people shouted and cursed or simply woke, others put their heads on comfortable pillows (at least, those lucky enough to have beds to sleep in and a roof over their heads), from night duty soldiers to arachne who’d had a satisfying, if extremely tiring, day. Taking care of the spiderlings was a full time job with no space for things like ‘distractions’. A distraction meant you didn’t notice the little ones playing ‘hang the arachne’, which could be quite disastrous.
Still, that didn’t mean they didn’t have a life, that they didn’t spend some time on themselves. Oh no, they always managed to cut themselves an hour or two to spend together, to have fun, drink, dance, sing and play. Or just to stay together. To love.
That evening didn’t seem too different from usual. The [Carers] and day-duty [Warriors] and [Fighters] met in one of the biggest clearings of the forest of Tusca. The stars shone in the sky, watching and judging, while the moon simply floated, waning out of existence. During its last waxing days it had formed something like an eye on one of its sides, so now everyone felt like they were being watched. It was disquieting, and people couldn’t wait for the next waxing that would wash away that scary image.
The arachne, though, didn’t care.
They sat or walked or hung from the trees like oversized bats and, generally, had a good time. One of their [Mages] had filled the clearing with [Fox Fire] Spells, which produced heat and light but no smoke, and didn’t actually burn down the whole forest. She was quite sad they weren’t allowed to use actual fires, she would’ve so loved to try some smoke spells. They could be so beautiful!
A few older arachne, the highest Level in the clearing, were having fun near the center of the clearing, a small table with six dice at the center.
“Iadara, you’re losing pretty hard tonight. If you keep going like this you’re going to have to part from your beloved bottles!”
That was Makira, who had Luck on her side this evening. She’d been winning hand after hand at ‘Bone Loom’, a game of dice as old as their race that required people to make specific combinations of numbers to ‘build their loom’, creating images with the pips on the six sides. It was fun, and you had to have an eye for art if you wanted to win. As you can very well imagine, the game required a lot of dice, but when it had been created there had been no lack of bones to craft the little cubes.
Normally, Aru was the one who won all the time, but this evening even she was having trouble making something good with her shitty throws.
“Shut up! I will not give up my treasures to you heathens! You cannot even distinguish a red from a white from a vodka! Hell, you once thought I was drinking water instead of vodka and knocked yourself out!”
“That was one time! And now I don’t trust anything you drink.”
“Hmpf… as I said, heathens!”
They kept playing, and Iadara kept losing.
In the end, Aru managed to make a landscape with her dice throws, while Makira created a face. Meanwhile, Iadara just threw the absurd number of dice she had into a nearby bag and declared she surrendered, giving the [Chatterbox] a bottle of white wine. Not her finest, naturally, but it was still a great loss for the ex-[Alcoholist].
“Fancy another game?”
Iadara grumbled under her breath, then nodded, placing a bottle of something that passed for whisky on the table: “If I’m getting a [Gambler] Class because of you I’m going to kill you.”
Makira laughed, then tapped a finely decorated sword that had been standing beside the table since the beginning of the evening. Aru instead placed a piece of paper with the words ‘One dress design’ written on it.
“Mind if I join you?” asked a fourth voice.
An arachne with her fur colored like a rainbow and her hair as pink as a pig drawn by a child sat down opposite from Makira in the only free spot of the table.
“Absolutely! Need some dice Pochi?”
Pochartis Silksoul, better known as Pochi to her sisters, couldn’t be called the black sheep of the clan only because that was not a color on her body. Jokes apart, she was actually well liked by all her sisters. They just really didn’t see a reason for her to color her fur and hair the way she did. There was simply no tactical advantage to it.
“NO! ABSOLUTELY NOT!” shouted Iadara, “I am not playing against her. She always wins, and uses Skills!”
“There are no rules against using Skills in the game. Airm, it’s actually endorsed! Not my fault none of you are [Strategists],” she crossed her arms and puffed her cheeks in fake offense, lasting a whole three seconds before she burst out laughing.
“Come on Iada-”
“Don’t call me Iada!” she interrupted Makira.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Alright, alright! Anyways, what’s the worst that can happen? You lose a bottle of homemade alcohol, not even your finest. If anything, I should be the one who withdraws. This sword is good quality!”
The [Sommelier of Poisons] grumbled under her breath, then sighed and tapped her bottle again, agreeing to join the game.
“And as for you, Pochi, don’t go too nuts with your Skills.”
“Alriiiiiiiight,” she drawled.
Pochartis was a [Strategist of Games], probably over Level 30. There were stories going around the clan about how she managed to get to such a high Level in a war Class, stories that ranged from some kind of special training with Grandmother to her somehow managing to disguise herself as a human and becoming one of their [Strategists] for a while. Nobody knew which story was true, but they all knew that, at some point, the girl had disappeared, only to come back as she was today.
