Stalked
Corey "Benraven" Blakenship
The Private jolted as if struck with water. The shadow within him swallowed the light of the dawn, which felt more fantasy than reality now in this state. Fluid, warm and viscid, enclosed around him, his body confined in a cramped envelope. Confusion fell upon him like an overturned bookshelf, each brick of sensory data striking against all he remembered and knew. The fight was over and the party, his ragtag troop, and the cave monstrosities lay as a ruined heap around him. Now they were gone, replaced by the liquid sheath and cloak of darkness. He was alone and something in his subconscious told him he had been this way for a long time.
The return of feeling made him slowly aware of other oddities. His jaw felt longer, and split, maybe due to a forgotten punch from those towering brutes. His shoulder blades moved as though disjointed...or double-jointed. He could not be sure in this cocoon. At the mentally intoned word cocoon, his skin crawled as his independent spirit began to thirst for freedom. He found his knives came into his hands at this desire, balanced and eager to liberate their owner. He thrust through the thick barrier, the edges cutting cleanly through to the empty void beyond. The warm fluid spilled down to the floor below, oddly silent as it splashed into the unknown. He pressed the silken edges away and leaned out of the husk, realizing where he was, and retched. He hung suspended in a spiderweb cocoon, probably some creature’s intended meal.
'Not today', he thought as he spit. That his jaw didn’t hurt to spit surprised him. 'How long have I been in this place?' A quick scan revealed a semicircular tunnel that dead-ended at his former perch, which housed several other similar cocoons along its outer wall. He dropped to the floor, instincts allowing him to drop as quick and quiet as a spider from its web. He glanced back at the limp woven sack, an unexplainable nostalgia washing over him, some irrational sense of home lost in its broken threads. Shaking his head, the Private murmured about the twisted ways of the mind, and moved along the curved path toward the only apparent entrance.
Some of the sacs along the wall bulged as if containing a heavy load, while the others were slender as though only a waif hung inside. The temptation to open each and see what laid inside occurred to him, but a morbid distaste clung to his tongue at the images he might find lurking inside their grey shells. He turned his back to the row of silent pods, but paused, thinking he saw a slight movement from one in the corner of his gaze. Then again, his peripheral seemed much clearer and capable of focusing in detail than ever before. 'Maybe they loaded some nutrients in that goop of theirs. Fattening the food...' He shivered at the kaleidoscope of arachnids seasoning human-stuffed-California rolls before their feast.
The tunnel emptied into an antechamber, made much like the passage behind him. The floors, walls and ceiling flowed seamlessly together, crafted as though of one giant hollow strand of web. Ambient light drifted along the windless air, a dim glow that fed his enhanced vision with surprisingly clarity. Standing at the mouth of the chamber, he began to get an intuitive sense of the greater design. He simply knew what and where and why he was there. This was a Weaver of Despair’s creche, joined to the Matriarch’s Den, and he was a member of her hive. How he knew and what it all meant were both a mystery to be unraveled. And he knew where the answers lied. 'Time to talk with the queen...'