The Nine-Legged Widow of the Black Fall
A blighted spider out of a black-ash country, nine-legged from a mutation that doubled one limb and killed nothing else, and the size of a cottage.
She is not Mad Margaret and she is no Shattered. She is a wild animal that took the ash and kept going.
Body
She spins in blight rather than silk, out of glands that were silk glands and are now something else, and the web digests what the ash has already softened, which is to say she can eat a thing the black ash killed a fortnight ago and take no harm from it.
Black ash comes when the volcano throws from the old cooled shoulders rather than the vent. It is mostly inert and mostly just kills the crop, and a black-ash country is a poor one. She is the only creature in it that the fall made richer.
Regard
She has been hunted eleven times by parties of note and has eaten nine of them, and the two that came back did so because she was busy. That arithmetic is the whole of her reputation and it is the reason the twelfth party has not been raised.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Where the Black Fall is
- Whether she breeds, and what comes out if she does
- How much of the valley the web covers now