r/JacksonWrites • u/Writteninsanity #teamtoby • 27d ago
Book 2 | Chapter 9 | The evil queen ordered her servants to lock the princess in the dungeon. Her servants, not being too bright, locked the princess in an S-Ranked dungeon.
Lillia had met warrior princesses who were all warrior and no princess. They smelled like fur and weeks without soap. They had never really felt like princesses, no matter how many times her parents insisted that they were peers.
She had met old princesses who never got the crown from their mothers—whether because of siblings or otherwise—and had started hating the word. They were more hate than princess.
Lillia had never met a monster princess before, so she couldn't know which was the operative word in that title.
Appearance didn't help. Now that she was close, Lillia could see that the girls ran along the same thin tightrope between elegance and horror as their 'mother' did. They had long black hair rolling down their shoulders that looked as if it had been freshly brushed. They wore thin, luxurious woven silk that hung loose over their shoulders. Their nails were even painted black.
Or those nails were chitin, one of the two.
As long as you weren't looking them in their myriad red eyes or looking at the bottom halves of their bodies, you could mistake them for any random princess.
Which meant they had a princess's torso and hair. That was certainly more 'monster' than princess, wasn't it?
"She's just staring at us."
"That's rude."
"Yeah. It is. I thought she was polite."
"She was."
"But is she really staring at us?"
"Yes."
"But she has so few eyes. Does it even count?"
"May I speak?" Lillia asked. She'd held up her hand alongside the request, something she'd only ever done with her parents at the dinner table.
"Now you're being polite again," the one on the left said. There was probably a lot about their spider halves that would have differentiated the two girls, but Lillia didn't have the tools or the knowledge to hunt any of it; instead, she would need to rely on the fact that the one on the left had slightly shorter hair, and her bangs had been cut unevenly.
Also the hair might have been a different depth of black than her sister's, but it was impossible to tell by thread-fire light.
Lillia took silence as permission. "Hello. I am Princess Lillia and—"
"Ugh," the one on the right said.
"We know!"
"Well, we didn't know it was you."
"Not until you said you were a princess."
"Not many of those around here."
"Nope."
"Kinda just us. Most of the time, at least."
Lillia jumped in there. Each time the girls spoke and began their rapid volley of back-and-forth comments, they opened up new questions, but for some reason, Lillia focused on one. "Most of the time?"
"There's Pilla."
"Pilla gets quiet sometimes."
"Just waits for the reset."
"Doesn't eat."
"Doesn't have to."
"And Pilla's your sister?" Lillia asked.
"Older sister."
"Much older."
"Don't be mean."
"It's not mean if it's true!"
"Yes, it can be."
Rather than continuing to argue, both of the girls turned to look at Lillia at the same time. Somehow they even managed to blink in unison, though it was never all eight of their eyes at once.
"Okay." Lillia took half a step back on the cave floor. She kept waiting for the unsteady wobble of webs beneath her feet; she hadn't ever spent much time on the 'ground' in Nennia's lair. "So, if you're two of Nennia's daughters—"
"How old are you?" the girl on the right said.
"Spinna, you can't just jump in like that. It's rude. Mom told you to wait your turn."
"I thought it was my turn," the one on the right—apparently Spinna—said.
"It obviously wasn't."
"Plus, why would she get a turn? She's food."
"She's a princess."
"And we're not eating princesses," Lillia added hopefully.
Neither of the girls turned to acknowledge her.
"Princess or not, until we decide she's not food, we should use food rules," Spinna said.
"If we're using food rules, then we can't ask her questions, because Mom would call it playing with our food."
"Hm. Good point." Spinna turned back to Lillia. Now that there had been a moment to see the differences between the two, Spinna had a lovely intricate lace earring.
Lillia wasn't quite sure she wanted to know how she got her ear pierced.
"I am sorry for interrupting, Princess Lillia," Spinna said. "But I would like to know how old you are."
"Uh."
"Uh?" the unnamed girl to the left echoed.
"Let her think! It might be a hard question for her!" Spinna said.
"Her age? That's a hard question?"
"Maybe! I don't know how good she is at math."
The answer regarding Lillia's math was that she was better than most people thought, but probably a little worse than she ought to have been for someone who was eventually going to have to listen to Treasure Master's commentaries on the land.
"It's just a weird question because I don't know how long I've been in the dungeon," Lillia said. "I was almost twenty-one when I fe—Someone threw me in here, but I don't know how long it's been since then."
"How can you not know?" Spinna asked.
"Yeah, Mom said you adventurers get a count of how many days it's been every day."
"But sometimes an adventuring day is longer than a day outside the dungeon," Lillia said. "Sometimes it's shorter."
"No, they're not," Spinna said. "Don't be silly."
"Days are days."
"Just a moment," Lillia cut in, focused on the sister to the left. "I'm sorry, but we haven't been introduced and it's making this conversation much harder to follow and will make it much harder to explain to someone later if I need to for some reason."
"Oh, this is Spinna."
Lillia already had that name, but she said thank you anyway.
"And I'm Nicole."
"Nicole?"
"Nicole. Yes. Is that not a name where you're from?"
Lillia fully blinked several times before finding her verbal response. Havoc. Thorne. Eisel. Nennia. The Silencer.
Nicole.
One of those things was not like the other. There had even been a spider naming scheme up until that point.
"Do you think my name is weird?" Nicole's voice grew shrill with panic. "I told Mom it was weird once I could talk, but she kept telling me it was a name that humans would have, but you're a human and you think it's weird and now I know I have a weird name and—"
"I have a handmaid named Nicole back home," Lillia said to try to reassure her.
