A Web of Stars by Idrils Scribe

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Chapter 7

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'There lies the fastness of Southern Mirkwood,' said Haldir. 'It is clad in a forest of dark fir, where the trees strive one against another and their branches rot and wither. In the midst upon a stony height stands Dol Guldur, where long the hidden Enemy had his dwelling. We fear that now it is inhabited again, and with power sevenfold. A black cloud lies often over it of late.

Fellowship of the Ring, Book II, Ch 6, LothLórien

 

A scuttling sound cut the still air. It was but a squirrel dashing up a trunk, but Arwen leapt back nonetheless: the animal was black as night.

Around Amon Lanc, all undergrowth had withered from lack of light and air, suffocated beneath gigantic spruces, ancient firs and pines whose sombre branches formed a vaulted roof of darkening green a hundred feet above their heads. Whatever birds inhabited these parts did not sing, and their only accompaniments were silence and the wet squelch of rotting needles beneath their horses’ hooves.

Ahead a stony hill, wholly treeless, lifted its bald head above the canopy. The crumbling remains of what had once been Oropher’s great hall dominated the landscape, drawing the eye like decaying teeth in a Mortal’s face.

The windows stared outward into nothingness. In some the broken stained-glass panes remained like many-faceted eyes, now dulled and dimmed, but not dead. Something was awake there, and it watched.

The road to the gate remained open. Tangled branches, suffocated by trailing webs of spider-silk, had overtaken all but the path that cut straight as a spear through the dark forest. A small tingle of Power played across Arwen’s mind: a strong but hidden will was at work here. 

The gate gaped like an open maw, fallen arch-stones lying on the threshold like shattered bones. Arwen did not want to walk in that door — she had never been so sure of anything in her life. 

Legolas beside her had gone pale. “Do you want to turn back?” he whispered, and she knew he would like her to say yes. She did not. 

“Come,” he said with an upward glance to where Arien rode above the mists. “The sun is still high; the spiders should be sleeping.”

 

 

“A little way ahead and to his left he saw suddenly, issuing from a black hole of shadow under the cliff, the most loathly shape that he had ever beheld, horrible beyond the horror of an evil dream. Most like a spider she was, but huger than the greatest hunting beasts, and more terrible than they because of the evil purpose in her remorseless eyes. Those same eyes that he had thought daunted and defeated, there they were lit with a fell light again, clustering in her out-thrust head. Great horns she had, and behind her short stalk-like neck was her huge swollen body, a vast bloated bag, swaying and sagging between her legs; its great bulk was black, blotched with livid marks, but the belly underneath was pale and luminous and gave forth a stench. Her legs were bent, with great knobbed joints high above her back, and hairs that stuck out like steel spines, and at each leg's end there was a claw.

As soon as she had squeezed her soft squelching body and its folded limbs out of the upper exit from her lair, she moved with a horrible speed, now running her creaking legs, now making a sudden bound."

The Two Towers, Book 4, Ch 9, Shelob's Lair

 

Inside, the reek was overpowering. That alien smell of bugs in their thousands, crushed and left to decay: an overpowering odour of chitin and rot. A long year’s worth of spider’ prey — insect carapaces and small animal corpses — crackled beneath their soles, layers of them ankle deep. Small spiders still fed on the dead husks, and they scuttled away into the darkness before their feet. 

Dark shapes dotted the ceiling, and at first glance Arwen thought them strange-shaped lamps. Then she looked up and into the glassy eyes of a deer spun in spider-silk. One of the holy white hinds, judging by what fur could be seen beneath the strangling webs.

Legolas winced. “This deer has hung here less than a week.” 

“Is it alive?” Arwen pointed at the ceiling, at the hanging shapes. The silk cocoons were eerily white, like shrouded corpses. “They all are?”

Legolas looked very pale. “Probably,” he replied. “Such is the spiders’ poison.”

Arwen drew her hunting knife and turned back to the white hind. “We must deal the poor beast mercy.” 

Arwen had eviscerated her own game on many a hunt. She reached up on tiptoe, and with a single expert cut severed the deer’s throat. The animal was definitely alive: blood sprayed from the great arteries, pulsing over Arwen’s hands, her boots, a growing pool of steaming red at her feet. 

At the smell of blood, the tiny spiderlings’ hunger overcame their fear of light. They came chittering, millions of tiny feet and glinting eyelets, a tide of pale bulging bodies covering the blood, her boots, climbing to reach her hands and the knife. 

Arwen howled in terror and, leaping back, she flailed wildly to shed them.

