novelxo Chapter Black Widows
“You should pay attention to this,” Ronthiel warned the boy, nudging him.
Today’s class was about spiders. The boy yawned with disinterest as he stood around the front table with the other students. On it, the teacher, the Lady Mariel, had a collection of glass vials, each containing a different spider she had collected. Mariel would hold up a vial, describe and name the spider, before passing it around the class for their examination.
Their teacher expected her elves to identify venomous spiders from non-venomous, even be able to identify it by its web, including how long it took to weave. That way, when someone or something passed through it and broke the web, an elf could tell how long ago whatever he was tracking had blundered through it. Likewise, any elf not wishing to be tracked avoided breaking them.
The boy was not much interested. Few spiders were poisonous, most of their webs looked the same to him, and he seldom saw their webs before blundering into them, anyway. He knew they had eight legs and had once caught one just to see how big it would get by feeding it insects. From that experience, he learned spiders were rather timid and picky hunters (And—yes—it did grow pretty big.). They avoided prey that flew into their webs which, if they judged to be too big or that could sting, they wouldn’t go near. The boy thought that amount of information to know was already useless and he saw no reason to know anymore.
So his response to Ronthiel was to yawn.
He had arrived late for school that day. The boy had stayed up too late the night before, playing his flute for the fairies and had overslept. Normally, he’d have arrived in time to talk with Ronthiel before class but not today. Yet he’d been glad to see the elf had gotten home all right last night, as he had not seen Leradien afterward. In fact, this was his only reason for coming to school today—to make sure Ronthiel was all right when Leradien didn’t come back.
“Having discussed the nonpoisonous spiders,” the teacher went on. “Let’s now move on to the poisonous spiders. Poisonous spiders usually carry markings on their shell as a warning to other predators. Here is an example,” she said, passing around a glass vial. “This is a brown violin spider. On the back of its abdomen, you will see the violin-shaped emblem that identifies it. Its poisonous bite produces a red mark where bitten. The area then swells with a white blister, after which the red area enlarges significantly as the flesh dies. Although seldom fatal, the wound can take up to six months to heal.”
Boring, thought the satyr. Why would anyone get bitten by a violin spider?
“Poisonous spiders can also be identified by their webs, which tend to be loose and irregular. Are there any questions so far?”
Certainly not from the boy who glanced warily about in fear others would have questions and deliberately prolong this boring classroom agony.
“The next spider we’ll discuss is this large, black, shiny one. Known as the black widow for killing and eating its own mate, its distinctive warning marking is a red hourglass shape on its abdomen.”
“Are you getting this, Master Satyr?” asked Ronthiel in a whisper.
Getting what? The boy wondered. Why should this lesson possibly hold any interest to him?
“She’s quite deadly. Her paralyzing bite is far more venomous than most snakes,” the teacher was saying, “and can cause severe pain and muscle cramping. She can also carefully meter out the exact amount of poison she wishes to inject. Most spiders don’t wish to kill but paralyze only. That keeps its victim fresh.”
The jar was handed to him, and the boy took a glance at it and passed it to Ronthiel.
“Didn’t you notice, Master Satyr?” the elf asked the boy.
What was he to have noticed?
“Like most poisonous spiders, the web of the black widow is erratically woven but, in this case, also unusually strong,” the teacher concluded. “Any questions?” she asked.
Draugo had one.
“I understand Lolth is a black widow,” he said.
Heads all turned in Draugo’s direction. Had he just said the name they thought he said?
Lolth was the spider queen that ruled the drow. She was their keeper and was unusual for she was the only keeper who was a woman, being a man’s split-off. Yet that had not lasted long before she had been turned into a huge, bloated spider with a woman’s head and cast into the underground abyss as her punishment when she rebelled against the head keeper, Azazel. From that abyss, she still ruled the drow and commanded they worship her. She kept the drow fighting amongst each other so that only the strongest drow survived and so that they were too busy killing each other to plot to kill her.
No one brought up Lolth’s name publicly. It was like naming a family child murderer.
But the question had been asked and so the teacher answered.
“Yes,” she said. “Lolth has the body of black widow spider—many times larger than this one, of course.”
“Can you tell us about spider demons?” Draugo wanted to know.
Again, heads turned. Why was he asking this?
