Otherworld Ink

“I wanted to go for a ride by the river, but no! You said the swamp would be romantic!”

Nessa leaned forward in her saddle, propping her elbows up on her Wolf Spider’s head to get a better view of the unfolding drama. Below, a young pair of drylanders bickered on a tiny spit of solid ground while their poor horse struggled knee-deep in the dark, sucking mud. They’d been easy to spot. Dressed in bright yellows, blues, and greens, they practically glowed against the damp, muted colors of the swamp.

Nessa’s burly riding spider perched on the edge of a sheetweb path that ran along the underside of the swamp’s canopy, like a silken aerial road. The perfect vantage point. With a screen of hanging moss obscuring her position, the drylanders were unlikely to spot her, even if they bothered to look up.

“Let’s just go back to the farm,” the boy suggested. “We’ll get someone to bring an ox to pull it out!”

“And what’s going to happen to the horse while we’re gone? Even if he can wait that long, do you really think we can get an ox in here?”

The drylander boy groaned.

“My dad’s going to kill me.”

Nessa wished she’d brought a snack. Maybe something salty.

“Nessa?” a voice beside her interrupted. “Are we going to help them, or…”

She glanced over. It was just her luck to have the two newbies in tow. Estith on his barely-grown Red Star and Kesk on her twitchy Ghost Step. Estith was watching the proceedings with more concern than Nessa thought they warranted. Kesk, meanwhile, had pulled some sticky silk from her Ghost Step’s spinnerets to play a variation on cat’s cradle, uninterested in the drama below.

Nessa had been tasked with taking these two out for a standard road inspection near Blackswamp’s border. Looking for areas in disrepair, making note of hazards, dealing with noxious beasts—that sort of thing. While not strictly mentioned, “assisting lost drylanders” probably fell under that directive somewhere. Still, that didn’t mean they had to hurry about it.

But her displeased side-eye went right over Estith’s head. He kept staring at her, painfully earnest. Ugh.

“We’ll move them out eventually,” Nessa conceded. “Wouldn’t want them bringing even more drylanders in here.” She snorted. “They’d probably just get stuck in the mud, too.”

“Right,” Estith agreed. He paused expectantly. “So… what are we waiting for?”

“Nothing wrong with letting them squirm a little. The more panicked they are today, the less reckless they’ll be tomorrow.”

The mud was too thick and shallow for any self-respecting thrashergator, and Nessa hadn’t seen any centipede tracks. With no real threats nearby, why not let the drama unfold a little more?

“I can’t believe I went along with this!” the drylander girl ranted. “My mother said you had all the brains of a head of lettuce, and do you know what I said? I said she was wrong! I said you were wise in your own way. Well, you sure showed me different!”

They didn’t get a lot of drylanders in Blackswamp. Sometimes a few adventurous types would come “exploring”. Merchants usually hired a guide and stuck to established roads and towns. And then you had these two: just a couple of dumb kids looking for a new makeout spot.

“Uh, Nessa?” Estith prompted again. “The horse is still sinking, should we…?”

Nessa sighed.

So much for the entertainment.

“Fine, fine. We’ll cut this short.” She cast a disappointed glance down at the wayward pair and grumbled, “She’s just crying over that dumb, long-faced thing now anyway.”

Nessa sat up in her saddle and automatically checked the clips on her belt and boots.

“Alright you two, let’s go greet the tourists. And remember to check those clips! If you slip out of the saddle, I’m not lying to your family and saying you died well.”

Nessa shifted her weight and dug in her heels, prompting her Wolf Spider to scuttle down to the underside of their perch. The familiar tension of her saddle bindings kept her in place despite gravity’s efforts, but the head-rush was still unpleasant. She reached back to tap her spider’s abdomen, signaling it to descend.

As they slid down on a growing thread of silk, she snuck a glance back at her newbies. It wouldn’t do to have them actually fall out of the trees. There were no obvious problems, though Kesk had apparently freed her hands of the sticky silk by smearing it across her shirt. Well, it wasn’t like Nessa was the one who’d be washing it later.

As soon as they noticed motion overhead, the tourists scurried aside. They didn’t flee entirely, pausing at a distance to cast worried glances at their horse. Still, they were smart enough to give space to the three giant spiders now standing between them and the trapped animal.

Estith was average in height but solid, and his shiny black-and-red spider looked fiercer than it was. Kesk gave an unsettling impression, all sharp angles and twitchy movements, riding a spider that looked like it was made from opaque glass. As for Nessa, while she didn’t cut a particularly imposing figure, she’d been reliably informed that her attitude was intimidating enough. Paired with the largest and most aggressive breed of domesticated riding spider, she felt confident she was making a healthy contribution to the fear on the drylanders’ faces.

Estith greeted the tourists with a wave and a smile; Kesk just snickered.

“We’re, uh…” the drylander boy stammered. “We’re not looking for any trouble.”

“Uh-huh,” Nessa said, waving her two newbies towards the struggling horse. “You just thought you’d ride a horse somewhere horses have no business being and plant yourselves in the mud. You’re not the first idiots we’ve hauled out of the swamp.”

