Drachne Ch. 02

"One, two, chuckle with shrew,

three, four, lock the door!"

The woman was singing as she skipped along. She was close enough to smell the ash, now. Waking up to seeing smoke from her forest shack was always a highlight to Flick's day.

The tanukiki's tail hadn't stopped wagging since she'd first spied the smoke.

Elves always made a mess of things when they fled before other banditry-minded elves. Leaving food and clothes for less frightened things like herself.

There weren't a lot of elves willing to piss off forest spirits, even fewer who were willing to annoy something like her.

It was only superstition, of course. She might have fur down her back and arms, and might have a leaf on her head, but she was extremely ordinary.

She knew about enough magic to snuff a candle.

Not exactly an all-powerful spirit of vengeance if she got annoyed. Yet, the elves always thought she was both cute, and terrifying.

Which made it extremely easy to live out her life's goal - to be left alone.

Flick paused, sniffing the air, and then she pressed one of her bare feet into the soft soil. It had been disturbed here. The smoke was coming from... Underground.

The tanukiki dropped to all fours and took a deep whiff as the leaf resettled onto her forehead. She could smell burned oak, rosewood, and ash pine.

Something expensive had been wrecked and buried here, probably a palanquin or carriage. Something that had been transporting a lord... But then it had been carefully buried.

Flick twitched, looking around with her brown eyes into every shadow, afraid that she had stumbled not under a bandit attack, but an assassination.

She let out a squeal as a hand burst up through the soil to grab her by the scruff of her neck.

Her hands and feet desperately kicked at the ground, spraying it around, whilst she went exactly nowhere. The hand holding her felt like the damned thing was made of iron.

Flick squealed again as she was yanked down and onto the ground, as whatever had been buried used her as an anchor to drag itself up and out of the loose dirt.

She had run out of squeals when she saw the undead zombie stagger upright, still dragging her by the scruff of her neck. She settled for letting out a frightened whine.

The thing lifted her up to eye-level with its unseeing and white eyes, and coughed, spraying dirt into her face. "I... Where... Where... Where is she?"

"Sh-sh-she?" Flick gasped in terror.

"Where is Drachne!?" The creature roared, covering her in spittle, phlegm, and dirt.

She burst into tears and wet herself.

The dead thing blinked slowly, looking down at the puddle forming, and then back up at her, and the grip loosened slightly. "I... I don't know you. Do I? Sorry... I... I'm confused."

She let out a terrified whine.

"You're going to run, if I let go. So I won't." The zombie said, sounding less and less brutal, and beginning to get a sophisticated accent. "I... She killed me. I thought she killed me. I'm Lord Elan. I was with a woman... Well, you wouldn't think she's a woman. She's a monster."

She looked around desperately, wishing someone would save her from a zombie that had obviously just been resurrected and hadn't figured out that someone else owned their soul, now.

"You see, she's an arachne. Rare, beautiful, but so dangerous." He said, awestruck, "So beautiful. I... I couldn't help myself. I had just been trying to steal her poison. Sell it. But... The bragging rights of having bedded an arachne! Couldn't resist."

Flick stopped fighting him, "I... Won't run. No point."

He dropped her, and she flipped to avoid the wet patch, landing daintily. She blew at her leaf and swallowed, "You bedded an arachne? No wonder you're dead."

"She... She wasn't born here. Not in a forest." He said, looking around in confusion, "I don't know where she'd go. If she could survive. I... I have... I have..."

Flick rolled her eyes, "Bedded an arachne. Which means, you're hers, now. Zombie."

"She did kill me?" He said, and looked down at his hands. At the cuts and scrapes from digging his way out of his fresh grave.

The tanukiki sighed heavily, "Sheesh. Yeah. You're dead. Which means you can't heal anymore. Can't really eat. Can't ever sleep. And... And you're going to be utterly obsessed with this... Arachne."

"Drachne. That was her name." He whispered, as if in awe.

She felt her frightened tail curled up through her legs, and glanced around some more, "So... There's an arachne out here? There's no point trying to run away. They always get what they hunt. And she'll be able to sense you. Her slave."

"Draaachne." He moaned, eyes going even more blank than they already were.

She inched further away from him.

