The sun was high over a dark piece of forest. Dense trees blocked its rays in a way that felt intentional — malicious, even. The trunks were black and dying, clinging to life by the few leaves that still caught scraps of light. Brittle, angry things. The air itself had the sour ambiance of something that hated you just for breathing.

  In the branches above, white with silk, Shelob waited. A vast, spider-shaped shadow, still as a corpse, lurking over the road. Hunger gnawed at her belly until it became ferocity; she could strike and paralyse in a heartbeat. Two humans were coming — one large and silver-haired, the other a scrawny bag of bones. Both looked delicious. All eight of her eyes flinched with anticipation. She tensed, every limb a coiled trap.

  “Pssst.”

  At first she mistook it for the wind. Then again: “Pssst.”

  Her eyes narrowed. Across the road, perched just a leap away, another bulk crouched in the shadows. Black, hairy, familiar. She recognised her — Aragog, from that other dark forest, the one crawling with “fantastic beasts.”

  “I take the big one, you take the small one,” Aragog called.

  “What? No. I take them both,” Shelob hissed back. “I’m hungry. Go away. Find your own hiding spot.” Her forelegs made the universal ‘back off’ gesture.

  “I was here first,” Aragog said — then hesitated. “Wasn’t I?” She raised both forelegs in a vague shrug. “Anyway, no need to fight. We’re both spiders. We can share — give the two-leggers a show.”

  “You’re not a spider,” Shelob spat. “You’ve got a family. You live together. That’s ant behaviour.”

  Aragog snorted. “Like you’re a real spider. Your mother just looked like one. That makes you…” she paused, then hiss-laughed, “…a cosplayer. Forced to cosplay by your mum.”

  “At least I make sense,” Shelob shot back.

  “Oh? Explain, Sailor Doom,” Aragog mocked.

  “You live in a forest with four, maybe five thousand hatchlings. If each one needs one meal a month — like a normal spider — that’s fifty thousand prey animals a year. At your supposed fifty years old, that’s about two to three million medium to large meals. No forest can sustain that. Instead of an extinction event, your forest is blushing with life.”

  Aragog bristled. “Sure. And you’ve got penguins high in the mountains. That makes sense — you know they can’t fly up there, right?”

  “For the last time it was petrels,” Shelob bit back, sharp — an old wound reopened, all eight eyes narrowing in spite. “So they could have just flown in.”

  “Well, for one thing, they’re still oceanic birds,” Aragog fumed. “Point me to the nearest ocean from Mordor. Go on. I’ll wait.”

  “They… the hobbit brought them. The fifth one,” Shelob muttered, not quite convinced by her own argument but unwilling to lose face.

  ***

  “Will you shut up? Our prey is escaping,” came a sharp voice from somewhere close by — low, urgent, and annoyed.

  Both Shelob and Aragog froze. They turned toward the sound, scanning the forest. Branches shifted, shadows twitched… but nothing.

  “Who are you?” Shelob asked.

  “Lolth. Spider Goddess of the Drow.”

  A creature emerged from the shadows — the lower body of a giant spider fused with the torso of a woman, eyes glittering with divine malice.

  Shelob glanced at Aragog. Aragog raised her proverbial shoulders.

  “Drow?” Shelob asked.

  “The dark elves,” Lolth boasted.

  “Dark? Where do they put their socks?” Aragog asked, confused. “I think I know one.”

  “What? No — real elves. I mean the backstabbing, angry ones,” Lolth clarified.

  “So… Orcs?” Shelob said helpfully.

  “What? No, that’s not even a playable race anymore!” Lolth looked at their blank faces, sighed, and gave up. “Anyway, I am a Drider — half spider, half human.” She looked them both in the eyes — all sixteen of them. “A full deity,” she added, when the others didn’t seem impressed.

  “So… this is kind of a spiders-only thing,” Shelob said, gesturing with a foreleg. “Maybe you could find your own forest? Your own prey?”

  Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

  “That would be appreciated,” Aragog added, politely pointing a leg somewhere very far away.

  “I am as much a spider as you two,” Lolth snapped. She jabbed a clawed finger at Shelob. “A demi-god. Demi. Not even full.”

  Shelob shrank back instinctively.

  Then Lolth turned on Aragog. “And you — an oversized ant.”

  ***

  “Sorry. I’m sorry,” a new voice piped up.

  They all turned. On a high branch sat several hundred shapes unlike any spider. Their bodies were the size of horses, armored in jagged yellow-and-black chitin. Four scythe-like legs stabbed into the wood as they shifted forward, mandibles clacking in irritation. They weren’t hunters — they were soldiers, built for war.

