Researcher's Insight into the Bileweavers
Undated
While all spiders evolved from ancient marine arachnids, the biological structure of the Bileweaver is especially reminiscent of its ancestors. Aside from the thick exoskeletons vaguely resembling that of a crab, they also share another characteristic in their dependence on a carnivorous diet. Their build predisposes them to quick movement and an aggressive jump attack that allows them to deliver near-fatal doses of a noxious mist from their enlarged venom glands.
Additionally, the behavior of the Bileweaver is consistent with other jumping spiders in that they do not catch their prey in webs, preferring to hunt and instead use their silk to build their nests. The thing that separates them from any other known spider species, and that makes them eerily remarkable is, of course, their enormous mass. No evidence of terrestrial arachnids of this size has existed until now.
The deeper I dig into the origins of this impossible creature, the more uneasy I become. While other specimens from the Louisiana Incident show signs of having been “created"—such as the surgical scars present on the Ursa Mortis—the Bileweavers appear to have been “born." Or more accurately articulated: hatched. It brings Hannah Kinney to mind.
The Bileweavers are also the first specimens of the Corruption who appear to reproduce, spontaneously bursting from an observable source in response to human proximity. In this case that source being clusters of pulsating egg sacs. According to what I believe to be a harrowing firsthand account, the possibility of such evolution in the Corruption is entirely viable.
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Page From a Journal
Signed: Emilia B.
Undated
1/5
I close my eyes, and I remember. Choking on wet soil. Screaming to the rhythm of their shovels as they finished the job. Sobbing as the air started to run out.
Those bastards were friends, once. Partners. We hunted side by side, united in purpose. Sharing meals and jokes and firesides and secrets. I don't know why they turned on me, and I don't care. Worse than the beating was how they tormented me, throwing the corpses of my sweet pets, legs crushed and twisted, to rot in eternity beside me as they buried me alive.
They should have buried me deeper.
Through the pain and the torment came new life. Sweet and horrible and quiet and deadly.
I felt them first in my abdomen. Legs moving beneath taut skin, as strange shapes bulged outwards in alien silhouettes. Contained, writhing, eager, and testing, until finally, they pushed out through the nourishing flesh, fat and sticky and ravenous.
They slowly pushed the soil from my failing body, and they caressed my dying skin with delicate, silk-laden legs. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. A gruesome and beautiful dance of grasping, crawling appendages. Sticky with blood. Sticky with webbing as they wrapped me up and made me whole again. Caked in soil. My children, my saviors, my kin. Birthed of my body. Nourished of my flesh. Strengthened by my blood. Reborn. And I with them.
This grave is a cradle.
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Page From a Journal
Signed: Emilia B.
Undated
2/5
They were so tiny at first, my sweet little spiderlings. But together, we were transformed. As I lay dying, I gave them my flesh, and they feasted, and they grew. Blood of my blood, body of my body.
They pushed into my still-open wounds and went to work. With every pull of the strands of shimmering silk, I felt myself become whole again. Ruined organs fused back together, pulsing with new blood. Missing pieces regrown and returned. I coughed up dirt and blood and bile, and they fed on the bloody afterbirth.
For the first time in my life, I felt complete. It was both the beginning of life, and the end: Creator, Destroyer, Mother Bileweaver, and Empress.
I had always been fascinated with spiders and kept them as pets. I could not stand to see them mistreated and made sure any found in the house were removed alive. But now my fascination is something more. We are bound in flesh and in blood now. Kin.
That night, one of the spiders skittered clumsily to the tip of my finger before sinking its fangs into my flesh. Immediately my sight washed over in the green hue of their venom: a vision of what it would have been like had I been the one born of them. A green womb of light-headed dread. A hot wash of terror and confusion. Then: The freedom of eight legs. The euphoria of the kill. The rush of releasing venom. The security of home. The power of we.
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Page From a Journal
Signed: Emilia B.
Undated
3/5
They will write our story in webbing and bile, and I will write it in blood.
It wasn't hard to find the traitors. They were still fouling up their usual corners, gambling away stolen bounties. When they saw me…oh, it was everything. Their faces. The way the color just fell out of them, as though excreted in one terrible rush.
“I cannot thank you enough," I told them, “for doing your part to bring me to this very moment."
That is when they finally noticed that I was not alone. As my Bileweavers rushed forward, my heart was touched in ways I cannot describe. My dear, obedient children. Now I understood what people meant when they said to have children was to have your heart wander around outside of your body. I had several hearts, now. I had thousands.
Those tiny hearts beat their strongest songs. They crept up the legs and flailing arms of those traitors, dove with dedicated focus through the jelly of their eyes, and swirled in through their ears as though the canals were nothing more than dirty, starving drains. Their screams were pure medicine. Notes of a great and terrible song composed by the Sculptor.
I buried them alive, just as they had done to me. But they would not be remade. They would simply die in the dark. Cold, meaningless deaths cradled by the venomous and nesting embrace of the Bileweavers. I hoped their lungs were filling slowly with wet earth. I hoped it would never stop hurting. I prayed the venom made their final thoughts a waking nightmare.
A lady never forgets. A mother never forgives.
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Page From a Journal
Signed: Emilia B.
Undated
4/5
No matter what happens to me, I will live on, through them. Even if they have forgotten me now.
I don't know exactly when our perfect family became something else. As they feasted on Corruption and grew bigger, first like dinner plates and then like wagon wheels, they began nesting in abandoned buildings and over the trees. Every new generation was bigger, no longer the sweet, delicate children that had once pulled me by the soul back into life in the damp darkness of that cursed grave. When the first wave of newborns burst forth from the sacs, squealing their hunger and waving their mandibles around as though they were children's arms, I reached out, my lip trembling in pure, awestruck love.
“Come to me, my babies," I said, and they rushed me like a pack of angry dogs.
They bit me, stuck me with their poison as though it wasn't something I loved to endure. My new, lovingly stitched-together body started to hurt in ways that reminded me of my old life, sparking a momentary rush of fear and upset. Was I still trapped at the bottom of that grave? Was I what came before or after the swan's final song?
I refused to lose myself to it. Resigned to watch over my brood from afar, like all mothers must do when their children grow away from them. They stopped recognizing me altogether and would attack me as though I were just another passing Hunter and not the mother that gestated their family within her own corpse. I'd never abandon them in my heart, no matter what they did.
I would love them for always, and I would not squander their gifts.
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Page From a Journal
Signed: Emilia B.
Undated
5/5
Sometimes, in the stillest moments of the night, I swear I can still feel that familiar movement in the deepest parts of my body—the vessels of my lungs, the arteries of my heart, the squelching pulse of my intestines—as though those tiny feathery spiders are still in there, helping to hold me together, doing everything they can to make sure I do not fall apart. My scars tingle as though caressed by spiderwebs. The body never, ever forgets.
Motherhood haunts and heals. The lessons I've learned through pain and sacrifice and nearly unbearable levels of love are what moves my soiled, twisted spirit, reminds me that I have a purpose. This is only the beginning.
The Bileweavers remind me who I am. My love for them taught me what I was capable of. Among them, I am home. Among them I am The Empress.
Even now that they have left me, I will never be alone again. Wherever my children may be, I carry them with me in my heart, as they carry me with them in their flesh. Whether they're quietly watching unfortunate prey stumble towards their nests, or feasting on rotting flesh, they are with me always.
I will hunt with the newfound blackness of my heart, fueled with the venom and violence of a mother's undying love.
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