Flick flinched as he grabbed her wrist in his deathly grip, and he looked at her desperately, "You're beastkind. Can't you find her? A sense of smell, some scrying or something? I can pay you. I'm a lord."

"Pay? Like... Gold and silver?" She asked nervously.

He nodded excitedly, "Exactly!"

"I know what it is, but I've never used it. Not useful to me. And I'm not magical, either. I'm a tanukiki." She said tightly, "We're supposed to be lucky, and that's it. Apparently, my luck has already run out."

The zombie's grip tightened to the point of making her eyes water in pain. "M-must find her. Have to find her. Drachne."

Flick whined and considered chewing his wrist off. It wasn't like he could feel pain, anymore. However, her nose was twitching with a distinct smell, and it was his.

He smelled like decay and something else even sharper.

The arachne must have poisoned him, when she ended up killing him. It was still sitting in his inactive bloodstream, which meant that biting him was about as safe as swallowing a whitetail.

Flick's only real option to get away was to play along, until one of the many bastards in the forest decided to get rid of the zombie.

She could lead him somewhere.

Most of the things that felt precious about their territory had given up chasing her. She was fast, and if they caught her, they assumed it would be bad luck to hurt her.

She'd need to also get away from the zombie, and right now, she didn't know if she could.

Every time she seemed to think about it, he seemed to act without thinking and grab her.

Flick didn't know enough about dead things to manipulate him, and she didn't want to learn about dead things. She had been quite content, living life the way she had been.

Why the hell had this happened to her?

She took a deep and uncertain breath, "Tracking an arachne won't work. Won't smell them unless they want you to. You have to track the prey."

"Prey? She... She won't know what prey is." He shook his head, "Raised in the city, by elves."

Flick shrugged, "Doesn't mean all the prey that notices her isn't running the other fucking direction. Ain't much more nightmarish than an arachne."

---

"I ain't feeling so well." He said to no one in-particular. It wasn't like anyone actually lived in the house with him.

His wife had done everything she could to make him sign the divorce papers, before she'd given up and moved to another city.

His daughter had stuck around some to try and fix him, before she gave up as well. He didn't know where she'd moved to. Probably never would.

The elf's ears pulled back as he groaned loudly, grabbing onto the bench as another cramp ripped through his gut.

This wasn't like any hangover he'd had before.

Felt as if his stomach had burst.

What had the beast said last night, before he'd killed them? Something about it going badly and then... Called him a dumb bastard.

Even drunk he'd thought that was a bit odd. Calling out someone, who had already ended you, a dumb fucker wasn't exactly an ordinary kind of response to a knife between the ribs.

The elf screamed in pain, and stared down at something jutting out from between his ribs.

He reached down in confusion and fear, confirming he wasn't seeing things. It wasn't a knife blade, it was a bone shaped as it someone had twisted it.

It was the exact same horn that he had sold off last night for a couple silver pieces.

That he had cut from the head of the ali-whatever, right before he'd weighed the body down and dropped it into the swamp.

The elf screamed again as he felt his ribs breaking, as something else started to break free from inside him.

---

The web swayed in the wind that seemed to permanently flow through the freezing forest. Little droplets of dew and rain falling across the threads of her little bed, suspended so high above the ground.

The water she didn't mind, but she had underestimated how much the wind would get to her. Thinking that she'd be comfortable in her web just like she was in the temple.

Instead, she was lying spread across it, staring down at the ground, and trying not to shiver.

Nearby, a cocoon of her silk spun idly in the wind. The only thing she could see of the thing inside was his very angry and blue eyes.

Drachne hadn't been able to bring herself to end the bodyguard. Not when she needed to tell the empress what Elan had concealed from everyone.

Problem was, she was absolutely certain he'd just try and kill her if she released him. The elf didn't seem even remotely interested in listening to what the monster had to say.

She pressed her forehead against one of her strands as she tried not to burst into tears again.

She was an assassin, a cold-hearted creature who could appear, end a life, and disappear, before anybody knew that she even existed.

She shouldn't be so easily heartbroken.

Drachne had been called a monster her whole life. She had been treated differently, her whole life. She had thought she could mostly deal with that.

... She had been wrong.

