The final sight that Drow saw was the very prisoners that he’d excitedly dismembered and skinned for so long, beating his paralyzed and pain-wracked skull in.
Lydia had managed a second blow to her target, dodging the clumsy stab aimed at her by her still stunned opponent. The Drow she faced had lost an eye to the flames, and now had a broken right arm, the bone sticking out through the split skin of his forearm. It didn’t take her long to smash him in the face with her shield, knocking him back onto his arse. Barrett rushed around the other side of the fire, getting the final Drow’s attention, and circling him, forcing his back to the blaze.
I grinned as I looked over the guttering flames and saw Barrett neatly backing his target towards me, and I stepped forward, the blade of my naginata spearing forward to take the Drow in the back, erupting from his chest between a pair of ribs in a spray of blood.
Barrett wasted no time and swung a great blow, his two-handed greatsword flashing left to right and relieving his target of his head, while Lydia stepped forward, smashing the rim of her shield down and crushing the final Drow’s throat.
She spat down on the panicking, slowly asphyxiating creature, then left it to die.
We looked around the room, confused. There was nobody else here, but as the prisoners went silent, hunching down in fear, I noted the direction they stared so intently, and I looked up.
In the darkness above us, clear to my DarkVision, had I only thought to look, was a web. It was smaller than Ashrag’s, but still huge by any normal sense of scale, and three sets of eyes glared down at us from it.
The web shifted as the centermost figure moved, a huge Drider, a Drow from the waist up, in the form of a beautiful Elven woman with long white hair, and pale grey skin and covered in silver and black leather armor. From the waist down, she was a spider, with eight long legs that shifted her along effortlessly, the tips giving rise to a clicking sound as they touched the nearest wall. Her bulbous abdomen lifted and dipped in excitement as she moved, slowly circling us.
A movement from one of the other two occupants of her web drew my attention, and I bit down hard on my revulsion.
They were Drow, but they had been horribly mutated somehow. In addition to the regular humanoid form, they each had several spider-like legs coming out from their backs, additional eyes spread across their heads, and fangs.
I practically shit myself looking at them.
I’d been doing my best to get over my entirely fucking reasonable hatred of spiders, after making the deal I had with Ashrag; after all, I was going to need to deal with her and her kin on a regular basis, but this? Fuck this shit.
What I saw when I looked back at the Drider, and I’d missed in my original freak out, was that she held a whip in her right hand, and in her left…
“Oracle!” I cried out at seeing her tiny form trapped inside a cube the Drider held.
She looked terrible; she’d changed to the smallest form I’d seen yet, less than three inches high, and she glowed with a sickly green light that pulsed and wavered.
“You like my pet, trespasser?” The Drider asked, her voice light and relaxed, the tone far more suited to a conversation in a summer garden about a puppy. I glared up at her, my already tightly wound nerves twanging in fury at the sight of the creature that kept Oracle from me.
“Let her go,” I growled up at the Drider, and she laughed at me, daintily walking down the wall opposite to come to a rest atop the large building in the middle of the cavern.
“Now why would I do that? Hmmm?” she asked playfully, hanging her whip on a bony spike on her hip and tapped lightly at her ruby red lower lip. The contrast between the grey, almost lifeless skin and her lips was jarring, not to mention the flicker of bone white perfect teeth flashing as she spoke, long incisors visible. “You trespass here, in my home, kill my servants, and demand I give up my pet? I think not.” She smiled evilly at me, the incisors flashing as they lengthened noticeably, her pupils beginning to glow red.
“You took her, bitch. Give her back, or I’m gonna stick this somewhere very private.” I warned her, hefting my naginata, a touch of mana channeled into making it glow.
“Pretty,” she hissed; her eyes fixed hungrily on my weapon. “I will take that from you, child."
"I will feed on you, let you recover, and feed again, before slowly stripping the skin from you, inch by inch, to make a blanket for my nest. You will join all your kind who trespass in the deep places of the realm, as playthings for your betters!”
I looked where she pointed, noticing piles of cloth that had been laid on the webbing, where they’d been tossed carelessly. I frowned and spat as I realized what they were. The crazy bitch had made her Drow skin people, and she collected them.
“I’m gonna enjoy this, bitch,” I glared up at where she crouched, before focusing on Oracle. “Hold on, Oracle; I’m coming for you,” I said.
I twisted, a slight movement from my left warning me just in time to avoid a small triangular blade that flashed past my face. I looked back along the line of the throw, finding that one of the mutated Drow had slunk down to hang from the wall off to one side.
I threw out my
