“Have you sworn any oaths to them?” I asked, still unsure as to the power of the Oaths.
“You know so little, for one with so much to lose,” she muttered. “The Oaths I swore mean that I cannot swear to another, not without being released first. The Drow simply ordered my soldiers to guard the cave from all intruders or be destroyed. I moved up so that they would not come looking for this nest.”
“So, they don’t know how many of you there really are? Or that you aren’t a normal spider?”
“Define ‘normal’, little Lord,” she rumbled, and I couldn’t help but grin.
“Okay, well I’ve never known spiders that could talk; put it that way!”
“We can communicate; even my lesser brethren can do this, but my kind…we joined the Empire because we were sick of being hunted and hated for our forms. I was a lesser princess; when my queen tied us to the Empire, we were being hunted by the Vampyres for our silk, our venom. Others wanted us for alchemical uses. When your body is more valuable to others than it is to you, you make deals with the strongest you can."
"We swore to the Empire, agreed to guard it against those that would harm it, and in return, we were given sanctuary, hunting us was punished by death. Entire broods of your people were given to us when they were caught harvesting us. We were fed, given territory, I was permitted to walk the streets of your cities, to talk to your kind under the daystar. I sold my silk and gained sweet meats I’d never tasted. Life was good, until the Empire fell... Mere days after the ground shook and the heavens fell, we were attacked. Hundreds of my kind were killed or captured. We hid, protecting ourselves. We waited until the Legion appeared, and we sent our fastest runners to them, calling for protection. We were denied!” Her voice climbed as she spoke, until she spat the last with naked anger. “The Legion refused us, said they had more important things to do than to protect the ‘beasts of the underworld’.”
“Fuck,” I muttered, a sudden mental image of soldiers after the cataclysm. Oracle had said that the Legion would have returned to the capitol as fast as they could, to protect the Emperor first and foremost. I was freaked out by Ashrag as it was, but I was trying to get past that. For someone that had just seen the world ending in fire and death, to have a spider come running and tell you it needed help, when your family could be dead, and the Empire you’d sworn your life to was collapsing? Yeah, I could see the Legion telling her to get fucked. “What did they do?”
“They kicked the princess aside, broke her legs, and left her in the gutter to be taken by her ‘fellow citizens’. She was gutted and sold before we could reach her.”
“And what did you do?” I asked, already fearing the worst.
“We killed them all: everyone who had harmed her. The Legion had fled on ships in the port, but the citizens that killed her were easy to find, her musk still coating them. We killed them all, as per the Oath, we could harm other citizens only in self-defense, or in punishing murderers, but others attacked us, so we retaliated… hundreds on both sides died. We retreated as soon as we’d killed those responsible, but the damage was done. We were reduced to less than a third who could fight. Our strongest had died, and all we were left with were the very young, the old, and my fellow princesses.”
“Our Queen, Atalaya, sent us into hiding, declared our Oaths broken, and she faced the ones who came. We saw her slaughtered, her body carried away by cheering citizens we had befriended. I watched a merchant I’d sat with, who I’d spun the finest silk I could for… I watched her laughing as she gutted my mother for her spinnerets.”
Silence reigned as Ashrag and I looked sadly at each other, and we both reflected on the past.
“I don’t know what to say, Ashrag,” I said finally, sighing and sitting forward. “The Legion shouldn’t have abandoned you, and certainly shouldn’t have harmed your princess, but their first duty, as was yours as a citizen of the Empire, was to the Empire. Their Oath meant they had to return to the Capitol, to try to hold the Empire together."
"The citizens, well… they were afraid. I’d imagine the ones who hurt your princess were probably criminals, but when people saw you attacking them, they would have tried to help, and the whole thing boiled out of control.” I shook my head, getting up and walking forward slowly, the spiders all around me clacking their mandibles and fangs warningly. I was acting on instinct entirely now. I didn’t know what else I could do, but I had to try to make this right, or none of us were walking out of here alive. I stopped before Ashrag, and I slowly went down on one knee.
“I’m sorry for the things our people did to you and yours, Queen Ashrag. You deserved better, and you were failed by those you relied on.” I took a deep breath and met her pained gaze. “Your Oath to the Empire states that you have the right to protection from the Legion, the right to hold those who wronged you to justice, and the right to be avenged, if you cannot be saved,” I said, the notification with the Imperial Citizen’s Oath coming to me easily, the words imprinted on my soul. “The Empire failed you twice; the Legion didn’t come to your aid, and you were attacked when seeking justice. I can’t change that. These things happened hundreds of
