"One, two, chuckle with shrew,
three, four, lock the door!"
The woman was singing as she skipped along. She was close enough to smell the ash, now. Waking up to seeing smoke from her forest shack was always a highlight to Flick's day.
The tanukiki's tail hadn't stopped wagging since she'd first spied the smoke.
Elves always made a mess of things when they fled before other banditry-minded elves. Leaving food and clothes for less frightened things like herself.
There weren't a lot of elves willing to piss off forest spirits, even fewer who were willing to annoy something like her.
It was only superstition, of course. She might have fur down her back and arms, and might have a leaf on her head, but she was extremely ordinary.
She knew about enough magic to snuff a candle.
Not exactly an all-powerful spirit of vengeance if she got annoyed. Yet, the elves always thought she was both cute, and terrifying.
Which made it extremely easy to live out her life's goal - to be left alone.
Flick paused, sniffing the air, and then she pressed one of her bare feet into the soft soil. It had been disturbed here. The smoke was coming from... Underground.
The tanukiki dropped to all fours and took a deep whiff as the leaf resettled onto her forehead. She could smell burned oak, rosewood, and ash pine.
Something expensive had been wrecked and buried here, probably a palanquin or carriage. Something that had been transporting a lord... But then it had been carefully buried.
Flick twitched, looking around with her brown eyes into every shadow, afraid that she had stumbled not under a bandit attack, but an assassination.
She let out a squeal as a hand burst up through the soil to grab her by the scruff of her neck.
Her hands and feet desperately kicked at the ground, spraying it around, whilst she went exactly nowhere. The hand holding her felt like the damned thing was made of iron.
Flick squealed again as she was yanked down and onto the ground, as whatever had been buried used her as an anchor to drag itself up and out of the loose dirt.
She had run out of squeals when she saw the undead zombie stagger upright, still dragging her by the scruff of her neck. She settled for letting out a frightened whine.
The thing lifted her up to eye-level with its unseeing and white eyes, and coughed, spraying dirt into her face. "I... Where... Where... Where is she?"
"Sh-sh-she?" Flick gasped in terror.
"Where is Drachne!?" The creature roared, covering her in spittle, phlegm, and dirt.
She burst into tears and wet herself.
The dead thing blinked slowly, looking down at the puddle forming, and then back up at her, and the grip loosened slightly. "I... I don't know you. Do I? Sorry... I... I'm confused."
She let out a terrified whine.
"You're going to run, if I let go. So I won't." The zombie said, sounding less and less brutal, and beginning to get a sophisticated accent. "I... She killed me. I thought she killed me. I'm Lord Elan. I was with a woman... Well, you wouldn't think she's a woman. She's a monster."
She looked around desperately, wishing someone would save her from a zombie that had obviously just been resurrected and hadn't figured out that someone else owned their soul, now.
"You see, she's an arachne. Rare, beautiful, but so dangerous." He said, awestruck, "So beautiful. I... I couldn't help myself. I had just been trying to steal her poison. Sell it. But... The bragging rights of having bedded an arachne! Couldn't resist."
Flick stopped fighting him, "I... Won't run. No point."
He dropped her, and she flipped to avoid the wet patch, landing daintily. She blew at her leaf and swallowed, "You bedded an arachne? No wonder you're dead."
"She... She wasn't born here. Not in a forest." He said, looking around in confusion, "I don't know where she'd go. If she could survive. I... I have... I have..."
Flick rolled her eyes, "Bedded an arachne. Which means, you're hers, now. Zombie."
"She did kill me?" He said, and looked down at his hands. At the cuts and scrapes from digging his way out of his fresh grave.
The tanukiki sighed heavily, "Sheesh. Yeah. You're dead. Which means you can't heal anymore. Can't really eat. Can't ever sleep. And... And you're going to be utterly obsessed with this... Arachne."
"Drachne. That was her name." He whispered, as if in awe.
She felt her frightened tail curled up through her legs, and glanced around some more, "So... There's an arachne out here? There's no point trying to run away. They always get what they hunt. And she'll be able to sense you. Her slave."
"Draaachne." He moaned, eyes going even more blank than they already were.
She inched further away from him.
Flick flinched as he grabbed her wrist in his deathly grip, and he looked at her desperately, "You're beastkind. Can't you find her? A sense of smell, some scrying or something? I can pay you. I'm a lord."
"Pay? Like... Gold and silver?" She asked nervously.
