“He’s about this tall,” Pultine said casually and she lifted her hand a foot over her head. “He has wings like mine but they’re brown and don’t retract. He was wearing his jade tinted armor, metal plates on his chest and limbs, it’s very impressive. It’s all my fault he’s here…”
“Then he can thank you for his death,” one of the xaxews interrupted, speaking from its mouth that was hidden underneath the mass of its body propped up on eight furry legs to make it almost twice the size of Pultine. There were four pairs of eyes on top of the body, and two other xaxews with the same muddy gray fur and fearsome presence.
“You will not leave Xaxax alive,” another of the xaxews said. “This planet will be the death of you dainty wings. You should never have come here.”
“We agree there,” Pultine said. “But some things are out of our control, even for the likes of me. You didn’t happen to see an ax anywhere around the spot where you picked him up did you? Funny story, we used my charged up axes to propel a litter to get us from Earth to Endla, and we must have crashed into something. I was separated from my friend, who you’ve met and captured I’m assuming, and I lost connection to one of my axes. I’ve been wandering this thick vegetation for many of your moons hoping to find them.”
“Should we just eat her?” one of the xaxews asked.
“No, the leader will be just as happy to have her as he will be the other. The jeris are delicacies.”
“So you’re taking me to Rusa, then?” Pultine asked. It annoyed her when they talked to one another instead of her.
“What is a Rusa?” one of the xaxews asked the other.
“The other dainty wings.”
“Ohh,” the xaxew said just before one of its legs was severed and his neon green blood spewed over the vegetation as it screamed and danced around on its remaining legs to regain its bearing.
Pultine grabbed her ax out of the air and it was covered in the xaxew’s blood. The ax was glowing yellow-white and left tiny orbs of light in its wake like Pultine’s aspect. She shook the ax at her side and the blood sloughed off.
“Sorry,” she said and slung the ax to her back where it locked magnetically onto the other that was secured to her back with the strap that wrapped her torso and held another long, curved blade stealthily across her chest. She wore two lengths of durable cloth that wrapped her neck and left her shoulders bare, then swaddled her body to elegantly hide her modesty.
“That was an accident,” she said trying to hold back laughter as the xaxew hobbled and yelled loudly for aid from its compatriots who only wanted to jump on Pultine and rip her apart, but were forced to tend to their agonizing friend.
“When I’m within a certain range, it automatically comes back to me. I resisted summoning it to this point, you never know what’s in the way.”
Pultine had her hands up to show that the incident had truly been an accident and she meant the aggressive trio no harm, but when they finally tended to the wound and decided to head back to their headquarters, or hideout – Pultine pegged them as the type to have a hideout, they seemed like gang members – the two uninjured xaxew’s approached her with aggression.
“It was an unfortunate accident and I understand if I am required to pay some recompense for my carelessness, but there is no need for aggression,” Pultine said as soothingly as she could manage. Her pheromonal trances didn’t work on xaxews, their olfactory senses were much more sophisticated than the jeris.
“If you want to see another moon,” one of the snarling xaxews said, “you will come along with us with no resistance.”
The two uninjured xaxews approached Pultine and bared their fearsome mouths on the underside of their bodies, and pushed her forward through the vegetation. The injured xaxew cursed and lunged at Pultine as she passed it and the others put him in line while they shouted directions to her.
When they came to a large tree with a wide trunk that Pultine couldn’t get a measure of, the three xaxews began to climb up, and one shot her with a string of silk from the back of its body. Pultine started to protest, she reached for one of her axes, but calmed a little when she realized that they were only hauling her up behind them.
“A heads up next time,” she shouted to them, “you almost got the ax. But I’m allowing this because I wronged one of you and I’m trying to show you all that I am no threat to you.
“A threat to us,” one of them chuckled and then laughed out loud. “Even if you managed to throw your ax and catch one of us unguarded again, like a coward, the others would be on you before you could spread your dark wings. Realize where you are, dainty wings. This is the Nest of Aexea. We are the only reason you still breathe…”
“Technically,” Pultine interrupted, “I don’t need your realm’s oxygen to survive. I don’t mind it, it can be refreshing…”
“It’s not even listening to you,” another of the xaxews said. “Don’t waste your breath, maybe it will shut up. If it keeps talking, it won’t make it to the sack.”
