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You wake up, which is quite the shock. You had, after all, flung yourself violently off the stern of an airship that was in the middle of a violent mutiny or raid, you’re still not super sure. The last thing you remember was the sensation of falling at the sound of explosions and breaking being drowned out by wind. You had been under the assumption that if hitting the water didn’t kill you, being unconscious (hopefully) in the ocean definitely would? Like, you’re not an expert, but you do know humans are notoriously extremely fragile and easily killed. At the time, it had felt like very dramatic overkill.
Maybe this is the afterlife? From everything you’d read in high elf libraries, it had seemed like the afterlife was at the very least probable, although who knew when it came to humans? High elf philosophy was unclear on who, precisely, was in possession of a soul. High elves for sure had them, what with all the magic, but what about the less magically inclined races? Monsterkin? And down at frankly the very bottom of the list were humans, who, as far as anyone could tell, didn’t even have any gods or anything that might imply a soul or an afterlife or anything. Even the monster races had gods.
The afterlife feels suspiciously like a beach. You’re covered in sand and there’s water lapping steadily at your legs and chest. Also, everything, and you mean everything hurts the absolute second you try to move, which seems like a mean prank for the afterlife. You’re not ruling it out, though. Living as a human sucked, so being dead as one should logically suck too.
You manage to crack one bleary, sand and salt crusted eye open. You see a crab scurrying along the sand, sideways in your vision. Does the afterlife have crabs? You suppose it might as well. You try moving again, and your whole body protests, but not to the extent that you think anything is broken. Which would be weird, right, considering you jumped out of an airship? So maybe the afterlife is just achy. You don’t know how this shit works.
Wincing and gasping quietly, you manage to support your weight on hands and knees and crawl forward along the beach, away from the steadily lapping sea (of souls? maybe). If this is the afterlife, you’re disappointed, but that’s fair. You don’t know why you would have even thought subconsciously that death would be a better deal than life. Once you’ve pathetically crawled sufficiently far away from the ocean, enough for the sand to stop being wet and smooth and start sticking to every possible inch of your skin, you collapse back down onto the ground. You lay there for a while, as one by one, sensations other than “ow” begin to return to your body.
The wind is sharp. That’s the first non-pain related thing you take note of. You roll onto your back, and register that the sky is not a bright, sunny blue, but a dreary and ominous grey. That tracks. Sharp wind plus grey sky plus wet you equals cold, that’s the next thing you register. Pain and cold. Absolute zero for two in terms of afterlife quality here.
Well, if rolling over and dying isn’t an option (seeing as how you are maybe already dead), it’s probably time to stop rolling around in the sand feeling sorry for yourself. With a groan that’s more of a quiet whimper, you sit up. Your head is throbbing and you hurt where cold isn’t making your body numb.
The ocean would stretch out for infinity, if not for the very, very large broken shapes out there in the distance. You wouldn’t say that they’re recognizably ships. They’re actually more like burning hunks of wreckage. However, there is not normally smoking wreckage in the ocean. You have a growing suspicion that the rebels definitely successfully destroyed at least one ship, which makes sense because you’re pretty sure you heard the engine exploding. You also have a growing suspicion that this isn’t the afterlife, you just used a lifetime’s worth of accumulated luck in one fell swoop to somehow survive jumping off an exploding airship into the ocean.
You’re going to have to process how you feel about that later, because right now it does appear like you’ve been marooned on a possibly deserted island, where the only other survivors nearby would be either rebels who want to kill you or high elf soldiers who want to kill you. And also you are a human in the wild, which is kind of like being a pre-cooked chicken on a werewolf farm. Also, you were a relatively pampered slave of a high-ranking admiral and noble, which means your survival skills stop somewhere around “can start a fire with a magical high elf firestarter.” Also, either you were unconscious for twelve hours (possible) or whatever storm is making the winds kick up is really making it look like it’s getting dark.
Life is really conspiring to make your death as drawn out as possible. You should have asked that high elf traitor to do you solid and run you through on the spot. You should have just gone back to the admiral’s cabin and died at your master’s feet like a good slave should, so maybe at least the high elf god would take mercy on your maybe-soul and give you a shot at a decent afterlife. But no. You just had to throw yourself into the ocean.
Alright. Alright. Enough feeling sorry for yourself. There would be time for that later, probably while you slowly die from exposure and/or starvation. For right now, you need to get off the beach and look for some kind of shelter. The treeline looks incredibly thick, which is promising inasmuch as it offers some shelter for the rain you’re certain is going to start any second. Trees! Nature’s umbrella!
