A Lesson on Nature
Story by Final_Furry on SoFurry
The pic was not taken by me but I thought it was neat and it inspired this short story.
A scream echoed through the caverns, leaping down the tunnels and across bottomless voids until it disappeared somewhere in the underworld.
Inside the depths of the cliffs, the light of day had stretched quite thin. Only a dim twilight washed over the chamber, aided by the glow of mushrooms with sharply pointed caps and flitting insects moving between the columns and spikes of the deep blue rock.
Tess' eyes fluttered open as she recovered from the smack to her head she had taken. She quickly found out that was the only part of her that she could easily move. The rest was snugly bound, her arms and legs pressed together by a cocoon of silk, or something close enough to it. She was only a few feet from the floor and the ledge above was high enough that she would have at least a number of broken bones had the curtain of webs between two stalagmites not intercepted her.
Fear fueled a desperate fit of thrashing and muffled curses at her rotten luck, but Tess was no closer to freedom and only exhausted by the end of it. Surely somebody had to be coming for her, she hoped. Indeed somebody was coming, but it wasn't who she would have wanted.
At the opposite end of the chamber, a huge shadow swept in from shady parts unknown. The creature's appearance was not unusual, given the dark, webbed environment. Its size was what caused Tess' eyes to go wide, the webbing alone no longer holding her still but the stark fear of what she was looking at.
A gigantic spider strolled into the chamber, so gigantic in fact that it made Tess feel more an insect than this thing. Four eyes set on the thing's head did not move or blink, shiny points like droplets of oil deeper than the darkness. Its chitin was a similar shade of blue as the rock around it, with patterns of white along its abdomen. The two front limbs seemed to be used for combat or utility only, as they ended in sharp chitinous points and were held off the ground while walking with the other six.
Upon the spider's head was a strange object, a tall and pointy waxen structure. It couldn't be a hat and yet looked the part well enough.
If one of these monsters wasn't enough, a second moved into the chamber behind the first. This one followed a similar color and structure as the first, though it had a bloated abdomen making it look similar to a black widow in profile. The parade of horror was not over though. One last monster came into view, much smaller than the other two standing only a couple stories tall or so.
As the two large spiders walked, one of them halted suddenly with a strange noise booming in the cavern from its shifting fangs. A screech of some sort. It turned to the tiny webbed figure of Tess, who squeezed her eyes shut. One of the spider's forelimbs rose high over its head, but the one wearing the hat intercepted the motion before it could smash down on Tess.
"What in the world are you doing?" Pardosa asked his wife.
Orab blinked her two larger central eyes, "There's a creature caught up in one of your webs. I was going to squish it,"
Pardosa turned where she indicated and spotted the strange being staring up at him. A warm laugh escaped him.
"Oh, that's just a human. It won't hurt anyone. Actually, they like to hunt deer and other pests,"
"That's a human?" Piped up the smallest spider, which had skittered up beneath its parents for a closer look.
"Yes. The silly things wander into the caves and can't find their way out again,"
Humans had come thousands of years ago, hatched from a goddess in the shape of a dragonfly called Terra Former. She had flown so high through the heavens that the sun became jealous and burned her wings up, plunging her into the jungles. From her smashed body came the humans and a variety of other creatures that spread across the world.
Pardosa reached down with one of his forelimbs and carefully split the webs, though he cut into Tess' tunic and loincloth as well. It worked to push away the webs and separate her from the sticky prison. He spat some webs onto his other forelimb and reached over, pressing it against Tess' back. The procedure took a couple minutes but at last he lifted her up and away from the web.
The tiny naked woman was held up so they could all examine it. Pardosa pet her gently on the head, running his forelimb down the dark blonde hair hanging from her head and then along the globes of flesh on her chest. She was soft and warm, with large blue eyes gawking back at them.
"It's cute!" Kilik decided, reaching up to pet the human as her father had demonstrated.
"It doesn't bite or anything?" Orab asked. She had cringed away from the thing at first but started inching closer with curiosity.
"No. Even if they wanted to, they can't pierce our chitin. They're actually quite intelligent- just watch,"
Pardosa reached up to a cluster of plant life growing along the cavern wall. The plants looked like blue-skinned pineapples with bushy leaves shooting from either end. He stabbed one of the fruits with his limb and plucked it loose.
He sat Tess down on the cavern floor and peeled the grip of the webbing away.
"Sit!" Pardosa commanded.
Adrenaline had already turned her legs to noodles and Tess sunk to her knees, with palms on the floor. Flecks of webbing still clung to her hair as it fell wildly about her naked form. She didn't know what that sound was supposed to mean, but she hoped it wasn't directed at her.
"Good girl," Pardosa said, pleased. He lowered the fruit and scraped it off his forelimb, tossing it to the ground before her.
A trembling finger reached out to the fruit and she took a chunk of what looked like spongy white matter. Not wanting to defy the giant monsters watching her intently, she popped it into her mouth.
Kilik was practically climbing her father's leg at this point, "Can we keep her? PLEASE pleasepleaseplease-"
Searching the web where they had found the human, he spotted an arched wooden tool strung with a twine alongside a pouch of sharp sticks.
"No, I'm afraid not. This one here is a huntress, she must take food back to her nest. But we can help her and the other humans if you want to come on a hike with me,"
Spinning a web, Pardosa and Kilik gathered up a bundle of the blue pineapples. Tess would arrive back at the outskirts of her village later that day with the most wild hunting story that had ever been told, which most would have never believed had it not been for the giant web sack fastened to the side of the town granary with enough food to feed the village for several months.