Merlin, Mara, Bram, Dorian, and Jane stood at the front.
Between force barriers, stone, and summons, they were the closest thing we had to a proper tank line. The rest of us gathered behind them, leaving enough room for Sera and Orin to start working once we found somewhere to stand.
We knew our roles.
I had thought that would be enough.
With so many different kinds of magic, telling everyone exactly what to cast would only slow us down. The building team would build. The healers would heal. Everyone else could find something that needed killing.
We were intelligent enough to figure it out.
Then we crossed the entrance.
The first wave hit before I saw anything.
My knee almost folded.
Somebody behind me cried out, and the sound disappeared beneath a screech that seemed to pass straight through my skull.
Pain.
Not the sharp, useful kind that told you where you were hurt.
There was no wound I could put a hand over. No part of my body I could move to make it stop.
Something was suffering, and for a moment I knew exactly how badly.
I pressed my shoulder against the wall.
Across from me, Mara had one hand clamped over her ear. A pale barrier flickered in front of her, its edge trembling every time she tried to draw a breath.
Covering her ear wasn't helping.
She lowered her hand anyway.
"Keep going," Elara called. Her voice broke halfway through. "I'll… I'll try to cleanse it."
She was already casting.
Light gathered between her fingers, collapsed, then gathered again in a smaller shape.
Most of her cleansing work had been poisons and curses. I didn't know what she was going to do with this.
I needed her to know.
Webs covered the passage from ceiling to floor. Some were as thin as hair. Others crossed the stone in bundles thick enough that we had to step over them.
There was only one way forward.
Merlin stayed beside the front line, dragging one foot for a few steps before forcing himself to walk properly. Whenever someone behind him stumbled, a little pressure caught them beneath the arms.
Even now, he was watching where everyone was.
The passage opened into a cavern.
Egg chambers lined both walls, their pale coverings shifting in the dim light.
For a second, I thought the center was empty.
"Above," Blake said.
He was looking up with tears running down his face.
I followed his gaze.
The Spider Queen hung over us.
Her legs disappeared into the webbing on either side of the chamber. The body between them was so large that I struggled to understand how I had mistaken it for part of the ceiling.
Then she looked at me.
I stopped breathing.
She was afraid.
Not angry that we had entered her home. Not hungry.
Afraid.
Something pressed against my thoughts, too confused and desperate to become words.
She wanted to live.
She wanted something to stop.
She wanted help.
"Oh, God…"
Liora's staff lowered.
Jane made a small sound beside her. One hand had gone to the pendant beneath her collar.
Their magic was already reaching outward.
Mine told me where the Queen was, how much mana moved through her, which strands were carrying it.
Whatever theirs told them was worse.
Liora started shaking her head.
"No…"
A crack came from the wall.
Then another.
One of the egg chambers tore open.
A small spider pushed through the silk, its legs slipping as it tried to find the floor.
Its eyes were clear.
I saw it look up.
Saw it find its mother.
Then…
Fuck.
There wasn't a word for it.
The spider stayed standing. Its legs still moved. Its body turned toward us.
But something had been taken out of it.
Liora fell to her knees.
Merlin caught her before her head struck the stone. Vera crouched beside her, one arm around her shoulders while a patch of soft green growth spread beneath them.
Liora didn't seem to notice either of them.
Another egg opened.
I watched it happen again.
Jane's mouth moved, but no sound came out.
"Please…"
The Queen's voice scraped through the cavern.
"My young…"
Her forelegs pulled against the strands holding them.
"Don't do this. Run…"
The first spider charged.
A lump of webbing struck Mara's barrier and spread across it. She flinched so hard that one corner of the panel folded inward.
Bram stepped into the gap.
Stone climbed his forearm, thickening as he raised it. The next shot hit hard enough to push him back a step.
He planted his heel.
More stone spread over his boots and into the floor.
Behind him, Sera was trying to fit a rune plate into its mount.
She missed the slot twice.
Orin caught the plate before she dropped it. He held the frame still with both hands while she pressed her fingers against the markings.
Neither looked at the other.
Neither had enough attention left.
I put my Frostbough staff away.
For a moment, my left hand was empty.
Then I took out the other one.
Dark frostfir. A long wolfhide grip. Inscribed quartz curled around the deep-blue crystal at its head.
Inside the crystal, thin red currents climbed against gravity.
I had spent so much time making it.
Then so much time finding reasons not to use it.
Another scream passed through us.
The quartz cage shook against my sleeve.
Dorian's stone guardian moved.
Its fist struck the first spider with a noise that reached me even through everything else.
The creature disappeared beneath it.
Dorian shut his eyes.
Only for a moment.
Then he opened them and sent the guardian toward the next chamber.
Jane released her stored Ent. A second rose from the roots spreading beside her, slower, its shoulders still knitting together as the first lumbered across the cavern.
She kept watching the eggs.
When one of the spiders turned toward her, she hesitated.
The Ent didn't.
Lightning tore across the floor.
Finn had aimed low, catching the legs of the creatures spilling from the chambers. The bolt split between two bodies, then jumped somewhere he hadn't intended.
He jerked his staff upward and cut it off.
A strip of stone beside Dorian's guardian glowed.
Ice lances followed.
One struck the floor short of its target. Zach stared at it, breathing through his mouth, then formed another.
That one hit.
Flame passed over the broken ice.
The spiders were still outnumbered.
Every few seconds, that became less true.
"Tero."
