Sprout's command hangs in the air like a blade unsheathed. "Garm" he intones, the vegetal veins across his body flaring with emerald light. "Ensure that Humtoc is well-guarded and safe; thereafter, we shall embark to seek the Mother of this cave-dwelling being".
The wolf's growl reverberates through the cavern, a sound that once would have liquefied Arnechai's resolve. But not now. Not when salvation glimmers.
The Spidan trembles, not from fear, but revelation. Sprout's question: "By what name art thou known?" ignites a spark in his primitive psyche. Names are power. Names are shields.
Arnechai's mandibles quiver, emitting a high-pitched buzz that dances between terror and triumph. "Arnechai Kricekeer Qhenti" he rasps, the syllables clattering like dropped coins. "Spawn of Kricekeer Qhenti. Hunter! Not… food".
His voice, though thin, carries the brittle pride of a creature who clawed his way from broodling slop to named survivor.
Inside, Arnechai's mind spins a web of delusion. This wooden fool seeks the Mother? Let him. The Spidan's earlier dread curdles into cunning. His six eyes flick between Sprout and Garm, calculating their bulk.
'So much meat'.
The wolf alone could feed the Cluster Nest for weeks. The wooden titan? A feast of strange magics, his bark-rich flesh a delicacy for the Mother's palate.
Arnechai will lead them, he decides, legs twitching with suppressed glee. Through the deepest tunnels, to the heart of the Cluster Nest, the Chamber of Mandibles, where the Mother waits, a mountain of chitin and venom, her legs pillars of annihilation.
In his mind's eye, he sees it: Garm's obsidian fur matted with acidic spittle, Sprout's twig-scepter shattered under her claws.
The Mother's approval will be a physical thing, her pedipalps stroking his scarred carapace as she names him Father, granting him rights to the fattest preys, otherwise eaten only by Mother herself, the juiciest food he can imagine.
'No more skulking in shadows' he thinks, venom dripping from his fangs in eager rivulets. 'No more rivals'.
Arnechai will sup on the newborns himself, their soft bodies bursting like overripe berries on his tongue.
He bows his head, a parody of deference. "Arnechai… guides you to Mother".
The words taste like victory. Let the wooden god play savior. Let the wolf lurk close. Soon, the Cluster Nest's silken halls will echo with their dying thrums, and Arnechai will ascend, forever, from hunter… to heir and eventually king.
"Young Master" Garm makes to protest knowing well the eyes of a predator who thinks themself to have won, but Sprout stops him.
"I know, Garm. Together, we shall overthrow the tyrant and teach these spider creatures a truth eternal, that Nature and her Verdant Grace are the only Mother they shall ever need" replies Sprout calming down the Great Wolf.
Sprout's fungal eyes pierce the gloom of the tunnel, its walls veined with silk that glistens like fossilized tears.
Through Sprout's connection to the natural order, knowledge seeps into him, not as memory, but as instinct.
Despite them not hailing from YGGDRASIL the Spidan race's existence unfolds in his mind: a society spun from desperation, where survival is currency and matriarchs reign as living engines of consumption.
'Just like the corporations' he realizes, the thought bitter as medicinal bark. On Old Earth, CEOs had been the Mothers, their boardrooms Cluster Nests, their hunger devouring neighborhoods whole.
Arnechai scuttles ahead, oblivious, his gangly silhouette warped by the tunnel's curves. Ren pities him, not for his malice, but his myopia. The Spidan sees betrayal as triumph, blind to the truth Sprout's roots now whisper: the Mother's rule is a cancer, her offspring mere cells in a tumor choking the ecosystem.
"Poor fool" Ren murmurs, moss blooming where his human heart might ache. [Wisdom of the Oak] thrums in his grip, its power a scalpel poised to excise rot. He knows the risks.
Uplifting a predator could unravel the food web, but leaving them shackled to tyranny? That is the greater sin.
