Banned
Security is a novel concept. Many have aspired to obtain it, yet few, if any, have succeeded. Kings, merchants, and generals to peasants. All have sought refuge behind barriers only to discover themselves crushed against it. The sanguinary facets of existence couldn't be denied. And while necessary, it still amounted to a fool's errand—a doomed struggle to keep away the frigid hands of entropy. Valerna had seen it play out innumerable times. The names may change along with the faces. However, the song and dance presented itself as the same. Valerna was no exception; she, too, desired the impossible.
While an illusion, safety was a creaturely comfort Valerna didn't take for granted. Her time under the yoke of a self-imposed higher calling was ripe with turmoil. Her motherland, the Verdant Dynasty, was formerly teeming with conflict. The butchery of kin and social upheaval was once routine within that humid hellscape. Turbulence was the currency of the land. Its leafy bosom was painted red, and its animus ran deeper than its roots. Bigotry was commonplace, aimed at one's immutable traits.
Ever since she could recall, her father forewarned her of the realm's penchant for discrimination. The augury was ignored, assumed to be the ramblings of a jaded man. However, it wouldn't take long for the Araneae to encounter abuse. The people she met throughout her odyssey were skeptical of outsiders. They regarded her as a monstrosity, an aberration, and an affront against nature.
Relentlessly, Valerna was bombarded with invective and physical altercations. The monster with a heart of gold soon discovered that the world would never tolerate her. The dreams of starting a family and interacting with others as equals had long since evaporated. Alone, she faced the unrelenting heat of this truth. Aimlessly, she bounded between settlements, her spirit charred by the inferno of their indignation. To prevail against such a cruel reality, she retreated into her mindscape.
It was through the gardening of introspection that she discovered repletion. Those dexterous arachnoid ligaments toiled away at the construction of her webbing. Her thirst for knowledge couldn't be assuaged. With each discovery, she desired just a drop more. Valerna's dearth of savoir-faire presented itself as a stumbling block. Clumsily, she navigated an unfamiliar theatre. Her spindly appendages scribbled her thoughts in a bid to provide a resolution.
The fear of being harmed often fostered sequestration. Her quotidian existence resumed without incident for a time as Valerna vicariously absorbed more and more data concerning what led her to this precipice. It's ingrained in her; Valerna is an explorer of all pursuits under the firmament. She rends the veil between enlightenment and ignorance—the spearhead within the vanguard that is discovery. When she first cracked open the door to perspicuity, she studied prudently into the darkness. Fearful of the wailing horrors that dominated beyond the threshold.
She didn't balk, for a glimpse beyond wasn't enough for the mistress of the web. She had long since plunged headlong over the escarpment and set sails across the sea of understanding. In this ruminative stupor, there were no suns by which one could navigate. Nor a moon to guide the tides. Latitude and longitude would not avail her, for the laws of time and physics are unique to the temporal plane.
This errant sojourner represented order within an expanse of raucous chaos. And as she broke the murky swells, she discharged spumes or creation before her. The elders were ever anticipatory. The impudence of this mere speck amused them. But she was most zealous and would stand dauntless before these wills. After all, she helmed her destiny. She sought to break the code and discover the truth of her enemy. For understanding is power, and mental oblivion is weakness.
The defiled is the riddle unsolvable. The door unopenable, the tome unreadable, the query unanswerable. Nevertheless, Valerna pledged to solve the unsolvable and answer the unanswerable. The secret she searched for was one that even the demons of plague had forgotten and erased from the chronicles of memory.
There, within a cave, crystal lighting dimly pulsated. Its luminosity painted the ridges of the rocks. The shadows were repulsed into the depressions darted throughout the earthen chamber's walls. The space was eerily silent, with but the turning of pages to break its spell. Even the moats of dust seemed to be frozen from trepidation.
Valerna fell into its orbit. Her spirit rattled due to the reverberations of its gravity. She could feel it. The secrets, yet unlocked, yearned to be opened. That sensation swelled within the back of her mind as if twisting tendrils suctioned onto her sanity and squeezed. The crude pincers clenched her curiosity while snipping away the twines of uncertainty that remained. Her notes filled the heartless earthen pouch she had been camping in with inferential power. The sort of energy that would elude most.
While silent to others, Valerna swore it yawned with the fury of a leviathan. The waves of delirium crashed violently against the rocks along the shores of sanity. The foam scoured any fear as the moment passed, and the tide returned to the sea. It brought a eureka moment, one sealed by the scratching of a quill against hemp paper.
