Crawling Things

Crawling Things

By Finnbarr Martin

She was hungry. And the hunger was making her weak. It had been many days since her last meal; many painful days since she’d colluded with her last remaining brother to commit sororicide on their last surviving sister. Sister had been younger than them, and smaller. Their glacial, experienced metabolisms had kept them strong, whilst Sister had grown weak. By the end she was a shivering ghost; no more the terrifying visage of a true daughter of the clan. Her weakness had been heartbreaking and contemptible all at once. Strength was all that mattered out here; it was to their clan as coin is to civilized men. It was meat, water, and shelter. When Sister had lost all strength, they had killed her. Her body had made a paltry meal when split between them; but it had been enough to armour them against the cold winds that sighed out of the North like airborne blades. It had been enough to get them this far.

Her guilt in regards to the kill, that small degree of guilt she was capable of feeling at least, gnawed at her with only a fraction of the voracity with which the hunger gnawed and scraped at her belly. Sister’s valuable calories were nearly spent, and her aching digestive tract would let her have no delusion about that fact. A rat, scrabbling and screaming inside her. Razors in her blood. It made her feel savage; ruthless. She had never felt hunger like it. And behind the pain was imminent death; a dark wind swallowing up her world. Her Brother’s black eyes betrayed nothing, but she knew he felt it too. And he would be watching her with a new lust now; tremulous sibling bonds dissolving; her body seeming a treasure of fresh calories in his eyes. If they didn’t find something to eat soon, one of them was liable to end up in the others’ belly; cannibalised into constituent proteins and micro-nutrients. The simple, inevitable solution to a brutal equation of survival.

But that moment had not yet come. They marched forwards with the mechanical determination of clockwork automatons, a dozen feet between them; trees twisting to the sky behind, trees twisting to the sky in front. The ground was loam, sticky and deep. But they were nimble, even by the standards of their kind, and the algae-slopped mud did little to hinder their progress. They devoured those few food-things that were dim-witted or dull-sensed enough to remain in their path. Morsels to whet the appetite and pique their aggression. But there were no substantial meals to be had; the hefty lizards and giant owls that had once filled the forest with hisses and hoots were in sharp decline.

There had been a time in her youth when the forest had been ripe with prey; a time before the appearance of the man-nest. A corrupt agglutination of wood and smoke that had unfurled upon the banks of the estuary like a tumorous rose. The sweet songs of food-things were still sung, but the man-things’ anvils and steeple bells had sung as well. Then packs of them, armed with silver fangs, had begun to roam about the woods. They were weaker and slower than their green-skinned, pointy-eared cousins; but they were cunning. They laid traps, and used flying metal teeth, and they sang to each other in sharp, small voices. With these attributes they had decimated the prey populations upon which her clan had sustained itself for millenia.

After a thousand moons and more of effortless living, she had known hardship for the first time. The forest was desolate of large, vulnerable creatures. Her clan was dead, or disbanded. She wandered with her brother in this new valley; both keeping eternal vigil on the other. They were searching for a healthy ecosystem of big animals into which they could insert themselves. If they were successful not only would they be able to rejuvenate their emaciated bodies, but they might even have a chance to breed, and start the clan anew. So far their hope had proved forlorn.

Strange vibrations. Far away. Her hind legs felt them first, and then a moment later her forelegs; which meant that the vibrations were coming from behind her. She slowed her relentless march, and pressed her limbs to the dirt. Coming closer. Regular thumps, like the footsteps or hoofsteps of a food-thing. Lizard or canine? Impossible to tell at this distance, but it was unlikely to be either. The footsteps were too heavy; galloping strides bombarding the marsh like earth-borne thunder. There was a lolloping quality to them, as if the animal were drunk on Nirn-Dew.

Within moments the entire swamp was a-trembling. Tiny multi-legged creatures slid from their muddy homes; beetles took flight. The slough began to slither over itself as tremors rippled across the landscape. A chirm of blood-finches exploded into the sky; eggs abandoned in their nests. Four legs. One impaired. She could discern more from the approaching clamour now. There were deep wrenching vibrations that might have been saplings ripped from the ground, or boggy crests being ploughed aside. She was almost certain that whatever it was was injured or panicked somehow; but with a thing that size it made no difference. She would move from its path, or be crushed.

She clambered up a spiralling bole; ancient whirlpools of bark proffering easy footholds. The climb should have been effortless, but she was enervated with hunger, and it took many seconds before her bulk was over the first major bough. She nestled herself in a snarl of black ash-bracken. Her unblinking eyes observed her brother’s climb; less strained than her own. Which worried her a little. She saw him retreat into the shadows and wait; silent and disguised against the dirty bark. And then it emerged into view.

