The Spider and the Chiss

[Atham'aali'kema]

The floor beneath him ached and moaned with a warning of foreboding. But this was but a babe in a man's body, clawing his way through the world. For all he knew, this was simply the sounds an old estate made when pressed with weight. Be it the weight of Eske or the weight of a Vong-Chiss.
Unhinged, he clamored down a pre-fabricated death trap. Layers of white webbing, territorial and reminding him of the harvesters on Selvaris, he barred his teeth as one layer caught him. Then another, then another. Until his descent was frozen in suspension. Barring his teeth as a cornered jackal, molten orbs turned upwards to the room he was just in. The shimmer of lightning and its thump, he exhaled as he shook his head and flexed. Fists in, fists out, the webbing grew tacky with his movement. Even more so, it clung to his armored flesh with a persistence that was only matched by his ignorance. Ignorance in what this what, ignorance in whether he would live through this.

He made peace with the possibilities, hanging his head to look at the abyss beneath him. Until he heard that familiar clatter in the thunderous applause. "Eske..." he said with a smile. The sort that he had learned from Mythos and Ophidia on Mindabaal. But here, he didn't understand his predicament. He was just comforted by that noise that escaped her lips. "...am I to be a part of your hunt?" He didn't need to be a force sensitive to know the expression of anticipation, even fleeting.

[member="Eske"]

 

[Loxa Visl]

A wry smile formed faintly on those venom-drenched lips. Eske descended upon her web, eight legs carrying her with meticulous skill across, "Not today, my love."

The mass of her arachnid half hovered over the man as she began to pick apart the main joiner threads with her spinnerets, ticking them away from the main web one by one like a pianist might pluck his way across the keys. No hurry was made, simply a calm concert of deft movements made with careful direction.

Forked tongue passed over her fingertips, lacing them with saliva, and she reached to gingerly begin pulling the webbing from his hair and head. They peeled away freely as the saliva counteracted the glue holding him in place.

"I must show you a better entrance," she said with a faint smile, "lest you get tangled in all my webs. Where have you been little Maalik? What have you seen in your journeys?"

[member="Atham'aali'kema"]

 

[Atham'aali'kema]

He might have been offended at the notion of being called little. But the truth was that he didn't understand the concept of insult, naive to any such notion. But compared to Eske, he was little. Size, experience, knowledge. He watched, quietly entranced by her movement. Fingers to lips, fingers to web, and back and forth. His eyes darted around with her movements until fixing upon the burning set of 8 that rested against her delicate face.

"Where have I been..." He searched her face and expression. Maybe he might find the words there. "Mindabaal, a wedding." Normally a thing of happiness, he recalled such ceremony from his past. But the Yuuzhan Vong instilled no such concept of commitment to him. He didn't understand it anymore, the idea of a formal ceremony at the prospect of love. The same word Eske just spoke, a thought that hardly occurred to him. As he felt the slack of the webbing from it's dissolution, he continued to fix upon her facial features. "I've seen atrocities. Reckless abandon. Chaos." He rattled off the words, like going down a grocery list.

[member="Eske"]

 

[Loxa Visl]

A wedding.

Eske emitted a soft sound of intrigue at the word but did not interrupt. She continued her course, slowly tick-tocking her way around the web, plucking strings like flowers from a hillside meadow, spinnerets clicking deftly at her rear.

Atrocities. Reckless abandon. Chaos.

"You've been busy..." she said gently, voice nearly drowned out by the over-arching applause of thunder. With a final snip [member="Atham'aali'kema"]'s form came free from the web and she caught him with ease by her secondary legs. They began to descend upon a drop-line, slowly swaying in the winds that whistled down through openings in the stone. Eventually she touched down upon another web and, while securing the man against the soft underside of her abdomen with her legs to keep him from being caught again, she stalked across and in deposited him within a gaping stone archway lined by funnel webbing. He would still find it difficult to move as the cut away web attached to his extremities remained. Eske set to work freeing him of it.

"Those are curious descriptors for a wedding..." she remarked as her hands roved up along his legs, removing the sticky webbing there, "did you partake?"

 

[Atham'aali'kema]

He blinked slowly as she moved about him, working in reverse of a puppet masters work. H swallowed hard at the thought of partaking in those acts, wondering if that was what he was really supposed to do. The tragedies came so natural to them, was he a broken piece of this puzzle. Board bent and peeling back paint, was he truly part of this group? He shook his head quietly to her question and her statement. He didn't partake and he hadn't been busy. There was nothing he could say besides describing to her the intricate complexities of One Sith culture and how he couldn't grasp it.