The air thickens with the Nest's stench as they delve deeper, ammonia and rotting chitin. Ahead, the Mother waits, a deity of fang and fecundity to her children. Ren's resolve hardens. Old Earth's ghosts, the starved, the IV-dependent, the girl with clumps of hair in her fists, howl in his marrow.
No more, he vows, Sprout's voice merging with his own. This world will not be another hospice. I'll burn the tumor if I must.
—
The Chamber of Mandibles screams before them, a cavernous maw of nightmares where biology and prehistoric architecture collide in grotesque union.
Its vaulted ceiling arches like the ribcage of some primordial leviathan, strung with silk cables thick as subway lines, glistening with a viscosity that suggests both web and sinew.
The walls, rippled with fossilized resin and the calcified husks of consumed prey, rise like the chimneys of a forgotten factory, their surfaces pocked with countless burrows where Spidan young squirm in larval darkness. This is not a nest, but a city, a deranged metropolis designed by a Darwinian god, its streets paved with the carapaces of the devoured.
At its heart, enthroned upon a dais of woven bone and still-dripping silk, sits Kricekeer Qhenti.
The Spidan Mother is less a creature than a monument, a bloated colossus whose segmented abdomen swells like a dirigible of pulsating chitin, her colossal legs splayed like smokestacks spewing venomous mist.
Her cephalothorax alone dwarfs Garm's lupine bulk, a fortress of obsidian, tar-like, plating studded with clusters of eyes that glow with the sickly luminescence of rotting bioluminescence.
Each orb swivels independently, a panopticon of predation, ensuring every Spidan, from the nameless grubs scuttling in the bile-slick trenches to the hunters clinging to the ceiling, feels her gaze.
Around her, the Chamber seethes. Thousands of Spidans move in jerky synchronicity, their bodies reduced to cogs in a living engine. They haul sacks of desiccated prey up silken ramps, their mandibles clicking in arrhythmic hymns. Others, too weak to work, are dragged toward gaping pits where acidic fluids bubble, a nutrient slurry for the Mother's next brood.
The air reeks of ammonia and despair, a miasma that clings to Sprout's bark like oil.
Garm's growl reverberates, a subsonic tremor that shakes loose a rain of desiccated wings from above. His claws score the stone, etching furrows into what might be a floor, or a midden of centuries of exoskeletal waste.
Yet even his primordial wrath seems trivial here, dwarfed by the Chamber's scale.
Ren's fungal eyes pulse, Sprout's ancient knowledge dissecting the horror.
'This is no hive' he realizes. 'It's an abattoir crossed with a conveyor belt, a slaughterhouse where the architect is also the consumer'.
What startles Ren is not really the monstrous apparatus in front of him, bit tat the Mother's tyranny isn't merely cruel, it's efficient. Her children, nameless and numberless, exist only to feed the machine of her hunger, their lives as expendable as Old Earth's wage-slaves.
"By the Verdang Grace" Ren breathes, Sprout's voice fraying. If he still possessed a human stomach, he'd retch. Instead, lichen blossoms across his joints, a stress response to the blasphemy before him.
The Mother's central eyes, a trio of crimson orbs the size of wagon wheels, lock onto Sprout in a challenge. Monster challenging a God. Her mandibles part, dripping a viscous ichor that hisses where it strikes stone.
'Welcome' the hiss seems to say. 'To the end of the food chain'.
Kricekeer Qhenti's mandibles clatter, a sound like skyscrapers collapsing, and the Chamber of Mandibles erupts.
A tsunami of chitin floods the cavern, thousands of Spidans cascading from walls, ceilings, and burrows, their combined hisses merging into a deafening roar.
Light dies as their bodies blot out the fungal glow, the air thickening with the reek of venom and desperation.
Garm's answering snarl splits the chaos. Helreaver materializes in his jaws, the obsidian greatsword crackling with necrotic energy that bleeds shadows into the air.
"Go forth" Sprout commands, and the wolf moves.
His howl unleashes [Aura of Despair V, a wave of primordial terror that liquefies the resolve of lesser beings. Spidans falter mid-leap, legs buckling, their faceted eyes bursting like overripe grapes as the aura's weight crushes their primitive minds.