“Shhh!” Legolas hissed, his eyes wide with terror, and she composed herself before him. 

The hall’s tomb-like silence descended once more. Nothing moved in the shadowed space. Only the spun beasts at the ceiling rotated slowly in a wind from some gaping doorway overhead, like a bounty of monstrous fruits. 

“We cannot kill them all. We must only look for Elves or Men!” Legolas whispered.

Only now did it strike Arwen: the dreadful realisation that there might be more than deer hanging in this hallway of horrors. 

Legolas elbowed her, and she almost screamed again. “There!” he whispered urgently, and ran further into the hall to one of the hanging bulges. He drew his knife and began to slash at the silk cocoon. 

When it gave way, there was a face.  

Arwen racked her brain, in that single heartbeat of terror, for how to go about healing a patient so horribly poisoned, but there would be no need... She could not even tell whether this shrivelled husk of a woman was once Elf or Mortal. The head was dried to skin and bones. They stood still and stared for a moment, frozen before the horror of it. Then Arwen thought to pull back the curtain of hair and found leaf-shaped ears. Legolas groaned as if in pain, and took his dagger to the silk cocoon once more, slashing in frustrated rage until the body dropped to the ground with a horrid little thump . It had been sucked dry. 

“Dineloth,” Legolas murmured, running gentle fingers down the spiralling clan tattoos. “She still mourns her husband. She used to climb to this dreadful place and look out towards Mordor. Ai, for her suffering!”

Arwen did not know this woman, and she knew for certain that her houseless spirit was not here. Her concerns were more prosaic. “These did not hang her from the ceiling,” she said as she shook off another clutch of spiderlings clinging to her blood-soaked breeches. “Where are the ones that did? We need to know, or we might soon hang beside her!” 

It sufficed to draw Legolas back to the present. “Spiders tend their eggs in a breeding chamber, away from their larder.” His eyes flashed with hate. “When we find it, there shall be a reckoning!” 

There was nothing for it but to leave Dineloth’s body behind. On they went across the gruesome bed of corpses, halting only to examine the cocoons dangling overhead. Those all held beasts and birds, thank the Valar. At the end of the hallway with its horrors stood two columns shaped like great beeches. Between their stone boles rose a wide marble stair.

“The great hall,” Legolas whispered.

Atop the stairs hung a pair of massive bronze doors, twisted on their hinges. Fascinated, Arwen put her foot on the lowest step. Dried carapaces and egg membranes crackled like straw beneath her boot. 

Legolas’ hand closed about her arm. “Not that way. The spiders will see us.” He thought for a moment. “My father has old drawings displayed in his study. If they are correct, there should be a smaller entrance beside the guards’ room.”

He led her through a side door, into what must once have been an antechamber. Wooden benches lay mouldering on the flagstones. The stuffed head of a great warg still hung, absurdly, mounted upon the wall. The far door stood ajar, and behind it shone a red glow like fire. 

They approached it in silence, like hunters stalking some ravenous thing, and with a whispered cantrip of hiding Arwen pulled open the door. 

High up by the hall’s eaves the setting sun cast a sickly orange light through shattered windows, illuminating a nightmare: a heaving mass of silk and spiderlings writhed from wall to wall. The entire great hall had become one monstrous breeding chamber.

Despair struck them. They could not barge in for a surprise raid. They could not even step foot on the floor, lost as it was beneath the mass of spider eggs. 

“We can never kill this many!” Legolas hissed into her ear.

Arwen’s  eyes played across the roof-beams — ancient oak, dry as powder. An idea struck like a flash of lightning. “We must lock the doors, then set it on fire!” 

Legolas was shocked at the very notion. “This is my grandfather’s hall!” 

Arwen shook her head, and gestured at the nightmarish, many-legged mass writhing in the hall. “It is Oropher’s no more.”

She ran back to the hallway, to the weathered bronze doors on their battered hinges. “We need some lever to move them. Perhaps a young tree might …”

Legolas shook his head. “Only Song will move them. The Song of Oropher’s House.” He smiled. “It is a good thing you came here with me.”

His voice was gentle, lacking the artful timbre of Noldorin classical schooling, but sharp and clear as an obsidian blade. 

The doors shivered, moaned, and for a heartstopping instant of terror Arwen believed they would shatter. Legolas frowned, and lay such Power beneath his Song that the very air before him seemed to shimmer. Then, with a woosh and a clang, first one door, then the other turned on its hinges and fell shut. 

Legolas leapt up the stairs to stand upon the highest step, where he lay both palms against the doors. “Remain closed!” he commanded with a thrumming wave of Power beneath the words.

