Fool's Errand
Sara crept through the mountain pass that edged out of Duskwood. Her eyes by now were used to the perpetual darkness of the area, and she narrowed them in search of any movement. This would not be her first foray into Deadwind Pass, but she hoped it would be her most productive. She prowled the pass with a single goal in mind—to tame a Deadwind Widow.
She had first stumbled upon one of the spiders while aiding the people of Darkshire with their worgen problem…and their undead problem. Every so often one would range out from the pass and into the eastern forests. They were much more dangerous than the forest creatures that remained there, and usually had to be eradicated. They had asked her to take care of things, and Sara had readily accepted.
Moving through those trees after the other spider had filled Sara with the same rush of adrenaline that coursed through her veins now. The hunt was thrilling, even moreso now that she was less human than she had been before. It felt good in the same, primal way that spending time with her lover felt good. This was natural rightness.
The change between Duskwood and Deadwind Pass was fairly observable even in the dark. There the forest had been cloaked in perpetual midnight, but there were still signs of life among the trees. Here, there was next to nothing. There were no trees or plants of any sort that Sara could see, and the ground beneath her boots was rocky soil. She stepped carefully, very aware of how one misstep could echo through the pass. Though prey was scarce, she doubted the place would be entirely empty.
The walls of rock on either side of Sara were too sheer for any but the most skilled climbers, and Sara felt a little exposed as she moved through the area. There were trees on either side but they were long dead. Their bark was graying with decay and the bare branches clinked together like brittle bones in the chilly wind. Beneath it all was a pervading sense of wrongness that raised the hair on the back of her neck.
Ahead were arch-like outcroppings of rock, and as Sara passed under the first one she could see a massive spider dangling from it by a thick cord of silk. Her legs ended high above the huntress's head, but Sara did take a moment to stare at her. The widow stared back, not threatening—not yet, but watchful from the center of her web. Maybe that one, Sara thought. If her web wasn't so high.
She continued walking for what felt like a very long time but might not have been. Time was hard to discern out here. She passed under another rocky archway and saw three more widows clustered together within a massive web. It stretched over the entire lower surface of the outcropping. Not those ones, either. Sara had tamed animals before, and knew the sort to go after. There was no advantage to being spirit-bonded to a two-legger if they were already content within their own society. As she passed them, Sara wrapped her cloak closer around herself.
Light flickered ahead, and Sara quickened her pace as she approached it. Perhaps there was an encampment ahead with a warm fire and friendly faces. It would be a nice, if brief, reprieve from her spider hunt. She should have known better.
The stench hit her before she saw them. The low reek of death and decay slammed into Sara's sensitive worgen senses like a wave. Her stomach turned and she took a step back, trying to put some distance between herself and whatever had died nearby. Whatever—or whoever it was had been dead for some time, but this place had preserved their remains to a degree to make them stink like that. Swallowing the urge to vomit, she walked on.
The light's source was what she noticed immediately. A single lantern of sorts placed under a tree glowed magically in what little light there was. Beside it was what appeared to be a road sign, its words carved into the wood rather than written in markings that would fade. She started to read it, and then made the mistake of looking up. Her stomach flip-flopped again.
Three corpses dangled from the tree, hung by their necks from lengths of rotting rope. Sara did not know if this had occurred before or after death—they were too far gone to tell, but she didn't really care. One of the corpses was intact save for the skin around their ankles, which had been torn to shreds sometime before their death. The other two were missing body parts. One leg had been ripped off of the one closest to the sign, and the other one's legs looked to have been severed at the knees.
"Light," Sara murmured. "Bless their poor souls." Her voice sounded more shaky than she wanted it to and only then did she pause to read the sign. TURN BACK, one read in block script. Below it stated: Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. Neither was a promising omen, and Sara found herself wondering if one tamed spider was worth it. She had done plenty of fighting against humans, demons, animals and the Forsaken that had swept over Gilneas like a plague, but that had been different. Survival very often depended on those fights, or if not that, the good of some group of people that was not capable of dealing with the problem. This…this was a ranger's foray into certain darkness. Whatever had killed those men could just as easily kill her, and she had not forgotten the tales the villagers whispered amongst themselves about the Dark Riders. No one knew what had become of them. Sara did not want to know. At that moment, Sara wanted nothing more than to return to her fiance's comforting embrace.
She turned back towards the road that would take her to Duskwood and started walking, leaving the three corpses, the tree and the sign as she had found them. Coming out here for one creature had been a fool's errand, she realized, a senseless risk of her life. Perhaps it was cowardly to abandon it now, but…
A bulbous shape moved in the periphery of Sara's vision. At first she could not quite see it as her eyes adjusted back to the semidarkness, but the skittering stride was unmistakable. One of the widows, sensing the huntress's sudden panic, had skittered down from the archway and was now perched upon one of the smaller rocky outcroppings. Her larger body gave way to a smaller head, and eight glittering eyes stared at Sara. For a moment she stood frozen, surprised by the creature's appearance.
