The Valley of Spiders

Towards midday, three pursuers — a stern master with a silver-studded bridle, a gaunt man with a scarred lip, and a small nervous man on a white horse — rode out of a dry riverbed into a wide, desolate valley. They had been tracking two fugitives for a long time, but as they scanned the empty expanse of yellow grass and thorn bushes stretching towards the snow-capped mountains, there was no sign of them anywhere. "Nowhere," the gaunt man admitted, unable to hide his disappointment.

Undeterred, the three pressed on, following faint traces in the scanty soil — a bent blade of grass here, a footprint there, and once, worryingly, a smear of blood where the escaped servant girl might have stumbled. The master led the way in grim silence, the gaunt man close behind, and the little man on the white horse trailing last, half lost in his own uneasy thoughts as the valley grew stranger and stiller around them — no breeze, no birdsong, nothing but a strange haze gathering in the distance.

Before long, the wind began to pick up, and the valley seemed suddenly full of life fleeing in fear: a wild dog tore past them as though pursued by something unseen, and later a whole line of wild hogs went stampeding down the slope, followed by a single panicked boar. The three riders exchanged uneasy glances but pushed on — until strange pale, drifting shapes began sailing past on the wind. At first they took them for harmless thistledown, but up close the globes turned out to be something far stranger: sheets of grey, cobwebby material trailing long sticky threads, drifting like tiny airships.

It was only when one of these masses caught and clung to the master's face that the horrifying truth became clear — the "thistledown" was alive, a swarm of countless small spiders travelling together on threads of gossamer, and it was descending on them from every side. The gaunt man, tangled in grey strands he could not cut free with his sword, stumbled, fell, and was quickly swarmed and overwhelmed. The little man, still mounted, fought free and went galloping off in panic; the master, entangled and terrified, only barely managed to break away and flee blindly down the valley, lashing wildly at threads that seemed to follow him everywhere.

By the time the spider swarm had passed and it was safe to move again, the master found himself alone. His own prized horse — and with it his silver-mounted bridle — was gone, most likely lost to the spiders along with the gaunt man; the little man, too, had vanished. All that remained to him was the little man's white horse, which he now led cautiously rather than mounted, too fearful to go back and check what state his own horse might be in.