Blood-Spinners
Blood-Spinners are spiders of the Blood River, among its River-Beasts, that weave their webs of blood drawn from the river. The webs stretch between the swollen plants of the banks and catch anything that walks into them. They share a name with the Cast-Out Flesh Weaver and have nothing to do with it.
Appearance
A Blood-Spinner’s body is the size of a cat, its legspan as wide as a cartwheel. It is the colour of dried blood, darkening to near black at the joints, and its abdomen is swollen and faintly translucent, showing the red it carries inside. Its eight eyes are small and glossy. It moves in jerks, stopping dead between them, and makes no sound but a faint wet tick of its legs on the web.
The webs are what people see first: sticky crimson threads, thick as twine, glistening between stalks and branches, warm to the touch and smelling of copper. Fresh web pulses faintly in time with the river.
Habitat and Range
They live in the oversized growth along the banks, where the plants are tall enough to hang a web between, and seldom go far from the water they draw on. A bank can hold several, each with its own web.
Behaviour and Temperament
A Blood-Spinner drinks from the river and spins what it drinks. Its thread stays liquid inside and sets sticky outside, and it clings like the river’s water clings to skin. It waits at the edge of its web, rushes on whatever is caught, binds it, and bites, and the prey’s blood is added to the web as the spider feeds. It does not chase prey beyond its web.
Abilities
Its blood-thread is stronger than it looks and very hard to scrape off; it softens in fire or clean water. A web that is broken knits itself again when the spider walks it. The spider’s bite numbs.
Life Cycle
Females lay egg-sacs in the heart of the web, wrapped in fresh thread, and the young hatch hungry and spread along the bank. A Blood-Spinner lives as long as its river runs; when the river fails, the webs dry to brittle brown lace and the spiders with them.
Uses and Dangers
Dried web is sometimes gathered as a dark red dye, and some herbalists claim it stanches bleeding when laid on a wound. A traveller who walks into a web in the dim red light of the banks is stuck fast, and the spider and the river’s other hunters come quickly.
Lore and Belief
Valley folk say a Blood-Spinner’s web over a path means the river is waking, and some believe the spiders serve the Flesh Weaver, the Cast-Out who stitches bodies, or that the Cast-Out takes the form of a great spider. Neither is so: the spiders are beasts of the river, changed like its other beasts by what they drink.
Travellers cut free of a web tell of the bodies hanging further in, drained and wrapped, and the valley’s bounty on the spiders is paid by the leg.