It belched forth from a dense grove to her East. A visual calamity spilling from the trees like a newborn foal. It charged across the mud with the force of a dozen bulls; loam splurging from underneath its heavy tread. It was a blur of carmine scales and wildly protruding spines; great, bloody teeth standing in sharp relief against a tight, muscular head. It looked like a giant, legged wyrm. Serpentine and horse-like all at once. It was running like its life depended on it; boulders and mud and plants leaping asunder in its wake.

She quailed at the sheer force behind such a charge, and retreated further into her hiding place as the beast rumbled past. The tree within which she had concealed herself trembled and tilted alarmingly as its clawed feet toiled the marshy soil into a new geography. Then it was gone; streaking away into the shadows of a dense grove. She waited for the emergence of whatever terrible predator it was that had spurred the beast to flight, but no such predator appeared. The trembling ground calmed itself, and after a while the blood-finches returned to check their eggs. She thought about trying to nab one of them, but the nests were spider-webbed among a filigree of delicate branches high above the ground; far too thin to support her weight.

Once she was sure the danger had passed, she descended to the freshly churned earth with her brother. White worms wriggled in the mud, and were dutifully eaten. Drops of water on the tongue of a creature dying from thirst. Then, with silent efficiency they began to investigate the tracks of the thundering thing. Blood. Red and luke-warm. At first they found only drops; but soon they discovered pools of the stuff, settled in gouges. A crawling blue funghi, known to men as deadskin because of the way it enveloped the dead, was already shivering its way into the sanguine pools. A fat fly landed in the blood, and drank with gusto.

Her brother pointedly angled himself to the dark woods into which the thundering thing had disappeared. Follow. She understood his intent without him saying it. The smell of blood had whetted their appetites, and it strongly indicated that the thundering thing was hurt. Which was good, because uninjured and awake it would have been impossibly dangerous game to pursue. But the pale sun was beginning to wane. If they could pursue the thundering thing to its place of refuge, they could ambush it while it slept. Or maybe just wait for it to bleed out. Either way, it was the only chance at a meal they had.

They followed its trail into the grove. Unbeknownst to them, the fat fly that had landed in the blood pool finished its meal. It took flight, and buzzed around in increasingly lethargic trajectories before dropping to the ground, dead.

Their mutual suspicion had been temporarily ameliorated by the appearance of the thundering thing. While there was hope of a larger meal, they would not attack each other. They were a team again, united by predatory instinct. Its trail was easy to follow; cracked roots and squashed ferns forming a clear path through the forest.

She had hunted big prey before. Golden elks twice as large as herself, and great tusked boars that were all sinewy, explosive muscle. These however were exceptions, and for the most part she had fed on small pigs and wildcats. There were some creatures that were too risky to attack; she had seen her less cautious siblings made into tangled corpses by giant, red-speckled cranes with beaks as long as a man-thing. Her mother had been torn apart by a troop of Goblins, their stone teeth rending her into pieces. She herself bore the scars of failed conquests; one of her legs had a weak joint, and her abdomen was mottled with shallow craters of missing flesh. The former had been given to her by a giant toad. The thing had wrapped its powerful tongue around her limb, and pulled with enough sudden force to dislocate her knee. It had died soon after; her powerful venom subduing its nervous system and softening its internal organs for consumption. But the damage had been done.

It was from painful lessons such as these that she had learned when to strike for a meal and when to walk away. Large-jawed prey; long-clawed heavyweights; these were to be approached only in their weakest moments. Rainbow-skinned amphibians and giant bears were to be avoided altogether. To pursue the thundering thing went against this well-tested instinct of caution. Injured or not, it was a behemoth, far beyond her normal capabilities as a hunter; let alone in her current weakened state. But she was desperate, as was her brother. It was the first sizeable creature they had come across in almost a moon.

The trees grew denser as they advanced. Great pillars of black ash, their roots sunk deep in fertile soil. The sky, pink as roses now, winked at them through gaps in the canopy overhead. The air had become heavy and wet. The thing’s trail was becoming less savage; the damage to vegetation less severe, and the pools of blood greater in size. It was slowing. Perhaps it was exhausted. Or maybe the dense woodland had calmed it somehow, lulling it into a false sense of security.

After many hours of walking they arrived at a marshy grove, moated by stagnant pools. They could see something angular protruding from the earth; a monolith of scintillating stone. It shimmered like oil in the sun; geometric carvings gouged into its surface and a doorway in the shadows. She would have taken it as the work of a man-thing but for the size and shape of the door, which implied far stranger origins. And there was a pungency about the place; a scent of corruption that thickened the air. And that was when they saw them.

Bloated bodies floating in the water. Food-things of all kinds. Prey possessed of hooves and wings and hands. Some were mottled with the vibrant stain of deadskin, and others were entirely blue with the stuff. The stench was overwhelming. She wandered over to a pool near the entrance and prodded a blue corpse with her forelegs. It buoyed in the water, coming loose from its anchor point with a belch of putrid gas. As it gently rotated skyward she saw a face emerge from the water. It was masked in deadskin; the features reduced to an impressionist sculpture. But despite the lack of detail there was no mistaking the proportions. It was a man-thing.