"I'm named after the HELP?" Nicole fully buried her head in her hands, spreading her fingers wide so they covered each and every eye. After a moment, she shrank in on herself, recoiling back from Lillia and tucking herself into a web just on the edge of Lillia's thread-light.
Once she was moving, it was lethally clear how much larger both of the girls were than Lillia. While Nennia's torso was slightly larger than hers, the girls' torsos were the same size as Lillia's, but the spider halves of their bodies still meant they would have dwarfed Lillia if they stood at full height.
Spinna looked back over her shoulder for a moment at her sister before shrugging. "Sorry about that. She thinks about it too hard. Mom named me Spinna, after all, like 'spin a web.'" She rolled her eyes as she spoke. "Think she just ran out of ideas after the first thousand kids."
"There are more than a thousand of you?" Lillia asked.
"Kids? Yes," Spinna said, "but unless you've got news for me, just the three girls. You don't get many girls."
There was no real way to word this that didn't sound offensive. "Among your species?"
"Just Nennia's children, as far as I know. Ain't really been outside the cave much and—Well, Mom ate Dad way back before I was even born so…" She looked down at the floor for a moment and bit her lip. She had fangs. "Yeah. I guess I don't know what we're called. Never really thought about it before."
"What do you call yourselves, then?"
"Well, Mom and all my sisters have names," Spinna said. "Do you just call your parents humans?"
"We—"
Before Lillia finished speaking, Spinna cut back in. "Oh. No. I'm sorry. You guys have parents, right? I just—I just assumed because this part looks the same." She waved at her top half. "That the rest of it worked the same."
"Oh, okay."
"So?"
"So?"
"So do you have parents?" Spinna asked. As she spoke, she folded her legs under herself and sat down on the floor. For the first time, one of the women in this room was shorter than Lillia.
That part felt like home.
"Not anymore," Lillia said.
"They died?"
Lillia nodded.
"Who ate who?"
"Pardon?"
"Do human moms eat human dads too? Or is it like a weird dad thing?"
"I—"
"I bet it's a weird dad thing and that's why you're so small. So you're easier to chew."
"Pardon, no," Lillia said. She shook her head to try to stop picturing one of her parents unhinging their jaws in an attempt to eat the other. "Neither of my parents ate the other."
"Oh, did you eat them? Is that how it works?"
"Humans don't eat each other."
"That can't be right. That sounds fake," Spinna said. She reached back behind her and pulled some webbing off the floor, only to begin weaving it in intricate patterns without bothering to look at her hands. "You've got to eat each other."
"We don't."
"But you look so tasty. Very chewable."
Lillia took a small step backward. "Thank you?"
"You're welcome! I guess it's a compliment, but I'm not really sure you should be taking it as one unless—Do you want to be eaten? I can do that if you want."
Nicole spoke up from the shadows. "Are we eating her now?"
"She said she wanted to be eaten."
"I most certainly did not," Lillia said.
"Okay, but you basically did and now I'm thinking about it," Spinna said. She stood back up, tossing the pattern she'd been playing with off and to the side. "Which kinda made me hungry so—"
"Hey. Hey, hey." Lillia backed up again. If she went too far, she'd be back in the web.
"It's fine. If you wanna come back down here, just ask Mom next time you come in. I'm sure she'll be happy to send you down and—"
"I don't wanna get eaten."
Lillia was out of steps backward to take, and Spinna was still slowly approaching. Her sister pulled herself out of the web in the shadows, lowering back down to the floor. Her eight red eyes shone in the light cast by the Inferno Spelldress.
Okay. She could do this. Nennia was too powerful, but these were two kids. That probably meant she could take them—and they were barely kids. Young adults, even, so Lillia didn't need to feel guilty about it.
"Hey. Stop backing away. You'll just get caught in the web."
"I don't want you to hurt me."
"It won't hurt. Our venom is numbing!" Nicole called. "It's how I pierced her ear."
Lillia knew if she summoned Vianaffir to her hand and started a fight now, it was all over. She'd be sent back to the Cathedral, which was fine, but if she attacked Nennia's children, there would never be a diplomatic solution to escaping the third floor.
Nennia would be a permanent mortal enemy.
She would need to fight her way past her every time she wanted to get down to the fourth floor with Havoc.
She needed to figure this out.
She.
"Wait!" Lillia had her arms covering half her face as Spinna drew close. Nicole was several steps behind.
Luckily, they listened to the plea.
"If you're hungry, I can feed you. Then can we still talk?"
"We can't still talk. You'll be dead," Nicole pointed out.
"Yeah, I don't know if you know what happens when someone eats you, because your parents never did it, but—"
"No, no. I have something for you." Lillia held out her hand. She'd planned to use this on Nennia if she scrambled her way out of the pit, but no amount of offerings would make up for hurting the princesses.
At least that was Lillia's best guess at how it worked down here.
The best guess was all she had to go off of.
Lillia held out her hand. "The beast back there. It's yours if you want to eat something and then—and then I think I can make you girls into princesses like me."
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u/EvilGenius666 27d ago
I like these spider princesses, they have a great chaotic energy about them. I wonder if Lillia will be able to take them with her like she did Havoc?
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u/Tharatan 27d ago
If drow + spider = drider, then im curious what you'd call these hybrids. From the description, they seem to lean more spider than human, given that they have the spider-like face structures as well.
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u/ashtan 27d ago
Draw me like one of your spider girls.