《Arachnophillia》 Prologue: Snatched from Deaths Sweet Embrace My name is, well..., was, Desini. Great name, I know. From what I was told, my ¡°parents¡± dropped me off at the orphanage in a luxurious ¡°Destiny Awaits¡± pre-built computer box. Why they could afford an expensive, $2000 dollar game-station but not keep their child, couldn''t tell you. What I can tell you is that without any form of identification or any contact information, I received the great name of Desini, which never got me weird stares. Nope. Needless to say, I learned to fend for myself as one of the very few girls at the orphanage. But it wasn¡¯t that bad, I grew up in Northwestern Washington, surrounded by thick forest and thicker rain. Going to school wasn¡¯t half bad, although the super special individuals who think the world revolves around them were as plentiful as cockroaches in a condemned motel. As I grew up, I learned that I had a creative soul, I loved to draw, paint, sculpt and create. I could spend hours in front of a canvas, creating silhouettes, otherworldly patterns, landscapes, and anything else that was waiting just beyond the limits of my imagination. Using the school studio was bliss, the one place I felt comfortable on Earth. The other thing I learned is that people can be incredibly cruel. Let me give you an example of latter. When I was seventeen I worked at a sawmill in order to get enough money to move to Seattle and become an artist for a living. While there I met a charming gentleman by the name of Randy. *Gag* He was the owner¡¯s only son, and his pride and joy. I always felt uneasy around him, but I only had the job for a couple of months until I saved enough to move, so ignoring him until then was bearable enough. However, near the end of my shift one day when everyone was headed home, I got stuck with locking up the office and securing the equipment. Out of the corner of my eye while doing so, I spotted Randy staggering across the yard. He looked hammered, which was pretty much the norm for him. ¡°You okay?¡± I questioned, eyeing him carefully in case he did anything stupid. My question seemed to wake him up from his stupor, and he looked around until his eyes caught me standing on a raised platform near the controls for one of the saws. He slowly started moving towards me trying to make small talk. ¡°Oh yeaah, I¡¯m finee.¡± He slurred, ¡°e¡¯en beetter with you ¡®round.¡± I gave him a cold stare, remembering the stories of the other female workers that quit due to claims of sexual harassment. Of course, those claims disappeared rather quickly due to some greased palms. But if Randy tried something with me, I was going to sober him up rather quickly with an ancient technique: a five finger salute. My stare seemed to do the trick, as he confusedly ogled me, bewildered at the situation of a girl refusing him! Revolutionary. But he turned around and walked away, so that was the end of that, I mistakenly assumed. I turned my back to shut down the saw, the last log having been cut in half, when I heard loud clanging coming from the stairs behind me. Randy had covered the distance between us when my back was turned and charged at me. I yelped and raised my hands to defend myself, but Randy grabbed them and shouted at me, ¡°Who do you think you are?¡± The alcohol¡¯s effect wearing off at his rage, ¡°I¡¯ll show you who¡¯s in charge here!¡± He jerked my hands above my head and held them up with one hand. With the other, he reached down and cupped my chin, leaning forward to mash his lips on mine. I kneed him right between the legs. Hard. Randy jumped back, howling and crouching a little, protecting his face with one hand and crossing his arm over his stomach in pain. ¡°You little slut!¡± He writhed. ¡°Piss off Randy, before your precious member there gets mutilated beyond repair.¡± I snarled At that, Randy pulled himself to his feet and grabbed one of the elongated hooks used for moving the massive logs around. With fire in his eyes he swung it at my face too quickly for me to dodge. Pain coursed through my face as I felt warmth spread diagonally across my face from my forehead down to my upper lip. The vision in my right eye was gone, replaced with a murky red world. I didn¡¯t have much time to react though, as I felt a kick to my side, pushing me off the platform into the moving saw. I spun in the air in what felt like slow-motion as I frantically tried to grab onto something. With a sickening crunch, I landed in an impossible position on my side, with my right hand bent backwards over my wrist so it lay flat against my arm. My legs were splayed out behind me and my chest was on fire, I probably had multiple broken ribs. The vision in my left eye was blacking out around the edges due to the pain I was in, but I realized that I was slowly being pulled to the saw, which would cut me in half if I remained in the position I was in. I tried to roll over onto my stomach and pull myself off the saw with my left hand, but after moving only a few inches, I felt the disturbed air from the saw on my left leg. I screamed as I felt it nick my pants just below my hip and I thought I heard a voice other than Randy¡¯s above me. Then the saw dug into my leg and the world disappeared. --- The next thing I remember was waking up in a hospital, surrounded by monitors and IV bags. My face was on fire, aching from horribly acute shocks of pain that made the world spin. I almost blacked out again, but I gritted