Deep within the forests lie places where sunlight falters and dies before it ever touches the ground. Beneath tangled canopies and choked branches, the air grows thick and still, as though the world itself is holding its breath. In that dim half-light far from human paths and fading from memory, dwell creatures whose names are no longer spoken.
There were days when the entire forest bent to their dominion. Every branch, every hollow, every trembling thread of life belonged to them. But like all empires, theirs withered. Time eroded their power, scattered their kin, and left their kingdom to rot in silence. And yet, on her journey, Ada strays beyond the known trails, into lands long abandoned and there, she finds what was never truly gone.
The Cult of the Spider once whispered about in dread as a creeping plague that consumed grove after grove with unnatural hunger has faded into obscurity. Villages burned their shrines, and the world chose to forget. Now, it lingers only as a husk of its former might, a dying echo clinging to the edges of existence. But shadows, once cast, do not vanish so easily.
What drives those who remain? What faith sustains them in the face of ruin? Why do they still wait, patient and unyielding, for the day when silken threads will choke the skies and bind the world in a suffocating web? No answer survives. Memory has decayed, just as their numbers have. Only a scattered few endure—zealots, or perhaps something less than human now.
What we do know is this: the spiders have changed.
They are no longer silent architects lurking at the edges of sight. They are restless. Agitated. Hungry in a way that feels… deliberate. As if something stirs beneath their instincts, something ancient, watching through a thousand unblinking eyes.
Some would dismiss them as mere beasts, lashing out in their final struggle against extinction.
How comforting that would be.
How terribly, irrevocably wrong.