He nodded excitedly, "Exactly!"
"I know what it is, but I've never used it. Not useful to me. And I'm not magical, either. I'm a tanukiki." She said tightly, "We're supposed to be lucky, and that's it. Apparently, my luck has already run out."
The zombie's grip tightened to the point of making her eyes water in pain. "M-must find her. Have to find her. Drachne."
Flick whined and considered chewing his wrist off. It wasn't like he could feel pain, anymore. However, her nose was twitching with a distinct smell, and it was his.
He smelled like decay and something else even sharper.
The arachne must have poisoned him, when she ended up killing him. It was still sitting in his inactive bloodstream, which meant that biting him was about as safe as swallowing a whitetail.
Flick's only real option to get away was to play along, until one of the many bastards in the forest decided to get rid of the zombie.
She could lead him somewhere.
Most of the things that felt precious about their territory had given up chasing her. She was fast, and if they caught her, they assumed it would be bad luck to hurt her.
She'd need to also get away from the zombie, and right now, she didn't know if she could.
Every time she seemed to think about it, he seemed to act without thinking and grab her.
Flick didn't know enough about dead things to manipulate him, and she didn't want to learn about dead things. She had been quite content, living life the way she had been.
Why the hell had this happened to her?
She took a deep and uncertain breath, "Tracking an arachne won't work. Won't smell them unless they want you to. You have to track the prey."
"Prey? She... She won't know what prey is." He shook his head, "Raised in the city, by elves."
Flick shrugged, "Doesn't mean all the prey that notices her isn't running the other fucking direction. Ain't much more nightmarish than an arachne."
---
"I ain't feeling so well." He said to no one in-particular. It wasn't like anyone actually lived in the house with him.
His wife had done everything she could to make him sign the divorce papers, before she'd given up and moved to another city.
His daughter had stuck around some to try and fix him, before she gave up as well. He didn't know where she'd moved to. Probably never would.
The elf's ears pulled back as he groaned loudly, grabbing onto the bench as another cramp ripped through his gut.
This wasn't like any hangover he'd had before.
Felt as if his stomach had burst.
What had the beast said last night, before he'd killed them? Something about it going badly and then... Called him a dumb bastard.
Even drunk he'd thought that was a bit odd. Calling out someone, who had already ended you, a dumb fucker wasn't exactly an ordinary kind of response to a knife between the ribs.
The elf screamed in pain, and stared down at something jutting out from between his ribs.
He reached down in confusion and fear, confirming he wasn't seeing things. It wasn't a knife blade, it was a bone shaped as it someone had twisted it.
It was the exact same horn that he had sold off last night for a couple silver pieces.
That he had cut from the head of the ali-whatever, right before he'd weighed the body down and dropped it into the swamp.
The elf screamed again as he felt his ribs breaking, as something else started to break free from inside him.
---
The web swayed in the wind that seemed to permanently flow through the freezing forest. Little droplets of dew and rain falling across the threads of her little bed, suspended so high above the ground.
The water she didn't mind, but she had underestimated how much the wind would get to her. Thinking that she'd be comfortable in her web just like she was in the temple.
Instead, she was lying spread across it, staring down at the ground, and trying not to shiver.
Nearby, a cocoon of her silk spun idly in the wind. The only thing she could see of the thing inside was his very angry and blue eyes.
Drachne hadn't been able to bring herself to end the bodyguard. Not when she needed to tell the empress what Elan had concealed from everyone.
Problem was, she was absolutely certain he'd just try and kill her if she released him. The elf didn't seem even remotely interested in listening to what the monster had to say.
She pressed her forehead against one of her strands as she tried not to burst into tears again.
She was an assassin, a cold-hearted creature who could appear, end a life, and disappear, before anybody knew that she even existed.
She shouldn't be so easily heartbroken.
Drachne had been called a monster her whole life. She had been treated differently, her whole life. She had thought she could mostly deal with that.
... She had been wrong.
Now that she knew that she was a monster... Now that she knew that she could not coexist with the peaceful idiots inside the cities... She finally understood what self-hatred meant.
Confronted with all of this, Drachne did what she always did.
She rolled onto her side, closed her eyes, and began to pluck a melancholy tune on her web. The vibrating strands reverberating out an eerie tune.
She felt the music as it flowed out of her, expressing her painful emotions. Rising up angrily before crashing to new lows. A haunting and overlapping sound.
