13. A Spider Too Many

Once the verdant forests faded to a mottled yellow, Silane’s class was ready to apply their spellcasting skills to a real-world infestation. Two paladin chaperones, Sir Tessa and Sir Raimond, brought the initiates north to mountainous terrain. By late afternoon, they arrived at an ancient hunter’s road called Fallen Light Pass, a treacherous seven-mile ledge hike that crawled up the hillside between an alpine forest and sheer cliffs leading to a wisp-infested chasm.

“A merchant caravan went missing in this area two weeks ago,” Sir Raimond explained. “The King’s peacekeepers have blamed the disappearance on bandits. The locals suspect demonic activity. We are here to perform a routine cleansing.”

“Bandits?” a student asked. “Nobody said anything about fighting bandits. We’re not trained for that.”

“No, you are not. Nor need you concern yourselves with such. We of the Order carry neither coin nor jewel; the light of our faith protects us from secular disputes,” Sir Raimond said.

Sir Tessa coughed. “If that doesn’t work, a blank shot from your emergency pistol will scare them long enough for you to run away. Now, each of you has a mist-binding jar. Your grade depends on how many wisps you capture before dawn. I expect everyone to get at least one. Catch more than five, and you’re exempt from the chores rotation for a week. If anyone finds the missing travelers, there’s also a bounty of a hundred gold.”

“Ahem.” Sir Raimond cleared his throat.

“...which will be donated to the Order of Illumination treasury, of course, while you enjoy the true bounty: the joy of saving lives,” Sir Tessa amended, sounding rather less enthusiastic than before.

The initiates were paired up and dismissed with instructions to return here at dawn or when recalled with a signal flare, whichever came first. A few groups went farther down the road in either direction, while others went off-trail to climb the hillside by the starting point. Silane was paired with Aaron. While he wandered away, Silane peered off the left side of the road where packed dirt fell away into a bottomless abyss. In the lengthening shadows of impending dusk, darker mist spiraled amid the depths of the chasm, nipping at the edges of the fading sunshine. She could hear the murmurs of the wisps lurking there, eager to prey upon any who fell.

A hand touched Silane’s shoulder, and she startled. Sir Tessa smiled gently down at her. Silane let out a breath and mirrored the smile.

“Best not to linger too close to the edge.” Sir Tessa steered Silane away from the cliff with a firm arm about her backpack and shoulders. “Do you know why this place is called Fallen Light Pass?”

It was getting dark out. Silane pointed at the orange blaze descending past the western treeline. “The sun sets over the mountain pass?”

“Not quite. Long ago, a famous paladin fell off this cliff on the way to Lumivale. They say his power was so immense that his corpse glowed, lighting up the sky for three days and three nights after he died.” Sir Tessa shook her head. “I say, it doesn’t matter how much magic you’ve got—crack your skull against those rocks, and you’ll be just as dead as anyone else. Mind the footing as you go.”

Aaron was already some distance uphill, bushwhacking off-trail in the direction opposite the chasm. Silane hurried after him, glad to be away from Sir Tessa and her iron grip. Aaron nodded at Silane and held up a scrap of floppy brown fabric.

“Piece of a hat,” he identified. “We must be close.”

With the forest canopy overhead and the setting sun plunging daylight into the deeper blues of dusk, it became increasingly difficult to see with mortal eyes. Living trees were simple enough to sense and avoid, but dead twigs jabbed at her legs, tearing through trouser and skin alike. The fallen leaves underfoot shifted as Silane climbed, threatening to send her toppling down the hillside from an unlucky slip. Rocks were practically invisible in the gloom, and she tripped over them more times than she could count. With each misstep, she yearned more and more to manifest temporary eyes with better night vision. It was dark enough that any condensed-mist modifications to this possessed body would take. However, if she modified the eyes tonight, there was no guarantee that they could survive tomorrow’s dawn. She couldn’t risk leaving this body with two smoking pits where eyes ought to be.

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A thunk and a yelp interrupted her musings. Aaron walked face-first into a tree and sat down hard. From the hot gush of life essence down his face, he was bleeding. He groaned. Wisps slithered in the shadows around them, inching cautiously nearer, drawn by the promise of pain.

Silane drew the emergency pistol from her belt and loaded a blank. When the closest wisp lunged, she spun around and fired. Light flashed with a deafening bang, scattering off fangs a mere handspan from her face. The wisp hissed like water on a hot pan and fled. Darkness closed in again, leaving Silane feeling more useless than ever. The wisps were circling, and she couldn’t properly fight them while stuffed inside a mortal body. She waded toward the beacon of Aaron’s life, feeling brambles catch at her shins. “We should keep moving.”