While she wrote, her arachnoid additions reached out, performing various complex motor functions—organizing her supplies, combing back her auburn mane, and spinning the strings of her bone harp. One thing was clear to anyone that may disturb her meditation. Valerna is within her zone, her very own pocket reality. However, she ultimately would close her journal shut, securing it within a bag of filigree she had spun. The giantess rose after collecting her things and tchotchkes before she crept through the veil of shadows, inching into the light and trekking down the dirt road.
The primordial call of her motherland was absent here. Its dearth brought with it a sense of forlornness. The psithurism of the wilds failed to fill the chasm in her heart. The kiss of the sun's rays that perforated through the verdant canopy supplied a mite of elation. The fauna of this world was foreign; it lacked the magnificence of the kaleidoscopic array of her motherland. The ferns were replaced by extensive patches of wild grass mixed with the bushes and thorns of the forest. The soundscape was serene, camouflaging the predators that prowled this labyrinthine wilderness.
The trees here were lilliputian in stature when contrasted with the edifices of her ancestral home. The animals she had spotted from the shadows were smaller and no more agile than the behemoths of the Verdant Dynasty. The saurians were replaced with more mammalian critters. And even the air itself emerged as lacking. Everything felt wrong. The biodome was an effrontery to what she had known. Valerna had felt such dismay before. During her time as the eternal voyager, she ambled through many climates. And, by happenstance, worlds.
The winks before her materialization here were a blur. The last thing she recalled was being immersed in a bright light. A sense of weightlessness took hold as an extraordinary void lingered for an indeterminable passage of time. She was adrift, bobbing on the currents and eddies of the great silence. Valerna brooked it all, curious to face what awaited at the end of such torpor. She languished but was thankful its permeance wasn't interminable. That's when she slipped into this plane of existence.
It didn't take long to thread together that she was far from home. The spider needed only to gaze at the welkin to reach that conclusion. Whatever this globe was, it had a lonesome sol traversing the sky. The positions of the stars were also off, further confirming her fears. Valerna was alone, an inescapable truth she had to accept.
A hefty sough divorced itself from her gullet. Her lips parted as that split oral muscle moisturized them. The woman didn't belong. She stood 13 feet tall, and her body was swathed in spider silk with a bone mold overlaid on top. Its rubicund hue matched the arachnid legs affixed to her back. Its light red hair picked up on the breeze as her armored palm rubbed against the surrounding plant life.
The dew streaked across her hand as she kept vigilant and analyzed her surroundings. Whatever caused her extraction remained an enigma. Nevertheless, this wasn't her first foray into such phenomena. Valerna understood the universe had a way of correcting itself. Things that didn't belong would return to their natural point in space and time. It wasn't a question of if, instead, when. And at most, all her measures could do was defer or accelerate that inevitability.
Val's sculpture was buxom. Her curves were hugged tightly by the protective veneer. Prematurely, some might be predisposed to assume she was hedonistically inclined. Should such wild assumptions manifest, she'd quickly shoo them away. Her people's culture and mastery over cellmancy would be lost to the people of this province. It wasn't donned to solicit the fickled and short-lived carnality of others. No, it stood as a testament to her proficiency and status in society. A telltale sign that she wasn't one to be trifled with—a woman who had warranted her status via the sweat of her brow.
Here, feminity may be taboo. She wouldn't permit the astigmatic perceptions of others to restrain her. Valerna was a matron, a woman whose only fetters were her responsibilities to her people. For heavy is the crown, but heavier is the heft of failure. Risque or not, this spider none would cage. She wasn't responsible for the libidinal hankerings of the dim-witted and close-minded. Regardless, she anticipated it to stand as an obstacle. After all, vainglorious cretins had a way of projecting their moral arbitration on others with little regard for the contrast. That's why, in her mind, most were slaves, subjects crushed under their belief. What wasted passion and effort if only one would be amicable to see the world through the eyes of another? Perhaps then, most of our woes might be circumvented.
Eventually, she reached a clearing. Her sharp eyes inspected the disturbed grass. Wildlife frequented this spot. She was famished and required sustenance. Quickly, she spun together a few lines of her web before crawling on all fours and hiding within the brush. She remained silent for some time until, eventually, a doe ran into her mesh. Once her meal had become entangled due to its pointless struggles, Valerna emerged from her nested position.