Now that she knew that she was a monster... Now that she knew that she could not coexist with the peaceful idiots inside the cities... She finally understood what self-hatred meant.

Confronted with all of this, Drachne did what she always did.

She rolled onto her side, closed her eyes, and began to pluck a melancholy tune on her web. The vibrating strands reverberating out an eerie tune.

She felt the music as it flowed out of her, expressing her painful emotions. Rising up angrily before crashing to new lows. A haunting and overlapping sound.

With so many strands, and four hands, Drachne was able to pluck out a duet, with one or two background sounds that could continue onwards with her.

She lost herself in the music, as if the wind faded away, the cold shrivelled up. She found herself in a void, dancing alone to the sound of her own depression.

Movements of anger and sorrow surrounding her. Lifting her into flying leaps, before dashing her into the ground.

Drachne didn't know how long she spent in the ethereal place made of sound.

When a chord she hadn't made jerked her back into the real world, causing her hands to fumble, the sun was beginning to set. Or maybe rise.

A tiny thrumming on her web from a feeler strand, letting her know that something was approaching.

She cursed herself.

Of course music would attract someone or something, in a forest like this. They might just be a hunter, but to her, all living things were her enemy.

She skittered over the edge of her web and leaped across through several trees before landing silently on a branch. Her abdomen swelled and shrank with the nervous beat of her heart.

The eyes more attuned to movement saw it first.

Whatever had noticed her, wasn't an elf. They were also extremely cautious, because her music had faded away the moment they had started to approach.

She considered the small creature carefully.

They did wear clothes, so had some semblance of civility, but the clothes were tattered. Torn, patched, and re-torn so many times it was pointless to try and repair them anymore.

The walking stride was awkward. She didn't think it was just because the thing wanted to be quiet. Their steps were long, and flowing. Making the torso rise and fall awkwardly.

A sign of a deranged mind.

A madman, then. Driven out of their village and into the forest, where they had managed to survive for a while, but eventually had given in to pure instinct.

Whatever that thing was, very little of its sanity remained.

Only enough for it to want to hunt her, and to know that she was probably hunting them.

Drachne resisted the urge to click her fangs together in irritation. She didn't want to have to be responsible for a mercy killing, but she didn't want anything to know where her web was, either.

Distracting and drawing away mad things was always a gamble. They had a habit of... Fixating on the things that didn't make sense.

In a way, madness gave them the clarity to understand when things didn't add up.

The thing came closer, and Drachne finally spied something that could help her identify the creature. Small black bands encircled both arms, and she could see a handful of markings that might mean it was scaled.

At this distance, it was the best that she could hope for.

They were either an Adderan, or a Viperei.

Either way, they were venomous, and probably not that vulnerable to her own. She could probably kill them with hers, but it would take longer, in which time they could hurt her.

Adderans were the rarer of the two. The exotic used to be plentiful throughout the forests, but that was before the elves had moved in.

Nothing but ancient history.

Elves were elves.

When they saw something that wasn't them, the instinct was to either kill it, or enslave it.

Viperei, on the other hand, weren't terribly uncommon for exotics. They didn't tend to live near humans who butchered them on sight, but the elvish empire had a habit of using them as beserkers in their army.

Drachne had even seen two pass through the temple in her time, there. One of them had been sold off as a concubine to a minor lady, as a kind of bodyguard in disguise. The other had been bought by an alchemist, keen to exploit their venom.

If she had to gamble, she'd gamble on this one being a Viperei.

A mad viper.

Couldn't really get much worse for her.

"Arachne!" The thing suddenly bellowed with a voice three or four octaves below the norm, "Come out, come out, and play!"

It knew what she was, just from the music?

Her kind was supposed to be rare as fuck.

He was probably faster than her. She couldn't risk an open confrontation... But she did want to speak to it, now. Wanted to know what it knew about her kind.

She used her silk to drag her into the air, like she had at the temple, floating momentarily.

The viper noticed the shadow and two dark-red eyes jerked upwards to see her.

Right as a weaving of web hit them, spinning around both their legs and latching onto the ground.

One of her knees hit the thing in the centre of the head, and she flicked herself backwards to land on all three feet, glaring at them.

