Memory (I)

Maath hissed in pain as she adjusted her positioning on the huge silken cushion she usually laid upon when she was awake, her three remaining legs subtly creaking and straining under the weight of her massive body.

Her mind was still reeling from the revelation of Alice’s origin and, on top of that, the violent reaction of the colony following her own mistake was definitely not helping her calm down.

Despite the turmoil she was feeling, The Spider Queen placed her single anterior leg on the wire, using her fine control of its metallic silk to produce the sounds of speech.

The ability to produce true language was one of her greatest achievements, something she had always been proud of; thus, she didn’t miss the way the small creature at her feet flinched and shied away from the vibrating implement. It pained her to see the only living creature she could converse with, being scared of her only way of speaking.

Maath cursed her wasp-brained reaction, she should have been more careful with her emotions. Emotions. Something I had to learn to live with she thought as new words flowed out of her silk.

“Alice. I am sorry for my reaction. I let my □︎♎︎♓︎□︎ and fear get to my body.” she finally said, looking at her squirming form, continuously pacing around on her two legs, moving her arms and fingers in many complex ways every time she talked, almost speaking a second, complementary language through them.

Alice stopped, her two eyes meeting her remaining five as beautiful sounds came out of her mouth.

“It’s okay Maath. I’m alive, even if it was close. I hope it won’t happen again. I don’t want to die here. Can you tell me what is □︎♎︎♓︎□︎?” she finally asked, her mouth laboriously pronouncing the unknown word. She was still learning despite having greatly improved since coming to the Nest. Maath had been quite surprised at her incredible progress.

“Hatred is when you desire to kill something but not to eat it, you would kill it even if you and your nest was full of food. That is what I felt” she replied after quickly finding a way to describe the emotion.

“O-okay. Thank you… but why did you feel hatred when I told you about me being from another world? Did you meet more like me? Have you met more humans? What is Anathema? Is it my world?” she asked, launching question after question as if she was a hatchling with its first web. Maath had always felt amusement when hearing her endless questions, always so eager to know more. This time she remained serious, thinking about the answers she would give.

“I have met a creature similar to you once, it has been far more than a hundred molts ago, when I was barely more than a hatchling, but that is not important in this moment.” She said, ignoring the new smattering of questions thrown by the excitable being at her feet.

“Anathema is not a place.” she continued, “Anathema is what comes from the tears in the air. They open up, in the darkness of the caves, for brief instants or for more time. Sometimes they offer water, air and light in places where neither has ever been seen; other times, however, it is heat and fumes and sucking darkness that swallows things around it. Even then, those deathly things last for mere seconds and they are not the enemy of the living. Anathema is different, it is what willingly comes out to slaughter and feed without control, killing everything on its path.” She paused, staring at the now silent Alice before resuming again.

“We didn’t call them like that at first, there were creatures of many kinds spilling out of those rifts, some of them dying as soon as they came here, their corpses melting, or exploding, or simply stopping, some of them we ate, others ignored. The holes are rare, but they were seen as gifts of the caves to the colony. Until the first of Them came through.” Maath hissed softly, her mind coming back to the discovery.

“We didn’t know of the danger then; a tear had appeared near one of the satellite nests and one of their males had consumed the worms that had spilled out of it. Within a molt, four nests were lost, and with them many hunting grounds. It took me and my Daughters many more molts to find and destroy every single one of those things.”

It had been the first time she had really used her powers. Maath still remembered the feeling of the metal flowing from under her spikes, a gleaming wave of liquid alloy coating the ground in front of her eyes, choking anything that could breathe and thus, carry within itself those blue, squirming worms. She remembered some of her daughters as they died twice, the first time when they were infected, the second when she ended them.

The Queen controlled the ripple running along her exoskeleton, preventing it from warping her limb once again, resuming her tale instead.

“Next, came a dark mist that killed all sound, creeping from the gash like a living thing, twisting and squirming as if a slug cut in half when the opening was sealed. It appeared far deeper in the caves and it has lived there ever since. Some creatures lose their way in it and come out changed, different and more dangerous. I believe you have met one of them before coming here. The mist is treacherous and deadly but, not unlike our own webs, dangerous only if you get caught in it.” She chuckled once again, barely noticing the way Alice was now clutching her strange arm replacement, silently staring at it.

Maath took her time, her mind now bringing back the memories of those days.

“And finally, many molts later, came the last Anathema and with it, my death.”

The large, gleaming spike crushed the head of the first centipede and effortlessly sunk in the yellowed stone beneath it. The sinuous and segmented body of the large predator kept squirming and contorting even after its small brain was crushed, the many legs of the being leaving deep furrows in the softer ground beneath it.

Maath ignored the body, stepping forward as three more of the monsters emerged from the frozen pile of ice and prey that they used as a nest.

The creatures immediately reacted at the invader intruding their territory, rushing forward with incredible speed to meet the threat to their lair. Maath didn’t hesitate, her left frontal leg immediately turning into a wide, cleaver-like blade that slammed on the first of the centipedes, splitting in half the first few segments of the creature. From the exposed organs of the monster started oozing out a boiling liquid that, once exposed to the warmer air of the cave, instantly vaporized into an explosion of frosty, white mist, obscuring her vision.