There was a grotesque figure behind it. A tangle of turquoise limbs, snared in the roots of a tree. She strained to discern what it was; searching her memory for animals that possessed eight chunky limbs, all at odd angles to each other. As she stared the confusing image began to resolve itself, and she realised that the bulging chest was in fact another head. Two sets of legs, and two sets of arms, one pair half-concealed by the boggy water. Two bodies, locked in an embrace. One wide-hipped and long-haired, the other small. Like she had been when she was a youngling. Woman and child; their clothes and jewelry still partially visible through the blue fungus. Such a waste. Many creatures would have been driven to anger or fear by the sight; but her heart was as cold as the cold, dead earth. But still...to see such an abundance of flesh wasted by deadskin and rot; it was a travesty. In her clan such corpses would have been mummified for future use; nutrients carefully preserved by silk.

Her brother ignored the corpses and made a beeline for the monolith doorway, which was lightly spattered with fresh blood. The thundering thing was in there, and unlike the menagerie of bloated bodies it was still alive. Still fresh. He disappeared into the shadows of the door, ever-so-slightly warmer air gusting out from the darkness like a dying breath. He knew that she would follow him without having to ask. They had grown up together, hunted together, and now they starved together. Their instincts and impulses were as thoroughly aligned to each other as it was possible for two creatures to get.

She followed him, her eye cluster rapidly adjusting to the darkness. Vibrant stone gargoyles leered at her from the ceiling. Voracious demons and tentacled things designed to terrify. But her predator brain wasn’t capable of recognising symbolic representations of real things, and so she didn’t give them a second look as the darkness intensified. Their journey into the subterranean edifice was slow. They felt their way along bit by bit, seeing hardly anything. After a significant distance the corridor through which they were descending opened out into a large vestibule, from which seven new corridors departed in various directions. A huge limpet of glass or crystal was attached to the ceiling, providing just enough illumination to highlight certain details of the room.

It was brutalist in design. The seven doorways were framed by a thuggish colonnade; big, ignorant shapes pretending to be columns. The floor was a solid sheet of stone. No tiles, or slabs; just unbroken stone. Presumably there was too little light down here for vegetation to take hold. Above each doorway sat angular sculptures, different for each door. Two hands, two feet, two eyes, and above the central door; a gaping mouth. It was lined with teeth, as big and flat as tombstones. Her eyes caught a glimmer of metal near the entrance, and she tensed. Protruding from the shadows was the tip of a long, silver claw. It was uncurved, and unstained. The hoary light of the chandelier ran along its edge, suggesting a razor sharp point. It took a few moments for her to recognise it as the metal claw of a man-thing.

Out in the soft marshes she could feel the pitter patter of an insect’s feet from ten metres away; her brother’s silent steps had registered as a low-level rumble. But in these corridors there was no soft earth or water to act as a conductor. The hard, unyielding stone nullified her hypersensitivity to vibration. So she wasn’t quite sure if the claw belonged to a thing living or dead.

When she finally did muster the courage to investigate the claw with her sense of touch, she felt only cold, hard metal and something akin to bumpy porcelain. She engaged her pedipalps for a more thorough investigation, and a picture began to form in her mind.

It was the shape of a man-thing, long dead. It was sheathed in the rigid metal skin that their warriors wore. She felt pauldrons, a cuirass, an armoured skirt and spiked elbows; although she was unaware of the associated names. These had none of the engraved finery of the armour of chieftains; it was hardiness personified. Tough iron, peppered with dents and scratches. The porcelain texture was clean bone. Where the head should have been there was only a lower jawbone, jagged edges indicating a massively violent death. It was a warning; if the thundering thing could rip through metal then her armoured carapace would offer scant defence.

Her brother was busy investigating the vestibule doorways. His powerful legs, still formidable in their malnourished state, felt along the wet, warm stone for signs of blood. He had been scouring the floor for quite a while; his eye cluster keeping a lock on his sisters’ position as best it could in the nigh total blackness. He wasn’t as paranoid as he had been during their most hopeless moments out in the marshes, but he was not a being susceptible to complacency. That particular vice had been bred out of their clan a long time ago. His sister looked weak; and she was slower than usual. But her fangs were strong, and full of fire. And he knew it.

He had been careful to move ahead of his sister during their meanderings; ensuring himself a tiny advantage in the number of small prey that they both consumed. He had seen how readily she had killed their younger sibling; how eagerly her fangs had plunged into the upturned belly; how greedily she had drunk. That wouldn’t happen to him. If the time came for them to confront each other, those extra calories he’d been stealing could prove the deciding factor. Blood.