my teeth and cleared my head. That was when out of my left eye I saw the two stumps that used to be my legs. That was when I blacked out. --- It turned out, Randy had panicked and gotten another of the workers that was about to leave to come and help. Luckily for me, the man was a former soldier who had worked with the field medics to treat injuries caused by bombs and shrapnel, so he managed to cauterize my legs and face, deeming it the only way to keep me alive long enough for the paramedics to arrive. It worked, but the doctors repeatedly commented on how lucky I was to have survived. Oh boy, did I feel like I was bathing in four leaf clovers. The owner¡¯s son even managed to get off scot free, claiming it was a terrible accident and that while he was moving logs, I startled him and he ¡°accidentally¡± blinded me in one eye and crippled me for life. Nobody really believed him, but when the only other witness is a virtually penniless orphan in a 2-week coma, lining pockets to make problems disappear is pitifully easy. I was seething with rage, at Randy, his father, the people that just brushed off my life like it was nothing because they got a quick buck or two. I was angry at everyone really. Long story short, I was eventually released into the public with a rusty wheelchair, a demented right hand, and no savings¡ªdue to all of the money I had saved for my entire life going towards medical bills, with thousands of dollars still owed. Lucky me. The first thing I did was gather my art supplies, go to a park, and try to paint. My hand in its mangled state refused to cooperate however, and I felt the last emotional support beam I had crumble into dust. I broke down in tears in the middle of the park, clenching my teeth to muffle my sobs. I noticed the figures around me glancing over at my crying figure and in every single one I saw a quick shudder of revulsion before they averted their gaze and lengthened the distance between us. Some oaf was shouting something about war and a return to the old ways where competition and necessity drove invention and progress and how the world would be better if everyone was fighting, some sort of drug-induced drivel. I ignored him and did my best to ignore the others, focusing on the good things in my life, like how I still had one good hand and one good eye. Also, I was alive, which is generally a good thing. And that was when I was blown up. --- The pain from my severed legs, mangled hand, and scarred face disappeared. I was floating in a sort of¡­ nothing¡­ness. It was hard to think, it was hard to focus. I could see something of a faint outline surrounding my body, like I was drawn on a page in glowing light-blue paint. The outline didn¡¯t extend past the stumps of where my legs used to be though, they curved down right below the hip just like my severed legs did. I watched as the outline began to fade and I slowly began to lose consciousness, dying and now disappearing forever. I tried to reflect on my life but found that my memories were quickly shriveling up like paper under intense heat. Suddenly, I felt something like a swarm of hooks latch into my back and across my arms, it wasn¡¯t exactly painful, but it wasn¡¯t comfortable and it felt¡­ wrong. The spikes lurched me back, my spirit body-thing twitching at the abuse. I was assaulted again, but with each pull the hooks only embedded themselves deeper, pulling me away from¡­ dissolving I guess? I turned my head and out of the corner of my eye I saw a terrifying black vortex, swirling parallel to me, the hooks connected to it by dark, slightly glowing chains. I was getting pulled into THAT? Aww come on, I was so close to being dead. --- Sidren was practically dancing around a large egg-shaped structure at the center of his study, excited for the final stage of his arduous experimentation. It had taken him a long time to hunt down not just one, but two living spidren and get them to mate. He only succeeded because the remanents of the race were barely intelligent at all, but intelligent enough. They had been hunted and selectively killed to do so. In a weird way, only the animalistic and stupid would survive, like a backwards form of survival of the fittest. Sidren chuckled, no! He was getting distracted, and there was no room for distraction at a moment like this! Once the female had laid the egg sack, the temporary home to five or six spidren larvae, he had painstakingly drawn the runes for a complete one-way binding, with a few personal modifications, on the hardened shell of the sack. If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it. Normally, a complete binding that tied the soul of an intelligentcreature to a human and created a servant was virtually impossible, or caused massive complications.They were even more unstable if the creature wasn''t willing (a common occurence). However, with a few modifications and the right circumstances, Sidren was confident he could finally develop a breakthrough that would create the first true one-way binding between intelligent creatures.He would show the Kaidian order! Sending him off here to do an impossible task, well he haddone it hadn''t he? Whoops! Distracted again. Today was the day that the egg sack would burst and he would be faced with the results of his experimentation. If all went according to plan, he would have not only one permanent servant, but four, five, or even six minions to do his will! The fools at the academy