The Stygian Spiders · The full story
The whole story
Valg in a spider's shape, spinning the finest thread in Erilea and selling it only for the years you were counting on — and the one witch who walked back down the Ruhnn without paying.
On sight
Not what you brace for
Everyone pictures something squat and bristling. That is not what comes down the web.
- Size
- About the size of a horse — large enough that the scale is the first wrong thing about them.
- Colour
- Black, white, and grey, in variations; the pale ones read almost ornamental against the rock.
- Build
- Elegantly built rather than sturdy and hairy. Long-limbed, fine, deliberate. Made, not grown.
- Voice
- They speak, and they are good at it — reasonable, unhurried, and entirely willing to wait.
- The silk
- Lightweight and extraordinarily strong, and it catches the sun with a faint gleam that gives the webs away a valley off.
Their register
What they actually are
Valg, wearing legs
Here is the thing that reframes them entirely: the Stygian spiders are not animals. They are Valg — the same ancient darkness that produced Erawan and the collars and the whole slow horror of Morath — wearing the shape of a giant spider because it suits them. They speak. They reason. They negotiate. Every one of them is female, all of them are old, and none of them are in any hurry. Erawan built an army and a fortress and made himself impossible to ignore. The spiders went up a mountain, strung a web across the pass, and waited for the world to come to them with something it wanted. Same darkness. Different patience.
The silk
Worth it. That's the trap.
Spidersilk is the best material in Erilea and it is not close — lighter than anything that strong has any right to be, effectively untearable, and faintly luminous when the light comes in low. Armour, ropes, sails, wings. The catch is the currency. They have no use for gold, and they will tell you so kindly. What they take is youth, beauty, a memory you would rather keep, the dreams you had for later. A merchant out of Xandria walked up for a hundred yards and walked down twenty years older, and by every account he considered it a fair deal. That is the genuinely unsettling part. The price is always fair. It is just paid in the only things you cannot earn back.
The one bargain that went wrong for them
Manon, and the wings
Abraxos was bred to die in a pit and had his tail spikes sawn off so he could not defend himself, and his wings were ruined long before Manon ever chose him. So she took him into the Ruhnn Mountains after the only thing that could mend them. She offered the spider her beauty — which, for an Ironteeth heir whose face is a weapon and an inheritance, is not a small offer. Then, silk in hand, she claimed a flaw in the weave, needled the spider into breaking the bargain first, and had Abraxos sweep her and her guards off the cliff. She kept the silk. She kept her face. She cheated a Valg out of its price, for a wyvern who could not have asked her to.
How they work
The shape of every dealing
- I
The climb
Nobody stumbles onto them. The webs are visible from a valley away and the passes are avoidable. Everyone who meets a Stygian spider went looking.
- II
The offer
They are courteous, articulate and unhurried. They name what they want and they do not haggle, because they do not need to. The silk is the only silk.
- III
The price
Youth. Beauty. A memory. The years you assumed you had. Never coin — coin is no use to something that has been on that mountain since before Erilea had kings.
- IV
The walk down
The merchant from Xandria got his hundred yards and lost two decades, and called it fair. They are not cheats. They are worse than that: they are honest.
- V
The exception
One person walked down the Ruhnn with the silk and the price still in her pocket, and only because she was willing to start a fight she might not win over a wyvern's wings.
What the web holds
Silk and its price
Two things, really: the finest thread in the world, and the ledger of what it cost.
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