“Fine,” Pultine said, eyeing the scenery of the area that came into view as they ascended. She loved it even though the smell of the place was generally unpleasant. “I’ll keep my mouth shut. But you, especially angry and dismissive one, you and I will talk soon enough.”
“I look forward to it,” the xaxew said sarcastically.
The nest loomed largely overheard and Pultine wondered how many xaxews crawled around inside. It was the shape of a beehive, but hundreds of times larger and spun completely of silk. Like the trunk of the tree, Pultine struggled to get a sense of the full size of the thing that she assumed wrapped the trunk completely. There were plenty of spiders in the Fonlands, but she had never seen a structure like this one on Xaxax. The xaxews weren’t exactly spiders, though they were very similar but with a much more angry disposition.
When they entered the nest, Pultine braced herself for the feeling she found repulsive, dried silk strings racking against her skin and hair and sometimes clinging to it, and then she had to steel herself against the smell. She rested in a bed of silk that made the wall of the structure and she had to move to keep from sticking to it. It was very warm inside the nest and there was a pervasive smell of decay that hung heavy in the heat. The interior structure was impressive; it was wired with electricity and there were enough lights inside to show the vastness of the structure. There were intricately woven trails of silk that connected the walls to the interior trunk and smaller silk structures that existed throughout. It was a large and busy city constructed of silk and densely populated by xaxews on every surface.
“Throw her in with the other,” one of her captors said to the others, “then go get patched up. I’ll go tell Hasah’s guard what we found.”
“I’m not letting you take all the credit,” the xaxew that Pultine had injured with her ax said. “These dainty wings from Wiis are impossible to find and we’ve got two! Hasah will definitely be in a good mood giving out work assignments to whomever brings him word of this one, and I’m done with security.”
“Then go get patched up and meet me there,” the other xaxew said with annoyance. “Bleeding in his office isn’t going to get you any points.”
“You take her to the sack and then meet us at Hasah’s guard…”
“Go!” the xaxew was very annoyed now. “I’ll take her, just shut up.”
The xaxew seemed to jump and shot Pultine with a string of silk much quicker that she could protest, and soon she was tightly wrapped in webbing up to just below her eyes. The xaxew held her with its spinnerets as it moved quickly through the nest and soon she was being secured vertically to the wall of a small room of silk.
“You can talk all you want now, dainty wings,” the xaxew said with a laugh as it left, closing the entrance behind it with its silk and leaving Pultine in the dark.
Pultine took a moment to memorize the xaxew. The gray fur of a xaxew was a mix of short black and white hairs, and that one was a deep, muddy gray with fewer white hairs than most. And his eyes were a deeper color red than the other two of his compatriots.
“I will talk to you again, Deep Red,” she said as clearly as she could under the webbing over her mouth.
“Pristine!” Pultine heard in the darkness and then she heard rustling, felt movement in the wall of webbing she was stuck to.
“Rusa?” she mumbled with surprise.
“Yeah, I was waiting for you,” he said and she felt him slicing at the webbing that wrapped her. “Took you a while, and this place isn’t pleasant.”
“Why did they bring us here instead of killing us?”
“The xaxew called Hasah,” Rusa said as he helped Pultine out of the webbing that bound her. “Apparently he’s a big deal, off fighting some xaxews of some other nest. We are to be his meal upon his triumphant return. Wiisers, as you like to call us, are a delicacy on this planet. Or should I say this realm of Xaxax crawling with Xaxaxers.”
“You’ll be an Fonlander soon enough,” Pultine said proudly as a light green glow began to fill the silk sack where the two were trapped. She smiled when she was able to see his face clearly. “I always forget you have an aspect now.”
“I haven’t used it since they brought me here.”
“Why didn’t you break out?” Pultine asked. “How did you know they would bring me here?”
“I’ve been listening to them. This nest controls almost half of this realm, and they all want to make Hasah happy.”
“Well let’s get out of here,” Pultine said. “I want to make Deep Red beg for my mercy before we leave this Muwa-Lisa forsaken place.”
“Before we go, my Pristine, I think there is something we should do.” Rusa stopped his aspect and everything was dark. “Something that will help us on the big mission.”
“What is it? Anything if you think it will help us.”
“We must kill this Hasah that they all love so much. Then we will have to hunt down his two sons and three daughters and kill each one of them as well.”
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