"I did not..." He spoke with a hush, as if a whisper might not be heard over the thunder. He studied her meticulous path around him as she lowered him into the stone archway, continuing to work on freeing him. "But I did not stop them either." His eyes darted back and forth to the acts that unfolded before him once more. "They were so...happy. To be killing and slaughtering and..." He stopped mid thought. "I spotted a woman beneath a table. I could have saved her but...instead I let her die gruesomely, as the others." He fixed on Eske once more, hoping that she could guide him as she had before. "What's wrong with me, Eske? I felt nothing. And now I...grieve. And I don't know why." Was he to take pleasure in death, as the assassins of the One Sith, or was he to forever persist in this limbo, unable to understand the world around him?

[member="Eske"]

 

[Loxa Visl]

The Arachneri listened while she worked, pausing her movements only during the rumblings of thunder - a fine and subtle hint to her deficit of hearing - and continued again as the silence of the deep citadel persisted. Two blackened hands and four spidery forelimbs worked in tandem, delicately plucking at the strings still attached to his figure like a finely tuned machine, moving slowly up his legs and to his middle and abdomen, then finally to his chest.

When Eske made eyes contact her human hands withdrew while the other four continued working.

"Oh sweet naly," one hand lifted to stroke the man's face and jawline while the other gently removed webbing from his hair, "death is a complicated thing. Simple," her fingers trickled down along his shoulders where they worked away the sticky strings, "in execution but complex in its lingering effects. It is a part of the natural order of this galaxy: to kill and be killed. There is nothing inherently wrong about death in this - wrong is merely affixed by emotion. Morality: to live and let live."

"Morality is a choice, Maalik. A tenant of sentience and self awareness - things that I believe you are only just now discovering. Things such as..." she cast an eerie, fang-filled grimace, blackened fingers unfurling before him, "grief."

Tchtchtchtch....

The last of the webbing pulled away, Eske's form pressed forwards into Maalik's space, her hands lifting to his shoulders to turn the man down into the adjoining hall of the archway, dark and echoing hollow notes of the storm above. She stalked silently after him, eight legs nimbly pressing her through, splayed upwards along the funnel webbing lining the hall.

"Some say morality is the only thing separating men from monsters but in my experience these two are not mutually exclusive."

[member="Atham'aali'kema"]

 

[Atham'aali'kema]

"I don't understand." That should have been fairly obvious, a limitation of the mind by dogma he couldn't understand. As if teaching a blind man about color, he looked around, taking in the breath of her actions and intricate movement. Details detail details. Her mannerisms, her gesticulation, such life for one that spoke of death as a passing fancy. Was that what life and death was, merely the experiences that emphasized that final threshold. As if the presence of death was merely there to cast vibrant foil to life, to emphasize that passing.

"Life and death..." He looked up to her, not sure yet whether he could move in this archway. Looking down, he scanned the remnants of webbing with a molten a fierce gaze, if not for how passive his expression might have been. Every bit of effort was in his own attempts to grasp this. "Black and white..." He exhaled. "How can something, as you say, be so simple yet so complicated?" He looked back up to her, searching for an answer. If not in her complex words and complex thought patterns, the likes of which he couldn't follow, at least in the set of 8 eyes of blood resting against the fair skin that held them. "If the passing of life, it's execution, comes so easily, then why must our response to it afterwards be so hard?"

He blinked slowly, head tilted the side, as his eyes darted to the floor and he smiled. The same smile he saw of those beings, throwing away life as if it was nothing more than bones and flesh. As if there was no soul inside, no presence within. Just nothing. "If morality is a choice, I choose to not feel this...sadness. I desire complacency." He desired that numbness again, the same he complained about in the days before. With experience, he realized that such apathy came with a lack of worldliness and as he crept slowly into the tethers of the universe, outstretched from Selvaris, he changed. And he wasn't sure he was happy about it. He wasn't sure of anything.

[member="Eske"]

 

[Loxa Visl]

"Complacencyyyyy-" tchtchtchtchtchtchtch.

Eske gently ushered the man along the hall, figures drenched in the blackness of unlit ancient catacombs.

"The beast that is complacent to kill everything soon finds he devours his own self. Such is the plight of many creatures of the Dark. Complacency leads to erosion, stagnation, disintegration. The choice of morality is a double edged blade. Feel, do not feel. Black or white. But like all blades there is balance to be found between the edges, if you are careful enough to find it, wise enough to know how to maintain it. This comes with time and-" the arachneri stopped the man's forward movement down the hall with outstretched forelimbs, keeping him from taking a nasty plunge deep down into gaping ground fissure cutting clean through the underground foundations of the citadel, "-experience."

Eight glowing red eyes looked upon the Chiss balefully in the dark, the faint resonance of her pale skin like ghost at his back, "Nothing is ever truly black or white."