A small amount; but the two-clawed tips of his legs were sensitive to even the slightest variation in temperature. He could feel the fading warmth, and upon closer inspection he could smell the iron tang. The blood-trail led into the central doorway; doubtless another lengthy corridor. They continued their pursuit, appetites whetted by the scent of blood. For a long time there was only darkness. They were unfazed by it, descended as they were from creatures who had once relished the night. But it did make their progress slow, forcing them to stumble along like blind animals. They were alerted to the presence of looming walls only when their legs came into contact with damp surfaces. She thought she could feel the porcelain texture of more skeletons, but she didn’t have the patience to check. Her brother’s excitement, communicated only by a marginal decrease in his lethargy, was contagious. Her mind was off the pain that wracked her digestive tract; off the creeping numbness that tickled her limbs. She was thinking of prey now. She imagined the thundering thing paralysed by her venom. A mountain of flesh; enough to sustain them for moons on end. They could wrap it in silk, preserving its nutritional vigour for as long as they needed to. Perhaps it even had younglings that they could incapacitate for future use. It was strong, but they were patient, and careful, and silent.

A monstrous roar quashed her excitement immediately. It came bellowing out of the tunnel ahead of them; a tidal wave of sound. The vibrations generated from that leviathan wail were strong enough to pass through the unyielding stone. She instinctively scurried to a wall, her legs searching for some crevice or crack she could use to conceal herself. But she found nothing. The builders of this place had done their work well; the walls were smooth and firm. She settled for contracting herself into a tight ball of legs, and waited.

The roar came again, transmuting from a bassy growl to a puling sound. It was like the song of a great bovine creature. And she recognised another quality in the voice, a quality with which she was well acquainted after so many years hunting. It was the sound of death. A bundle of agony and rage and sadness. She felt a tinge of respect for the creature. It was a mere kernel of sympathy compared to the surfit of murderous instinct that motivated her, but it was sympathy all the same. She unfolded herself from the wall, and began to follow the desperate puling. She and her brother slowly became aware of a distant source of light. It was a wan yellow at the end of the corridor, seeming positively luminescent after their pitchblack journey. It was a relief to see again.

They finally emerged into a stone vault. Several chandeliers shone with what must have been moonlight reflected and refracted down from the surface by some arrangement of mirrors or polished reflectors. The rooms yellow ambience was provided by mountains of gold. Countless coins, ceremonial weapons, polished orbs, statuettes, gold-leafed scrolls, and fabrics. Amid the sea of yellow were silvers, rubies and emerald-festooned trinkets of all kinds. A latticed cage held what appeared to be gigantic samples of amber containing enormous winged insects with beak-like mouths. Some of the treasures were neatly segregated and stacked, but for the most part the room was disorganized. Stacks of copper artifacts waned green from oxidation. The brilliance of the gilt piles was slightly muted by a veil of dust, which grew thicker towards their bases. Grey hills snow-capped with gold. Kings would have been struck dumb by the sight, but she and her brother were unaffected. To them the real treasure was slumped at the edge of a dark pool; a rose of blood blossoming in the water.

As they advanced the thundering thing’s true scale became apparent. Each rattled breath seemed more desperate than the last. Its eyes, deep set and rolling madly with pain or fear, suddenly fixed on her. It stirred lazily, thick limbs quaking into life. Lips pulled back in half a snarl; a deep, earthquake rumble emerging from somewhere in its chest. Its enormous heft could almost be felt; like a swelling bubble of outward pressure in the air. Her hair tingled apprehensively. For a few terrible moments it seemed as if the thundering thing was going to rise up and crush her; all her perseverance and ingenuity wasted in a single moment. But after raising its belly from the ground by mere inches it re-collapsed into a prone position. The growl faded to what might be described as a whimper, although it was far deeper than any whimper she had ever heard. A single beady eye rolled back into its head, and then juddered into view again, blood-amber irises trying desperately to bring her into focus. Her brother emerged above the creature’s piston-muscled neck. His precise, slender legs knitting a path across the hapless creature’s spine. He found a small gap in the draconic scales, and prised it apart with his pedipalps. The creature did not protest as his venom penetrated its defences. It simply closed its eyes in resignation. After a short while its laboured breathing stopped altogether.

Triumph. She clambered up the creature’s huge front leg, hunger-induced weakness cast aside by a bolt of adrenaline. After so long without sustenance they had before them meat enough to last for a moon or more. It was still warm - nay, hot. Beneath that armoured hide lay a reservoir of blood and muscle. She would be able to quench the God of hunger that had wracked her so; she would feel her limbs galvanised with fresh protein, atrophied muscles rebuilding themselves. The fresh calories would stave off cold, and tiredness, and the insufferable pain of deprivation. There was hope again. They would survive. They would survive!

In her delirium she utterly failed to see the strike coming. An enormous pressure exerted itself on her thorax, threatening to splinter the protective carapace. Her legs thrashed wildly as she tried to break free, but her head was also pinned down. She never allowed herself to be taken unawares. She was sure the thundering thing had been dead. The ground was stained deep red with its blood, and it wasn’t breathing. Had her excitement really blinded her to the fact that it was still alive?