would have a hard time shunting him off to the wilderness when he marched right back and flaunted his achievement in their faces! They had failed for hundreds of years and he had accomplished it in less than a decade! There! Motion again! He couldn¡¯t contain his grin as the shell began to crack, the squirming of the strongest spidren sibling disrupting its protection. A sharpened black leg shot out of the sack¡¯s side, small pieces of shell flying out. The leg was shiny and covered in the ooze used to keep the infants alive, but Sidren was surprised at its size. If that was the leg of just one of those creatures, then the sack would be much too small to fit four or five of them. Sure enough, as the creature struggled and kicked out against the encasing more and more, he realized that there were not multiple,but only one spidren! Infuriating! Sidren scowled and turned to his desk where a book on spidren anatomy and life was open. Skimming it, he found the passage about multiple offspring from one egg sack and frowned as he re-read it. Undoubtedly, it said four to five! Sidren started muttering to himself and deciding what exactly he was going to do now. While only one spidren infant was unfortunate, he could still make it work. He turned around to face the spidren, and realized it was staring directly at him. While it was only an infant, it still came up to a little above his waist. The human half looked like a 6 year old girl, with light purple hair, like lilac. Her arms were covered in a dark chitin that started at her elbows and encased all the way up to her hands which ended with five finger-like appendages which tapered to a sharp point. Her lower, spider half resembled that of a normal spider, with eight large segmented legs the color of obsidian surrounding her body. She had a faint outline of something resembling an eye on her abdomen, only slightly lighter than the surrounding chitin. But the most unsettling part was she was staring directly at him with all eight red, horizontal slits she had for eyes. Sidren felt a chill go down his spine, the gaze of this creature was¡­ disturbing to say the least. She was staring up at him like a human toddler would look at a parent. But the intent behind the gaze was worlds apart. He remembered a detail from his book that stated spidren infants wouldn¡¯t be able to see clearly for about two months, but this one was piercing him with that gaze of hers. He shuffled back, keeping his eyes on her and trying not to make any sudden movements, then slowly turned around to get his book. He realized she hadn¡¯t moved yet, and, what was he worried about, her soul was bound to his anyway! Smiling upon recalling the best safety measure there was, Sidren flipped through the (apparently) inaccurate book to find the mistaken passage. --- Desini awoke in what felt like a prison. She remembered little, but an image of a creature striking her with a hook and pushing her towards a giant saw permeated her mind, along with another image of hooks dragging her into a black abyss. She began to struggle, feeling too constricted in the small shell-like container. Rotating and twisting around, she managed to get a good angle for one of her legs to kick through the wall. It went through easily, like shredding paper, but she stopped and stared at her leg. She had a leg. But it was black, hard, and segmented. A spider leg. She tried to scream, but the ooze inside the¡­ egg? Stopped her from doing so. She couldn''t breathe or speak, the goo filled her throat! Frantic now, she writhed and kicked with each of her¡­ eight, legs and struck out with her two arms, which were also covered in dark chitin. Finally, she broke free, the last of the shell peeling off her head. Coughing the goo out of her lungs and slipping around on the floor for a while, she eventually found a foothold and stood up. As she brought her upper body to its full height she realized that she had been laying back against her, woah, abdomen. Her eyes darted around the room she was in, trying to get a grip on her surroundings, but her vision was swimming every time she moved her head, and that only confused her more. She appeared to be in some sort of circular tower made of stone and lit by candles. The wooden ceiling reached far above her head, and the floor was simple stone as well. She noticed a creature with its back turned to her, but it was almost twice her height. It turned around and she stared at the being, trying to remember anything about the creature in front of her. She realized she had a past life, but couldn¡¯t remember hardly anything at all from it. The one thing she recalled in crystal quality was the adolescent creature attacking her and destroying one of her eyes and sawing off her legs. Hatred, her old companion, returned and she gave the coldest stare she could to the human (she recalled the name). She remembered the cruelty of the species. He seemed unnerved, and she realized she could sense his unease through her¡­ claws? Surprised, She discovered a set of claws right around her waist that hinged and tucked down under her abdomen, but she could distinctly sense fear from the human in front of her through them. He shuffled back and she continued to stare at him, waiting for him to do something cruel. But nothing came. Instead the man turned around and started flipping through a book on his desk. But Desini knew it was only a matter of time until he struck out. She narrowed her