Flesh-Eating Arachnids
Giant spiders that the Nightmare Nexus makes from the fear of spiders, the zone's standing example of how a traveller's worst fear becomes its chief predator.
Overview
In the Nightmare Nexus the most feared thing in a mind becomes the zone's chief predator, and the giant flesh-eating arachnids are the example everyone gives: a traveller who fears spiders finds the Nexus full of them. They are Nightmares of one common kind, and, like everything the Nexus dreams, they have real flesh.
Appearance
They are spiders the size of a calf or a pony, long-legged and heavy-bodied, but never quite one kind of spider: the dreamer's fear decides the details. Most share the marks of a waking dread: too many eyes, glossy black or bruise-purple bodies furred with stiff hair, legs that bend the wrong way, fangs that drip. They come out of corners and ceilings, scuttling with a dry clicking, and their webs hang in the zone's corridors like grey sails. They smell of rot and wet hair.
Habitat and Range
They appear wherever a Nexus has a dreamer who fears spiders, and where many such fears run together they fill whole halls. When the ephemeral Nexus fades, they go with it, except what has been killed and carried out.
Behaviour and Temperament
They hunt fear. They stalk the dreamer whose fear made them, corner, taunt, and close in, and they grow stronger and more numerous the more their prey panics. They are relentless and adaptive, learning the dreamer's weak points as a nightmare does. Prey they catch they bind in web and eat, and in the Nexus being eaten is how a mind is lost while the body lies comatose in the waking world.
Abilities
They are as strong as the fear behind them, and wounds dealt by ordinary courage barely mark them. A lucid traveller, who knows it is dreaming, can wound their flesh and kill them, though the Nexus fights harder to break that focus.
Life Cycle
They are dreamed into being and end when they are slain, when the dreamer wakes or is lost, or when the Nexus fades. Their bodies stay solid when they die.
Uses and Dangers
What the Nexus gives a body remains when carried out: the hide, fangs, and bone of a slain arachnid can be worked like any other material, and nightmare bone is a known wonder of the zones. The danger is to anyone who meets their fear here unready.
Lore and Belief
Some who survive believe that killing their arachnids cured them of the fear in waking life, and the Nexus can grant that. Others hold that nightmare bone carries the fear with it and keep it away from children's rooms.