Arwen looked upon him with new awe.

He grinned and made a mock bow with grand flourish. “They did teach me something , in this wood of ours.”

The crumbling benches in the guards’ room made for excellent kindling. Legolas wrapped his arrowheads in strips of a torn spare shirt, and smeared them with tallow from his pack. 

Then Arwen thrust open the door. The first flaming arrow arched through the hall to strike a fat cluster of eggs on the throne. A hellish din of shrieks went up as it burst into flame. With a popping sound, a writhing mass of unborn spiderlings poured forth, and they were whitish and transparent as corpse-ghosts as they spilled onto the flagstones. 

Legolas moved too fast for even her eyes to follow as he nocked and released another arrow, its tip an arc of flame. It struck a waving curtain of silk hanging from the rafters, and a hail of smouldering fragments rained down on the spiders below. Legolas did not stop to watch them writhe and shriek as their nests caught fire, but lit and launched another arrow, and another. 

Arwen grew aware of a whisper, dry and awful like brittle bones cracking at the edge of hearing. 

“Intruders! Foul Elves! Take them!” moaned a chorus of dreadful voices. “Grasp them, bite them! Hang them until they rot!”

The spiders came streaming towards the door, and Arwen stepped forward to shield Legolas. Wielding a flaming plank like a club with one hand and her sword with the other, she drove them back. 

Everywhere, silken nests and the foul carpet of debris — egg casings and spider droppings and the empty, sucked-dry husks of men and beasts — caught flame like dry tinder, and soon the hall was a mass of flame. Acrid black smoke stung their eyes. 

Now the spiders no longer whispered, but shrieked. “Closed! The door is closed! Bite them, kill them, get out!”

An elk-sized spider came leaping for Arwen’s head, and in its despair it no longer feared fire nor blade. It came for her, pincers clicking, poison dripping down to hiss and splutter upon the floor. 

Erferil’s mutilated face swam before her eyes, dripping whorls of scar tissue and that clouded white eye. Bile rose in her throat, and some deep animal part of her clamoured for her to bolt. 

Run! it beat through her blood like a battle-drum. Run now, run far, and save yourself!

Arwen’s hand went lax about her sword hilt. She would run, as far as her legs would carry her, without care for Legolas, or her own honour. She would run and hide in a hole in the ground. She stood there frozen for an endless moment, torn, her breath heaving, sour bile in her mouth.

She should have been bitten and maimed, then, but Legolas’ bow sang, and the beast fell with an arrow sprouting from its eye. For but a moment he caught her eye. He remembered his own first battle well enough to understand. He touched her arm, his hand warm against her skin, and the feeling brought her back to herself. She nodded her thanks, and stood tall before him once more.

Another wave of spiders came roaring, a moving wall of clicking pincers and clawing legs. A jet of greenish venom hit the wall beside her, and the stray drops on her arm made her hiss with fiery pain. There was nothing for it but to retreat behind the door and bar it with rotting wood. 

“Run!” Legolas screamed, and then they were both fleeing, legs pumping, lungs burning with each smoke-laden breath, the screeching, many-legged tide of horror chasing them.

They flew past the dreaded hallway, the hanging cocoons, Dineloth’s dessicated corpse, Arwen’s heart thumping in her throat, her legs burning like a brand. Beside her, Legolas shrieked as the foremost spider lunged forward and caught his arm with her pincer. He struck wildly with his long knife, and the beast fell.

On they ran, out of those dreadful doors, stumbling into the cool night air and down the slope to where their fettered horses waited at the foot of the hill. Behind them thrummed the dull roar of the flames, rising until it overpowered even the burning spiders’ death-shrieks. Flakes of soot began to rain down around them. 

Arwen scrambled with shaking hands to saddle her snorting, trembling stallion. Only then did she dare turn around for a final look at Amon Lanc.  

Oropher’s hall was no more. A crown of fire rose upon the hill, lighting a tower of black smoke that billowed to the clouds in leaping bursts of madder and crimson.

“They will see this from Caras Galadhon to the Forest Mountains!” Arwen gasped as they leapt into their saddles and began a mad dash away. 

“Good,” replied Legolas dryly, pointing over his shoulder at the calf-sized spiders chasing them. “We could use some help.” 

 

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Chapter End Notes

And so out heroes finally meet the dreaded Mirkwood Spiders. 

This chapter was fun to write, both for the swashbuckling adventure of the battle scene and the chance to revisit one of my favorite chapters in the Hobbit for inspiration.  I'd love to hear what you think of it, a comment would make me a very happy scribe!

See you soon,
IS