  “What?” the three said in unison.

  “We’re arachnids,” the largest and most colourful declared. “And we do not appreciate this appropriation of our culture and race.”

  The trio stared, each silently blaming the other two for failing to spot the small army sooner.

  “There are legs missing,” Aragog pointed out.

  “And eyes,” Shelob added.

  “Aren’t you, like… extraterrestrial?” Lolth ventured.

  “Yes,” the big one replied, “and you, of course, are completely from this realm… aren’t you?”

  “Well… from this planet at least,” Shelob offered.

  “Uh-huh,” Aragog said slowly. “Technically—” she pointed a hairy leg at Lolth—“you’re from another plane. And you”—she jabbed at Shelob—“are from another realm. Which makes all of us… multiversal creatures.”

  “Stop farting nonsense,” the largest arachnid cut in.

  “What?” Lolth frowned at Shelob.

  “Well,” Shelob explained patiently, “we basically breathe out of our asses. Talking is just making sounds with exhaled air, so…” She shrugged her forelegs.

  There was a long, awkward pause.

  ***

  Then there was a loud clack.

  From the underbrush waddled a massive, armor-plated figure, claws clicking with authority.

  “Oh great,” Shelob muttered. “Crabzilla.”

  The creature raised one claw, proud and offended in equal measure. “Excuse me. Technically, I am closer to you than you are to each other.”

  Lolth squinted. “You’re a crab.”

  “A horseshoe crab,” she corrected, wheezing slightly. “An ancient lineage. Four hundred and fifty million years of glorious butt-breathing heritage. While you three were still deciding which cosplay to wear, my kind were surviving everything.”

  Aragog curled her lip. “Surviving? You live by burying yourself in the sand until something smaller and dumber walks into your claws. That’s not survival, that’s… fishing with depression.”

  Shelob, still glaring, chimed in. “At least she doesn’t need a thousand children just to feel relevant. Your whole reproductive strategy is a mid-life crisis.”

  Lolth flicked her hair disdainfully. “Please. You’re all primitive. I’ve transcended the flesh. I am both elf and spider — the perfect union. Meanwhile you—” she pointed at Crabzilla—

  “Well, I have blue blood. Copper-based. So you know: royalty.” Crabzilla snapped back.

  “Congratulations,” Lolth muttered, mildly defeated. “You’re literally a Smurf’s circulatory system.”

  The largest of the alien arachnids coughed politely. “Coming from you? You live in a cave eating your own worshippers. That’s not divinity. That’s just bad resource management.”

  Crabzilla smiled as the insults washed over him. His claws clicked, slow and deliberate. Finally, he leaned forward, all six of his eyes glinting like wet pebbles.

  “Say what you will. But when the seas boiled, when the continents split, when meteors rained down, I was there. Still butt-breathing. Still clacking. Still here.”

  He raised his claw dramatically. “And when all of you have gone extinct in your little cosplay forests and multiversal tantrums, there will still be… me.”

  A long silence followed.

  Then Crabzilla added, softer: “Also, we taste fantastic with butter. Don’t think I don’t know.”

  “You know,” Shelob said, letting out a long, echoing pbbbtthhh, “I’m not hungry anymore.” She turned and skittered away.

  Aragog looked at the path and exhaled. Their prey had left the forest a good ten minutes earlier.

  ***

  “I am so glad we’re out of that forest,” Reralt said, finally unclamping his nose.

  “What happened there?” Narro unfolded his map. “The whole place smelled like… broccoli.”

  “Indeed. Should we go back and pick some?” Reralt asked, then shook his head at himself. “No. No. Too healthy.”

  “Go on then, I’ll wait.” Narro scribbled a note on his map.

  The Void looked at them both like they’d missed the obvious — then went back to sleep.

  “I’ll mark it the Brassica Woods,” Narro said smugly.

  “Good one,” Reralt replied, pretending he knew exactly what it meant.

  They rode on, blissfully unaware they had just escaped the wrath of the spider-adjacents.

  ***

  Who is spider, who is not,

  Penguin forests soon forgot.

  Cosplay, crabs, and Smurf-blue blood,

  All still breathing through the butt.

  Some claim hunger, some claim might,

  Some just skitter out of spite.

  Yet in the end, what proves most dire—

  A forest filled with flatulent choir.

  So mark the map and close the wood,

  Name it Brassica, as you should.

  And should you hear the branches creak,

  It’s only crabs that try to speak.

  Comment, DM, or toss something in the forum.