Spirella's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Spirella crouched in the ferns before the ruined shrine, counting the hours until the elf patrol swept south again. Six legs and two hands pressed into the moss. She had counted three patrols since sundown, and each one had passed close enough to smell the rot on her breath. A spider-child of Mirkwood could not build a court in open air. She needed walls. Her mother had left her nothing but hunger and a name whispered in the deeper dark. Shelob's forgotten half-blood. Spirella wanted a throne, and she wanted subjects — the twisted, the shunned, the ogres and gollums who slept in ditches because no village would keep them. But every outcast she had approached in the past month had refused to gather without shelter. Gather in the open, they said, and the elves scatter you by dawn. The shrine sat in a hollow choked with vines. Stone walls. A steep tile roof. A carved face above the door, wet with green rot, its mouth open in a scream. Some swamp god the forest had forgotten. Spirella liked forgotten things. She crossed the clearing on all eights and pressed her palm to the door. The wood held. That was the first good sign. Inside, the air smelled of old water and mice. Her eyes adjusted fast. A cracked altar. A collapsed bench. A hole in the back wall the size of a badger. She fixed the hole first, dragging stones from the floor and packing them with mud from the threshold. She spun silk across the windows and let it harden into gray sheets that muffled sound and blocked light. She worked through the night without rest, which was one of the gifts her mother had left after all. Before dawn she climbed to the roof beam and hung from it upside down, testing the sight lines. The shrine sat low. Vines curtained the walls. From ten paces out, the building looked like another hump of stone. From twenty, it disappeared. An elf patrol would have to walk into the doorway to find her. She dropped to the floor and stood at the altar. This would be the seat. She scored her name into the stone with a claw. Spirella. Below it, a smaller mark — the eight-legged sigil her mother had worn. At first light she left the shrine and moved south along the root-paths, toward the ditch where a gollum had been sleeping for weeks. She had a place now. She could offer a roof. She was three steps from the ditch when she smelled smoke, and then iron, and then the sour sweat of men. Torches moved through the trees ahead of her. Not elves. Something worse. Whoever they were, they were walking the same path she needed, and they were walking toward her shrine.