“That’s a little off subject,” the teacher replied, “but, if you must know, a spider demon is a mindless creation, acting only on instinct. They cannot enter this world unless summoned by a gateway. Only a tainted drow priestess of Lolth or Lolth, herself, can summon them. By instinct they hunt other black blooded creatures but, when summoned, they will mindlessly attack a red-blooded drow when ordered to and then fuse their spider bodies to their victim, creating a drider.”
“And what happens to the drow that becomes a drider?” Draugo asked.
The boy’s eyes warily moved to the teacher. Draugo, he knew, was asking about Leradien.
“The attacked drow undergoes excruciating pain, to the point of possibly going insane,” their teacher answered. “Even if the drow retains its sanity, it becomes tainted by the demon’s black blood mixing with its own when their bodies fuse together and become one. The most dangerous thing a demon can do is to ‘taint’ an unwilling drow. If the drow does not have special training, the tainted blood will quickly transform it into another demon that desires to taint others. Even if the demon does not completely consume the drow’s personality, they will still share the same black blood—blood which more or less makes the drow the offspring of the demon as it affects its mind and body.”
“Any benefits to being a drider?” asked Draugo.
“Hardly,” was the expected reply. “They are, of course, immune to possession from a demon, since they are already possessed, anyway. Their senses and powers are all enhanced by their black blood that its demon might help keep it alive. Otherwise, there are no benefits and only negatives to being a drider. We all know the darker effects. Their red eyes begin to glow and they become more vicious and aggressive, adopting spider instincts. Their minds can also change, and their habits and personality can shift. They are always on the border of losing to madness, unable to keep it at bay. One day, they all eventually wake up just a crazed, empty shell, and with the demon in full control of the body, the soul of the original person completely lost.”
The eyes of the rest of the class were no longer on either Draugo or the teacher anymore. Everyone’s eyes were on the boy. They all knew about his drider. As the class’s attention shifted to the boy due to his connection with Leradien, it was as if the threads of suspicion were unraveling, exposing a previously concealed layer of curiosity and doubt among his peers.
After class, Ronthiel hurried to catch up with the boy outside who was still angry he had been singled out for knowing Leradien.
“That Draugo!” the boy complained. “Why did he have to bring up Leradien?”
“Bring up Leradien?” asked the surprised elf. “We were having a class on spiders. Why wouldn’t he?”
“Leradien is not a spider!”
“I’ll wager the fairies think differently. But no matter your view, half of her is.”
“Not the half that thinks,” the boy countered. “Her spider demon half is mindless. The teacher said so!”
“The teacher also said it has instincts that affect the drider’s mind, instincts it transfers to its drow victim. Your Leradien has those instincts. You can’t deny it!”
“She does not!”
“She does too. She tried to kill me last night!”
The boy blinked unexpectedly in sudden shocked surprise and dismay at this. He paused and said, “I don’t believe you!”
“You heard me,” said Ronthiel. “She tried to kill me! She and that cat! They were waiting on the trail ahead of me. I saw them both. She claimed she ran the cat off, but only after I put an arrow in her!”
“You put an arrow in Leradien?” the boy gasped.
“Oh! Don’t worry! It bounced off her like she was made of iron. But the cat took off before I could let the arrow fly. It knew I’d heard them both. And, unlike Leradien, my arrow wouldn’t have bounced off it!”
“I sent Leradien after you to protect you from the cat,” stated the boy.
“Yes. So she said,” scoffed Ronthiel. “She sounded mighty convincing of it too, except she was ahead of me in waiting instead of behind me in warning! She wanted me to believe that she was innocent. She said you even made a bargain with her for her to do it. Is that true?”
“Yes,” the boy replied. “We made a bargain for your protection. If you think she didn’t keep it, why didn’t she kill you?”
“Because I still held another arrow on her black heart!”
The boy turned instantly at that in disapproval.
“You’re not to kill Leradien!” he said.
“Why not?” demanded Ronthiel. “She’s trying to kill me!”
“She saved you from the ogress!”
“Out of what?” Ronthiel scoffed. “The kindness of her heart?”
“She wouldn’t kill anyone. I know her.”
“Weren’t you listening in class?” Ronthiel warned. “Leradien won’t just kill me. She’ll kill you, too! Didn’t you see that black spider that was handed to you? The spider the teacher said that would kill and eat its own mate?”
“The one she called a black widow?”
“Yes! That’s the one—the one with the red hourglass on its abdomen! You saw it, didn’t you? Leradien has the same black shell and the same red hourglass. Haven’t you noticed? She’s a black widow, Master Satyr, the same as Lolth herself!”