You head cautiously into the woods, which are significantly harder to walk through than high elf parks. You have some vague memories of forests from when you were very small, but you’d thought they were exaggerated from your tiny perspective. Maybe not… these trees are huge and some of them are stunningly tall. You almost immediately notice some seem to have fruit growing on them, which is promising. You’re not sure if it’s ripe, or edible, but the existence of fruit trees makes you slightly more optimistic. You might not immediately starve to death, once you ensure you don’t die from exposure!
Which isn’t going well. You hadn’t thought about it, but going into the trees just blotted out the limited light from the sun even faster. The storm might be coming in fast, or it could actually just be getting dark, or it could be tree cover, but all you know is it’s getting harder and harder to see clearly. You’d wandered in with the general idea of finding a cave or rocky overhang or something like they tend to in stories, but you’re just finding trees, no matter how far you walk. And you walk… pretty far. There’s no point in stopping until you find like, shelter or water or something. Being ‘lost’ doesn’t matter if the place where you started is as unhelpful as ‘random beach.’ Right?
It’s getting so dark.
Also, you’re hearing things, and maybe it’s the wind, or maybe you’re an idiot human who wandered deep into an unknown forestjunglething on an island that might be deserted or might be full of giant hungry monsterkin who are salivating at the mere thought of delicious manflesh. Or, with your luck, it’s inhabited entirely by orcs. As you stumble through the jungle, repeatedly telling yourself that nothing is going to chase you if you don’t start running and everything will be fine if you just keep walking at a steady pace, a slide show of every scary monster you ever read about in a high elf library parades through your mind. Not that there were a lot of them. You were easily spooked and after a book on spiderkin had given you night terrors for weeks, your caretaker had forbidden you from reading any bestiaries. A wise decision that leaves you with only the vaguest concept about what exactly might be coming to eat you.
You’re not going to find a cave. You have to accept that.
With that in mind, when you see a massive tree with roots sticking up from the ground, you feel like you’ve been saved. It’s no secure cave, but the roots are pretty close together, creating a sort of cage and a lot of hidden nooks and crannies. There’s probably hella bugs in there, but there’s nothing large enough to eat you, and, in fact, it kind of looks like nothing large enough to eat you could even fit in. You’d read a human biology book once that theorized that your species had survived mostly by being small enough to hide in tiny little nooks and crannies, kind of like wood elves. You’re just going back to your roots. By climbing into some roots.
The roots have the tree lifted off the ground, almost like there used to be dirt here once, but there isn’t anymore, and the roots were so strong and deep that the tree just stayed upright despite the fact the trunk didn’t actually go into the ground. Or maybe it was supposed to do this. You don’t know, you’re not a fucking tree expert. You know seventeen different ways to present tea, instead.
Gods above, you’re going to die horribly out here. But maybe not tonight, because you and tree are going to make this work. You’re going to hide down here all night or all storm or whatever and in the morning you’re going to scavenge for fruit or whatever. Definitely. For sure.
You have been prolonging your death one stupid decision at a time since you found your master dead in his cabin. You’re just making it worse for yourself.
You cover your ears, as if you can drown out your own internal voice. La la la, I can’t hear you, common sense! LA. LA. LA.
“…That’s not a very good hiding spot, you know.”
If you were a rugged survivalist or even the smart version of a human, you would, at the sound of an unfamiliar voice in a dark forest on an island you thought had been deserted, stay super still and quiet. Unfortunately, you’re you, so you jump, flail, and hit your head on a root.
“Seriously, under the roots of a banyan tree?” Mental note: this is a banyan tree. “Honestly, you’re more likely to get yourself stuck than anything. Anyone can see you down there; the shape of your shadow looks extremely unnatural.”
You hope, briefly, that this is a rescue. After all, whoever this is, they’re talking to you and not trying to eat you, so that’s somewhat promising, right? Can monster races even speak Common? Probably not, right? They probably speak some weird hissy language full of sounds that elven or human mouths couldn’t even make! Feeling mildly optimistic but still cautious, you squirm around to try and peek through the roots.
You see the shape of a lot of limbs. Like, too many limbs. Way too fucking many limbs. Also? Too many eyes. That thing out there is vaguely person shaped, yes, but it is in possession of many limbs and too many eyes and are those fucking mandibles oh god oh god oh god–
You mentioned earlier you were scared of many things, such as heights, and the dark? Well, as it so happens, you’re also fucking terrified of spiders–like, “master finds you crying and hiding in the hallway because you saw a spider on the ceiling and then it fell down and scurried away and it could be anywhere just waiting to fucking crawl on you” terrified of spiders. Like “you are a grown adult and will run away from a two inch spider and that is a giant person-shaped monster one that is definitely fully capable of eating you, and also is probably about to.