“So, what are you betting, little rainbow?” asked Aru with a small smile. Of them all, she liked Pochi the most.
“Hmmm… I’m betting my favorite set of crystal dice,” she placed on the table a small satchel filled with six sided dice, all cut from gems of all the colors of the rainbow. You could say many things about Pochi, but you could not say she wasn’t thematic.
“The game is on!” declared Makira.
And they began playing.
This time, Luck decided to abstain from choosing a favorite and instead just observed the game as it progressed, sometimes twitching a finger to make a roll come out as a combination instead of a ‘skipped slot’. And, after a few minutes, she just left and went to change things up somewhere else. She had changed in the years, she was a lot less powerful, but she was still there, sometimes.
Meanwhile, the arachne played and joked and cursed and, in general, had a lot of fun.
Until someone else walked up. She was a much younger arachne than the players, muscled from head to toe, even her spider paws seemed thicker than most. She wore a serious expression on her face, light brown hair framing it all.
“Makira. Arunielle. Iadara, Pochartis,” she greeted the arachne one by one.
Makira looked up from her ‘stairway to Larnos’, a combination that went from one to six, not to be confused with the ‘descent to Airm’, which went from six to one, and, as always, smiled.
“Why hello Desina! How are you doing? Been a while since you came here. I’m sorry, you can’t join us now, but what about the next game?”
Desina shook her head: “No thank you, I am only here to talk.”
“Then talk away!” Makira motioned her to come closer, patting the ground nearby to make her sit down. Desina didn’t move from where she stood.
“There are lots of humans around the forest recently. Even deep inside. Just two weeks ago a family lost their daughter around here. These last few days we’ve counted four different hunting and adventuring parties looking for Rainbow Imitators.”
“So? Let them be. The forest is large enough for them to play their little games and for us to stay hidden.”
“Not for long. They’re getting bolder, going deeper to hunt bigger prey, and meanwhile the animals are escaping towards our zones. If they keep going they’ll start finding us!”
“Then, when they do, we’ll kill them,” that was Iadara. Her voice was cold steel, strong, unyielding, and ready to cut someone apart. Or rather, poison them out of their bodies. Once upon a time she’d developed a special poison capable of opening any old wound taken from someone. Cuts that had long since become just white signs on someone’s body would open up, broken bones would fall apart, and after enough time the people began to literally fall apart, becoming masses of flesh. It was so bad that she’d been forbidden from ever using it. Still, she kept a single vial tucked away, just for emergencies. Or for a very rainy day.
“But why wait? We could easily overpower them all! Capture them, kill the women, breed with the men, and increase our numbers! There’s enough [Warriors] to capture an entire town in this forest. We cou-”
A sound like a rope snapping resounded all around the clearing. Everybody turned towards the table, curious about where it had come from. All they saw was a shocked Desina with her head turned ninety degrees to the left and Makira now standing near her with a forced smile that did nothing to hide the frown and anger in her eyes.
Everyone immediately went back to what they were doing before.
Meanwhile, the older arachne all stared at their younger counterpart.
“This time alone, I will forget you just proposed that,” said Makira, an edge to her voice.
“For once, I agree with this madspider,” added Iadara as she moved her combinations around to see what she could form.
Aru just sighed, while Pochi shook her head.
“W-Why? We could…”
“Because they would find out,” Makira didn’t let her finish her sentence.
“So what? Let them! We’d slaughter them all!”
“And they would call upon the College of Memoirs, bring their Laws, and slaughter us with iron and fire.”
“We could win!”
“Maybe, but how many would die? A few? A dozen? A hundred? All of us? It’s too risky. Too much. No, better to wait, let them forget about us, and then rise.”
Desina was shivering in anger: “We’re better than them! Their Hunters are gone, died to the last. They’ve forgotten our magic and how to stop it. They have only their fire! We could beat them without losing even a single one of us, even with their Law!”
“No, we couldn’t,” was all Makira said, before sitting back down and placing her ‘stairway’ somewhere in her drawing.
“How can you say that?!”
“I can say it because I thought exactly like you, and I saw the result of our failure. Now go, Desina, before I decide you have no right to call yourself one of our sisters.”
Silence fell completely on the clearing, as heavy as a rock. Every single arachne turned to the table at the center of the clearing, watching Makira and Desina. Those had been some heavy words, but most of those present here knew the [Chatterbox]’s story, what had happened to her previous clan, what she’d gone through because of her and others’ mistakes.
Desina knew the story too.
But, unlike the others, she was young. And, like with all young people, there was one thought forefront to her mind: this time it will be different.
Poor, little, Desina, who had yet to find a satisfying answer to the oldest question ever asked to the arachne. She was so young. So full of hope and desire to change things. She had yet to learn one of the worst lessons of this world: history is a circle. Sooner or later, it all loops back to the starting point and repeats.
She ran out of the clearing, determined to show her older sisters that they were wrong.