Chapter 1: Autonomous

The land itself trembled under the passage of the fleeing hadrosaurs. They thundered over the grasslands in a panic. Their mouths frothed, eyes rolled with fear. Any small creature unlucky enough to have been in their way was trampled. Birds scattered before the stampeding feet.

Aesdondia delighted in their struggle. She liked to run them before she ate them. It was like she could taste their fear.

She didn’t need tender meat; her jaw and fangs were enough for the thickest of hides and the toughest flesh, bearing little distinction between one thing and another. Her tongue was more discerning. She dipped one great wing to bank to the side. Her black scales glittered in the sunlight like finely polished obsidian, and far less fragile.

A grown dragon in flight was an equal parts terrifying and awe-inspiring sight. Flying, she was all but impervious to harm. She was far above any petty squabble on the ground and should anything trouble her in the air, she was confident of her breath and her claws.

She started to dive toward them, claws braced to shred, but something in the distance caught her eye.

She stopped and flew upwards, into the sun to hide herself from view. An astute hunter might have seen her shadow. It was cold here, above the clouds. She liked the feel of the fierce winds buffeting her great body, the chill despite the sun. She liked, most all, the whistling wind and the vast empty space.

Some dragons chose to live as mortals did, practically forsaking their heritage to crawl about the ground. Some were often sluggish and dull, bad-tempered. Aesdondia was a wild thing to her core. She would rather hunt than hoard, would rather fight than sleep. She loved to roam the open sky and the fields of Thindol. Why had she not come here sooner?

Some seasons past, she had felt the call so strongly to Chult that it was irresistible and she had followed it half out of curiosity. She had not found the source, and did not care to. She liked it here and was inclined to stay.

The best of it was that the locals often provided a fine, if one-sided, fight whenever she might have desired, though recently she had acquired a taste for elf flesh. Sometimes, she watched the little dark elves fighting with the goblins in the dark. How pathetic they seemed, to one such as she.

To her eyes, one two-legged face was much the same as another. She didn’t know why they wasted so much time fighting one another when they were so alike to begin with.

The little dark ones had some kind of trading route through what she now distinctly thought of as her territory. Aesdondia let them scurry back and forth as often as not; if she always attacked, they might stop using it. The ruined wagons made excellent bait to scavengers she could ambush as she liked. With such a variety of food, hunting, and entertainment, she wanted for little.

She assumed it was another group of them, riding large lizards that resembled her as much as a pteranodon resembled a bird. The lizards did not compare as far as taste.

She peered down at them closely, but to her disappointment, these were not them; they lacked the lizards, and they were crawling about in the sunlight, which the dark ones did not like at all.

Aesdondia wondered if they had put out a bounty on her. Did they think to make themselves dragonslayers?

She took a wide, circular route back to watch the little group.

She had half a mind to ignore them—let them chase her about the steppes if they desired. She had no hoard to go after, barely a permanent roost.

A dragon might stay aloft indefinitely if they desired, like the ocean-faring albatross but far more fearsome and elegant. A dragon was safest in the air, particular types of giants notwithstanding.

She might never need to land, and she intended to make that clear to these tiny mortals. How very futile their lives were.

She passed them, flying low enough for them to easily spot her, but far too high for any arrow or spell. Her shadow covered the tiny two-legged things. How awkward they looked to her. It was a wonder how they managed to keep their balance at all.

She flew past them. She would continue this direction for a time, before she flew back above the clouds and changed directions. They might prove fun to toy with, until she tired of them.

She was therefore looking the wrong way when the wagons opened. Hissing and ferocious, snapping fangs and claws, the wyverns screamed and she did not hear it for the roar of the wind high in the air. Their wings beat and carried them and their riders upwards.

They would be dragonslayers.

The scream reverberated off the walls of the room and sank into the dry, smooth quartzite. A spider hunched against the shallow vibrations traveling down its sensitive web.

Muscles contracted. Bone parted to allow passage. Her body split, organs shoved to one side. Her cervix dilated in teeth-clenching contractions. It was time.

Sweat glistened like oil on her dark, shaking form and matted her amber hair. The floor was wet with embryonic fluid where it had sloshed from the waiting pan below. Her perspiring fingers slipped on the soapstone birthing chair. The miracle of birth was an inferno of pain blazing inside her and cooking her from the inside. It was like being impaled from inside going out.

Jaele’s mother claimed it was more brutal than her seven other births. Years had diminished those pains to flecks of memory, whereas this one burned alive in her belly and loins, so Virabel, Jaele’s eldest living sister, claimed. She was the only one of them to have had children herself.

The child within Almalza Tith’Rix, who had kicked hard enough to crack one of her ribs while she was weakened with pregnancy, now fought against its nature-driven eviction at a mere eight months of gestation, a sign of Lady Lolth’s blessing to her beloved drow. Alamalza’s muscles worked with gravity to expel it.

Her eldest daughter knelt between her legs with a towel, ready to catch the newborn. Virabel directed her younger sisters like a priestess addressing acolytes. There had been no need of a midwife as long as Virabel had been there to witness the births of her six younger sisters.

There were no men in the house, no sons or brothers. Their mother was the youngest of eight sisters, and they fully expected an eighth daughter of her. It appealed to a drow’s religious sensibilities that the eighth daughter should be the most difficult birth.

Amalette, her arms laden with fresh towels, all but danced into the room. She hummed wordlessly to herself; music had touched her soul long ago, and its grip was a tenacious one.