eyes and scoured the room for a potential escape should she need one. The slits of windows were too small for her to escape through, and the heavy wooden door was just to the right of the man. She was unsure if she could rush past him quickly enough, so she bided her time. Trying to get a grip on her surroundings and clear her thoughts to formulate a plan, she closed her eyes. But the world wasn¡¯t replaced with darkness. Desini could still see. With a start, she realized that her forehead had three more sets of eyes, replacing her eyebrows and taking up most of the space above them. With a conscious effort, she realized she could control them individually, closing and opening them individually. However, she seemed to have no pupil, and she couldn¡¯t move her eyes to focus on a particular object, instead, everything within the same range was clear to her, she merely had to focus her mind on it. This would take some getting used to. --- Sidren concluded that the book was garbage. What kind of scholarly book would have a title like The Truth About Our Terrifying Neighbors anyway? Confronted with the real thing, most of the descriptions and explanations in the book paled in comparison, and he could discern how faulty they were. It was nothing more than a children¡¯s book to scare children into submission! Fuming at the waste of effort and time, he began to reassess his plans. One minion would do he supposed¡­ Oh! But that¡¯s if the soul binding was absolute. Sidren turned around and grinned, the spidren started at his rapid expression change and took a hesitant step back. Oh, it was afraid of him, well that only made sense of course, he was twice her height, although they probably weighed about the same. Toning back his excitement, he softened his grin into a warming smile and spoke to the creature. ¡°It¡¯s alright, calm down, I¡¯m not going to hurt you. You and I are going to be a team, and together we will be able to do great things!¡± He soothed. While she couldn¡¯t understand his words, Sidren saw her relax a bit at his gentle tone. He tentatively reached out with his soul presence to feel the strength of the link between them. But his eyes widened as he realized it was nonexistent. Sidren gasped at the revelation, his complete soul binding had done nothing! Aghast at the result and devastated at the waste, he spun around and reviewed the runes he had painstakingly inscribed on the egg sack. The rune for himself, Sidren, was prominent in the middle along with the proper runes for soul, binding, power, and life. It should have bound the life, soul, and power of the creature entombed within to him, Sidren. But he couldn¡¯t feel any sort of link between him and the creature! His scowl deepened as he contemplated what could have gone wrong. Runic inscription was both precise and chaotic. The runes would always perform their function and once a configuration was discovered, they reproduced the same result without fail. However, experimenting with new combinations of runes often resulted in unexpected results. Sidren ground his teeth together, ¡®as in this case.¡¯ His eyes widened as he realized what might have happened. The runes must have interpreted his name as the source of the power they would draw on to bind a soul to a forming body, creating life. Oh, he knew it was too complicated! ¡®But that would mean¡­¡¯ Sidren paled as he realized there was an unbound spidren right behind him. ¡­ Cold sweat broke out down his back as he slowly turned to face the creature. Chapter 1: A Stealthy Start Desini watched the strange man in front of her rapidly scramble around the circular room, his emotions shifting from irritation to uneasiness to incredible fear. Then he slowly turned to face her. She could feel the fear rippling off of him in waves. Confused as to why the man would be so erratic, Desini cocked her head and stared at him, which only seemed to make him more panicked. She was somewhat assured that if he intended to hurt her, he would have done so already. He was harmless. Probably. With no idea of what to do, having just entered the world, Desini simply continued to stare at the man. She tried controlling here eyes individually and slowly closed them one at a time: left, right, up, left, up, right, it was a strange feeling. Her legs began to ache, having been cramped in the small shell for so long; so Desini repeated the one-by-one process with her legs, flexing them each in turn. At this point she had decided to ignore the man. If he was going to do something drastic, he would have acted by now. Just then, he began to speak to her, but again in an unintelligible series of noise. His beard was mostly black with streaks of grey and it shook erratically as he spoke like it had a life of its own. His curious red robes had strange black patterns inscribed on them, mostly jagged circles with lines branching off of them at strange angles. He continued to jabber on. Not really irritating, but didn¡¯t he realize it was pointless yet? Bored and exhausted at this point, Desini lowered her abdomen to the ground and folded her legs up against it, sitting down. More or less. What in the world was she doing here? What was she supposed to do? Her memory was fuzzy, even the strong memory of another man attacking her only came back in quick, blurry fragments. Other than her name, she could remember almost nothing of her previous life. The man was still chatting away. At this point, he wasn¡¯t even