You don’t scream, mostly because you’re paralyzed in terror and if humans have souls yours is leaving your body as you speak.
“You’re not quiet at all,” the horrifying monster continues, apparently unaware of the fact you’re now having a panic attack and regretting so much that you didn’t just die conveniently with your master. “I thought there was another spiderkin, skirting around the edges of our territory again… They’re always fucking testing. But you’re small… and kind of stupid?” He squats down, squinting at you through the roots, and you scramble backwards on pure animal instinct.
“You a youngling, maybe? Don’t know where the boundaries are yet? I know you ferals don’t exactly raise your young right, just send them off into the world to get killed, really, then wonder why your population is dwindling.” He scoffs. “You’ll notice we don’t have that problem.”
Alright. Okay. The giant terrifying spider monster is definitely, in fact, a spiderkin, which is the monster race most notorious for being antisocial, violent, and eating anything that moves, including many things bigger than them, which you, notably, are not. Literally the worst possible thing to run into of maybe every single monster race in the entire world. And he thinks you’re a baby spider, because he’s stupid and can’t see that you have normal-person number of eyes and arms, you guess, because you’re hiding in this tree, which is, by the way, now your home where you live forever because you are never ever fucking coming out from under it.
“You can stop cowering,” the terrifying monster that is going to eat you says. “Get out from under there. I’m not going to kill a youngling. I might be a huntsman spiderkin, but I do have some standards… unlike you lot.”
In a distant part of your mind, you think to yourself that this must be what wild humans are like. You’ve never felt so propelled by pure animal instinct. You don’t remember the raid on the wood elf village very well, but as you recall, you’d been scared but also having human emotions like “I WANT MY MOMMY” and such. By contrast, right now you feel like a terrified wild animal. You feel like hissing or growling. If you had any natural defenses whatsoever you would be catapulting them one after another.
Humans, quite famously, have literally no natural defenses whatsoever. They’re actually stunningly unique in that aspect. Now, as you cower defensively underneath a tree, trying to avoid being eaten by a giant spider monster, your mind runs through every defense that other, better species have. The ability to spit venom. Large teeth for ripping and tearing. Spines. Defensive fart spray. You’ve got fucking nothing.
“Hey, are you listening to me?” The monster sounds irritated, which is a bad sign. “I said get out. You’re still in huntsman territory; I can’t just leave you here. I’ll escort you to the edge of it and you can run off to terrorize the forest another day.”
You curl up tighter around one of the roots. You may bare your teeth. You’re not entirely sure.
“Come on, you piece of shit. If you make me drag you out from those roots, I can’t guarantee I’m not going to tear one of your limbs off. On accident, I mean. Probably.”
Nope. No. Absolutely not. Tree is life, tree is love. You are not coming out from under the fucking tree.
That was your steadfast opinion right up until a huge fucking arm stabbed its way effortlessly into your little root haven and grabbed one of your legs before you had so much as a chance to kick. The hand is so huge that it wraps around your thigh with ease; it’s coal black, although that might be partially the shadows, and has a cold, chitinous texture. The hand is big enough that its fingertips barely make contact with your skin, which is good, because they end in large, sharp claws.
It starts to pull and you yelp in immediate agony.
“I tried to make it easy,” the monster reminds you.
“I’ll come out!”
Your own voice startles you; for a minute there, you think you’d forgotten how to speak. Common sounds rough and awkward on your tongue; you spoke high elven with your master almost exclusively, and your common was mostly used when talking to the other slaves–something you did as infrequently as possible.
Astonishingly, the hand actually lets go of your leg. You squash the brief flare of optimism this causes by reminding yourself that he thinks you’re a baby spiderkin. Once he realizes you’re a plump, delicious human, his tune will change. But getting your legs torn off won’t help, and so, shaking and crying, you crawl out from under the roots of your precious banyan tree. You curl up as close to them as you can, unwilling to go any further once you’re technically out from under the tree.
You can see the spiderkin clearly now, although you wish you couldn’t. You’re willing to admit that cowering on the ground might be making it look larger than it is in actuality, but you swear it’s like eight feet tall. Its skin is ashy and dark in the terrible lighting; it could be any color at all and you suspect you wouldn’t know. What you do know is that despite having roughly human (or elf) proportions in the sense that it has two legs, a torso, a head, and one set of arms where they ought to go, what it also has is way too many extra limbs. They arch out as if attached to the back, which you guess in a sense they are, although your mind half-remembers anatomy sketches out of childhood nightmares. Those limbs aren’t particularly human at all, being essentially just giant spider legs from hell (not actually from hell; things from hell are arguably worse but you don’t see how right now). A lot of your newest nightmare is unclear due to the dark lighting–small mercies–but what you can extremely see is the extra eyes, four pairs in various sizes, seeming to glow a deadly red in the darkness.