Her newbies approached the horse on spiderback, circling cautiously around its sides. The spiders’ forelegs tapped the ground, feeling out the border where solid ground ended and sinking mud began. With numerous legs to spread out their weight and extra limbs to probe ahead for hazards, they had a natural advantage over four-legged mounts on such uncertain terrain.

The horse, however, had no appreciation for these traits. At their approach, it screamed and thrashed, trying to rear and buck away.

Estith’s Red Star backed up a few wary paces, but Kesk’s Ghost Step bolted. Kesk yelped. The Ghost Step made it halfway up a tree before she brought it to an inelegant stop, dangling off the back of the saddle like a loose strap.

“Not dead!” she declared cheerfully.

Estith gave her a thumbs-up.

Nessa made a few additions to her mental list of drills to run them through.

“Well,” she said, amending her previous statement, “you’re not the first idiots I’ve hauled out of the mud.”

The horse, meanwhile, continued thrashing and screaming in the muck. If it continued like that, they’d have predators all over the place, and Nessa was trying to keep her spider on a diet.

“Hey, loverboy!” Nessa barked, making the drylander boy jump. “It’s your animal, isn’t it? Get over there and calm it down.”

“R-right.”

He hurried over, skirting warily around Estith’s Red Star. He caught the horse’s reins, trying to get control of its head. By this time, Kesk had convinced her Ghost Step to get back on the ground and return to work. But a Ghost Step wasn’t called a Ghost Step for nothing. When it appeared soundlessly in the corner of the drylander boy’s vision, he jumped and almost planted himself in the mud next to his horse.

“Don’t get stuck in there with it, or we’ll be webbing you up, too,” Nessa warned.

It was always funny how drylanders squirmed at just the threat of some cobwebs. He did manage to get the horse to stop fighting, though.

“Alright you two!” she called to her newbies. “Back your spiders up to that horse and web up its thorax. Don’t get kicked.”

Kesk yelped.

“Don’t get bitten either.”

“Why aren’t you helping?” the drylander girl asked. She’d edged closer for a better view of the proceedings until she stood alongside Nessa, though still out of reach.

“I’m supervising,” Nessa said. “Besides, if I let Keekee get near that horse, she’ll think it’s mealtime.”

“Your spider’s name is Keekee?” the drylander girl asked, trying to be sociable. “That’s a cute name. Is she friendly?”

As she asked, she reached for one of the spider’s fuzzy legs.

“Nope,” Nessa said, popping the ‘p’ for emphasis.

Keekee chittered and shuffled her feet. The drylander girl jerked her hand away.

With the drylander boy holding the horse steady, the newbies managed to web up a harness for it. The beast didn’t make it easy for them, struggling and biting whenever the opportunity presented itself, but they managed. It’s not like horses were venomous, the useless things.

“That’ll do,” Nessa declared. “Now pull! Make sure your spiders don’t keep letting out silk! … Yeah, like that. Don’t do that.”

Estith’s mistake this time. That Red Star of his was a little too generous with the silk.

“So, they’re, uhh… new?” the drylander girl asked, trying again to make conversation.

“Fresh out of scout training,” Nessa confirmed.

“Do they cover this sort of thing in scout training?”

“They cover using your spider to web up and move large, stubborn objects, so close enough.”

The two spiders struggled to drag the horse forward out of the mud while it dug in its heels and strained backwards—more afraid of two large predators than of the sucking mud. It took a messy, ungainly effort, but between the lot of them they managed to haul the horse up onto solid ground. Once freed, the horse stood stock still, wide-eyed and trembling visibly.

“Good enough for an amateur job,” Nessa praised. Both of her newbies were smeared with mud and sported various horse-related bruises. Estith straightened up at her words while Kesk grinned through a mask of mud. How she’d gotten that much mud on her while sitting on her spider’s back, Nessa couldn’t fathom.

“Thank you so much for stopping to help us,” the drylander girl said. Her words were polite, though she kept a careful distance.

Avoidance was a good policy for outsiders. Estith’s Red Star loved everyone and Kesk’s Ghost Step was as afraid of any human as they were of it, but without venom inoculations, one accidental nip could lay a person out flat.

“Technically, it’s fine for you to be here if you don’t cause trouble,” Nessa said, mentally putting on her Blackswamp Representative hat. “There hasn’t been anything more than a couple fistfights between our people for more than a generation, and the official treaties only restrict travel for political and military bigwigs. But if you keep getting yourselves stuck in our mud, I might decide to count that as trouble. Understood?”

“Understood!” the drylander girl said, then elbowed her boyfriend until he offered a “yes ma’am” of his own.

With a bit of guidance, the drylanders walked their horse to the swamp’s edge and continued onto the hard-packed dirt road that led to the nearest farming village. On foot, it would be dark before they got back, but that horse wasn’t in any state to bear a rider, never mind two.

“If she doesn’t break up with him over this stunt, they’ll be married one day,” Nessa mused to no one in particular. “And then we’ll have all their dumb babies wandering into the mud along with them.”

Nessa looked over her well-worn charges and considered the low angle of the sun.

“Alright, check your clips and get your spiders back in the trees. We’re calling it for the day.”

Kesk whooped and Estith slouched in relief.

And people said she wasn’t nice.