Deep beneath the surface of the earth in a cavern as dark as dreamless sleep, they toiled tirelessly. Thousands of them; tiny crystalline spiders all spinning and knitting and weaving giant sticky mountains of webs there in the blackness. But these were no ordinary spiders for these did not need to eat nor drink nor mate and lay eggs. They lived only to work, powered by some mysterious and magical force heretofore unknown. They were made for this, elegantly designed creatures with bodies like delicate teardrops of translucent glass that were carried about on eight tiny crystal legs, and each of these legs sporting hundreds of nearly microscopic filaments that could feel the tiniest of vibrations created in the world around them. Whereas a normal spider could use the hairs on their legs to sense the slight shifting of the wind or the tiniest of prey struggling caught in their web, the trichobothria on these spider’s legs were so sensitive they could pick up the even slightest of sounds from the world above, from the whispering of the things said in secret to the soft hiss of the unsheathing of the assassin’s blade. And each of these vibrations, each and every movement and sound made in the world above, these crystal spiders diligently knitted into the Great Weave here in the darkness of the foundation of the world.
A figure glided silently through the mountains of webs with the unnatural grace of a phantom, careful not to disturb a single strand of the webbing lest the interference interrupt the spiders’ work; her diaphanous white robes, pale skin, and long and unkempt silvery-white hair all stood out in stark contrast to the blackness that surrounded her. She had had a name once, but here amid the sheer enormity of the infinite, she had forgotten it long ago. She knew that she could unerringly find her strand from among the millions of others with ease, should the need ever arise, but it never did. Her story was not one that held her attention amid the volumes of stories written here. Nor did it bother her in the least that she could not remember her name, for the handful of visitors who knew of her existence simply called her the Weaver, and that moniker suited her just fine.
She had been born above the ground, in the Silvanesti homeland up in the world beneath the amber sun a long, long time ago. Just how long she had been down here was hard to differentiate here in the darkness, without the changing of the seasons or the waning and waxing of the threefold moons to mark the passage of time. She could of course read the answer in the webs should she want to, but the thought had never crossed her mind; there were many more interesting and important secrets written here upon these sticky, silken strands.
She had been drawn to this place by an insatiable and relentless desire for knowledge, for this inhospitable blackness served as a repository for all the information in the world for one gifted enough to read the secrets woven into these webs. Before she had embarked to this place beneath the earth, she had tried her hand at more mundane sources of knowledge of prophecy: the distribution of painted cards; the reading of the stories etched in the veins of a leaf or upon the bark of a tree; and the communing with dark and inscrutable forces. All of these gave her some insights into the secrets of the world, but none of these gave her the satisfaction of knowing enough.
In the days of old, it was said that the serpents used to unveil the secrets of the world inscribed upon their scales, and the snake-readers of yore who could discern the information contained therein could predict the future with near unerring accuracy. But it was also said that the snakes had lost their voice when Mother Dusk and Set had battled for dominion over the serpents of world in a fight that lasted for generations. Though Mother Dusk had been victorious in the end, the serpents had been so traumatized by the experience that on the rare occasions that a legible portent was descried upon their scales thereafter, the stories written upon them were typically a garbled mess of petty grievances and hurt feelings.
Many would-be fortune tellers had thus been driven to trying to study animals for clues as to what the future held, sacrificing these unfortunate beasts to see what auguries they could glean from the specific manner of their death throes, or the way their entrails dribbled upon the ground or burned upon a fire, or whether there was a lesson to be told in the way the moonlight reflected in their crimson blood. These haruspices were, for a time, able to predict great events and their services were highly sought after by the peoples of the world, and word of their prodigious gifts of prophecy spread far and wide. But once word reached the ear of the Goddess Arnia, rumors say that the Lady of Death was livid. She promptly tainted the blood of all the animals of the land so that those who would sacrifice a beast in an effort to glean a glimpse of the future would be plagued by her divine wrath, and the only true prophecy they would receive would be a vision of their own ultimate descent into madness. It was a cruel punishment, but some attest that the Lady of Death took her role very seriously and despised the unnecessary burden of the taking of an innocent life for such frivolities as trivial prognostication. Others simply proclaim that Arnia had instead come to enjoy the company of animals more than that of people in the later years.
Lacking a truly satisfactory font of knowledge, the Weaver had then sought out the webs of the spiders of the surface world hoping they might contain what she required. At first, their webs seemed to hold some promise, but she quickly found that most of these spiders were simple and capricious; shallow creatures focused more upon food and gossip, easily distracted by trivialities, and often ignoring the greater truths in the world around them in favor of mindless, idle diversion. But they had imparted one useful bit of information to her during her time among their webs with their mocking derision of their strange, industrious brethren toiling and weaving in the world below. And so she sought out to find these hardworking creatures in the hopes that they might finally reveal the information she so desperately yearned for.
The journey here had been laborious and wrought with peril, and it had taken every mote of her skill with spell and sword to finally reach this place, to this hidden repository of knowledge gestating in the womb of the world. The dark room had greeted her like a long-lost lover returned at last from war, as a gentle breeze rustled through the cavern and caressed the strings of the webs with soft zephyrine hands, and in that moment, she heard the song of the world as sung by a thousand times a thousand voices in a beautiful cacophony. When she examined the knots and strands of the giant masses of webs themselves, they too spoke to her, doing so in the same manner a book tells its truth to the reader, relaying to her the story of every silken thread from start to finish. Every strand a life, some short and thin others sturdy, strong and long, but each one telling a story, and each story tying into others, adding to them and making them part of the whole. In this room every life and death and secret thing in the world above all cried out her in a symphony of string and song all composed for an audience of one.