This is a spiderkin. This is one of the many horrifying monsters that terrorized humanity (and arguably everyone else) in ages past, reshaped by the New Gods after the War. They could have done a better fucking job, in your humble opinion, because spiderkin are still notoriously unfriendly psychopathic monsters that feast on anything that holds still long enough.
“There, was that so hard?” The monster sounds exasperated. “For pity’s sake, your tiny… wait. Where are your limbs? Where’s… where’s any of you?”
Almost in slow motion, the monster reaches out towards you, and you discover you have reached your absolute limit for things you can handle without going batfucking insane. With a terrified screech that you didn’t know your body could produce, you grab a large broken branch from amongst the banyan roots and begin swinging it wildly at the spiderkin. You smack it again and again in a blind panic, as if you’re in the library back home trying to smash a bug with a book so it doesn’t touch you with its horrible little legs.
“Hey! Whoa! Stop! Ow! Will you fucking stop, I’m trying to help–OW. Oh, that is it.” The spiderkin, unfortunately, is in possession of opposable thumbs–the gods’ cruelest joke–and catches the branch in one hand. With a seemingly effortless twist, it tears it out of your hands and throws it to the side. In retaliation, you pick up and throw a rock, which misses. You have found humanity’s natural defenses, you think, and it’s screeching in terror and flailing wildly. You are letting out every violent instinct you never had for the past few decades of life, throwing sticks and handfuls of dirt. When the spiderkin closes in, because obviously it’s going to fucking grab you, you kick wildly, your back against the tree, like a violent toddler resisting being picked up.
“Fucking hold still you wriggly little piece of shit!” Despite your valiant attempts at self-defense, it seems humiliatingly easy for the spiderkin to overpower you. It grabs your legs first with one hand, and then pins them down into the dirt with just one before tucking your ankles under what you suspect is a knee but might also be one of the extraneous limbs. “For fuck’s sake, stop squirming, what are you even trying to accomplish?” You are trying to accomplish violence, and it is not your fault your species is the worst at it.
It grabs your arms, and you’re close enough now to see its horrible fucking fangs and the way its mouth opens way too wide, wider than a mouth on a humanoid head should. Unable to release the pure animal terror through violence anymore, your body apparently opts for method two: you open your mouth and let out a piercing, terror-filled scream at a decibel you hadn’t realized you were physically capable of.
“Augh! Are you out of your mind?!” Seeming strangely frantic, the terrifying-spiderkin-monster-that-is-going-to-eat-you shoves a massive clawed hand over your mouth. It is also over your nose. It’s kind of over your entire face, a little. Now that it’s on top of you, you really don’t think you’d been overestimating its size earlier. You’re used to things being bigger than you, what with high elves being tall and humans being comically short, but high elves tend to be very beautifully proportioned with slender bodies and long limbs. This thing, by contrast, is built like a brick shithouse and has too many fucking limbs. Way too many limbs that are too long. You hadn’t entirely realized before that they were pulled in close to his body. Now, however, they’ve spread wide out and have boxed you in, clawed tips digging into the wood of the tree.
You’re going to die and it’s going to suck so fucking bad holy shit.
“Stop pulling at my wrist,” it orders, and you notice that you’d been doing that. You’d actually been clawing, but you don’t think it had noticed, since its skin there is chitin and you have useless human fingernails and not claws. You can’t breathe super well, a fact you try to communicate by hitting its arm repeatedly. It doesn’t appear to translate. “I can literally feel you still trying to scream; I am not taking my hand off your stupid little mouth. You’re going to attract everything hungry in a ten mile radius screaming like that, you fucking idiot.”
You try to bite the hand. It doesn’t even begin to work.
“Look, you’re obviously one of those little elf things. I don’t know what you’re doing so far from the coast, but you’re deep in spiderkin territory. It’s a miracle I found you and you didn’t wander into a funnelweb nest, because we are not far from the edge of our territory. If you scream like that, something will definitely hear you. Multiple somethings. So instead of getting us swarmed, I need you to be quiet.”
You can barely squirm, and you’re getting lightheaded. This is it. This is how it fucking ends. With each promised death being worse than the last, you dazedly realize that if you don’t take this one, the next one is probably going to getting swarmed by every spiderkin in the area and torn apart while you’re still alive or something. Life keeps telling you to lay down and die and you keep not, and where is it getting you? Worse deaths!!! It’s just getting you worse fucking deaths!
