The Kitsune and the Spiders

We were exhaled by the Forest Tempest, emerging upon a high cliffside. Before us lay a valley steeped in a permanent and sorrowful dusk, a landscape that seemed to be the physical memory of a long-forgotten sigh. In its center stood a fortress, an exercise in the architecture of despair—a single, defiant square of stone with four unadorned towers, like the four unwavering notes of a funeral dirge. The design was a painful, familiar echo from my own world's history: a Norman keep.

The sky above was a bruised and morosely morbid canvas of congealed reds and deep, abyssal blues. There was no sun, nor moon, only this strange, perpetual dusk. A strange miasma of static electricity hung in the air, a palpable buzz that caused the fine hairs on my arms to stand erect. Every few moments, great tendrils of lightning would crawl upward from the valley floor, clawing their way into the waiting, sickly clouds.

Xiao Ru stood at the precipice, her form silhouetted against the sky, her gaze fixed and determined. "They are there," she whispered, her voice a low vow. "The cubs are in that place."

Ashley let out a long, theatrical sigh. "Can't you just… make more?" she jokingly whined. "We could be home by now."

All the levity in Xiao Ru's face collapsed into a single, hard point of intention. She took Ashley's hand, and with that single point of contact, revoked her right to stand upon the cliff's edge. Their movement down the cliff face was a sudden erasure of the vertical, a wild slide accompanied by the sound of the shale hill shedding its stony skin. My lungs, which had apparently been hoarding a single breath, decided to release it, and with that small sigh, I followed them.

The path to the castle was a precarious, winding ribbon of stone carved into the side of a steep, sheer butte that thrust into the morbidly contused sky like a warmed dagger in supple, soft flesh. I raised a hand, bringing our small procession to a halt at its base. "We cannot simply walk into such a place," I said. "We require a plan."

Ashley leaned against the rock face, examining her nails. "I agree," she said, before a slow, considering look came over her face. "A thought, detective. Why do you suppose the monster, the fake sister, sought out the little Ru herself?"

Xiao Ru, who had been peering up at the fortress, cocked her head to the side and squinted one eye, her expression a perfect portrait of "who are you calling little?" Certainly, she was taller than Ashley, though in my native tongue what would be Xiao surely amounted to "little".

"I have been asking myself the same question," I admitted, my gaze distant. "Xiao Ru mentioned she was the only one from her village to have taken up residence in the city. Perhaps, then, the creatures wish to have all the foxes in one place…"

My words hung in the charged air, and in that moment, the disparate pieces of our strange quest clicked together with a sudden, terrible clarity accented by a succinct flash of blue lightning just behind. It struck all three of us at once. The faked sister, the elaborate lure… It was about retrieving a single, specific person. Her.

And if they went to such lengths to lure Xiao Ru away… a cold, sickening dread washed over me. What was happening to the village now that she was gone? Why would the Matriarch send her most valuable asset away from the village if it were under siege? Unless… is Xiao Ru, perhaps, special in a way none of us understood?

"They do not mean to simply slaughter the children," I thought aloud, the theory taking shape. "They have a separate intention. A fuel source, then? If these creatures require blood…" I turned to Xiao Ru. "Do fox children possess something special in their own? A unique property?"

She shook her head, though the denial was not absolute. I saw the seed of a new and terrible doubt planted in her eyes. The thought—a venomous and persistent thing—gnawed at the back of my mind as we resumed our ascent up the treacherous path. Might it be that they craved the very same blood as I?

The path ended before a set of doors whose scale did not so much intimidate as propose a new and humbling definition of 'small'—towering the stature of over one hundred Xiao Ru’s, at the least. They were made of a black metal whose surface was marked by a slow, geological weeping of rust. The concept of forcing entry was a fool's errand, though perhaps the hinges...? Before the thought could complete itself, a sound issued from the stone, the deep, resonant complaint of a fault line shifting. A door began to open. We exchanged a silent look, our separate trepidations becoming a single, braided cord, and stepped across the threshold into the long, patient throat of the fortress.

The air within was damp and still, carrying the scent of dust and old stone. The long, cavernous halls were lit by the flickering, primitive light of torches set in iron sconces, their flames casting a dance of long, distorted shadows upon the walls.

"The architecture…" Ashley murmured, her voice a low echo in the corridor. "It is… wrong. It hardly seems native to the Capital, or anywhere near it."

"It was constructed by settlers," Xiao Ru explained, her own voice hushed with a kind of reverence. "From a place far away, so many long rotations ago."

From a place far away. The words stirred a strange and disquieting thought within me. Could it be? Had others from my own, forgotten world found their way into this strange and… resplendent place?

My speculation was cut short by a low, deep rumbling that vibrated through the very stones beneath our feet. A sense of urgency seized us, and we hurried our pace, moving from the narrow hall into a vast, cavernous chamber at the castle's heart.

It was a great hall, a place of crumbling majesty that put me in the mind of some tragic play—a court out of Hamlet, with a high, vaulted ceiling lost in shadow and a great, empty throne of black stone at its far end.