She had marveled then - and still now - at the complexity of the webs and the breadth of information contained within the knotted silk, noting how something as simple as a harsh word given in anger or an unspoken profession of love could often have a greater impact upon the strands than a bloodied blade; these simple actions or inactions could create entire new bridge threads, which could eventually come to support a completely new spiral of silken netting, all supporting thousands of other strands all interlaced and connected and knotted with one another; connected yet individual.
She had eventually found that, given enough knowledge of what was happening in the moment, she could also intuit what was going to occur in the future, as the inertia of the events of today create ripples and waves into the events of tomorrow, reading the events of tomorrow as surely as the events of the day before. Looking at the skein in this way, the Weaver could see potential mergings of threads moving towards one another, connecting and strengthening each other and creating strong bridge strands that would be capable of supporting the weight of an entire new intricate network of webbing.
One such merging had drawn much of her attention of late. It was a network of ten delicate strands of silk, each fragile and tenuous on its own, but when they combined together upon a particularly long and robust thread - one with thousands of connections along its windy path that she knew as the Shield of Green - these ten strands created one especially strong and sturdy bridge. She traced this strand with a delicate finger, marveling at the stories contained within the knots and wyes in the silken thread. One of the ten had served its purpose already and had snapped under the burden it bore, but it had been integral in getting others to the meeting place where the remaining nine would at last become one. Another, the Hands of Nine, had also been severed but it had been replaced so seamlessly by another strand that the Weaver had almost missed the flawless substitution. If that one thread had not been cut short right when it had, this second thread – symbolizing the one Blessed by the Silver Wyrm – would not have found space in the deck of that small fishing boat and he would have instead perished in the flames of that small fishing village instead of assuming his rightful place among the nine.
She continued to trace this strand, following it as it stretched towards the back of the cave and watching as smaller threads diverged and interlaced with more established wheels elsewhere in the chamber. The air grew noticeably colder the longer she traced this bridge and the crystalline spiders seemed to be working harder as she wended her way along this promising new thread. She observed this stout bridge strand comprised of the nine smaller ones diverge into two, one of five threads and one of four, and it was obvious even separated as they were that each of these strands, even disconnected from the whole, was still capable of bearing a great deal of weight, and several new webs were already tying into these strands and creating whole other networks within the tangled skein. Something powerful was at work here with these nine threads, and there was a palpable hum of energy comi...
Her thoughts were interrupted by a tinkling of broken glass from beneath her bare feet, the sound followed immediately by sharp burst of pain that raced from her heel to the nape of her neck. The Weaver knelt down and a chill ran down the her spine as she realized that the floor here was littered with the corpses of hundreds of these precious crystal spiders, all lying cracked and still upon the cold cave floor. Ignoring the blood and pain in her foot, she scooped a few of their delicate forms into her hands and stared at them in disbelief. In all of her years…decades? centuries? here beneath the surface of the world, she had never seen one of these magnificent creatures die, and now there were hundreds?
The Weaver stood and continued her slow walk towards the rear of the cave, unsure and afraid for the first time as to what she might find there. It only took a few more steps for the image to come into focus as she stopped and stared in disbelief at the sight before her, her numbed hands opened on their own accord, spilling the small glass corpses they held to shatter upon the cold, hard ground beneath her feet. There in the back of the cavern was a near solid mass of sticky silken threads, more resembling mounds of rock-hard pillars than the delicate and beautiful radial symmetry of the orb webs found elsewhere in the room. The spiders here were working with a fervor that seemed to border on madness, knitting and weaving and constantly adding to this solid mass, ever growing and expanding it, and working until that delicate magical spark within them burned out completely and they dropped dead from exhaustion.
Something dark and sinister and domineering was contained within the matted and gnarled mass of this immense mound of webbing, and hundreds of sturdy bridge strands were beginning to reach out from its form to connect with the rest of the webs in the cavern, grabbing them with silken fingers so strong and sure that they threatened to pull the rest of the webs in this room free of the delicate moors that secured each of them in place, and draw them into itself. Soon, this mass would be everything, eventually subsuming all and merging the entirety of entirety with itself, until it was all that there was. There was only one force that could create a web like this, and it was clear that Her strength was growing mightily and quickly.
The Weaver looked back at those two promising bridge strands, one of five threads and one of four, which had moments ago seemed so full of hope and strength and capable of bearing such great weight. But now in light of what awaited them in the back of this cavern, they suddenly seemed so delicate and fragile by comparison; like the first snowflake of winter alighting upon a grassy field and carrying with it the hidden promise of a forthcoming blanket of snow, but more likely as not to end up instead as a solitary disremembered and unremarkable bead of dew.
The Weaver gingerly reached out and touched each of these two strands, one of five threads and one of four, and she whispered a soft prayer that they would find the strength they needed for what lay ahead, and for the first time since her descent into this dark repository of all the knowledge of the world, she quietly cursed the gift of knowing.