Inside the walls of the village, the men and women were beginning to celebrate their victory and calls for ale, wine and feasting filled the air. Timm alone refused to join the festivities, maintaining his position on the guard tower at the main gate, his gaze moving from the goblin host, to the distant Spiderwood, to the mountain, and back.

Even now, hours later, the goblins remained in their positions of worship, their faces pressed into the mud and their arms outstretched before them.

Alaric threw open the doors of the great hall and came forth to the excited cheers of the crowd. They hailed him as a hero.

For a moment.

Slowly, behind him, two giant, black, hairy legs emerged from the doorway, and the cheers faltered and were silenced, replaced with a collective gasp of horror.

Two more legs followed the first, and then the Spider’s hideous human body. She looked blindly at the throng before her, her empty eyes drinking in the horrified gazes of the villagers.

‘I present our salvation! The Village Mother has returned!’ Alaric, herald and harbinger of the doom of humanity, declared.

The disgusting and monstrous spider body followed her torso, too small for the doorway. The great hall doors were huge, but the spider was bigger. The wood of the frame creaked and groaned as the Spider squeezed her body through the doorway. The villagers were petrified in place, those not immediately under her spell far too terrified to move. Those under her spell had eyes that were glazed and vacant, following her hideous movement, unimpeded, through the village and towards the great gates.

One man, tankard of ale in one hand, dropped lifeless to the ground at the very sight of her.

Timm alone stood in defiance of her. He stood, hunched and elderly, the very picture of weakness, before the gates, leaning heavily on his walking stick. Horror danced behind his eyes, but he set his face in a grimace of determination. Their eyes met. Timm’s full of hatred, fear and resilience. The Spider’s, black and empty. She spoke aloud for the first time, a gross and unnatural sound from her toothless mouth, an ancient evil witch’s cruel, shrill croak.

‘Bow.’

Timm’s legs twisted horridly and he fell to his knees with a groan of pain, unwillingly and immediately, following the Spider’s command.

‘You stupid man. You cannot stop me. You banished me to the deepest part of the woods, bound me to an ancient site of evil and suffering. You thought the evil would break me, that you would escape my wrath and my power. But it was the very act of your punishment that condemned you to your fate, a fate I have woven from the moment of my exile.’

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The Spider brushed one of her hands across her other wrist, pointing to the black blood coursing through her human veins.

‘My pet Alaric has been visiting me, deep in the Wood. I’ve been whispering to him, and he’s been bringing me gifts. Goblin blood, every full moon, without fail. A dark ritual consolidating my power with the forest’s.

‘We’ve been biding our time. It has empowered me, and now I empower them. Did you believe the walls of your village would protect you? That your council could rule the goblins into submission? I thrived in the darkness you condemned me to, all the while whispering to the goblins to rise again and fight for me, gathering their strength. And now, I return, tempered in darkness and evil. Not as the Mother of the village, not as the Spider.

‘I return, the Grandmother of Goblins, and they follow my command.’

She raised her arms as she spoke, and the din of goblins preparing for attack rose from outside the gates, chanting and hooting, clashing steel.

‘And my command is to kill.’

As she said the word ‘kill’, most of the men and women in the village threw themselves to the ground in the same position of worship as the goblins had, begging for her forgiveness and showing their loyalty. Simultaneously, a great gust of wind came down from the mountains against the great gates. Their hinges screeched and buckled and the gates that had stood against goblin raids and wars for centuries flew open.

Timm was thrown to his back as the tempest passed him, his broken legs sprawled out before him, and the Spider towered over him.

Too old, too sore, too frail to rise in time, Timm was crushed under a stampede of brown and green as the goblin army finally breached the wall.

The humans that had thrown themselves to the ground in worship for the Spider, immediately under her evil spell, were ignored. All others, men and women, were slain by the goblin reavers who ran through the village.

They did not loot.

They did not burn.

They did not pillage.

They simply killed.

————

In the days that followed, the Spider went deep into the mountains, far deeper than Darius and Alaric had gone. It was said that she took with her a cocoon containing the broken and bloody corpse of Timm, who had withstood her until his last breath.

From the caves under her mountain spewed goblins innumerable, a force never seen before in the whole world. A mighty host of goblins, empowered by the Spider’s dark magic, seized villages, towns and cities. Those who fought back would defeat a goblin army only for one twice the size to appear within days and force their surrender. She controlled them all from her den in the mountains.

And so it came to pass that the world of humans was cast into shadow. A great and terrible shadow, cast by the Spider from her evil foothold in the mountains by the Spiderwood, enveloped the entire region.

There was but one hero that might have the strength to overthrow her. A hero that had braved the Spiderwood. A hero, a veteran, an experienced and loyal soldier of the village.

A hero who had been her captive, but finally overpowered her spell.

A hero destined to be King.

A hero lying dead and broken at the bottom of a cliff.