text: : *This was originally posted to /r/nosleep but had to be taken down (because I am a dumbfuck).* *Also, any concrit is eagerly welcomed.* No one is sure when The Limb-less got here, or where they came from. The only thing for certain is that we were here first. No one even remembers a time before them. For generations and generations, for thousands of years, The Limb-less have been here. How are we certain they came after us? I don't know. It's just something everyone says. Something we all know to be true. Limb-less is a bit of a misnomer. When I was young and asked about the name, I was told that when they first came here, however that was, they stood in such a way that their limbs were tucked neatly against their bodies, making them look like a body with no limbs. They were dubbed The Limb-less and the name stuck. I've also heard that they originally didn't have limbs and evolved them, which sounds ridiculous. They didn't just sprout normal limbs like everyone else. But they have limbs attached to larger limbs, vaguely resembling trees. Their enormous size furthers the comparison. No one is certain why they came here in the first place. The most commonly accepted theory is invasion. They barely noticed us, it seems, building their gargantuan homes around our homes, blotting out the sun. That they came here to harvest something is another popular theory. What that something is is unclear. It doesn't seem to be us, at any rate. Some of the crazier individuals say The Limb-less were here all along, hiding deep in our oceans until the time was right to surface. My sister, who I'll get to in a little bit, she thought the reason nobody can agree on a motivation is because there wasn't one singular motivation. She believed that each Limb-less has their own reasoning. It makes more sense than it should, seeing as how she was the only one who ever put forth that idea. But indeed The Limb-less seem to differ greatly. For the most part, The Limb-less pay no attention to us. They neither seek us out nor avoid us. They don't seem to consider us at all, really. However, there's some fractioning among them. Some of them will kill us on sight if we happen to cross their field of vision. They do not hunt us down, but prefer to lie in wait. Then there are the assassins. Their sole purpose is to hunt us down and kill us all. Unlike the ones who lie in wait and use blunt force to take us out one at a time, the assassins use some kind of poison that kills us all, spreading from one to another like a horrible infection. Yet there are those of The Limb-less who do not seek to harm us at all. They will see us, know we are there, and be completely fine with our presence. Some of them will kill every other creature in range but purposefully avoid us. Then there's the third group. Their mentality is most bizarre. They will kidnap one of us if seen and not kill us. Nor do they keep us captive. Instead, they will bafflingly Relocate us. Exactly as it sounds, they will abduct us and set us free hours from our home. We disappear all the time, only to show up battered and worn but otherwise unharmed some hours later. I know lots who have been Relocated. Their stories are identical to my own experience: We are placed inside some sort of invisible force field, flown at frightening speeds to a different area of the map, then let go. Weirder still, they often release us in the same area. Everyone has been Relocated at least once or twice in their lives. My sister probably holds the record for number of Relocations. Sometimes The Limb-less do interact with us without killing us. The smaller ones, which everyone generally assumes is their young, in particular show a curiosity toward us. I was once out getting food when I spotted one. I froze, hoping to blend in with my surroundings, but it was too late. It's face, this horrifying monstrosity beyond description, took up my entire field of vision. Moments went by while I waited for it to act. It didn't move, just watched. So I inched my way along, warily. It still didn't attack, but it did follow me. It followed me as I grabbed my food, and continued to watch as I ate. Eventually it went away, perhaps having lost interest. It was the most harrowing experience of my life. See, while their young seem to have mostly benevolent intentions, they are clumsy and uncoordinated, and dangerously unpredictable. The larger ones, for the most part, have their own patterns. You learn to identify the ones who will kill on sight, the ones who will let you go, and the ones who Relocate you. We make sure to teach one another which of The Limb-less are to be avoided and which are safe. I make it a personal rule to avoid all of them just to be safe. My sister does not hold my same belief. In fact, she has been obsessed with The Limb-less ever since she claimed one of them has rescued her. She will tell the story to anyone who asks, and to most who don't. She had fallen into a lake, or ocean (the