Arachne Silkweaver's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Arachne Silkweaver crouched in the grass at the edge of a clearing and counted three days since anything had touched her silk. She was a large spider, and she had spun in many forests, many caves, and the quiet corners of more than one house. A web that got fought against was a web in the right place. This web had not been fought against. It had not even been brushed. She had chosen the spot for the smell of moss and the soft give of the soil. The grass around her anchor lines stood straight. No trail bent through it. No beetle had crushed a path to the water. The strands she had strung between two low branches caught the morning light and held only dew, a faint silver tangle glittering above untouched stems. Somewhere under the leaves above her, she had built a heavy bundle of pearl-pale silk wrapped around mossy twigs, ready to drop and bind whatever blundered in. Nothing had blundered in. Clipped to the underside of one leg, she carried a small keepsake. It was a scrap from an old kill: a torn cocoon threaded with moth scales, gnawed open at the center where the moth had fought and lost. She had carried it out of the rafters of a farmhouse where she had eaten for a whole summer. She kept it because it reminded her what a good web felt like before the strike. This new clearing did not feel like that. She climbed back up to the heavy bundle and pressed a leg against it. The silk was clean. No tug. No tremor. She understood, finally, what was wrong. She had spun where she could reach, not where prey already walked. She had no way to know, from one patch of forest to the next, which place held the blundering and which place held only grass. She had been guessing. The torn cocoon under her leg had come from a farmhouse beam that mice used every night. She had not chosen that beam. The mice had chosen it for her, and she had only noticed. Arachne cut the anchor lines one by one. The pale bundle dropped into the grass and rolled against a stem. She left it. From now on she would not spin first and wait. She would walk the ground first and read it: look for crushed stalks, for trails worn smooth, for droppings, for the small signs that something passed this way often. She tucked the torn cocoon tighter against her leg and started into the trees, watching the dirt.