talking to her, just making noise to comfort himself or something. While mentally unstable acquaintances weren¡¯t usually a good thing, this one didn¡¯t seem malicious, just¡­ off. A pang of drowsiness swept over her then, and seeing as she wasn¡¯t necessary to keep the man company, Desini leaned the human-half of her body back against the front of her abdomen and turned her upper body on its side. She would get some rest and figure out what was going on later. --- Sidren just stared at the spidren for a while as it creepily blinked one eye at a time at him. He shuddered; it was incredibly unnerving. Then it started to extend its legs and then retract them as well, one at a time. Watching for a while, guard fully raised in case of any sudden movements, Sidren shuffled back a little bit, distancing himself from the creature. ¡°Now l-listen here, I b-b-brought you into this world, and because of that I think I d-d-deserve a bit of courtesy!¡± He stammered, ¡°I d-d-don¡¯t intend to hurt you or anything, but you cannot hurt m-me, as I¡¯m going to be in charge of you.¡± No! That was stupid sounding and didn¡¯t work at all! Sidren felt the cold sweat on his back multiply. This creature, although half his size, was equipped with razor-sharp claws that extended like daggers. Should it deign to attack him, he didn¡¯t stand a chance, and he was here explaining how he was its master for all intents and purposes! A movement from the creature startled him and he clamped his jaws shut as to not scream out, but the spidren was simply sitting down with a somewhat humorous thud. Oh. It was basically a baby, and there was no way it could understand his speech. Sidren sighed, ¡°Well that¡¯s a relief you know. Here I was thinking I was about to be killed by a vicious spidren, but you¡¯re not going to attack me are you?¡± The spidren leaned back and yawned, turning away from him and closing all of its eyes. Sleeping was it? Well alright then. Just in case it was a ploy to lure him into false security, Sidren slowly backed out of the room, carefully watching the creature until he had made it out the door which he closed softly. He was alive! Somehow. He spun and walked down the dimly lit stone corridor that led to his study, determined to figure out just what had happened with his binding and what went wrong. The wooden door to his study creaked open as he pushed it and revealed another circular room with a vaulted ceiling, still lit from the candles he had placed earlier. Books lined the walls in great number, some incredibly old and others with new bindings. Other than the musty smell and the stained rug, it was a rather cozy little alcove. Walking over to his desk, Sidren examined the original rune he had devised for the binding. Perhaps he had copied it down incorrectly on the sheet he used for reference in the summoning chamber? No, it was identical to how he remembered it. The fact was it had simply performed differently than he had expected. Catastrophe! The Kaidian order had sent him here to discover a new and powerful way of binding intelligent souls, but what did he have to show? Failures upon failures! Flipping through a nearby book Sidren reviewed the challenges others had faced in binding intelligent souls. A simple one-way binding on unintelligent creatures was commonplace, however, anything strong enough to bind intelligent souls could never be so asynchronous. There were many stories following the fate of a foolish king that decided to tamper with soul magic and bound his subjects to him. In a one-way binding, the master is supreme and the subject¡¯s will is erased. In a two-way binding¡­ not so much.Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Kaidian priests had been searching for a way to create a new rune that could accomplish this miracle of subservience for centuries, but no matter what combination was used, the rune never did quite what was wanted. Horror stories of a melded consciousness between the priest and the test subject were just as common as stories where years of effort and research yielded absolutely no effect. Of all the unfortunate assignments to receive! Sidren mourned his fate and cursed himself twice over for showing promise at the academy. He had risen too quickly through the ranks and must have spooked one of the existing priests, resulting in his current assignment intended to delay or remove him. It was bad enough they had shipped him off to a foreign country alone, but he had also received orders to not return unless his task was complete. With nothing else to do, Sidren fell into his chair, cradling his face with his hands. It was hopeless. Even if he changed something about the runes used he still wouldn¡¯t be able to make any progress. He had no idea how to start, he was so sure his runes would work! Double-checking his links, he confirmed that indeed there was no connection between him and the spidren. He could only feel her faint presence through the stone walls, still in the tower chamber. No link meant no progress, and he couldn¡¯t feel anything. But wait¡­ Nobody else would feel anything either. Links were only discernible by those bound by them¡­ What if¡­ no, that was a terrible idea. Could he pull it off? A scam to make it seem like he had succeeded? Pondering over the possible consequences, Sidren dissected this wicked idea of his. Were he to succeed with the fa?ade, he could go down in history as the first person to have created a one-way