A cold blade plunged through his collar bone, the mourning mother standing above him, her eyes red, raw and misted. He saw the thin line of her mouth as she twisted the blade within him, mutilating attached muscle and sinew, puncturing his lungs and heart. He felt himself pulled upwards, and when he saw his own body slump and collapse to the frozen earth, the pull became stronger, and he fell, tumbling into the sky.
The webs heaved below him as he landed. Hundreds of barbs dug into his skin as he screamed and thrashed. He was welcomed with a chorus of moans erupting all around him. The barbs bit deeper as he writhed and roared. Soon the webs bound him tight, and he was immobile. He could only weep and bleed, suspended in all that black, plushy darkness.
In the dark, there was no day, or night, and he did not know if minutes or months had passed. He tried to remember the moments before the twisting blade, to dull the pain that bit into his biceps and cheeks, his legs and spine. He tried to remember the glinting sun and the feel of sweat crawling down his back. He tried to remember the warm meals his pale and cold fingers would wrap around, or the stink and smell of dust when his father returned from months on the road. He tried to remember what it meant to be small, and little, and the feel of his mother’s sleeve across his cheek as she held him. Eventually, the pain from the thousands of barbs receded, not because his memories fought them back, but because the unmarked eons he spent in the webs soon outweighed the moments before he fell into them. He cared as much about staving off the agony as he cared to stall his memories.
Time passed, and other bodies fell into the webs, the sticky strands shivering all around him as he and others moaned and screamed. He tried to mark the time by their descent, or the spiders that would come and cocoon the young and old, women and men, trapped around him. Hundreds, thousands fell, and then were cocooned, and taken away, and yet he still lay in the webs, bleeding and begging for a spider to come and cocoon him too.
It was after the number of spiders and people began to blur together when he stopped his counting. Millions upon millions upon millions. He did not know how long it was, but after he cared not for the memories he had lost, or the people weeping around him, or the moans that escaped his lips, the spiders finally came, and enfolded him too. He screamed as he felt the webs cover his face and eyes. Then they left him, and all was still, for a while. He did not know long it was, until he tried to remember his name.
He spent what felt like centuries, trying to remember it. He knew he knew it, before he fell, and a little after, and he could not remember it, try as he might, and later he would feel vexed because of it. This was not because he couldn’t remember it, but that he couldn’t remember why it was important. That was when the spiders came for a final time for him. Their pincers clicked as they spoke.
“Is that him?” One asked. Another spider came and examined his barbed shroud.
“It’s him. Take him.”
And with that, they unstuck him from the webs, and carried him away.
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