You go limp, and the spiderkin seems to appreciate that, which makes sense. His grip on your face relaxes somewhat.
“That’s it,” he says. “Just calm down. Breathe through your nose. Not… not like that.”
This is no fucking time for him to get picky about your breathing. If he didn’t want you violently shaking and gasping for air, he shouldn’t have done literally any of the things he’d just done. Or existed looking like that, for that matter, because while you might be particularly terrified of spiders and therefore existing in a new level of psychological torment just for you, you’re pretty sure anyone would be freaking out at the mere sight of him. He had too many limbs and many of them were disproportionately large and long; his eyes are directly from the nightmares of children. Oh and also did you mention his mouth? His mouth is the thing that existed in the primordial ooze before nightmares even existed. He’s not even opening very wide to speak, but this close you’re getting little flashes of fangs that are so horrifyingly, unnecessarily long that you want to kill yourself so you don’t have to think about them anymore.
In short: bad vibes.
“Hey, you’re going to pass out if you keep hyperventilating like that.” That would be a good thing. You hope he’s right, and if anything, wheeze harder. “You’re shaking like… shit, are you crying?” Obviously you are fucking crying. Who in this situation would not be crying.
“Hey, hey, don’t cry. I swear, I’m not going to hurt you. I just need you to calm down, okay? We’re really far from my village, and very much on the outskirts of our territory. And I don’t like my odds protecting you from whatever hears you screaming and wants to take a bite out of what sounds very much like wounded prey. Okay? Now, if I take my hand off your mouth, do you promise to use it to take some deep breaths and not scream or yell?”
See, it’s weird, because at this point it seems like he should be eating you, and he’s not? He knows you’re not a baby spiderkin but instead a delicious, extremely helpless human. You also hit him with a stick a bunch, although it’s unclear if he found that painful or just thought you were being rude. Also it is very clear from his physiology, species, and General Aura of Horror that he is a thing that eats people.
“Hey. Hey, nod your head if you understand me and you’re going to be good and breathe and not scream. Okay?” Slowly, not entirely sure what’s going on or why you’re not dying horribly, you nod your head. “Okay,” he says again, letting out a sigh that shows too much fang. “Here we go. Like a trust exercise!”
He takes his gigantic hand off your mouth, and you gasp in a huge breath of air. You can’t tell if you’re breathing it or swallowing it.
“Okay, so that’s, that’s technically breathing, but maybe you can go for a little less… gaspy and desperate?” he suggests, unhelpfully. Maybe you wouldn’t be gaspy and desperate if he wasn’t a terrifying monster that dragged you out from under your perfectly safe tree and then pinned you to it. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he informs you, and it occurs to you belatedly that he’s said that like six times and he might actually, for some reason, be telling the truth.
“You’re not going to eat me?” you blurt out. It is your most pressing concern.
“What? No, I’m… okay, actually, I do see your concern there, but no, I’m not going to eat you. Didn’t your pirate buddies fill you in? We have a treaty, and anyway, I don’t eat elves. No offense.” Why would you be offended by that. “So now that you’re caught up on that, maybe you can stop violently shaking and crying?” he suggests.
“No,” you say, slightly dazed. “I’m good, thanks.”
“Uh? Well, you know, it’s just that violently shaking and trembling and whimpering pathetically is kind of… Well, I mean, it’s unnecessary, that’s all. We’ve established I’m not going to eat you. But there’s a lot around here that will?”
“Not helping,” you gasp out, tears admittedly streaming down your face.
“Geez, you’re really freaking out. Hey, what’s wrong? Are you hurt? You were flailing around so vigorously that I kind of assumed you were fine, but…” He takes this moment to bend closer, and to grab one of your arms and kind of lift it up as if checking to see if it still moves. You choke on the scream that automatically wants to burst out of your mouth, and it exits as a strangled whimper instead. “Okay, maybe your arm is hurt…”
“No! Stop… stop touching me!”
To his credit, he pulls his hand back, looking confused. “Does it hurt? The pirates probably have an… apothecary or something? I think? I’d take you back to my village, but I don’t think our doctor would know much about elf anatomy. Especially if it’s one of your limbs or your back. They’re kind of… weird shaped.”
“I’m not hurt,” you wheeze out. “I think.”
“You seem hurt.”
“I’m terrified!”
“I told you I’m not going to–”
“Look okay even if I believe you I’m scared of spiders!” It comes out a little too loud and you cover your mouth, glancing around like you might have immediately summoned the wrath of the bajillion other horrible monsters that are obviously nearby and do want to eat you, unlike this singular monster that doesn’t seem to.