She clicked her fangs together.

"Whoah! Whoah!" The viper held up their hands, "I absolutely did not come here to fight! Gods, woman. Settle down."

Drachne clicked her fangs, again.

He smiled nervously, revealing a central fang longer than the rest, "I'm not a threat, miss. Seriously. I'm about as toxic as a jackrabbit."

She shrugged.

"Okay... Lemme start over." He laughed nervously, "My name, if you would have it, or be in the habit of using it, is the great and wondrous Palantok."

She wasn't completely wrong about him being off his rocker, then. Nobody talked like that.

"I was tracking a little morsel for my dinner, a wee little raccoondog, when I came upon something astonishing." He said with a smile, "An elf, moaning and groaning, obsessed with finding an arachne that had bit him."

Drachne's stomach dropped like a stone.

Palantok shrugged, "It is a rare ability, but one granted by the beasts of the sky, that the strongest of the arachne do not just kill their prey... They kill them so hard they go through the other side and back to our world."

She blinked unevenly at him, keeping at least one eye open the whole time. Trying to pretend she already knew that she could zombify.

Had Elan really come back, as an undead?

That... That might solve her problem. Or make it even more complicated. She wasn't exactly sure which.

"It's been lonely in the forest. Ever since the last of the arachnes fled the elves." Palantok said forlornly, "The last queen promised that she'd bed me and bring me back. I so did want it, but she died before she could make good on that promise."

He was a madman. Through and through.

Thought that being zombified and enslaved to someone's will was somehow a shortcut to immortality. Nevermind how easy it was to kill the undead for good.

"Though I hardly expect you to fulfil her promise, I would like to swear my fealty to you, our new queen." He smiled sweetly, "I will do anything you tell me to."

Drachne finally spoke, "Why?"

"Because it is what I am wanting to do. One cannot be the grand and wondrous Palantok without a queen to wonder about." He shrugged.

She rolled her jaw, "How long has it been since your last queen left, viper?"

"Oh, I'm not a viper." He shook his head, "I'm an Adderan. Specifically, a Banded Adderan. I suppose... Queen Vessimultik was killed by the elf who called himself Emperor Finnis."

She already knew he was crazy.

Now she knew he was so crazy that he thought he was as old as the second emperor of the Golden Mountain. That he was born from a race that was extinct.

Expecting him to keep to an oath of fealty would be Drachne embracing the same kind of insanity.

She rolled her mouth for a moment, and shoved a small ball of webbing into it. Rolling it around as she looked at him and pretended curiosity.

Then she spat the sticky ball of acid into his face.

Palantok fell to the ground screaming.

Drachne scampered out of sight and into the trees, tossing tendrils of silk back and forth through them so that she could come at him from any direction.

She prepared a couple tight balls of webbing, filling them with acid so that they wouldn't leak, but would explode when she tossed them.

The viper rolled his face into the dirt. She had to imagine that it would hurt, even if it would cut down on the burning. As he sat up, she noted with irritation that she'd only scarred half his face.

One eye was fine to look around for her.

"Arachne! My queen!" He called out, "Please, allow me to serve you! All I desire is to be allowed to serve you."

The bastard wasn't even a little deterred by her attacking him.

Drachne wasn't that afraid of the madman, now. However, if her music was enough to catch the attention of something like this, then what was his yelling going to attract?

She had a feeling that in this place... She was about as far from the top of the foodchain as she could be.

There had to be something worse than an arachne out here.

Not everyone who went out into the dark came back.

She did have to admit, despite the danger, she got a small thrill out of being called a queen. Drachne, Queen of the Shadows.

Too bad that she was as much a queen as he was a clear-headed academic.

She spiked one of her acid balls out on a line, swinging it in from a direction which didn't lead towards her. However, this time he seemed to see it coming.

Palantok was agile, easily twisting himself out of the way with a flexibility that she could only envy. He also didn't seem fazed that she was still trying to kill him.

"I can lead prey to you, my queen. Help your elven plaything find its way to you. Let me be of use!"

There was a desperation to his cry. More distressed she wouldn't accept him, than her trying to eliminate him. She hated the insane ones.

She always felt a bitter pity, afterwards.