Yet the swarm persists, a testament to the Mother's indoctrination. They surge in writhing layers, fangs glistening, silk spewing in suffocating nets.
Garm becomes a maelstrom of blade and fury, Helreaver carving arcs of void-black energy that sever Spidans midair, their bisected bodies raining down in smoking heaps. Each swing harvests a dozen lives, the wolf's movements a dance of annihilation.
Sprout stands immovable at the storm's eye. 6th-Tier Spell: [Autumn Rampart] engulfs him, a whirling mantle of crimson, gold, and amber leaves sharpened to monomolecular edges, as sharp as the thinnest blade of adamantine.
They orbit him like a vengeful galaxy, shredding any Spidan reckless enough to breach the vortex. His voice, serene yet seismic, cuts through the bedlam: "Thou vile architect of sorrow, thy reign of terror hath reached its dusk'.
The Twig of Yggdrasil trembles in his grip, its blossoms erupting in a supernova of light. Vines explode from the cavern floor, thick as siege towers, impaling Spidans en masse and pinning their twitching forms to the walls.
Kricekeer Qhenti's once-imperious gaze flickers with something ancient and feral, fear. Her brood's sacrifice, though vast as a fallen forest, cannot touch these intruders.
Sprout steps forward, leaves parting like a courtier's curtain. "Behold" he murmurs, not to the Mother, but to the cowering masses of unnamed Spidans.
"As I have come to deliver thee from despair, so shall I deliver thy kind from this senseless slaughter. Beneath the shelter of the Verdant Grace and the guiding hand of Mother Nature, all are equal, for she knoweth naught of serfdom nor the cruel weight of chains".
Above, Garm's laughter rumbles, a sound of avalanches and bloodshed, as Helreaver drinks deep.
Sprout advances through the carnage, each step a tectonic shift that fractures the Chamber's resin-coated floor.
Around him, the air shimmers with the afterglow of Garm's rampage, a mist of Spidan ichor and charred silk hanging like funeral gauze. Ahead, Kricekeer Qhenti looms, her gargantuan form quivering not from fear, but the futile thrashing of a despot cornered.
Her legs, pillars of obsidian bristling with serrated spines, scrape furrows into the stone as she retreats, her bloated abdomen dragging like a capsized warship. Silk jets from her spinnerets in panicked bursts, hardening into barricades that Sprout's [Autumn Rampart] reduces to confetti.
'This is how it should have been' Ren thinks, his human consciousness surfacing again like a ghost in the machine of Sprout's divinity.
The Spidan Mother's desperation mirrors the oligarchs of Old Earth, those corporate titans who'd feasted on desperation while their boardrooms gleamed. He envisions Tokyo's neon-lit slums, the skeletal figures begging outside bioreactor plants, and for a heartbeat, Kricekeer Qhenti's mandibles morph into the sneer of a CEO signing layoffs into existence. 'But here, I can cut the tumor out'.
Sprout halts, the [Twig of Yggdrasil] raised like a scepter. Lichen blooms across his wooden skin, luminescent patterns swirling into the sigils of a language older than civilizations. Ren's voice, their voice, resonates, a harmony of mortal resolve and divine wrath:
"From this day forth" they intone, the Chamber trembling as though the earth itself kneels. "These wretched souls whom thou dost name 'children' yet treat as naught but sustenance and tools, shall be shielded beneath my protection. Now, away with thee, as I deliver the blow that ends thy dominion!"
The Twig's blossoms detonate into a supernova, a Super-Tier Spell is casted again by the [Archdruid].
Light floods the cavern, not the sterile glare of Old Earth's LEDs, but the raw, incandescent fury of a star's heart. Spidans shriek, their compound eyes boiling in their sockets as [Sunna's Scorching Punishment] tears through the fabric of reality.
Above Sprout, the air fractures.
