Forsaken by the one person who was supposed to love her unconditionally, Red must brave the magic and monsters of the Wylds to find her true place in the world.
*****
Plague...
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The rank, coppery taste of blood was the only constant as I ebbed in and out of consciousness, only vaguely aware of being dragged through the woods. Every glimpse I caught of my surroundings was bleaker than the last, until the tree trunks were as bleached as the bones in the Orchid Mantis's meadow. The webbing overhead wound tighter and thicker, plunging the woods into artificial twilight.
It was when the open woods gave way to the mouth of a tunnel -- woven from the same sticky silk as Gordon's cocoon -- that I woke and started struggling in earnest. I kicked and screamed and otherwise tried to claw my way back up to the diminishing pinprick of grey light, but my hands and feet were bound with spider silk, so tightly I could scarcely feel my fingers. My captors were grey shadows against the yawning darkness, an insensible mass of arms and legs that refused to resolve in my imagination. The hand that gripped my ankle was undeniably human, but I couldn't make sense of the sharp angles and bulbous curves that swum in the murky darkness beyond it.
Terrified of what lay below, I cast my eyes up, foolishly hoping for a glimmer of silver, a flash of fangs. But it was only a finger of bleak, grey light that dared to answer my unspoken prayers, caressing my upturned face in farewell before blinking out all together.
My mind imposed all manners of horror on the formless dark. Spiders started crawling over every inch of my skin, stealing into my ears, my nostrils, dropping into my open mouth. My screams turned shrill as they dragged me deeper and deeper, pain flaring in my fingertips as I gouged them into anything I could get my hands on, nails shredding apart like the shell of a snail under a sturdy boot. My breath ripped in and out of my chest, whittling my lungs and my throat to bloody tatters, and still it wasn't enough; I couldn't get enough air, I couldn't breathe --
With a grunt, my captor grabbed the lapels of my bathrobe, using that hold to hurl me into the air. My stomach curled into my spine as I sailed through the absolute darkness, cringing into a ball as pain loomed from every direction. I couldn't tell left from right, up from down, air from rock --
The impact slammed through my hip, ringing out in every joint. False stars exploded in my vision as a groan hummed against my lips, sealed tight against the critters suddenly hellbent on fleeing my person -- or perhaps whatever new threat lay ahead of me. I fought the urge to thrash and wail, head threatening to explode from the pressure of my fear as I held still as my trembling body would allow, ears aching for a sign of the death that lurked in the dark.
Whispers filled my ears, horrible promises of slow death and decay, of my insides liquifying and being sucked out through a straw. A shudder rippled through my body before I could get a pinch on my imagination, the words dissolving into rustling skirts. Only two footsteps rang out in the dark, crunching through the brittle layer of calcified webbing on the floors, but it was eight eyes that emerged from the darkness. Their baleful red glow cast a ghostly sheen on the features of a creature straight from nightmare.