There is a pause, and then a spluttering laugh.
It takes you a hot minute to recognize it as laughter. The first thing that registers is Fangs and Horrible Fangs and Sharp Pointy Death Fangs As Big As Your Face, and you let out a terrified mini-shriek and cover your face so that you don’t have to see death coming. Then you realize there is a sound, and then you realize that sound is very obviously laughter. It’s a little… clicky, as if he’s got something else going on in his mouth–he probably does but you are not fucking looking–that’s making a weird noise, but it’s definitely laughter. You flush with indignation, which, it’s kind of insane that you can even feel indignation at the moment.
“Sorry, sorry,” he says, because you guess he knows he’s being an asshole. “I shouldn’t laugh, I know but… you realize you came to like, the spider islands, right?” You did not fucking realize that, no. Also came is a strong word! Unaware of your distress–a running theme–he continues on.
“I know your kind call them the ‘demon’ islands, but it’s not like there are demons here. They just ran into a bunch of hyperaggressive spiderkin. Why in the world would you come here if you’re scared of spiders?”
“I didn’t come here!” you… alright, you maybe wail. Potentially you sob. “My master is dead they killed everyone and they made it look like it was my fault and then they were going to sink the ship and I guess they did because the engine exploded and I jumped off and I was so sure that was going to kill me but I guess it didn’t because I woke up here and this isn’t hell apparently even though it really feels like hell and has you in it but I’m alive and everyone else is dead and–”
“Whoa, okay, breathe, breathe, I barely caught a word of that!”
“Everyone is dead!”
“Okay, right, got the main takeaway.” The spiderkin reaches out to touch you, and then stops when you flinch. “Uh. Look, the exact specifics of who’s dead and where and why are going to have to wait. It’s getting dark, and there’s a storm coming in. Why don’t I take you back to my village, and–”
“Your village?” you say with mixed disbelief and horror. “Your spider village full of spiderkin?”
“Well, obviously–oh. Alright, I see how that might sound less than ideal, but really, we’re nice spiderkin.”
“That is not a thing!” you say, despite the fact there’s some evidence for it looming ominously over you.
“Listen, you’re not from around here, so maybe you’ve only heard scary stories about spiderkin. But I’m a huntsman spiderkin, right? We eat… well, mostly other spiderkin actually. But not elves!”
“You eat other spiderkin?” you demand with growing astonishment and horror. “There are so many spiderkin here that you have an entire village of spiderkin that eat other spiderkin as their primary source of nutrients?”
“Well, I think that’s stretching it a little. We eat animals. And sometimes insectkin. The aggressive ones.”
“Why?”
The spiderkin huffed. “Why do you eat roots? It’s just what we eat. Look, ask the doctor if you want a biological answer and the chief if you want a philosophical one. I’m a hunter, so if you ask me, the answer is ‘because it’s what we eat.’ They don’t keep me around for my brilliant insights.”
“Spiderkin don’t have villages,” you protest, dazed. “They don’t have doctors and chiefs.”
The spiderkin sighed. “I get it. We’re all supposedly territorial isolationists, right? But listen, I’m telling you, we huntsmen spiderkin live in villages. We have communal young-raising and everything, unlike those feral things that just send them off to get killed in the woods. We’re not like other spiderkin. We’re friendly. We like elves! We warn them when new ships land here, and we find them when they’re stupidly hiding under a tree about to drown in mud in a rainstorm.”
You scowl. “I would have been fine.”
“You would not have been fine.”
“Ugh! So you seriously expect me to believe you’re a nice spiderkin, from a village of spiderkin, which still sounds horrible by the way?”
“Yes, because it’s true!” Apparently species with eight eyes still roll them, and it looks very dramatic. “We have ongoing trade with the pirates and occasional travelers. We do not eat elves.”
“I’m not an elf!” you snap finally, despite the fact it would probably be better to let him think you were. Your desire to be right is briefly overpowering all common sense. You are a human, goddamnit, and you are wildly edible.
“What do you mean you’re not an elf?” He sounds incredulous. “Just look at you.” He places a hand on your head, as if to emphasize your comparative stature. You bat at it. “Nothing but wood elves are that tiny and… fleshy. I actually don’t understand why the other spiderkin like it; not to be weird but your texture looks terrible. No crunch, just… squish.” He shudders. “Disgusting.”
You’re offended by that. Why are you offended by that?
“I’m a human!” you hiss, having the good sense to lean forward and whisper it very quietly. You glance around, as if something might overhear and lunge in to take a bite. “Just look at my ears! Notice how they’re not pointed at all? Human!”