The titanic spider hissed in pain and wrenched the weapon out of the still-twitching carcass as a burning feeling of extreme cold quickly moved through the living metal of her exoskeleton, a coat of hoarfrost building up on its surface as the flesh contained within started freezing.

Maath took a quick step back from the unexpected fog and immediately used the distance she had created to hit the first shadow rushing out of the deadly cloud. The surprised centipede was literally batted away with the flat side of the blade and sent flying in the air. The airborne trip of the creature ending more than ten meters away from the Queen, when it impacted on a large stalagmite covered in a milky layer of ice.

Maath heard the crack of the monster’s carapace crashing against the frozen stone, many of its spindly legs breaking from the following impact to the ground as a mix of gelid saliva and blue blood spewed out of the injured creature’s mouth.

Her eight eyes still glued to the previous attacker, the matriarch wasn’t fast enough to dodge the last of the predatory myriapods which slipped past her guard and started weaving through her large legs. Annoyed, she tried to crush it with her posterior limbs but the monster easily avoided the powerful but poorly-aimed thrusts.

The last centipede finally took its chance as one of her spikes sunk once again into the soft calcite of the floor, hindering her movements. The icy monster immediately coiled around the pole-like limb and started crawling upwards, using the frost coating the surface to create more traction as it moved its flexible body in a spiraling pattern, its gelid legs sticking on the metal of her exoskeleton.

The behemoth hissed in annoyance as the defiant arthropod continued upwards, its jaws clicking expectantly every few seconds.

The centipede suddenly stumbled, the metal becoming softer the further it crawled; the many legs of the creature were now sinking in the exoskeleton and subsequently getting stuck each time it took a step forward.

The first few times, the enraged centipede resorted to keep moving at speed, letting the immobilized legs get ripped out of its body by the momentum, barely twitching from the pain of each loss; the more legs it lost, however, the slower it became until, finally, the creature realized its mistake.

The wounded monster finally stopped its mad rush and opened up a large set of engorged pincer-like appendages, slamming them down on the metallic leg as it tried to pierce through the exoskeleton of the Spider Queen.

Once again, Maath hissed in pain and anger as the same freezing substance trickled onto her body from the hollow fangs of the centipede. Her metallic exoskeleton rippled in a mesmerizing pattern of small waves, each one seemingly moving towards the stubborn creature clinging to her limb.

An instant later, with a wet, crunching sound of broken chitin and ruptured insides, the first of a series of long and thin barbs erupted from the tail of the centipede, quickly progressing upwards and through each of its body segments until, a heartbeat later, its flat head was pierced and ripped off by a particularly large prong.

The ravaged body of the creature finally detached from her leg and crashed down on the ground with the dull sound of a carcass, glacial ichor dripped out of its many wounds and coated the limestone of the floor, immediately turning into a translucent sludge that started slowly sublimating into more freezing mist.

The spikes disappeared once again into the matriarch’s carapace as she turned away from the remains, her silvery, orb-like eyes scanning the rest of the large, frigid cave she had been fighting in.

A pleased click came from her maw as she looked at the contingent of Spear Spiders busy removing the last signs of resistance from the previous apex predators of the area. As soon as the last of the centipede escaped or fell, the construction of the new satellite nest would finally start for good.

A plinking sound came from beside her.

“Make sure to keep the hunting to an acceptable level. We came just in time to remove the centipedes; those damned things have ruined more than one expanse with their senseless breeding.” She clicked, now staring at a small clutter of younger Thinkers busy finishing off the injured male centipede she had thrown against the stalagmite.

“Yes Mother.” Readily replied Eisor after sending a few more clusters towards the last remaining pockets of resistance in the centipedes’ lairs.

“The construction of the nest will begin as soon as we find a suitable spot. I have also personally eliminated all the centipede birthers I could find. They shouldn’t be able to replenish their numbers for a while.” concluded the Overseer.

Maath clicked in assent before moving away from her busy Daughter, walking through the thawing piles of food.

Fourteen molts had passed since the arrival of the Soundless and aside from the destruction of a smaller satellite nest due to a particularly hungry and unknown predator, everything was proceeding like freshly woven silk.

She hissed slightly when she put too much of her weight on one of the wounded limbs but, aside from that small injury, Maath was satisfied with today’s assault. Finding and securing more hunting grounds was always a messy business after all.

The titanic spider was preparing to head back to the Nest when a wildly chittering Ozren appeared from the main tunnel and rushed towards her.

“Anathema! In the Main Nest! We cannot kill it!” she hissed out before collapsing on the ground, her body shivering from the strain of running.

Maath stumbled for an instant, her mind unable to process the information it had received.

Anathema? Now? In the Nest? How?

A deep, sweltering rage filled her, erupting from her mind and flowing through her veins like incandescent magma, burning off any shivering remain of the centipede’s poison as her exoskeleton warped and rippled under the influence of her emotions.

Her pedipalps crashed against each other, reverberating throughout the cave and giving her the attention of the entire swarm.

“Anathema. Defend your Colony.” she simply said.

When the clicking words finally reached the last one of the stunned spiders, their Queen had already disappeared in the darkness of the passages, rushing back to her Nest.

*****

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