She was thrown headlong into the pool. Thick, muddied and blooded water splashed over her, impaling her with cold spasms. She wrenched herself free from the body of water, climbing ashore as fast as she could, trying to escape the abysmally low temperatures. Considering the relatively cosy atmosphere of the vaults the water was shocking. It compounded the hunger-induced enervation that assailed her, making her limbs feel heavy, and anchoring her bulky abdomen to the ground as effectively as if she had been pinned there by falling rock. The thundering thing lay unmoving; the rivulets of blood leaking from its flanks were still now, slowly coagulating into dark veins amidst the stone and gold. And then her gaze fell on her brother, mounted as he was on the nape of the creature’s vast neck. His forelegs were raised in a combative stance and his fangs pulsed with bridled wrath; eight black globes that were his eyes stared at her, unblinking and merciless. The unspoken edict was clear; it echoed in her mind like a scream, leaving no room for misinterpretation. My kill.

She thought about challenging him. For a split second her body tensed as she visualised how she would rip out his legs for his betrayal. Her mind flooded with emotions that would have been expressed as an ear-splitting shriek, had she the vocal cords to produce it. Treacherous Prey-Thing; Overgrown Grub; Insolent Pretender; Avaricious - but her rage, hot as it was, couldn’t eclipse the tiredness she felt. Back in the stomping grounds of her clan she had had status, and a strong body with which to defend it. But out here in the wilderness, in this dank cave carved by alien hands, in front of this creature the likes of which she had never seen, the clan seemed an eternity away. Their dispute was settled before it began, her brother’s victory secured by the most sacred of laws. He was stronger than her, and she knew it.

She retreated to a valley between two treasure piles. Ancient dust clung to her belly and legs in fuzzy clumps. That she would receiver her portion of the meal was a likelihood; she was a breeder, and he needed her to rejuvenate the clan. But the prize was his. He would suckle the most nutritious juices, and leave her the dregs, thereby cementing his dominance over her. She watched him with considerable envy as he pumped liquifying venom into the creature’s hide. Its dead heart would slow the process of liquefaction, but slow or nay, her brother’s poison would do its work. Cartilage, subcutaneous fat, muscle fibre and organs would be transmuted into readily digestible fluids. Her brother’s primordial digestive tract would have to expend only minimal energy in order to extract the required nutrients from the aforementioned soup.

As he ate she began to notice details about the thundering thing that had escaped her before. Most of the spines that protruded from the thing’s back were clearly made of keratin; decorative rather than defensive in nature. But some of the spines were made of wood, and stuck out at varying angles and lengths. At the point where the spines conjoined with the body there were silvery glints, and gore. It took her predator brain a while to recognise them as spears; what she thought of as man’s flying metal teeth. The thundering thing was porcupined with a smattering of them, some broken off at the blade. But they didn’t seem to have penetrated too far. None went deeper than the thick layer of fat that’d protected the creature’s muscles and organs; none had penetrated deep enough to kill it outright.

Her brother sutted his appetite with fervour. His eyes remained fixed on her position as he gorged himself. Within hours he would be strong again, and soon he would start to grow. Children of the clan never stopped growing entirely as long as there was sufficient food available. It was a blessing and a curse; increased size meant increased prowess as a hunter, but that same advantageous heft required more calories to maintain, and shrinking back down again was not an option. It was a effective characteristic for survival in an ecosystem full of large game; but during times of scarcity it created a brutal population bottleneck which only the skilled, lucky, or small would have a chance of surviving.

Over the next few hours she made a few attempts to eat, but her brother was not ready to relinquish his dominance just yet. A hiss from his dripping fangs was all it took to warn her back. And so she was condemned to wrestle with her infuriating hunger as her brother feasted. She did not think in words, but her mind buzzed with multi-faceted resentment towards her brother, as refined and determined as any man-thing could have felt. He atop the thundering thing with all the smugness of a fat goblin, his legs folded under him in the spider-analogue of a languorous pose. He was making her suffer; every consecutive minute of willingly endured hunger on her behalf further ingraining their new relationship. The new hierarchy.

He hissed. She flinched. She hadn’t done anything wrong, hadn’t moved a muscle. She’d settled into a state of suspended metabolism, bodily functions consuming as little energy as possible. She’d barely needed to breath.

He hissed again, more viciously this time. His forelegs snapped upwards in an aggressive stance, his languor gone in an instant. He wasn’t paying attention her. Her instincts came alive at once; the hierarchy dispute was settled, they would have to present a united front to whatever new threat her brother had spied. She clambered to the crest of a gold pile, making sure to stick to the shadows. It would have been better if her brother had let her eat - his imposition had been overdrawn. But enervated or not she was a formidable opponent for any creature that dared attack them. She scanned the vault for movement, her legs waiting to detect the slightest vibration or change in air pressure. But there was nothing.