But before my mind could linger on such morbid fancies, a new sound reached us—a soft, dry, chitinous clicking. From the deep shadows that clung to the edges of the hall, they began to emerge. Creatures with the grotesque, eight-legged bodies of great spiders, their abdomens a startling, venomous pink. And yet, from the thorax of each rose the pale, unnervingly humanoid torso of a woman, with hair as white as Ashley’s, tied up in a strange, pink bow. The "widows," as my mind instantly and irrevocably christened them, were filtering out from the darkness, their many eyes fixed upon us.

The chitinous clicking grew louder as the spider-widows advanced, a slow, inexorable tide of legs and pale female forms. A cold, nauseating dread, entirely separate from any vampiric instinct, rose from the pit of my stomach. Spiders. In my mortal life, I had harbored a deep revulsion for them. That feeling, it seemed, had followed me into undeath. My eye began to twitch, a small, uncontrollable spasm.

I felt a soft brush against my arm and flinched violently, a choked gasp escaping my lips, only to see Xiao Ru looking at me with concern. But her concern was not for the advancing monstrosities. To my bewilderment, her tail was wagging back and forth with a slow, hypnotic rhythm, like that of a curious dog. A look of what I could only describe as delighted fascination was upon her face. My mind, reeling from a mixture of arachnophobia and pure disbelief, could only form a single, silent question: What is wrong with you?

"Oh, aren't they lovely?" Xiao Ru whispered, her eyes beamy with genuine admiration. "I adore spiders. I find them terribly cute."

As she spoke, one of the closest widows, its two black eyes fixed upon her, seemed to pause. A faint, pinkish hue suffused its pale, humanoid cheeks, and it shyly averted its gaze. This bizarre and momentary truce, however, did not extend to the rest of the horde. They continued their slow, unnerving advance, their many-jointed legs moving with a strange, hydraulic stiffness, as if I were witnessing a series of still frames from a nightmare, with the connecting moments of reality simply missing.

The sight made my stomach churn. I glanced at Ashley, and was reminded of when we first met—I saw a woman trying desperately to master her own terror. Her face was pale… but that was a given, her knuckles white… also a given, but a fine tremor ran through her hands. She swallowed hard, the sound unnaturally loud in the tense silence.

For just a moment, a shade of blue seemed to besmirch her. "I am not," she said, her voice a strained whisper, "completely… useless."

Her fear was a visible and delicate architecture of tremors, yet she took a single step forward, becoming a living, breathing semicolon between us and the advancing horrors. She raised a hand toward the torchlit wall, and her shadow, a long, quiet attendant woven from absence, performed the same gesture in perfect, silent sympathy.

And then, it detached.

The shadow unglued itself from the laws of light, its form elongating, its fingers sharpening into the delicate, skeletal architecture of a bat's wing. It moved with a life of its own across the cold stone. The shadow's talons reached the dark shape of the spider-widow and closed upon a single point—not its heart, but the silent, grammatical subject of its existence, squeezing the platonic ideal of life from the dark shape.

In the torchlight, the real creature froze, its body attempting to solve an impossible new equation of pain. A scream was folded into a different dimension, leaving only a faint, ozonic scent in the air. On the wall, we all watched the wall as the single, dark axiom upon which its existence was predicated, was calmly and methodically disproven by Ashley's terrible, living shadow. The darkness of the heart, when broken, effervesced into a brief and beautiful cloud of paradoxes that then vanished.

I stared, uncomprehending, at the place where the creature's life had been so unnaturally extinguished, then at Ashley, who now seemed to be leaning against the wall for support. My mind could not form a rational explanation for what I had just witnessed.

But it was Xiao Ru who spoke first, her voice a low, horrified whisper. Her ears, which had been perked with fascination, were now pressed flat against her head in distress. "Was… was that truly necessary?" she asked, her gaze fixed on the dead thing. "I believe they can be reasoned with!"

Ashley and I both turned to stare at her, a shared look of… of something like disgusted disbelief on our faces. "Reasoned with?" Ashley shrieked, her voice cracking with a mixture of fear and outrage. "They mean to kill us!"

"But we cannot know that for certain, can we?" Xiao Ru said, turning from the dead creature to the living, advancing horde, a strange, cheerful smile gracing her lips as she took in the sight of their mouth-watering forms closing in. They had, indeed, used our moment of squabbling to creep much closer.

"There is no time for this," I snapped, the detective in me overriding the stunned spectator. "There are at least a dozen of them."

Ashley gulped, catching her breath, her teeth chattering softly. But she extended her hands again. Two more living shadows detached from her, each one a terrible, grasping claw that found and crushed the life from two more of the advancing horrors. My own pistol was in my hand, its faint glow a welcome sight. Two shots rang out, a boisterous thunder in the great hall, and two more of the creatures collapsed, their pale heads sublimating into a complex spray of viscous fluid.

But Xiao Ru chose to author a different sort of story in that moment. To my dumbfounded horror, she approached the one that had blushed, her hands held open as if offering a map of a peaceful and alternative country. She began to speak in a series of soft, musical chirps. Are you serious? What in all the hells is she doing?

My internal disbelief was cut short as another widow scuttled with unnatural speed behind her, its fanged mandibles wide. Before I could shout a warning, a shadow in the shape of a booted leg lashed out from Ashley's feet, kicking the creature square in its bulbous, pink abdomen. The thing burst like an overripe fruit, splattering the stone floor with a foul, gelatinous goo. But even as it died, its head whipped around, and its fangs sank deep into Xiao Ru's calf.