Sivara Frostwhisper's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Sivara Frostwhisper wanted the great stag, the one whose antlers were said to carry a shard of the Helium Mother. But a village eats now, not in legends. So she tracked a lame Frosthorn buck instead, a fat kill to fill bellies while she waited for her real prize. The buck's left foreleg dragged. She had followed its tired trail for two days. Then the tracks crossed onto ground she did not know, and the sign vanished. She knelt in a patch of frostglow tundra. The grass blades shone faintly from within, blue and green and one strange purple. She pressed her palm to the frost. No fresh scent. No broken stem. The buck had walked here, then simply stopped existing in her senses. Her scalp filaments strained the air and found nothing. Sivara stood and studied the strange purple glow. The tundra should not glow that color. Something had changed this ground. She followed the purple threads with her eyes, deeper, until she saw two great mushrooms ahead. A web of luminous silk stretched between their stalks, wide as a hut, shimmering pale violet. A voice came flat behind her. "You are far from village trails." Sivara turned. Seren Velyx stood among the frostpines, spear in hand, the tip stained faint purple with Venara toxin. Seren was a hunter of dangerous beasts, not deer. One patch of skin on their forearm stayed dark where poison mist had once numbed it. Sivara knew Seren by reputation. Careful. Never wasteful with words. "I lost a buck," Sivara said. "Bad leg. He came this way." Seren looked at the web, then at her. "He did not come out." Sivara walked closer. Now she saw it. The buck hung tangled in the lower silk, still, its bad leg twisted in the strands. Above it crouched a spider the size of a Cronkey. Orange hairs bristled along its back. Purple armor covered its body, and green marks pulsed slow across its swollen belly. "That took my kill," Sivara said. "That took three settlements' game," Seren said. "I have hunted it for a cycle." The spider shifted. Its legs found the strands without sound. Sivara pulled her runed blowgun from her shaw and slid a dart from the frostelk bag. Her dose was cut for deer meat, too light for this armor. She knew it the moment she raised the tube. "Do not," Seren said. "Your poison is wrong." Sivara blew anyway. The dart struck the belly and stuck. The spider did not slow. It dropped from the web onto the tundra, fast, and both hunters scattered. Sivara rolled through frost and came up empty-handed. Her dart bag lay behind her, near the spider's legs. The buck was lost. The meat was lost. And now the beast that had emptied three villages of game stood between Sivara and the ground she needed to cross to find her stag. "We kill it together," Seren said. "Or it feeds again."