A celestial mandala materializes: a golden disc etched with runes of solar fire, its center a stylized chariot drawn by the twin stallions Arvakr and Alsvidr whose manes cascade like solar flares. Sunna, the Radiant Lady, gazes down from her celestial throne, her presence a weight that cracks the Chamber's ceiling.
"Oh Radiant Lady of the Sun on high!" Sprout chants, each syllable a detonation of power needed for the spell to be casted. "Cast thy light to guide my steps and scorch mine enemy! For thy brilliance is undying, and thy celestial cycle knows no end!"
The spell ignites liek the explosion of a nuclear reactor.
From the [Twig of Yggdrasil]'s tip erupts a beam of annihilation, a column of pure photonic rage so intense its color exists beyond mortal comprehension, unable to be seen my human senses.
It is the white of collapsing stars, the blue of lightning forged in galactic cores, the gold of Sunna's own crown.
The air screams as it ionizes, molecules ripped apart in a chain reaction that merges nuclear fission and arcane wrath. Kricekeer Qhenti has time only to unleash a final, ear-splitting shriek before the light consumes her.
Her exoskeleton vaporizes mid-screech, her innards flash-incinerated into plasma. The beam punches through her remains, drilling into the cavern floor with apocalyptic force.
The Chamber disintegrates. Stone sublimates into glass; Spidan silk combusts into ash.
Garm howls, retreating as the cataclysm rips upward, clawing toward the surface, and beyond. Ren glimpses the future in a nanosecond: the beam erupting into the night sky, a second sun born over the Abelion Hills, incinerating forests and mountains in its wake.
The Holy Kingdom's Great Wall would melt like wax if it is in the beam's way. The cities behind and all the lives would be lost before they can even comprehend what happened.
'No! I refuse!'.
Sprout's hand closes.
Nestled within his wooden palm there is an [Hourglass, the time changing cash item, a relic of frosted crystal and enchanted sand, shatters. Time fractures.
The beam recoils, its luminous tendrils snaking backward as though rewound by a god's hand. The cavern's rubble reassembles; glass reverts to stone; ash spirals into unburned silk. Only Kricekeer Qhenti remains erased, her existence scrubbed from the timeline.
Silence.
Garm howls to the ceiling of the cavern, Helreaver's blade dimming and delving back in the wolf's shadow. The surviving Spidans cower, their unnamed masses trembling as Sprout's gaze sweeps over them. Ren exhales through Sprout's bark-lined lungs, the Hourglass's sand glittering at his feet like stolen stardust as the broken glass disappears.
'Lucky me I can still access my inventory... I wonder if Lildrasil is around somewhere in this New World' a smile would appear on his wooden lips if they could curl. 'Come on Sprout, you have a lot of work to do' he says to himself.
Garm sprawls across the ravaged floor of the former Chamber of Mandibles, his obsidian fur matted with Spidan viscera that sizzles faintly as the wolf's still active necrotic aura consumes it. The wolf's tongue lolls, crimson eyes half-lidded with satiated bloodlust.
"Garm had plenty of fun" he rumbles, the sound vibrating through the cavern like a contented earthquake. A clawed paw lazily bats a severed Spidan leg into the shadows. "He really needed to stretch".
His tail thumps once, sending a tremor through the glass-smooth stone forged by Sunna's unforgiving wrath. "Garm asks what Young Master wants to do with this… place. Lady Sunna's magic is really powerful and Garm doesn't like it".
The word place drips with lupine disdain, as though the cavern were a gnawed bone stripped of marrow. Garm's nature as a Warden of a frozen and haunted place like Helheim naturally dislikes a magic so bright with radiant light.
Sprout, no, Ren, the human psyche momentarily ascendant, sweeps his fungal gaze across the aftermath.
The Chamber of Mandibles lies in ruins, its once-oppressive and repugnant grandeur reduced to a necropolis of cracked chitin and smoldering silk.
Sunna's purged light has scoured the walls bare, revealing strata of fossilized Spidan husks that tell a millennia of cannibalistic history or maybe even more ancient.