body of water seems to grow with each retelling) and struggled to stay afloat. Just when (according to her) she had accepted her death and was about to give up, a Limb-less spotted her and pulled her out of the water and onto dry land. Over night she went from being reasonably cautious to dangerously daring. She started associating with the crazy ones. She's regurgitate some of their nuttier stories as if they were gospel. The Limb-less have replicated us in machine-form, she would tell me excitedly, or some of them, the bigger ones not just the young, study us, try to understand us. This phase was harmless. Sure, she was believing some crazy stuff, but it was just stories. I figured she was just trying to rationalize The Limb-less's irrational behavior. Then she decided she wanted to study The Limb-less back. 'We barely know anything about them,' she'd told me. 'Don't you think it odd that we haven't even tried to understand their language?' She would go out in view and just observe them. She wasn't totally idiotic; she would try not to be seen by the ones who would kill on sight, but she was more reckless when it came to the others. This resulted in many Relocations. Each time she'd return chipper and full of breathless excitement, as if being Relocated was some sort of honor bestowed upon her, or a bonding moment. She'd constantly update me on their movements and her theories regarding them. 'One stayed completely still for hours on end. I think it might have been at rest,' she'd tell me. I'd hoped it was some sort of temporary rebellion. We were quite young when the famed near-drowning occurred. But her interest in The Limb-less never waned as we grew older. We each started families, and our children started their own families. Even in old age she still wanted to know everything she could about them. Up until the day she died, she never ceased her investigation. Eventually, their communication became her favorite subject. In fact, her intense study made her a sort of expert in the field. By observing them day in and day out, she had grown to recognize patterns in their language. Using contextual clues she could sort of determine the general meanings, or at least what it pertained to. She couldn't give a direct translation, but she was able to piece together if they were discussing rest or meals. Somehow, through means I have yet to understand, she could also determine if The Limb-less was more likely to kill one of us or Relocate us. Because of this, she was sometimes tasked to identify the intention of a particular Limb-less to serve those who lived near it. I can't argue with results: she was absolutely spot on. When I didn't see her for a while, I hadn't worried at first. I just assumed she had been Relocated again. As she aged it took her longer and longer to return home. Maybe she moved slower, maybe she paused to watch The Limb-less for a while. I only went to her home to check to take care of her children. It wasn't like her to abandon them, but I thought it best to keep them company all the same. That's when I saw her. My sister, dead. I knew she hadn't been killed by The Limb-less. Their methods of killing made it obvious they were the culprits. Those killed by The Limb-less were either utterly obliterated beyond recognition, or poisoned. It wasn't poison, since nobody else in our family was sick, and she was whole and full, I knew it hadn't been one of them. It seemed, in all likelihood, she had died of old age. It was a bittersweet moment. Just the day prior, she had gleefully informed me that she might have cracked their language. At least, she thought she had isolated and identified one particular word. 'This is the start,' she had told me. 'Everything is going to change.' She had died full of hope and joy. She had died thinking she had done the impossible and had given us a way to possibly communicate with The Limb-less, to finally understand them. She had died happy. But with her death went the very thing she had hoped for. Nobody had devoted their lives like she had. Nobody had ever gotten as far as she had, not even close. Because nobody had cared enough to. I certainly hadn't cared when she informed me of the good news. Don't get me wrong; I was constantly impressed with the things she had gleaned. But I wasn't as excited as she had hoped when she had told me. I regret that now. I hope that there will be someone like her, someone down the line who will have her passion for The Limb-less and do her memory proud. I'm far too old right now to go down that road, for it took my sister her entire life to get as far as she had. We were the same age. I don't have much longer before I meet her same fate. But I hope her discovery will help whoever decides to study The Limb-less. So I'm going to share it as much as I can, hoping to spark an interest in her protegé. She had identified the name The Limb-less have given us, what they use to describe us as a species. That word is spider.