The Deadwind widow eyed her with appraisal. Sara stood frozen for a moment, unsure if the creature's descent from her rocky roost was luck on the huntress's part of misfortune. Sara was familiar enough with the wilderness and wild things to know that this moment would decide if woman and spider were potential allies or adversaries for the rest of her stay in this harsh environment. The two of them sized each other up, maintaining eye contact. It felt like a strange relationship with a spider, but most of Sara's encounters with potential pets had been mammals. The widow's mind and body were entirely different. The bulbous eyes followed Sara as she moved with great care back the way she had come. There was a sort of unspoken acknowledgement in the widow's stillness.
A piercing cry shattered the silence and Sara's head snapped up in time to see a large silhouette swoop down from the darkness. She staggered backward as the massive bird dove at her. She lifted her arm instinctively to cover her face as the breath of wind from its wings brushed against it. Instinctively she reached for her bow, lifting it from its place at her side. The bird circled above them, its shadow black against the grayness of the heavens. Its talons looked large enough to seize a grown man by the shoulders and she quickly recalled the dead men hanging from the tree. Sure, birds couldn't hang ropes around people's necks, but someone could have found the remains once they were finished.
All of this happened in the span of about fifteen seconds before the bird dove at her again. Sara was ready this time, and fired an arrow towards the moving target. The projectile's trajectory was true…at least it would have been if not for the thick rope of silk that shot through the air. It hit the bird square in the breast and clung to the feathers. The bird hovered, but die weight of the silk was too heavy for it to take wing again.
Sara readied another arrow as the bird drifted lower. Its talons raked against the heavy silk in a furious attempt to free itself. One rake slashed through some of it and Sara fired. The arrow lodged itself harmlessly in the bird's flapping wing and was tossed aside.
The widow hissed and something green and liquid shot past Sara and into the bird. The creature shrieked as the poison touched its feathers. Now that the bird was closer to the ground, pieces of silk were sticking to the cracked earth, weighing it down. It shrieked again and raked at the heavy silk, but by then the widow had fired another cord to help hold it in place. Sara notched another arrow and fired. This one buried itself in the bird's chest, the tip puncturing that racing heart. The creature's wings pumped once, twice, three times, but a lot of the fight had gone out of it.
The widow, sensing her prey's final vulnerability, skittered forward. The bird was struggling drunkenly now, beating its wings here and there and occasionally slashing at the webbing with little luck. The spider sank her teeth into the bird's foot and bit down hard enough for Sara to hear bones crunch. She smelled rather than saw the passage of poison from the widow's mouth into the dying creature's body. Sara fired again, but there wasn't too much need to. The great bird's wings flapped their last flap and the creature keeled over.
For several moments that deep silence returned while Sara and the widow looked at each other again. The spider began to bite through the web that bound the bird to the ground and started dragging it back towards the rocky outcroppings. Sara watched and then moved forward.
The widow eyed the huntress as she approached but Sara stood her ground. This kill was just as much hers. Though Sara disliked bird meat in general, preferring pork or bear, she would not waste what she had killed, or let it be stolen. She replaced the bow at her side and withdrew a long knife.
"That is just as much mine as it is yours," she said, as if the spider could understand her. The widow looked up at her. While words meant nothing to spiders, the tone of voice was unmistakable. The giant spider hissed. Now that Sara was closer she could appreciate the widow's size. She had seen her fair share of giant spiders in places such as Duskwood and even Elwynn forest, but nothing quite like the creature before her. There was a magnificence to spiders that she had not quite appreciated before now. Neither moved immediately. It was an important moment, one that would decide whether the unlikely pair would remain allies through adversity or try and eat each other.
"Come with me," Sara said slowly. "You can be my…companion. My ally. We will kill much, and you will never be hungry or wanting for food." To prove her point, instead of butchering the bird she reached into her packsack where her food supplies were. Ever since her transformation Sara preferred her meat rare, and she tossed a good-sized piece of pork to the spider. The widow caught the meat in her mandibles and with a quick swallow it was gone. The two eyed each other carefully, and then Sara threw her another piece.
The spider skittered a little closer, forgetting about the bird meat in light of this new source of food. Sara kept throwing them until the spider was sitting beside her. Then, as the creature was eating, she placed a hand carefully upon the widow's exoskeleton. The widow eyed her, but didn't pull away.
"There's more," she said simply, and then carefully began heading back towards Duskwood. The sky was darkening, for the sun had already set over the mountains, and she didn't want to think of what sort of creatures might be out in Deadwind Pass after dark. Undoubtedly they would be enemies of human and spider alike. The shadows were long, and she could see other Deadwind widows in their lofty perches, watching the huntress as she retreated from their territory and the spider that skittered after her, lured by the promise of food in a less harsh environment. In time, their relationship would grow until they were a formidable force to be reckoned with, taking out humans and animals alike, but for that moment they were just Sara and Dahlia.