After their unkindly encounter with the insects, Fayth and Travis carried on following the tunnel and they eventually reached a large chamber. Unlike the total blackness of the tunnels, a single lightbulb was hanging from the ceiling and illuminating light within the chamber. It wasn’t enough to banish the shadows from every corner, but it was enough for the sighted to see again after their journey of darkness.
The light hit Fayth’s eyes and after a few minutes of her eyes readjusting to the brightness of the world again, she started to make out her surroundings and was shocked at what she saw. There were spider webs all over the place, spanning across the enormous ceiling, along all four walls of the chamber and covering the floor that she and Travis were stepping on. As with any webs, there were spiders upon which they hung, waiting for any food to come along and become entangled within their silky, sticky traps. There were spiders in the thousands, all of different sizes and species, but all were hanging freely waiting for their next meal. Despite not being an arachnophobia, the presence of so many spiders sent shivers down Fayth’s spine.
The webbing was not simply smooth or flat decorating the chamber; there were various lumpy shapes that the webbing was holding in place along the walls or on the ceiling. Along the floor, however, the webbing was weaker as their feet broke the fragile silk with each step they took, and objects appeared to be randomly littered around them. Upon closer inspection, Fayth was revolted to find that they were the bone carcasses of dead animals, empty of flesh and life. She looked up at the many webbed bumps and saw that some were fully cocooned, while some were only suspended by the webbing and partially displayed what was inside. Fayth guessed what most of them held though: something still living and ready to be the next meal of many spiders.
Her assumption was reinforced by the background of psychic energies that Fayth was picking up from her surroundings. The further she and Travis went into the chamber, the more she could sense the feelings of desperation, fear, and maliciousness, which were faint but impressionable to her. At times she would receive an instant flash of a miserable animal pleading for its life or spiders in the process of securing their meal with their webbing or a dark, sinister, and vague form.
Her gaze continued to track the lumpy cocoons and stopped at one shape in particular. Her heart sped up and tears started to well up in her eyes as relief washed over her. Finally, her brain reconnected with her mouth and she whispered, “Reina”.
Her psychic senses reached out to her friend and found that Reina was still alive, but unconscious. Fayth was about to alert Travis when she noticed a crawling sensation on her legs. She looked down and found several large spiders were making their way up towards her. Several more spiders were beginning to join them, as they revealed themselves from beneath the graveyard of broken webs. Her psychic senses had picked up on that malevolent joy again, the same one she had felt earlier that day. However, the emotion was more intense than before, and her mind started to freeze up in response and prevented her from reacting. She tried to call out or send a thought to Travis, but she was effectively trapped; her physical and mental self was paralysed by the spell of that malicious glee. But her sight of her companion filled her with dread, as he too had his own overly friendly creepy crawlers to deal with.
Then came the form of a gargantuan sized spider into Fayth’s view. It silently slid from the ceiling on a thick web from its enormous spinneret and landed soundlessly in front of the frozen telepath. It adjusted itself on the solid ground, disturbing many of the weak webbing as it did, and peered right into Fayth’s eyes. An eerie, almost alien, sound that was more of a screech than speech came from the mouth of the spider. “You’ve kept me waiting, Fayth Svartalf…”