Almalza sweat and pushed. The windows opened or closed at her whim. Cold or warm water, or a dry towel to mop up sweat. Haeltania pressed a silver cup of cool water to her mother’s lips. Though she tried to hide it, her nose wrinkled at the smell of birthing and her lips curled in disgust at the gruesome details of the process.

“She’s crowning!” Virabel declared. Descaronan wiped sweat from her mother’s brow with a damp cloth. Her expression was impassive--this was just one more battle to be won. “Make haste. More water, in a basin. Clean towels. Swaddling cloth. Hurry now.”

Haeltania and Descaronan, perhaps seeing an excuse to leave the room, jumped to do her bidding. Amalette took their places. Only Jaele, barely fourteen, stood still.

She was the youngest, until now, and across her face scrawled a novel of emotions she had not yet learned to curb. The prospect of a new sister filled her with excitement. Yet she felt cheated, because her childhood should be her own, not to be shared. None of her other sisters had shared so much of it, save the twins and that hardly counted--why must she? Then she thought of all her old clothes she might dress her new sister in, how she could teach her, as her sisters in turn had taught her. She had said as much aloud as her mother’s stomach swelled and the time drew near, and hardly needed to repeat herself now for the others to guess her thoughts.

Descaronan came back with Haeltania. The room was crowded and Jaele felt superfluous.

The matron of the house wailed. The cry sent a chill down Jaele’s spine. It was the wrong sort of scream. It was the scream an animal made when it died in terror and pain, or of some primal horror.

Virabel barked at her sisters to get out, to give her some room--and to fetch a needle and thread. Amalette grabbed Jaele’s arm and ushered the others out. The door slammed shut. Jaele hated that they always acted like she was half her age.

The four gathered sisters waited and watched through the open door; only Desarandian evaded the tasks the other sisters assisted with, for she was wholly devoted to her forge. She should be, as she was the one who founded it. On ordinary days, no one envied her. A space in the hall was empty, as if for the nearly forgotten ghost of their older sister and Almalza’s firtborn, now deceased.

Another scream, this one weaker. Then silence.

“Why doesn’t she cry?” Almalza gasped from a hoarse throat. She sagged weakly in the chair. From the tear on her genitals, she bled. Virabel set the bundle of flesh and blood aside and reached upward, urging her mother to push while she gently tugged the placenta free with a gooey splat. Tears borne of pain filled her mother’s grey eyes when the organ pushed through her and rubbed against the open wound.

“The infant,” the woman gasped, clutching her deflated belly.

Virabel shook her head. “Dead.” She dropped the organ next to the stillborn in the basket.

Someone knocked at the door frame and Amalette entered with the bone needle and a small spool of black silk. Virabel took the tools and threaded the needle. “I’ll need more water. And fetch some wine.” Her younger sisters scurried to obey. “Get a slave to take that away.”

A house servant approached Amalette as she left and passed her a small scroll. She broke the seal and pried it open. Her grey eyes lit with delight. “The dragon was slain. Aesdondia, perhaps a tenday past.”

Almalza heaved shuddering breaths against the pain of the needle. “Every light creates a shadow.” The old dark elven adage had a different meaning from drow to their listening slave.

While her daughters gathered around her, a captured slave removed the dead infant. Jaele felt claustrophobic in the room, and her sisters moved about busily, and she had to stand awkwardly to the side. The main event done and disappointing, it was only a matter of cleaning up.

She stepped after the slave. She needed the practice at sneaking anyway, and disposal of a body might have been more interesting than what the birthing room provided. It was expected of the slave to prepare the body. She had never seen a body prepared for entombment; the eldest sister had died before she was born.

He navigated the dark halls with a dim lantern on his belt. The candle inside it flickered with each step and cast monstrous shadows on the walls. Jaele stayed out of its dim range.

The slave took the bloody bundle to the kitchen to clean it. Jaele peeked around the doorway to watch as he tied off and cut the cord to the placenta then tossed the dead organ into the furnace. The flames burst once and crackled. The room filled with the scent of burning meat. A person’s organs and meat smelled little different from an animal’s.

He touched the small, unresponsive hand. He searched for a pulse, for a tiny beat that meant it was alive. Whatever he felt, he did not seem to find it.

Cradling the head with a care that was no longer necessary, he brought it to the basin. He washed it gently, slowly. Lukewarm water trickled up its nose.

It snorted. Its formerly slack face wrinkled in distaste. Jaele’s mouth parted in shock. The slave gasped in surprise, and nearly dropped it.

It sniffled, then tested its new lungs with a soft yelp. It heaved a deep breath, another. Its eyes opened. Tepid grey waters on a dark, shadowed face, just like his mother and sisters. It screamed in pale imitation of its mother--at what it saw, at the noise, at the low light, hunger, pain, discomfort. At the horror of being ejected into this hostile alien earth from the safe dark, warm sea it had previously inhabited. Its loss of a connection, the cord attaching it to its parent severed. A parasite no longer, dead no longer. A kicking, screaming ball of flesh and fear. Autonomous.

It was a shout to the dark, to the world, to the gods. I’m alive.

“Shh,” he cooed. It sucked on his thumb.

Jaele stood in the doorway, ashen eyes wide. “Is that my baby brother?”

Author's Note: I hope you enjoyed the opening chapter to Axiom of Spiders: Ash. I upload a new chapter twice monthly. My patrons get early access to each chapter as they release, so look for me on patreon at axiom of spiders to read ahead.

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