Survivors huddle in the far reaches, their faceted eyes glinting like cowardly stars. Among them, Arnechai sits motionless, his spindly legs folded beneath him like broken reeds.
'This place…' Ren's mind races, Sprout's arboreal calm tempering his urgency. The cavern's vaulted ceiling, though fractured, remains structurally sound, a cathedral of natural stone and perverted industry.
'It's far larger than my former Apartment Complex... and we lived in hundreds there' he realizes, awe blending with pragmatism.
Memories of Earth's claustrophobic megacities flash before him: his stacked coffin-apartment, the hospital with corridors lined with gurneys. Here, space is abundant, defensible, alive with geothermal warmth and subterranean streams.
'A sanctuary. A cradle. New Lildrasil's roots could thrive here if I… adjust the ecosystem'.
But first he has another matter to take care of, the survivors.
—
Arnechai trembles not the calculated shivers of a hunter, but the full-body spasms of a creature unmoored, like a ship lost at sea.
His Mother's death has severed the psychic tether that once dictated his every action. Without her, his name, Kricekeer Qhenti, feels alien, a brand seared into a corpse.
His eyes sting, not only from Sunna's residual glare, but from the raw, incomprehensible grief of a puppet whose strings lie ashes.
'All those hunts… those sacrifices… for what?'
The Chamber's silence offers no answer, only the drip of distant water and the whimpers of his kin, lost just like him.
Sprout approaches, his footsteps silent and elegant yet seismic. Arnechai flinches, expecting annihilation, a mercy, perhaps in this Doom.
Instead, a wooden finger, gnarled and glowing with soft chlorophyll light, presses against his forehead gently.
[Wisdom of the Oak] blooms from Sprout's index finger into the Spidan's mind.
The change is not physical. No extra limbs sprout; his carapace doesn't thicken. Instead, his mind fractures, then rebuilds on new, stronger, bedrock.
Memories unspool: his first molt, celebrated not with pride, but with his Mother's assessment of his edible value. The day he earned his name, dragging a bat carcass while his siblings' mandibles snapped at his heels. The lies, woven into his psyche like silk, serve the Mother, feed the Mother, become one with the Mother.
'What was that I lived for?' he asks himself.
The veil tears. Like a marionette in a puppet theatre when the paper sky is ripped and it understands all ita life has been a lie.
Arnechai sees clearly now: his Mother was no deity, but a gluttonous parasite. Her 'love' was digestion delayed; her 'kingdom' a pyramid of bones with her at its apex. Disgust coils in his gut, acidic and purging. He retches, a thin stream of venom pooling between his claws.
Around him, the surviving Spidans cower, still trapped in their mental chrysalis. Arnechai pities them, truly pities, a novel emotion that terrifies him.
However he watches as Sprout moves among them, the [Twig of Yggdrasil] trailing vines that brush each Spidan's brow. One by one, they stiffen, then shudder, their clicking mandibles falling silent as [Wisdom of the Oak] rewires generations of indoctrination.
An infant female, no larger than a human hand, staggers forward, her once-feral eyes now wide with dawning horror. "Wh-what… are we?" she rasps, the question a heresy that would have earned her liquefaction just few hours prior.
Sprout kneels, his towering form folding with unnatural grace.
"From this day onward, thy kind shall bear the name of Kustarids," he proclaims, his voice reverberating with authority. "Yet thou art not merely Kustarids. Ye are my children. Beneath the Verdant Grace, may ye thrive in harmony, as one with Nature".
Arnechai's breath hitches. 'Children' he repeats to himself. The word reverberates through him, foreign yet intoxicating.
On Old Earth, Ren had seen families fractured by poverty, parents selling plasma to buy synthetic rice. Here, in this lightless womb, a God claims what humans call monsters as kin.
"Arnechai Kricekeer Qhenti is dead" he announces suddenly, his voice steadier than he feels. The suffix, Kricekeer Qhenti, tastes like ash. "I… I need a new name. A true name" he pleas.
