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Jarn Tormsen was a simple Lago. A man of science. A healer. Not often given to the superstitions and basic fears of his peers. He may not have invented medicine, but he had refined it using a system of logic that he himself had devised. He called it the scientific method: observe, hypothesize, devise a test, perform the test, evaluate the result, refine the hypothesis. It had thus far served him well. There was no room in it for… them.

For generations, his people had terrified each other with legends of the Weavers in the Dark. Chittering figures, wrapped in cloaks, with too many limbs and sharp teeth. The boogeymen, come to carry off the unruly or unwary. It was said that they came into town wearing hooded cloaks, with beautiful, alluring voices to enchant and ensnare, to carry off Lago to eat them.

Unfortunately, Jarn knew the horrible truth. They were all too real. This night, as on so many nights, he was waiting up late to receive a visitor. A Weaver. He suppressed the urge to thump his feet on the ground, an instinctive warning of danger and distress. For the hundredth time, he questioned the wisdom of his actions that day.

He had been taking a stroll through the woods in the morning, looking for herbs and minerals with which to craft his medicinal potions. It was then that he came across the dead wrathbeast, a hulking ursine creature with six strong limbs and fangs as long as his hand. A dangerous predator, he shuddered at the thought that something could have easily felled one. Then he saw it. Near the wrathbeast, heavily damaged, bleeding, he saw the thing from the collective nightmares of his race. A Weaver in the Dark, The Silent Killers. She looked up at him, blinking in the strong light of the sun, reached up to him and plead. “Please… help me…”

In her own way, she was beautiful. Sleek, graceful lines, intricate patterns etched into the hard chitinous shell. Four thin, elegant legs, one of which was torn open, the shell shattered. Four thin arms, delicate hands with three fingers and a thumb, much like his own hands. A gently angular face, disturbingly similar to his own. Two large main eyes, six smaller eyes, three of which, on the left side, were clawed and useless. Two small nostrils, a mouth filled with sharp teeth. He looked over her slender abdomen, between the legs and the four arms. She had been severely mauled, he could see the crimson blood leaking. Her voice though… her voice called to him, compelling him to obey. Or at least to help. Hypnotic in its pitch and timbre, the rhythm and the cadence. So he did. He wrapped her in a cloak and brought her to his home in Breridge.

For weeks he had treated her, and as he did, they had spoken. He told her of science and logic. She told him of the secret, nocturnal society of the Arache. She gave her name as Spinna Webber, daughter of Weeva. And when she was well, she gave him her heartfelt thanks and left into the dark.

Since then, she had visited from time to time, leaving an intricate web somewhere visible in his home for him to find when he woke up in the morning. And when night fell, she would just appear, in his home. Smiling her unnerving smile, her hands tucked under her chin, fingers wriggling and clicking in what he assumed was amusement, her chittering laughter quietly echoing in the dark.

Tonight was no different.

He startled at a shadow on the wall, spinning around to come face to face with the beautiful and unnerving woman, suspended upside down from his ceiling.

He slapped a hand over his racing heart. “I wish, I WISH you wouldn’t scare me like that, Miss Webber.”

“Why, Mister Tormsen, you flatter me with your fear.” She chittered. “But I am not here for a personal visit tonight. You are a man of science, yes?”

“Well, yes. I am.”

“And you have studied the beasts of the land, yes?”

“Ah, biology! Yes I have.”

She nodded as she reached beneath her cloak, bringing forth a webbed bundle of spun silk. “Good. Can you tell me more about this? I found him in the woods, I need to know what to feed him.”

“You brought me a… pet?”

Her eyes narrowed. “I have brought you a child. MY child. My precious one. The goddess gave him to me. But I have never seen anything like him. I don’t know how to care for him. You might.”

Jarn looked at the bundle, the sleeping hairless face. “I’ll see what I can do, Miss Webber.”