Her brother hissed again. To another creature it might have been a sound indistinguishable from his first utterance, but to her experienced auditory receptors it was a scream of agony. She spun to face him. He was perched still on the great carcass, but spinning madly about, his legs swiping at imagined foes. Then, in a great scrambling, thrashing of legs he went tumbling down the creature’s flank. The crackling hiss that emerged from his mouthpiece then chilled her blood. It was a sound she had heard before, when her mother had been dismembered by goblins, and had been left as a quivering, legless husk on the forest floor. It was more than a simple scream of pain; it was a death rattle.

Her brother ran, then. He ran with all the mighty force and dexterity that his eight legs could muster. It was a run of pure, hopeless panic, all the while accompanied by a dreadful, unbroken exhalation of air, like that which had occasionally broken forth from the boggy loam of the marshes. Her brother’s sprint was off kilter, and he swooned like a toppling ship to impact with a pile of coins. A small avalanche of gold swept over his head and thorax. His quivering forelegs and pedipalps were stilled by the weight, but he continued to hiss, and his back legs continued to scramble. She did not go near him.

Normally she would have begun to consume him almost immediately; wasted food was an abhorrence far worse than cannibalism to her kind. But as a carrier of venom she was intimately familiar with the death throes of a creature that had been poisoned, and she knew without needing to check that her brother’s blood was full of death. He would expire beneath those gold coins as surely as the sun rose each morning. She ignored him, preferring not to witness his impotent struggling, which grew weaker by the minute, and instead she began to investigate the carcass of the thundering thing.

The entry point from which her brother had extracted his meal revealed nothing. There was no telltale scent or taste of poison; only the smell of food. It sent her belly into agonies of hunger, and it took considerable willpower to restrain herself from eating. But it wasn’t long before she discovered the source of her brother’s agony. Her pedipalps brushed against an exposed spear-head, and the blood that had congealed around it. Pain. She involuntarily hissed, just as her brother had done, and began cleaning her pedipalps with her forelegs frantically. The blood was utterly toxic. Man-things had poisoned the creature, more effectively than she, bolstered with a half dozen of her kin, could have done. Her brother, who had ingested God knows how much of the stuff, had stopped moving now, his legs clenched in rigour mortis.

Despair gripped her, like a pressure coming from all sides. Their quest for food, through marshes and pitch black tunnels, had led them to this. The two carcasses were poisoned; huge reserves of meat sullied by unnatural venoms. Their only chance of survival had been snatched from them. Her body, already teetering on the brink of death from starvation, felt like it was collapsing in on itself. As her brother’s struggling ceased, she scaled a nearby column and secured herself in a stone alcove, resigned to starve.

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‘I think I ate too much.’ He said. ‘I feel a bit sick.’

Brennan Dreth gave him a sharp look. Dreth was clad in gambeson, with a covering of chainmail that would have drowned a man of normal size. His face, which peered from beneath the rim of a kettle helm, was clad in dirt and sweat, and after two days riding he was beginning to smell worse than the bog. The smell certainly wasn’t helping Mulvaney’s growing nausea.

‘Shut it. And keep your eyes peeled.’ His voice was husky with dehydration. They had been walking through these clammy tunnels for hours now, with no end in sight. With the armour, and the flames from the torches, and the lack of fresh air, it was like walking through a stove. Mulvaney was sure he smelled no sweeter than Dreth.

‘S’trooth Brennan, is there some utility to your rudeness that I’m not aware of? Six weeks we’ve hunted this beast together, and you’re as cantankerous as when we first met.’ He turned to face Greyfeet, who waddled behind them in silence.

‘Think you could make a potion to cheer him up a bit?’

Greyfeet kept his eyes from meeting Mulvaney’s. He was smaller than the armour-clad mercenaries, with a little, bald head that bobbed atop a mass of flowing black robes, like a pale marble. He would generally answer when directly addressed, but would rarely offer conversation of his own volition. His dark, beady eyes unnerved Mulvaney. It was like looking into a bottomless pit; two zeroes staring back at you.

‘I don’t make potions, only poisons.’ Greyfeet said flatly.

They continued in silence for a while, Dreth taking the vanguard, torches casting flickering shadows across the stonework. They had discovered a corpse a while back; some poor armsman whose head had been ripped clean in two, and whose armour had formed a crushed and twisted cocoon around his skeleton. It had made Mulvaney’s blood run cold, the same way it had done when he’d encountered his first wildcat as a boy. Back then he’d weighed no more than 7 stone, and so the wildcat’s 5 stone frame, replete with inch-long claws and a jaw full of needles, had posed a serious threat. When he’d first spied the infernal creature, staring at him from betwixt a curtain of leaves, his heart had dropped a mile into the ground. To experience that same dread again made him feel like a child. Dreth and Greyfeet had been unflappable; and he’d be damned if he’d give them an excuse to call him craven. So he kept his nerves to himself. Besides, he should know better than to be shaken by the sight of an old corpse. Except...it wasn’t just the corpse, and the terrible implication of violent power that came with it. He had the distinct feeling that there were monsters nearby. Cold minds that crawled in the dark with predatory intent; eyeing his soft flesh with envy and greed.