Sprout turns, fungal eyes narrowing in approval. "Then claim a name of thine own choosing, for thou art free at last to shape thy destiny".
The weight of autonomy terrifies him. Names in Spidan culture were given, not taken. Yet here, bathed in the afterglow of divine intervention, he understands: freedom is a blade that cuts both ways.
"I want you to tell my name. Oh Great Master" he whispers, the word drawn from some deep, ancestral well. He's now choosing to bow, he's not being imposed with subjection.
Sprout nods his head. "Then rise, Brunor the Quick. Herald of the Verdant Grace".
As the newly named Spidan straightens, his posture shifts. No longer the hunched supplicant, he stands tall, legs splayed in a mimicry of leadership he once witnessed in his Mother. But where her reign was tyranny, his… his will be stewardship.
Garm watches from the shadows, his muzzle stained black. "Young Master's pets are… interesting" he grumbles, though his tail gives a half-hearted wag. "But Garm hopes they taste better than they look".
Ren ignores him, marveling at the Spidans' transformation in Kustarids. They mill about, no longer a swarming mass, but individuals, persons, examining their claws with newfound curiosity, tracing the scars of old battles.
One male, his carapace dented from a rival's bite, begins repairing a shattered web, not as a trap, but as a hammock.
'This is how it begins' Ren thinks, Sprout's bark hiding his trembling smile. 'Not with a revolution, but a hammock'.
The Chamber, once a tomb of fear, hums with tentative hope. Above, through cracks in the ceiling, a single shaft of moonlight pierces the dark, a promise that even here, in the deepest dark, growth is possible.
"Garm will fetch Humtoc" announces the Great Wolf, anticipating his Master's order.
'All the things happen when Humtoc sleeps' jokes inwardly Ren as the foundations of a new kingdom are laid.
"The Kustarids stand as the first noble race to embrace the Verdant Grace in this realm. The Goatmen shall soon follow, and even those curious Centaurs will find their place within my fold. Together, all shall unite beneath the Timberous Order, consecrated by the eternal Wisdom of the Oak" declares Sprout.
Sprout's gaze lingers on the Kustarids, their once-feral movements now tempered by purpose. No longer do they scuttle in frenzied competition, claws slashing at one another for scraps of silk or morsels of prey.
Instead, they move in a strange, newfound harmony, a symphony of cooperation rather than chaos. One Kustarid, its carapace still bearing the jagged scars of past skirmishes, helps another repair a shattered web, its spinnerets weaving threads of steel-strong silk with meticulous care.
Another shares a freshly caught cave beetle that wasn't able to endure Sprout spell, its mandibles clicking in a rhythm that almost resembles laughter. The Chamber, once a grim battlefield of survival, hums with the quiet hum of unity.
'Freedom…' The word unspools in his mind, no longer abstract. It is not the absence of chains, he realizes, but the choice to forge them anew. On Earth, chains had been shackles, of debt, of greed, of corporate allegiances that leeched humanity dry.
Here, in this reclaimed darkness, they are something more. Each act of generosity, each shared burden, each murmured truth becomes a ring of iron reshaped, interlocked into armor. A chainmail of unity, its strength born not from subjugation, but from the relentless, unyielding choice to bear one another's weight.
The Kustarids' cooperation is no fragile ideal. It is a living forge. Every shared morsel hammers another link; every collaborative web tightens the weave. Ren thinks of the oligarchs' gilded towers, their foundations cracked by the rot of 'every man for himself'.
Here, the foundation is the collective the understanding that a chainmail cannot exist without each ring accepting its role, its connection to the whole.
'Egoism is a weak man's armor' he muses, Sprout's ancient wisdom tempering his cynicism. 'It shatters under the first blow. But this…'.
A young Kustarid stumbles, slow to accustome himself to his newfound thoughts and self-consciousness, almost immediately three others steady it without hesitation.
In their previous society he would have already been devoured by the Mother or by one his siblings.
'This is how civilizations survive. How they thrive'.