The spider sashayed, kneeling as she planted her hand on the quarry's head. Her eyes stared into the creature's own, seeing only fear mirrored back at her. Valerna's own reflected gratitude. A gesticulation that likely ranged hollow. Nonetheless, she'd present it all the same.
"Thank you for your bounty. May your life force nourish me. And should the predator become the prey, may my flesh add to the cycle. Rest now; your time to ascend the trunk of the tree of life has come. May you peer down from the leafy canopy and see my gratitude." She spoke in her native tongue, which none here could understand. Her voice was melodic, almost as if uttering a hymn or incantation.
Valerna wouldn't prolong the deer's suffering. She quickly snapped its neck before lurching forward and sinking her fangs into the beast. The venom she injected quickly liquified the animal's innards. The delectable soup was quickly sucked free from the body. The shriveled remains were ripped from the web and heaved into the bushes. Others would feast on what remained, guaranteeing the commemoration of the timeless cycle. The giantess kept silent as she removed the twine she had woven and ingested them, recycling the fibers. Now nourished, she'd continue following the traffic the other animals left.
Providentially, it led the Araneae to a body of water. She stood silently by the lake, kneeling down as she peered into its reflective and still surface. A weak smile formed across her countenance as she stared at her reflection. It had been too long since she had communed with nature. The anomaly behind her journey was unexpected yet good for her soul. Regardless, she doubted any benevolent benefactor was behind it all, whether mortal or higher.
Valerna remained, taking out her bone and spider silk harp as her talons danced across the strings. Her playing sent forth an otherworldly yet soothing melody- a hymn of repletion accentuated by the heavenly voice that accompanied its vibrations across the winds. A flash of solace, while ephemeral, merited appreciation. And she intended not to fritter it away. Visibly, she'd air an atmosphere of collectiveness. Internally, however, she mulled over a great deal. Were there any people on this rock? And, if so, what manner of folk were they?
She apprehended that the universe is hostile. That the natural order never favored wimps. Any intelligence she ran into was a threat, no matter its corporeal form. They had reached their position in the hierarchy of the macrocosm through tribulations—an endless bout against threats and fulminations. The tools they appropriated and the faces of their menaces may change. But the stage and play remained invariably immovable.
Still, she'd need to tread prudently and abide by any barbs. Valerna wasn't in the position to be antagonistic. It would be wise to observe, study them, and ingratiate herself. Assimilation, while a terrifying prospect, may prove indispensable to her survival. But the point remained. Would they reciprocate the gesture? Would they see the world through a similar lens? Time, as per usual, would serve as the lone arbiter. She need only wait and see how things might unfold.
While an illusion, safety was a creaturely comfort Valerna didn't take for granted. Her time under the yoke of a self-imposed higher calling was ripe with turmoil. Her motherland, the Verdant Dynasty, was formerly teeming with conflict. The butchery of kin and social upheaval was once routine within that humid hellscape. Turbulence was the currency of the land. Its leafy bosom was painted red, and its animus ran deeper than its roots. Bigotry was commonplace, aimed at one's immutable traits.
Ever since she could recall, her father forewarned her of the realm's penchant for discrimination. The augury was ignored, assumed to be the ramblings of a jaded man. However, it wouldn't take long for the Araneae to encounter abuse. The people she met throughout her odyssey were skeptical of outsiders. They regarded her as a monstrosity, an aberration, and an affront against nature.
Relentlessly, Valerna was bombarded with invective and physical altercations. The monster with a heart of gold soon discovered that the world would never tolerate her. The dreams of starting a family and interacting with others as equals had long since evaporated. Alone, she faced the unrelenting heat of this truth. Aimlessly, she bounded between settlements, her spirit charred by the inferno of their indignation. To prevail against such a cruel reality, she retreated into her mindscape.
It was through the gardening of introspection that she discovered repletion. Those dexterous arachnoid ligaments toiled away at the construction of her webbing. Her thirst for knowledge couldn't be assuaged. With each discovery, she desired just a drop more. Valerna's dearth of savoir-faire presented itself as a stumbling block. Clumsily, she navigated an unfamiliar theatre. Her spindly appendages scribbled her thoughts in a bid to provide a resolution.
The fear of being harmed often fostered sequestration. Her quotidian existence resumed without incident for a time as Valerna vicariously absorbed more and more data concerning what led her to this precipice. It's ingrained in her; Valerna is an explorer of all pursuits under the firmament. She rends the veil between enlightenment and ignorance—the spearhead within the vanguard that is discovery. When she first cracked open the door to perspicuity, she studied prudently into the darkness. Fearful of the wailing horrors that dominated beyond the threshold.