‘This place is cursed.’ He announced, in as a matter-of-fact, nonchalant tone as he could manage. They ignored him, and so he said it again, more to himself this time. They walked past a dozen, chiaroscuro gargoyles before Greyfoot replied. His voice was a monotone buzz that rose to a callous rasp; surprising more because it was even offered than for how it sounded.

‘Cursed it might be. But this place looks like it might hold riches. I hear wyrms like riches. Bit akin to ravens or people in that way, I hear.’

Mulvaney looked at him. Greyfeet’s deep set eyes bobbed in and out of shadow, jet-black irises glinting like wolf-eyes in the torchlight. ‘Maybe this wyrm we’re looking for made its nest in gold.’ He finished. His stilted delivery almost made a non-sequitur of the statement.

‘If so, then the village elders will certainly give us a finders fee. After all, we’re the ones putting ourselves at risk to kill the beast.’ Mulvaney said.

Greyfeet remained expressionless. ‘That’s if we tell the elders what we find.’

‘Of course we have to tell them, this is their land by law. We’re sellswords not thieves.’

He unconsciously straightened his posture, pleased with his rebuttal. His mother had always called him virtuous. Tough, and strong, but virtuous. Greyfeet said nothing.

---------

She had lost any sense of time passing. If she’d cared to look, she would have seen that her Brother’s body had deflated with rot; a shell of fragile carapace intertwined with gold coins. The thundering thing had started to smell quite badly, although it didn’t bother her. Nothing bothered her now except the hunger, which had transformed itself from a roaring, nauseous pain to an icy feeling. Her insides had gone numb, interspersed with hollow pangs of agony; and her limbs, now locked beneath her in an imitation of her brother’s rigour mortis felt like they were being fossilized while she was still alive. She did not welcome death. She was a survivor. But at this point she would accept any escape from the pains of starvation, no matter what form it took.

A clamour of shrill sounds roused her from her dying reverie. It was very close; a ruckus of monkey-things singing their song of panting and low barks. No…it was not monkey-things, but man-things that sang. At first it seemed like many voices, but as she rose from her delirium of tiredness and hunger, the echoing chorus began to crystallise into three distinct sources. Her heart, for the first time in a long while, began to beat fast again. At first it beat with panic; her fine-haired legs should have detected the change in air pressure before they had even entered the room. She had been caught unawares, like a dumb prey animal. But as she re-ascertained that she was safely hidden, her fright turned to excitement.

Three of them had entered the room. One was very large for a man-thing, and clad in ringed, metal skin. The other was dressed similarly, but smaller in stature and probably younger, if she was any judge. Behind them both was a black-robed man-thing, opaque flasks tied around his belt. Although he was the least physically impressive of the three, she sensed in him a predator. While the other two man-things stood agape at the vault of treasures he stood behind them, away from the feeble light of the chandeliers. His shrewd face swiveled not an inch but she could feel his dark little eyes scanning the room. But eyes were all that the man-things’ had, and as good as they were they couldn’t penetrate the deeper shadows of the vault. They couldn’t see her. If she could have smiled, she would have.

The young man-thing was practically dancing as he navigated the mounds of treasure. His whoops and hollers rebounded off the stone walls like crashing waves. The big one barked at him, but his reprimand landed on deaf ears. He only stopped when he caught sight of the thundering-thing. They gathered around it in silence; metal skin clinking and opaque flasks chiming quietly, oblivious to her brother’s mostly obscured corpse. They covered their noses in disgust. She re-positioned herself so that she was directly above them, her legs buzzing into pain as fresh blood rushed into them. She was far too tired to attack all three at once.

The big one pointed at the thundering-thing, and sang a brusque command to the young one, who briefly protested and then obeyed. He took a long metal tooth on the end of a stick, similar to those that peppered the thundering-thing’s hide, and poked the giant carcass. Once, twice, thrice, and then four times. Each poke became less cautious, and more violent. The final jab succeeded in slicing a 5-inch deep layer of decaying tissue on the creature’s neck. The coiled tension that had animated the group dissipated, and they began to laugh again. The young one seemed especially excited. He danced about for a period, showering himself with gold coins - a behaviour which was so beyond her understanding that she didn’t even perceive it as noteworthy. Just another quirk of the man-things’ behaviour. Then, the young one turned his attention to the carcass, and covering his mouth with a cloth which transmuted his celebratory howls into muffled shouts, began to lift its heavy lips. A huge canine revealed itself, almost half the length of his body. He engaged himself in prying the thing away from its owner, using his own metal tooth to sever it from its holding. The canine was rooted deep in the thundering-thing’s jaw; not an easy thing to remove.

