Xiltharak’s ascension

In the Valley of the Weavers a tower rose against the night, a spire of black stone eroded by unhealthy winds and riddled with cobwebs that glittered in the dying moonlight. Its walls were smooth as silk in some areas, hard and thorny as the exoskeleton of an unholy creature in others.

And tonight, Xiltharak was preparing for his glorious metamorphosis.

The aspirant was kneeling on an altar of bones fused together by a whitish acid that still sizzled in the night breeze. His eyes, feverish from days of fasting and distilled poison drug, glowed with the light of a devotion beyond reason. Her body, naked and covered with runes made from the blood of those she had sacrificed, trembled between agony and ecstasy.

The Arachnid Priestesses surrounded him, their forms wrapped in robes of living silk that seemed to move with a will of their own. Extra eyes opened and closed on their foreheads, and their fingers, long and jointed like insect legs, drummed on the ground in a hypnotic rhythm.

– The cocoon is woven… the offering is ready – one of them whispered, her split tongue clicking impatiently.

Xiltharak smiled. He had done all that was necessary. The network was complete.

To rise in the hierarchy of the Weavers, he would have to give up his humanity completely. It was not enough to worship them, he had to become like them. And to do so, he had committed what others would consider atrocities, since their short-sightedness did not allow them to understand the truth.

The first test was the Eight Wailing Sacrifice. For eight nights, he had captured inhabitants of the Unholy Lands, innocents and warriors alike, and sewed them alive in cocoons of dark silk. He had not killed them. Not yet. Instead, she had allowed the Queen’s Daughters (small, hand-sized spiders) to slowly devour them from within. Their cries were songs of harmonious glory for the Weavers.

The second test was the Moulting of Flesh. At the top of the tower, under the pale light of the living skull in the sky, Xiltharak tore the skin from his arms with an obsidian knife, exposing his red, throbbing flesh. Then the priestesses wove a new skin over him: an exoskeleton of dark filaments hardened with secretions from the Great Nest. It bled. It shrieked. He transformed.

But the final test, the one that would define his fate, lay before him.

The priestesses held out to him a wooden bowl carved with images of the Weaver Mother. Inside, something was stirring. They were the Eggs of the Pure Lineage, spawned in the abysses where light has never touched the ground. Little black spheres, glistening, pulsing with unholy life.

– Drink it.

Xiltharak didn’t hesitate. He brought the bowl to his lips and let the eggs slide down his throat, leaving a sticky, cold trail. He swallowed each one, feeling how they descended, how they opened inside him, how the larvae began to move.

The pain was immediate.

Xiltharak fell to his knees, convulsing. His insides writhed like snakes caught in a jar. His bones creaked as they expanded, as they shifted. He felt something sprout from his back, eight new appendages, lengthening with each spasm. His teeth became stingers. His eyes multiplied.

The man who was once Xiltharak disappeared in a sea of clickings and slimy ooze. Something new was born in his place.

When the pain dissipated, he rose with movements foreign to the humans. Its legs were now chitinous appendages, and its torso was covered in shiny black skin. Its new maw opened and let out an incomprehensible, alien, ancestral sound.

The priestesses bowed.

The metamorphosis was complete.

Xiltharak was no longer a mere disciple. He was now a Herald of the Weavers.

And his first task as such was to expand the Net.

His new legs moved with inhuman agility as he launched himself from the tower, gliding along invisible threads in the night. In the distance, a group of outcast slept in their miserable lairs, ignorant of the fate that awaited them.

He wove their fates now.

And none would escape his web.