She didn't balk, for a glimpse beyond wasn't enough for the mistress of the web. She had long since plunged headlong over the escarpment and set sails across the sea of understanding. In this ruminative stupor, there were no suns by which one could navigate. Nor a moon to guide the tides. Latitude and longitude would not avail her, for the laws of time and physics are unique to the temporal plane.
This errant sojourner represented order within an expanse of raucous chaos. And as she broke the murky swells, she discharged spumes or creation before her. The elders were ever anticipatory. The impudence of this mere speck amused them. But she was most zealous and would stand dauntless before these wills. After all, she helmed her destiny. She sought to break the code and discover the truth of her enemy. For understanding is power, and mental oblivion is weakness.
The defiled is the riddle unsolvable. The door unopenable, the tome unreadable, the query unanswerable. Nevertheless, Valerna pledged to solve the unsolvable and answer the unanswerable. The secret she searched for was one that even the demons of plague had forgotten and erased from the chronicles of memory.
There, within a cave, crystal lighting dimly pulsated. Its luminosity painted the ridges of the rocks. The shadows were repulsed into the depressions darted throughout the earthen chamber's walls. The space was eerily silent, with but the turning of pages to break its spell. Even the moats of dust seemed to be frozen from trepidation.
Valerna fell into its orbit. Her spirit rattled due to the reverberations of its gravity. She could feel it. The secrets, yet unlocked, yearned to be opened. That sensation swelled within the back of her mind as if twisting tendrils suctioned onto her sanity and squeezed. The crude pincers clenched her curiosity while snipping away the twines of uncertainty that remained. Her notes filled the heartless earthen pouch she had been camping in with inferential power. The sort of energy that would elude most.
While silent to others, Valerna swore it yawned with the fury of a leviathan. The waves of delirium crashed violently against the rocks along the shores of sanity. The foam scoured any fear as the moment passed, and the tide returned to the sea. It brought a eureka moment, one sealed by the scratching of a quill against hemp paper.
While she wrote, her arachnoid additions reached out, performing various complex motor functions—organizing her supplies, combing back her auburn mane, and spinning the strings of her bone harp. One thing was clear to anyone that may disturb her meditation. Valerna is within her zone, her very own pocket reality. However, she ultimately would close her journal shut, securing it within a bag of filigree she had spun. The giantess rose after collecting her things and tchotchkes before she crept through the veil of shadows, inching into the light and trekking down the dirt road.
The primordial call of her motherland was absent here. Its dearth brought with it a sense of forlornness. The psithurism of the wilds failed to fill the chasm in her heart. The kiss of the sun's rays that perforated through the verdant canopy supplied a mite of elation. The fauna of this world was foreign; it lacked the magnificence of the kaleidoscopic array of her motherland. The ferns were replaced by extensive patches of wild grass mixed with the bushes and thorns of the forest. The soundscape was serene, camouflaging the predators that prowled this labyrinthine wilderness.
The trees here were lilliputian in stature when contrasted with the edifices of her ancestral home. The animals she had spotted from the shadows were smaller and no more agile than the behemoths of the Verdant Dynasty. The saurians were replaced with more mammalian critters. And even the air itself emerged as lacking. Everything felt wrong. The biodome was an effrontery to what she had known. Valerna had felt such dismay before. During her time as the eternal voyager, she ambled through many climates. And, by happenstance, worlds.
The winks before her materialization here were a blur. The last thing she recalled was being immersed in a bright light. A sense of weightlessness took hold as an extraordinary void lingered for an indeterminable passage of time. She was adrift, bobbing on the currents and eddies of the great silence. Valerna brooked it all, curious to face what awaited at the end of such torpor. She languished but was thankful its permeance wasn't interminable. That's when she slipped into this plane of existence.
It didn't take long to thread together that she was far from home. The spider needed only to gaze at the welkin to reach that conclusion. Whatever this globe was, it had a lonesome sol traversing the sky. The positions of the stars were also off, further confirming her fears. Valerna was alone, an inescapable truth she had to accept.
A hefty sough divorced itself from her gullet. Her lips parted as that split oral muscle moisturized them. The woman didn't belong. She stood 13 feet tall, and her body was swathed in spider silk with a bone mold overlaid on top. Its rubicund hue matched the arachnid legs affixed to her back. Its light red hair picked up on the breeze as her armored palm rubbed against the surrounding plant life.