The spiderkin’s mouth has dropped open slightly, which is horrifying for a number of reasons and kind of makes you want to puke a little.
“What? How did you… what were you doing… how did you even… Shit!”
“Uh.” That hadn’t been the reaction you’d been expecting at all. “Could you seriously not tell?”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one before. There’s a few in with the pirates, I think, but they don’t really. Come here. On account of being humans?”
“Um?” Had you washed up on the Everything Is Toxic Specifically To Humans Island? It would really… it would really be par for the course at this stage.
“No, I guess if you’re not with the pirates, you wouldn’t know,” he says with a sigh. “Hey, look, why don’t I explain this while I take you back to my village? I really have to get you out of here, and the longer we stay this close to funnelweb territory, the more likely it is something decidedly less cute and friendly than me–” You snort. He glares. You flinch. “Comes along,” he finishes pointedly. “Here, let me just…”
Unexpectedly, he reaches towards you, and you… okay, you screech slightly, and roll back into your back in ready-to-kick position. At least your master had equipped you with sturdy shoes. Although if those fangs of his are for biting through spiderkin and insectkin chitin–it would explain a lot about their length and general Horror Energy–you suspect they’d go straight through the leather of your boots.
“Shhhh! Don’t screech, for the love of… Will you stop shaking! I’m not even doing anything!”
“You’re scary!” you snap. “Have you looked in a mirror ever?!”
“Hey!” he says, sounding hurt, which is ridiculous.
“It’s objectively true!”
“It’s still kind of hurtful! I’m trying to help!”
“You are looming! You are terrifying! You are actively menacing me!”
“I am not! Stop crying!”
“I’m not crying!” You sniff loudly and rub your eyes which are hard to see out of for reasons unrelated to any tears that may or may not be present.
“What point does shaking and crying at something you’re scared of even serve, anyway?” he scoffs, sounding irritated. “What’s the point? Invoking pity?”
“Stop being mean to me!”
“I am being extremely nice to you! You’re the one crying about it! Is this a human survival thing? You just look really pathetic and hope something finds it cute?”
“Hey!”
“I’m just saying! Here I am trying to help you, and you’re all tiny and trembling and. Hm. Actually, come to think of it, is it a human survival thing? It kind of tracks from what I’ve heard about them… er, you.” He leans in and squints a little. You wiggle your feet threateningly. “I guess it kind of works. You’re all tiny and terrified and squishy. I do kind of feel an urge to pick you up and hold you–”
“I will kick you!”
“I’m not going to. And not because you’ll kick me, which I don’t think would even hurt, by the way. I know you’re scared, and I’m trying not to freak you out even more, because it seems extremely easy to do. But if you don’t want me to feel protective of you, you should really stop being tiny, adorable, and terrified. It’s your stupid survival mechanism, not mine.”
“Being cute is not a…” Actually, now that you think about it, isn’t being considered desirable by so many species kind of the entire reason humanity and also you specifically survived? Your parents were liked enough that wood elves let them stay and raise you in their village, and you were adopted by the high elves because they knew you’d be a highly desired slave when you were older. Your master, and also high elves in general, kind of fetishized you as being a lesser race compelled by your sexual urges, and from what you could tell, humans did have that kind of reputation. It’s not exactly being terrified, but being small (comparatively) and adorable was kind of your personal survival mechanism, if you really think about it.
You had trailed off, but the spiderkin didn’t seem to mind; he also looked like he was thinking. “Okay, listen. I’ve got an idea.” You must look extremely dubious. “Hear me out! Why don’t you just… close your eyes?”
“Oh my god. Inspired. Brilliant. Earth-shaking.”
“Quiet, you. Look, the problem is that you think I look scary, right?”
“You objectively look like the nightmare of eighty to ninety percent of living creatures.”
“Again: super hurtful. Just close your eyes and pretend I’m a… I don’t know, a big strong sun elf or whatever you fantasize about.”
“I don’t fantasize!”
“You get my point! Close your eyes and don’t look, and I can just carry you back to the village. It would honestly be faster than you stumbling around on those tiny legs of yours, tripping on everything. I also think I heard that humans don’t have very good night vision… I’m not even sure you can see.”
“I can… see…ish!”
“Ish?”
Okay, so you couldn’t see more than like, shapes and outlines at the moment. And his horrifying eyes, which caught the limited light in a very unappealing way.
“How do I know you’re not just carrying me off to eat me?” you demand.
“How many times do I have to say we don’t eat elves?!”
“I’m not an elf!”
“We also don’t eat humans!”
