Vault Spiders
In the Memory Palace a traveller can lock a memory in a vault and keep it from touching their days. Vault Spiders find those doors. Where they have spun, the lock becomes the Palace’s Lock: the key no longer turns, and the room behind is sealed for good.
Appearance
A Vault Spider is no larger than a thumbnail, round-bodied and short-legged, grey-brown and furred with a fine bloom like house dust. Its eight eyes are tiny and dull gold, the colour of the candlelight in the Palace’s halls. Its web is the clue: grey, dense, and dry as old cobweb, spun across a doorframe and over the keyhole in flat layers until the door looks felted shut. Disturbed, it smells of dust and beeswax, like a shut-up parlour.
Habitat and Range
They live in the darker corners of every traveller’s Palace, in the grey fog where repressed memories are kept, and spin only on doors that have been locked. A Palace with many vaults has many spiders.
Behaviour and Temperament
They are shy and slow, and they flee from light and from the Palace’s Curators. They are not hunters; nothing is known of what they eat, unless it is the forgetting itself. A spider comes to a newly locked door within days and begins to spin, and once begun it does not stop until the frame is covered.
Abilities
Their web holds a vault shut against its owner. A sealed door cannot be opened by will, by key, or by the Curators, and the memory behind it can no longer be reached, though it is not gone: it is perfectly preserved, as everything in the Palace is, and it presses on the traveller’s mind from behind the door. Brushed away before it is thick, the web leaves the door as it was.
Life Cycle
Egg sacs the size of a peppercorn hang in the angles of sealed doorframes, and the young spread to the next locked doors. Nothing is known of how long a spider lives.
Uses and Dangers
Some travellers want them: a grief so bad that it must never be opened again can be locked and left for the spiders. Most do not know they are there until they come back for something they locked, a lesson or a name, and find the door felted shut. Guides tell visitors to brush the cobweb off any door they mean to open again.
Lore and Belief
Scholars who study the Palace argue whether the spiders belong to the zone or to the traveller’s own mind, as the Curators do. Their folk name, "forgetters' spinners", comes from visitors who say the spiders are what makes a locked thing truly forgotten. That is half right; the memory is kept, only beyond reach.