The dew streaked across her hand as she kept vigilant and analyzed her surroundings. Whatever caused her extraction remained an enigma. Nevertheless, this wasn't her first foray into such phenomena. Valerna understood the universe had a way of correcting itself. Things that didn't belong would return to their natural point in space and time. It wasn't a question of if, instead, when. And at most, all her measures could do was defer or accelerate that inevitability.
Val's sculpture was buxom. Her curves were hugged tightly by the protective veneer. Prematurely, some might be predisposed to assume she was hedonistically inclined. Should such wild assumptions manifest, she'd quickly shoo them away. Her people's culture and mastery over cellmancy would be lost to the people of this province. It wasn't donned to solicit the fickled and short-lived carnality of others. No, it stood as a testament to her proficiency and status in society. A telltale sign that she wasn't one to be trifled with—a woman who had warranted her status via the sweat of her brow.
Here, feminity may be taboo. She wouldn't permit the astigmatic perceptions of others to restrain her. Valerna was a matron, a woman whose only fetters were her responsibilities to her people. For heavy is the crown, but heavier is the heft of failure. Risque or not, this spider none would cage. She wasn't responsible for the libidinal hankerings of the dim-witted and close-minded. Regardless, she anticipated it to stand as an obstacle. After all, vainglorious cretins had a way of projecting their moral arbitration on others with little regard for the contrast. That's why, in her mind, most were slaves, subjects crushed under their belief. What wasted passion and effort if only one would be amicable to see the world through the eyes of another? Perhaps then, most of our woes might be circumvented.
Eventually, she reached a clearing. Her sharp eyes inspected the disturbed grass. Wildlife frequented this spot. She was famished and required sustenance. Quickly, she spun together a few lines of her web before crawling on all fours and hiding within the brush. She remained silent for some time until, eventually, a doe ran into her mesh. Once her meal had become entangled due to its pointless struggles, Valerna emerged from her nested position.
The spider sashayed, kneeling as she planted her hand on the quarry's head. Her eyes stared into the creature's own, seeing only fear mirrored back at her. Valerna's own reflected gratitude. A gesticulation that likely ranged hollow. Nonetheless, she'd present it all the same.
"Thank you for your bounty. May your life force nourish me. And should the predator become the prey, may my flesh add to the cycle. Rest now; your time to ascend the trunk of the tree of life has come. May you peer down from the leafy canopy and see my gratitude." She spoke in her native tongue, which none here could understand. Her voice was melodic, almost as if uttering a hymn or incantation.
Valerna wouldn't prolong the deer's suffering. She quickly snapped its neck before lurching forward and sinking her fangs into the beast. The venom she injected quickly liquified the animal's innards. The delectable soup was quickly sucked free from the body. The shriveled remains were ripped from the web and heaved into the bushes. Others would feast on what remained, guaranteeing the commemoration of the timeless cycle. The giantess kept silent as she removed the twine she had woven and ingested them, recycling the fibers. Now nourished, she'd continue following the traffic the other animals left.
Providentially, it led the Araneae to a body of water. She stood silently by the lake, kneeling down as she peered into its reflective and still surface. A weak smile formed across her countenance as she stared at her reflection. It had been too long since she had communed with nature. The anomaly behind her journey was unexpected yet good for her soul. Regardless, she doubted any benevolent benefactor was behind it all, whether mortal or higher.
Valerna remained, taking out her bone and spider silk harp as her talons danced across the strings. Her playing sent forth an otherworldly yet soothing melody- a hymn of repletion accentuated by the heavenly voice that accompanied its vibrations across the winds. A flash of solace, while ephemeral, merited appreciation. And she intended not to fritter it away. Visibly, she'd air an atmosphere of collectiveness. Internally, however, she mulled over a great deal. Were there any people on this rock? And, if so, what manner of folk were they?
She apprehended that the universe is hostile. That the natural order never favored wimps. Any intelligence she ran into was a threat, no matter its corporeal form. They had reached their position in the hierarchy of the macrocosm through tribulations—an endless bout against threats and fulminations. The tools they appropriated and the faces of their menaces may change. But the stage and play remained invariably immovable.
Still, she'd need to tread prudently and abide by any barbs. Valerna wasn't in the position to be antagonistic. It would be wise to observe, study them, and ingratiate herself. Assimilation, while a terrifying prospect, may prove indispensable to her survival. But the point remained. Would they reciprocate the gesture? Would they see the world through a similar lens? Time, as per usual, would serve as the lone arbiter. She need only wait and see how things might unfold.