“One sec—got it!” Aaron pulled something from his backpack. A sparker clicked, and warm golden light washed across his face from a lantern held aloft. Two small wisps recoiled from the lamplight, spiraling away into the darkness like spooked fish. Aaron gasped and dropped the lantern to dig through his backpack again. “Wisps! Oh, where’s my jar… quick, Silane, take out your mist-binding jar.”

Before Silane could so much as unbuckle her backpack, Aaron found his own jar. He leapt upright, brandishing it like a weapon as he spun around in search of wisps. With lamplight illuminating his face from below and blood still trickling down his upper lip, he looked ready for the hunt. However, not a wisp remained within sight. The steady glow of the lantern had repelled them.

“They’ll come back if you put out the light,” Silane suggested, sensing a triad of shadows lurking some twenty yards away.

Aaron looked at her like she was crazy. Then, he looked down at the lantern with a rather more focused expression. His mouth opened. His foot lifted up.

“Spider,” Aaron said simply, and he stomped the ground next to the lantern seventeen times.

Silane hadn’t been paying enough attention to notice the spider’s life extinguish, but she noticed the mashed reddish smudge it left behind after Aaron retrieved the lantern and walked away. She knelt down and looked closer. Not a trace of life lingered, yet the crushed remnants shivered: trembling, dissolving, reflowing like a fluid—or like mist. As Silane watched in fascination, mangled legs straightened into alignment, severed bits wriggling back toward a body now plump and round as it had been before encountering Aaron’s shoe. It looked like a miniature version of Elrach. The resemblance stirred a pang of loss within her; ever since parting ways with her friends, she could only guess at their fates. Their annual reunion was not scheduled for another two months.

“Hello there, little one,” Silane said, trying to put those useless thoughts of the past out of her mind.

The spider did not react. It simply got up and kept walking as though it had never been crushed in the first place. Up ahead, Aaron turned back, swinging the lantern around. Shadows danced across the trees behind him. They didn’t entirely match the sway of his scarf-ends in the mild breeze.

“What’s the holdup?” Aaron called out.

“Nothing.” Silane snatched up the reformed spider and ate it, disintegrating its essence with a brush of her true Mistforged teeth. There was no brush of sentience or self when she consumed the spider, no flavor of anger or memory. It was simply gone, burst to nothingness like a popped bubble. The aftertaste was as bland as a pinch of sawdust or one gulp of air from the Shadowed Isle, hardly worth the effort of consumption. For a creature with the skill to attain solid existence and remember its original shape, Silane had expected it to be more flavorful.

“Forget I asked.” Aaron made a face and turned away, muttering, “Bug-eater. I should’ve known.”

Aaron soon found another spider to stomp, and another, and another. When stomped, they flattened; once left alone for a moment, they reformed and went on with their task, gathering around the splashes of blood that had dripped from Aaron’s nose or the tears in Silane’s trousers. Aaron was too focused on crushing new spiders to notice the old ones reviving. He charged ahead, eager for the kill.

Silane swiped a finger across her skinned knee and flicked one drop of fresh blood in front of a passing spider. The specimen halted, forelegs waving in the air, and then crept toward Silane’s offering. It gathered the blood-soaked dirt into a bundle, wrapped that in weblike strands of darkness, and hauled the package away. The energy signature emanating from this spider was miniscule, but with some concentration, Silane picked out similar smudges of energy from dozens of other spiders in the nearby area. They were everywhere: crawling over the ground, climbing up and down tree trunks, and overall moving in synchrony as though driven by some greater hivemind. The majority of the spiders migrated in the same direction as the first one, dragging off little fragments of web-wrapped life—plant cuttings, captured insects, and one terrified baby mouse.

Aaron was too busy hunting to notice when Silane turned away to follow the spider pilgrimage. His lantern shrank into the distance and was soon swallowed up by the dense underbrush. Now ensconced in darkness beyond the lantern’s halo, Silane’s eyes adjusted to better discern the forested hillside ahead. Patches of moonlight shone through the clouds, revealing slender dark wisps lurking where light could not reach. She let a hint of her Mistforged essence seep through her mortal guise. The wisps left her alone after that, recognizing the predator in their midst. Oddly, the spiders continued to ignore her presence. She followed them to their origin, moving slowly to avoid the worst of the underbrush.