The big one and the old predator quietly walked away, pretending to admire the treasures. Once they were out of earshot of the young one they began communicating in a low song. She understood none of it. Their sweeping hand gestures and pointed whisperings were meaningless to her; but some primal part of her brain did begin to correlate their puzzling communications into a vague sense of something. Something recognisable. When she and her brother had killed their younger sibling, their silent conversations which had preluded the act had had some of the same cold furtiveness as that of the man-thing’s beneath her. And so her predator brain, for all its primitiveness, knew what would happen even before the young one did.

The kill was simple, and devastating. The big one got the young one’s attention, gesticulating at the gold and murmuring in a low voice. As the young man-thing leaned in to hear, the old predator gave him a gentle pat on the neck. He furrowed his brow at the affected familiarity, but made no issue of it. The poison which entered his bloodstream via the small prick of a thorn went unnoticed at first. He returned to his task of removing the giant tooth, quite oblivious to te perfunctory nods being exchanged behind him. The big one went away, returning into the corridor from whence he had emerged for some reason unknown to her. But the old predator waited and watched.

After a few minutes of steadily weakening labour, the young man-thing stumbled. He turned slowly, his eyes red and wide with disbelief. He muttered something to the old predator, and then attempted to lift his beloved metal tooth. With what must have been monumental, vengeful effort he swung it in a lazy arc towards the old predator. But his grip was weak, and the weapon went tumbling out of his hand at the apex of the swing. It landed in the dust with an ineffectual thud. Having lost his only means of defence he went stumbling towards the old predator, teeth bared in rage, spittle frothing at the corners of his mouth; hands strained into iron claws and feet pumping against the hard ground like hammers. And then, before the poor thing knew it, he was on his back. Overcome by the toxin in his system, head rolling in tearful defeat. The old predator stood over him, utterly impassive. She knew that the man-things did not eat each other, and even if they did the poison used to kill the young one - which she could very faintly detect and recognise with her olfactory senses as the same bitter brew which had ended her brother’s life - would have rendered his body inedible. She couldn’t fathom the purpose of the kill; perhaps it was a mating dispute, or a particularly ruthless hierarchic struggle. Either way, the old predator’s murderous triumph blinded him to the significance of the young one’s new expression of horror.

For the young one could see what the murderer could not. With his eyes cast to the ceiling he could see her. Hovering above them, her bulbous abdomen dwarfing the poisoner; eight legs peeling apart to form a grasping hand three times the length of a man. Her eye clusters locked on to his terrified mammalian eyes; his reddening flesh seemed as soft and vulnerable as an overripe fruit, in sharp contrast to her own white-speckled black carapace. But she had no interest in his poisoned flesh. She was descending with silent grace upon the hairless marble-head of the old predator. The young one received a fresh shot of adrenalin as the fullness of her visage crept into the light; to him she was a horror of the deep, a biological form torn straight from nightmares. Her scuttling, crawling physiology which moved with all the hypnotic gracefulness of ink dropped in clear waters suggested a fate worse than death. By the unknowable machinations of her digestive system they would not only be killed; they would be dissolved into their constituent nutrients and used as fuel to perpetuate the nightmare form that span down upon them. Upon him.

His adrenalin gave him the strength to temporarily overcome the paralysing effects of the poison, and he twisted on to his belly, summoning all the effort of his being to crawl away. The old predator emitted a shot, sharp bark that she failed to interpret as a scoff, and then kicked the young one onto his back again. He held him there this time, his boot on the young one’s hip. The subdued man-thing stopped struggling, as a new expression dawned on his tortured face; a resolute grimace directed at his murderer. With all the dexterity he could muster, which wasn’t much, he wrapped his arms around the leg that pinned him down, and held tight. Whatever he said after that, in his broken voice, finally caused the old predator to look up.

The explosion of panic that followed made her feel at home again. The old predator tried to dart away, and if he’d managed it she would probably have been too weak to pursue him. But the young one’s grip, as clumsily formed as it may have been, was just strong enough to delay his flight. Her leg hairs vibrated in a display of gratitude the young man-thing had no hope of understanding, but she did it anyway. He did not smile back, but tightened his death grip on the terrified murderer. This was the way it was meant to be; unsuspecting prey-thing noticing her deadly approach just a little too late, his body uncorrupted by any poison but her own. The old predator fumbled for the flasks at his side, but his panicked fingers dropped one to the ground, and by the time he’d secured a trembling grip on another it was already too late. Her fangs pulsed with liquid fire, and her pedipalps pried apart in moist anticipation. The hunger that coiled inside her like a living thing howled in tremulous ecstasy.

It was time to eat.