Merlin was looking at me.
I knew he had said something before my name.
I hadn't heard it.
The Queen's eyes were still on us.
On the little bodies breaking beneath stone and wood.
She didn't want this.
She didn't want to fight us.
I extended my mana.
The room opened around me in ways I couldn't see before.
Sera's first rune took hold. Orin pressed a second device into the floor beside it. Nessa caught his shoulder and pulled him back before a strand dropped across the place where his neck had been.
Farther out, Dorian's guardian stepped into a trap.
Silk snapped around its leg.
It pulled once, dragging a section of webbing out of the floor, then kept moving.
An Ent tore through another snare. The strands cut into its bark, but Jane fed new growth into the damage before its next step landed.
Those traps would have taken one of us off our feet.
For now, the constructs were finding them first.
Then I felt Jane's mana.
And Liora's.
Liora was still on the ground. Vera had helped her sit upright, but she hadn't stopped looking at the Queen.
Green light trembled at the end of her staff.
Both of them were trying to reach her.
Their spells stretched upward, losing shape before they crossed half the distance.
I could fix that.
I knew how to fix that.
"Jane."
She looked at me.
I laid a leyline beside the edge of her spell.
A path.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then she pushed her magic into it.
Liora saw the green light climb. She lifted her staff with both hands and joined her own spell to the second line I formed.
The connection reached the Queen.
Something enormous pressed back.
My teeth struck together.
I nearly lost both lines.
She wasn't a low-level creature with a wound we could close. There was so much mana moving through her that our spells barely disturbed it.
But Jane kept casting.
Liora did too.
I touched the Heartspool, activating it.
Silver threads unfolded beneath my insignia, reaching toward four of the largest mana reserves I could feel nearby.
"I need your mana!"
Three connections answered.
The fourth stayed empty.
Rowan stood beyond it, feeding a narrow stream of fire through the gap between an Ent and the stone guardian.
"I can't," he shouted. "They're still coming."
A spider tried to cross the burning line.
He forced it back.
He was right.
The others' mana flowed into me as quickly as the threads allowed. I fed it into the work above us, holding the paths open while Jane and Liora tried to make their magic take.
It wasn't enough.
Across the room, Elara's light spread over her shoulders.
Then another wave of anguish hit.
The light broke apart.
She bent forward, coughing, one hand against her chest.
I looked back at the staff.
Demon blood and water-aspected power, bound into something I could hold.
Something I could use.
"Please," Jane whispered.
I didn't know who she was asking.
The Queen.
Me.
Anything.
"I'm sorry, Sheral."
I widened my reach.
There were so many spiders around us now.
So much mana, so much power.
I could feel where each body ended.
And what was held inside it.
"Tero. Don't."
Sheral's voice reached me clearly enough.
I heard her.
My mind was straining beneath the Queen's pain. Thoughts kept breaking apart before I could finish them.
I needed power.
I needed the noise to stop long enough to do something.
I pulled.
For a moment, the resistance nearly took the spell out of my control.
Then the first connection gave.
Others followed.
Dozens of little bodies stopped moving.
Mana rushed into me, carrying things that struggled as they came apart.
The relief was immediate.
Horribly familiar.
My grip tightened around the staff.
I fed the stolen power upward.
Jane's spell brightened. Liora gasped as the line beneath hers steadied.
Above us, the Queen screamed harder.
Her legs curled inward.
One reached toward the bodies on the floor.
I could still feel how good it had been.
That was the part I couldn't get away from.
A wall of silk folded open by the sides of the 'arena'.
White spiders stood behind it.
Beautiful things, with long, fine legs and pale bodies almost untouched by the filth of the cavern.
Their mana reserves were enormous.
One raised its forelegs.
Something caught hold of the mana I had spread across the floor.
Then another.
My sight lurched.
The far side of the cavern disappeared from my awareness as they began stripping the mana out of my reach.
I tried to pull it back.
One of the leylines buckled.
Jane staggered.
"No…"
I drew everything closer, abandoning whole sections before the white spiders could follow them back.
The cavern closed around me.
I could still see with my eyes.
It felt like being blinded anyway.
A mass of webbing struck the stone beside my head.
Merlin dragged me backward.
I hit the ground hard enough to drive the air out of my lungs, but I kept the two lines to the Queen.
Barely.
Around us, barriers flashed.
Bram was down on one knee. Mara stood beside him, holding a panel over both their heads while he tried to tear his stone-bound foot free.
Someone was calling for healing.
Someone else was crying.
Then warm fingers closed around the back of my neck.
Elara.
She was kneeling behind me, her other hand lifted toward the group.
The light around her had changed.
It no longer reached outward in broken bursts. It gathered close, settling over her skin before spreading across the short distance between us.
A thin warmth passed through my jaw.
The pressure inside my head shifted.
I sucked in a breath.
The Queen was still screaming.
I could still hear every awful second of it.
But a little of the pain stopped arriving with the sound.
Beside me, Jane's shoulders lowered.
Not much.
Enough that her next breath didn't catch.
Mara's barrier steadied. Bram got his foot beneath him. Farther back, Liora lifted her head, tears still falling while she held her spell.
Elara's hand shook against my neck.
"Keep close," she whispered.
Her cleansing light spread to the others.
It didn't take away what we had seen.
It didn't stop the spiders.
But for the first time since entering the cavern, I could hear my own breathing beneath the Queen's.
I held onto the next breath.
Around me, the others did too.