((OOC:  EEEE! Bear with me though, I'm rusty as hell sadly! ^^' ))<br/><br/><br/>Massive gnarled roots pressed hollow shapes right through Veronika’s slippers and into the soft flesh under her feet, like the fossils of an old python pit they bedded most of the earth here. Sheer adrenaline alone had gotten her this far, far enough to see landscape change from tall evergreens and ankle snatching brambles to long, wilting swamp willows and sucking mud. Only a few rotting webs, misty and opaque with age, strung between bark and branches, gave this territory away for what it truly was…<br/><br/>No, that wasn’t strictly true. Moss covered bones stretched out from beneath the clay in scatters like witches fingers reaching skyward.<br/>Arakyn used to hunt here.<br/>Good hunting too.<br/>Veronika had never seen one in person, but the books made them out to be wicked fast, their bones half hollow to reduce weight, their limbs and fingers were elongated and double jointed, the tips of every digit able to produce a sticky substance that hardened and spun into the webbing so proudly displayed here…<br/>Creatures who were more at home in trees and cave walls than on land.<br/><br/>Said, it was, that they slept with both eyes wide open, staring gaunt at the mire until poor unsuspecting animals waded in. Not slowed by the muck the arakyn would strike like lightening, biting into prey, releasing a venom, so potently acidic, that it melted through the very veins it had been injected into as it travelled, effectively using the animals own circuitry to digest them from the inside out.<br/><br/>They’d wrap it, their meal, in alkali webbing as it writhed in pain and melted, eventually the meat slurry would meet the thick cocoon and the chemical reaction would balance itself out over the course of a week until it was essentially a pre-digested, pre-packaged meal all ready to go, ridding the arakyn of the weighty burden of a digestive system and dipping their figures dramatically beneath the jut of ribcage.<br/><br/>The Master had taught her that.<br/>It was his reply to her asking about the beautiful things he’d seen in his travels.<br/>A pretty fucking fitting end for his pretty fucking human, Veronika could not imagine a worse way to go!<br/><br/>Dropping to her haunches she sifted a hand through the muck, through the watery porridge consistency her fingers finally connected with something solid and rough. Curling the stone into her palm she up righted, jaw clenched, shoulders shaking through either cold, fear or anger, it was getting hard to untangle the emotions now…<br/><br/>Normally it would have been a stupid idea. Go throw rocks at an arakyn web—shit! It even sounded like something the sore-losing, snotty-arse children of nobles would say to one another…. Only today it made perfect sense.<br/><br/>They didn’t come out of the woods this far, like most animals, arakyn weren’t interested in attracting daemon attention and hunted in private, meaning she’d have to lure them out for her dear friend Amora… secondly, it wasn’t as though she had no extraction plan!<br/><br/>Arakyn didn’t like the mud!<br/><br/>Having half the bone density meant being incredibly prone to breaks, if they got caught up in the mire they’d often snap limbs trying to pull themselves free, cannibalistic critters they were took this as a sign of weakness and would often devour their own comrade instead of the ‘riskier’ hunt, so if she just dropped herself into the bog and held her breath for long enough… maybe they’d sail past her…<br/><br/>It wasn’t going to be easy but between throwing the rock up into the webbing (no doubt there was an arakyn at the far end, slender digit poised on silk, waiting to pick up the slightest rabbits heartbeat of vibration…) she probably had a good thirty second to a minute gap to duck and cover, it was going to be close, but it was all she needed.<br/><br/>Plunging herself into the dark space behind her eyelids, she rallied herself, taking a long, deep breath as though it were the last she might ever have. C’mon girl, you just need to move fast in that critical gap… you just need to drop to the floor and wriggle until you’re completely buried…<br/><br/>The woods stood eerily silent around her, like every tree held its breath in solidarity with her, tall sentinels that they were…<br/><br/>“Pleasepleaseplease…” she whispered under her breath, raising her hand behind her head so there was room for a good swing to pelt the rock as high as it needed to b—<br/><br/>--Something grabbed her wrist.<br/><br/>The world froze.<br/>Blood cold. Her expression slackened in shock.<br/>Its grip tightened fractionally in slow motion.<br/>Fingers. Bony, long fingers.<br/><br/>Six of ‘em.<br/><br/>A tiny pained gasp escaped her lips as a terrible realisation dawned on her. Swallowing dryly she opened her eyes owlishly looking up. Sudden despair and horror flooded through her. What was over in less than seconds felt like minutes to her!<br/><br/>Veronica’s shrieks cut clean through the air. The forest sprung back into life, birds took off in howling flocks, things darted through the undergrowth, blood sprayed across the trees and the tiny bugs living in the hollows there stirred and crawled out to feed on it.<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><span style="font-style: italic">Meanwhile…</span><br/><br/>Something shifted in the dark. It was hard to tell in the woods, things were<span style="font-style: italic">always</span>moving about in the dark, that’s what they did best! Sometimes it was foxes, sometimes owls, sometimes it was hunters or nature spirits, sometimes it was just the breeze rattling the leaves all the way to its destination…<br/><br/>But this something, that had followed the vibrations of Amora’s pulse against the webbing, was big.<br/><br/>That which wasn’t distorted completely by shadow, or that occasionally got caught in the stark moonlight filtered through the trees, was humanoid enough in shape. It could have started out life as a man, but something was terribly wrong. All of its limbs, with one extra set of arms too many, even its body was too long, too thin, the way it moved was disjointed and unnatural, but with an odd predatory grace as it strode and shifted effortlessly from branch to branch, it’s skin, probably white was mottled and grey in the half light and it’s sheer bottomless black eyes screamed out in contrast.<br/><br/>It was a young arakyn, striking out on its own and feeling lucky whilst the rest of the flock worked on subduing the Big Food that had walked right into their territory.<br/><br/>Paying attention elsewhere it had picked up Amora’s signature body rhythm and crept out beyond the edge of the territory unnoticed. For a moment it perched on a branch opposite her, eyeing her up whilst she was still stuck, hinged jaw pulling unnaturally wide into a soundless snarl, rows of uneven teeth like a piano key graveyard on display. It was only a young one, it had never hunted anything bigger than a rabbit on its own before, ordinarily arakyn would have struck without a moment’s hesitation, but this one wasn’t quite certain of the situation… at least not yet…