binding with intelligent beings. And if anyone asked him to recreate it he could merely claim that perhaps it only worked with newborns. Sidren grinned as he realized that spidren were the only intelligent creatures that had a location suitable to inscribe runes on, the shell. Everything else was borne by womb. And spidren eggs, really spidren themselves, were nigh on impossible to find! A way out! A ticket to freedom, power, and fame! He would have to make it work¡­ He would have to train this spidren infant of his to make her obedient to him, anything to add to the validity of his deception. But it could work. It would work. --- Desini awoke to the sun leaking through the slits in the walls, casting faint beams of light across the circular room. The sun was still rising, so the light was faint, but she could already make out everything in the room as if she were outside at noon. Raising her torso up she began to stretch her shoulders. As strange as it sounded to her, her thorax made a pretty decent bed. She was still resting with her legs folded up neatly, so she began to stretch them as well. For some reason, it was almost second nature for her to move them, but the back of her mind was itching, sending signals as if something was¡­ off. Thinking about her situation, she knew she had some foggy memories of her past, a cruel man, pain, loss of¡­ something important. She had lived on her own for a while, or something. Desini shook her head as the memories became even more muddled and were giving her a headache. She was here now and she needed to figure out what to do. Escape was the most appealing option. Even though the man from yesterday didn¡¯t do anything, there wasn¡¯t anything stopping him from doing so today or the next day. Distance would be safety. Standing up with only a few shaky movements, she looked around the room she was in, looking for some clue as to where she was and why she was there. The shell fragments from her egg were still strewn on the floor about her, she grimaced as she remembered that unpleasant experience. Wait, how did she have memories if she had just been born? She flinched as a throb of pain reverberated through her head. Alright, alright, that train of thought is off limits. Sheesh. Aside from the two desks brimming with paper and ink, the room itself had basically nothing but stone and the heavy looking door. Clattering over to the table, Desini poked her head over the drawers and looked at what was on the desk. A book! Probably. That¡¯s what first came to her mind, so book it is. Reaching for the book, her claws pried the book up, making a faint scraping noise across the wooden surface of the desk, and she pulled it off the desk. Holding it with two¡­hands¡­she squinted at what was written. A strange circle with all sorts of squiggly figures that almost seemed to bleed across the page was the central figure of the left page, while the right page had some of the same squiggles, but without the same effect. With no idea of what to make of it, she flipped through the other pages, but nothing else broke the mold, and what was worse was she couldn¡¯t understand any of it. Frowning now, she placed the book back on the edge of the table and moved over to the door. It didn¡¯t have a handle, so a push would probably open it. She did so and entered a darker corridor with less openings for light. She could still see everything in good detail though, her eyes were working well. At the end of the short hallway was another door, like the one behind her, and about halfway down the hallway there was a T-shaped intersection. The other door probably just led to an identical chamber, so the new hallway it was. Moving as carefully as she could, Desini crept her way to the corner, peeking around it to see if the man was near. No sign of him. Moving down the second hallway, she saw light spilling out of another doorway on her left. As she neared it, the aroma of food wafted over her. Her stomach¡­ which was in her larger half instead of her torso, didn¡¯t exactly rumble, but something like it? Gah, what a weird feeling. Uncomfortable too. Sneaking up to the doorway, she peered around the edge of it and saw the man sitting at a wooden table eating. He wasn¡¯t doing a very good job, as he was also scribbling something on a piece of parchment next to him, so about a quarter of the soup he was spooning into his mouth ended up on his robe instead. There was an odd look in his eyes, like a maniac or mad scientist¡­whatever that was. Her stomach made the same sensation again. She needed to eat, and escaping now would postpone a meal for who knows how long. The man hadn¡¯t done anything terrible before, so maybe he wouldn¡¯t now. But it was safer to try and get food without him noticing. Slowly skittering through the doorway, Desini hunched a little to make herself smaller and made her way to the table, which was just about eye-level. The man didn¡¯t notice. She scoured the room to find the source of the food, and saw a small pot on the counter. Conveniently, right next to it was a stack of wooden bowls. However, getting to it would be a problem as the counter was even higher than the table. As she hid under the far side of the table, she thought about possible solutions. But it was to no avail, as a low growling came from the feet of the man. Jerking her head down, Desini saw a wretchedly old dog staring at her and baring its, well, what were left of its, teeth. Crap.