Like a hundred thousand unseen spiders, the guard hairs of the Arachneri tickled at his exposed skin as she coiled both pairs of forelimbs around his figure, lifting the man from his feet into her grasp. She encircled his shoulders with her human arms, white hair spilling around to his front in a slow, fluid rolling motion as she stepped headlong down into the massive crag, steadily dropping, held by the strength of a drop line.

Wind whistled down. Rainwater ran, dripping from stone faces.

[member="Atham'aali'kema"]

 

[Atham'aali'kema]

Her flesh against his, the maneuvering of his body against all the impossible traps and pitfalls, he found it soothing and comforting. The universe had grown a degree or two colder since his departure, but in her arms, he couldn't seem to notice. Even still, even as she dropped into the crag with his body wrapped in hers, flowing what hair over him, he couldn't seem to let the train of thought go. His hand drifted up to her hair, draped across his clavicle, and he ran his fingers through it. Wiry, weightless. Each tendril of hair could very well have more knowledge and experience than him and it wouldn't surprise him. Blackened nail beds, white hair, he shook his head.

"Nothing is every truly black or white." He spoke the words, hoping that if he himself uttered them, then he would believe or understand it. But there was nothing but the darkness and her body to comfort him in their descent, along the fibers of the string. His fingers stretched out from her hair, moving first to her human hand upon roundel of shoulder, before extending out towards the cold and wet stone."Careful, wise, experienced." She spoke of time but he felt the small creep of impatience lingering before him. Death and life, such things seemed so absolute. But where there was life, there wasn't always the living. He himself hadn't known the touch of life, only existing in time, it suddenly clicked. That if such a grand thing as life could be so defined on a spectrum, then everything else that extended from it must follow the same rules.

"I don't really want to be complacent. I just know that it would be easier..." He tilted his head, trying to find the ground beneath them through spurts of lightning, snapping audibly through crookedly locked stone. Mortar passing with each years erosion. But that erosion seemed halted in her presence, each tick and word like the flash of light, guiding him through a darkened tunnel. "I missed you, Eske." Her care, her experience, her wisdom.

[member="Eske"]

 

[Loxa Visl]

"And I you, dear Maalik."

A warm kiss to the flesh between cheekbone and ear as they continued ever slowly down, down. Her breath, hot on his flesh, hushed between rumbles of thunder and the whistles of the chilled wind gusts. The fissure was a shortcut into the deep, abandoned catacombs of the citadel and provided entry to some halls and rooms whose access points had long since caved in. Their descent stopped as she touched down upon a stone column acting as a makeshift bridge from one side of the ravine to the other, secured into place by a heavy tangle of thick webbing. It connected the archway of a tunnel through the gap and it was this that she placed the Chiss down upon.

To his left: the faint flicker of candelabras.

To his right: a foreboding dark fathomless pathway in the stone face.

"What comes easy rarely leads us to what we truly need," Eske said, dangling above him with eight legs splayed like a dancer as she gradually rotated on the line. A ghoulish smile faintly stretched her lips and with a gentle sway she motioned him towards the glow of candles, "make yourself at home. I will find you something to eat."

[member="Atham'aali'kema"]

 

[Atham'aali'kema]

The complexity of this place was second only to the creature that carried him, guiding him through the estate as if it was its own universe. Each room had it's own myriad of connectors and pathways, the likes of which made the mans head spin. He couldn't keep anything straight. He was made for the mud and for the fight, navigation a topic sorely missed. Looking up towards Eske, as she dropped him towards the floor, he mimicked her smile. It felt far more natural than the ones he had seen at the wedding, the glee unwholesome and the taint evident. He couldn't explain what was wrong or define it, but he felt he knew it when he saw it. In the world, in the mirror, across the universe. It was ever present for the watchful eye.

"Home..." He looked vacantly towards her chest as she spoke, recalling her heart and his head upon her, her shallow breaths. He liked the comfort of home. As she motioned towards the candlebras, he recalled the library and the fire and felt the warmth even from afar. Moving to his left, towards the fire, he pulled his wet robe from his body to reveal the bare flesh of a torso riddled with scars and tattoos of a legion. Of God's woe. Running his hand over the flame, he recalled the mention of a hunt. He wondered what she had captured, whether it was a worthy and eventful fight. He imagined her a capable foe when driven to the task, if her movement through the webbing was but a mere indicator towards her efficiency. He liked the idea of that.

"You would share your capture with me?" Words absentmindedly spilled from his lips, not even sure she could hear him. Survival was the most basic of instincts, the habit of eating allowed for it's continuation, the act of sharing reduced the chances of such intent. But this is home, perhaps that meant things were different. But what if they weren't home, would that change things? Home is where the heart is.

He scratched his chest, thoughtfully, as he slowly ran his blue fingers over the licking flame.

[member="Eske"]