Chapter 87 — Deeper Than Before
They broke camp at first light, the party moving with the same disciplined caution Torin had promised the night before — Sera’s detection wards extended ahead of their advance, everyone’s gear checked and rechecked before a single step forward.
"Signature’s stable," Sera reported, an hour into their careful approach. "Not moving toward us, not moving away. Might not have noticed us yet, or it simply doesn’t consider us worth reacting to."
"Neither option’s especially comforting," Priya muttered.
They pressed on through terrain that grew steadily stranger the deeper they went — the stunted trees giving way to something closer to petrified husks in places, the ground itself carrying an unsettling, faintly crystalline quality that crunched underfoot like frost even in the mild warmth of the day.
"This isn’t natural growth pattern damage," Eldrin said, crouching to examine a patch of the crystallized earth. "This looks almost deliberate. Cultivated, in some strange way."
"Cultivated by what?" Torin asked.
"That," Arlen said quietly, "might be exactly what we’re about to find out."
They came upon the first sign of the creature’s presence perhaps another hour further in — an enormous web, easily thirty feet across, strung between two of the valley’s largest surviving trees, its silken strands carrying the same faint, crystalline sheen as the ground beneath it.
"Spider," Torin said, unnecessary confirmation given the evidence stretched before them, though his voice carried a tightness that suggested the scale of the web had genuinely unsettled him. "A big one."
"How big?" Priya asked.
Sera’s expression had gone carefully neutral, the professional mask she’d maintained since her first detection reading now fully in place. "Big enough that I’d want considerably more preparation than we currently have before engaging it directly."
Eldrin, despite the evident danger, couldn’t quite suppress his scholarly fascination, already sketching the web’s structure with quick, careful strokes. "This is remarkable. I’ve read accounts of large arachnid predators in the southern territories, but nothing at this scale, and certainly nothing documented this far north."
"Professor," Arlen said gently, "I think documentation should wait until we’re somewhere safer to do it."
They retreated a cautious distance to properly discuss their approach, and it was during this careful deliberation that the ambush came — not from the web itself, but from the crystallized ground beneath their feet, the Ashveil Broodmother erupting upward in a shower of shattered earth with a speed that defied its evident, massive bulk.
It was larger than anything Arlen had imagined, its body alone easily the size of a cart, eight legs spanning wide enough to blot out considerable stretches of the canopy above, its carapace carrying the same pale, crystalline sheen as the terrain it had clearly shaped around itself over years of undisturbed dominance.
"Scatter!" Torin shouted, already moving.
The party broke in different directions as the creature’s first strike came down where they’d been standing, one massive leg driving deep into the earth with enough force to send a visible shockwave rippling outward. Arlen rolled clear, calling on Enduring Vitality to steady his balance as he came up already assessing the threat properly.
Sera’s barrier snapped into place around Priya and Eldrin, buying them precious seconds as the creature reoriented, its many eyes — Arlen counted at least six, each carrying the same faint luminescence he remembered from the smaller predator pack — fixing on the scattered party with unnerving, deliberate awareness.
Torin engaged first, driving a strike into one of its forelegs with Aura flaring bright along his blade, and the creature responded with a speed nobody had properly accounted for, one of its rear legs whipping around to catch him across the chest and send him tumbling hard across the crystallized ground.
"Torin!" Priya’s voice carried genuine alarm, already moving to help despite the barrier’s protection.
Arlen closed the distance, calling on Storm Step to reach Torin’s position before the creature could press its advantage, and found himself, for one desperate moment, standing directly beneath the Broodmother’s looming bulk, its many eyes swiveling to fix on this new, closer threat.
It struck at him with a foreleg, and he barely managed Aura Ward in time, the impact still driving him hard into the ground despite the technique’s absorption, pain flaring bright across his side as he scrambled to put distance between himself and the creature’s next strike.
Then the venom came — a sudden, hissing spray from some gland near its mandibles, and Arlen threw himself sideways on pure instinct, feeling droplets sear against his exposed forearm even as he avoided the worst of it. The pain was immediate and disorienting, a spreading numbness that made his hand clumsy around his sword’s grip.
"It’s got some kind of caustic venom!" he shouted, backing away while shaking feeling back into his fingers. "Don’t let it hit you directly!"
Sera, working frantically to reinforce her strained barrier, called back, "Torin’s hit worse than that — I think some got into the wound from its leg strike!"
Arlen glanced toward where Priya knelt over Torin, her hands already glowing with restorative magic, her expression tight with genuine alarm rather than her earlier calm professionalism. "How bad?"
"Bad enough that we need to retreat, now, before it gets worse!"
The Broodmother, seemingly displeased by the venom’s failure to immediately incapacitate its prey, reared back and unleashed a stream of webbing toward the retreating party, the silken strands catching Eldrin across one leg and dragging him off balance before Arlen managed to sever the strand with a hasty, desperate strike.
"We can’t outrun it carrying Torin," Sera said, her voice tight with barely controlled panic. "It’s too fast, and that barrier’s not going to hold much longer against strikes like that."
Arlen understood, in that moment, with the same cold clarity that had once settled over him facing Millbrook’s creature, that someone needed to make a decision the rest of the party couldn’t afford to make for them.
"Get Torin and Eldrin clear," he said, forcing his voice into something steadier than he actually felt. "Sera, maintain whatever barrier you can manage while you retreat. I’ll hold it here."
"Alone?" Priya’s voice cracked with disbelief. "Arlen, that thing nearly took Torin’s arm off—"
"I know." He met her eyes, steady despite everything screaming inside him to simply run alongside them. "I’ve got abilities you haven’t seen yet. Trust me on this, or we all die here together instead of just risking one of us."
Eldrin, despite his own dazed disorientation from the webbing, managed to focus enough to speak. "Arlen, this isn’t—"
"Professor, please." Arlen’s voice carried a plea beneath its urgency. "Get them safe. I’ll follow once I’ve dealt with it, or bought you enough distance that it won’t catch up."
The Broodmother shrieked, a grinding, chittering sound that set every nerve in Arlen’s body on edge, and reared back for another strike, and there was no more time for argument.
"Go!" Arlen shouted, already moving to intercept the creature’s attention, drawing on every reserve he had left as Sera finally, reluctantly, began pulling the wounded party back through the crystallized terrain, her barrier flickering weakly around them as they retreated.
The Broodmother’s attention fixed fully on Arlen now, its many eyes gleaming with the same eerie luminescence he remembered, and he understood, standing alone against something considerably beyond anything he’d faced before, that whatever happened in the next several minutes would determine far more than simply his own survival.
He drew Enduring Vitality’s steady warmth through his entire body, planted his feet against the crystallized earth, and met the creature’s next devastating charge with everything he had left to give.