“That’s exactly what someone that ate humans would say!”
“I… you…! Ugh!” He threw up his arms in frustration; all of them. It was extremely intimidating, and so you respond reasonably by curling up into a ball. “Okay, don’t start fucking crying again. Look, you’re very small and have been doing nothing but crying and shaking since we met. If I was any other kind of spiderkin, I would have started eating you like fifteen minutes ago. Oh, wait, shit, no, don’t start crying harder.”
You are maybe willing to admit that you’re crying harder. You haven’t really had control over it at any point during this encounter. Your body has just decided it’s time to cry and shake and vomit, and you’ve only managed to hold back the vomit.
“Shhh, don’t cry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that–I mean, okay, I kind of did, but it was maybe not the best way to say that.”
You let out an audible hiccup, which is not a sob.
“What I mean is,” he says, sounding slightly desperate, “If I wanted to eat you, wouldn’t I have done it by now? Or knocked you out and dragged you back to my village? I’m being really nice! You’re very small and I don’t have to! Doesn’t that count for anything?”
He was being extremely rude about it, but he was also kind of right. He hadn’t eaten you, and his menacing seemed mostly incidental, if you’re being honest, which you don’t want to be. He didn’t have to get your consent to drag you wherever he wanted; he just… could. But instead he’d stayed here trying to talk to you despite the fact you’re apparently a snack crying near the spiderkin equivalent of a food court.
“…I guess,” you say finally. Your voice sounds very meek, and you realize only now rarely you were ever scared since you were brought in by the high elves, and even moreso since you’d settled in with your current–er, recently ex–master. You didn’t particularly like any of the things you did as a slave, but even when he’d unceremoniously whored you out to other soldiers as means of reward, you hadn’t been particularly scared any of them would seriously hurt you. Not because they were above it, or something, just because the influence of your master had protected you. For as long as he’d kept interest in you, which, considering the difference between high elf and human lifespans, probably would have at least been until your general fuckability wore off.
You suppose, in retrospect, there’s a kind of security in knowing exactly what ways you were going to be hurt. There was a chance this guy, horrifying monster though he was, had no intentions to hurt you whatsoever. He might take you back to his village full of nice spiderkin the way the wood elves had been nice to your parents, asking for nothing in return for shelter. It was just that you didn’t know, and all the unknown space was filled up with possibilities more horrifying than you had previously needed to comprehend. You know the world is a scary place; you’d lost your parents young and then grown up relatively well-educated. And now you’re out in it, and everything is a terrifying maybe.
“Alright. So you’re okay if I pick you up?” the spiderkin is asking. You clench your eyes shut, pushing unshed tears out of them.
“Y-yeah.”
“Okay, just keep your eyes closed.”
You feel extremely large arms wrapping around you, one under your bent knees and the other behind your back. You squeeze your eyes more tightly shut. You can maybe almost pretend that you’re a child being carried by an adult. Although frankly, you’re not sure if being carried by a particularly tall adult high elf would feel that much different. You’d met plenty of tall, muscular ones on ships, at least in passing.
“Okay, hold on tight–oh, wait, maybe not around my back. I don’t want you hitting a limb and freaking out. Just… hold onto my arms, okay?”
You obediently wrap your arms around an upper bicep, and bury your face against it when you realize the skin there is skin and not chitin. He’s warm, which makes you suddenly realize how cold you are. It feels like blood hasn’t been moving through your body in a while.
“Geez, you barely weigh anything.” That is not a sentiment commonly shared by high elves. You think maybe spiderkin are just very heavy. “…Aww.” Aww?! “You’re kind of… cute.”
“Hey!” you protest, muffled by his arm.
“It’s just… you’re clinging really tight, and your hands are so tiny. I think we’re onto something with that survival mechanism thing. I guess this is just… what humans are like. It makes sense, with how popular you are…”
“Don’t get any ideas,” you warn him, although you have no way to prevent him from getting ideas or acting upon them.
“Don’t worry about it, it’s fine.”
That response is not very fine at all, and you are intensely worried about it, but there’s really not much you can do about it at this stage. You could kick him and he might drop you in shock, but you doubt you’d outrun him in a dark forest. Also there might still be worse things out there, although you’re not sure if he was telling the truth about that. He’d seemed really serious.
“Once we get you home, we can figure out what to do from there,” he promises you. “Maybe we can get you to the pirates or something.” Oh, the people who probably killed your master? Yeah, sure, super, great plan. “Anyway, someone will have a better idea of what to do than me. As long as we don’t run into anything on the way, it should be fine.”
He really shouldn’t have said that, because of course, immediately afterwards, you ran into something.