Eve stared at the ominous woods in front of her, working up the nerve to go in. Although she did not share her friend Juniper’s disgust for spiders, she would have given this patch of forest a wide berth if Chloe had not asked her to help look for her younger sister.
Less than a week ago, a long stretch of forest in the middle of Chloe and Zoey’s tribe’s hunting grounds had become infested with spiders. They bore strange markings on their abdomens, were slightly larger than a man’s hand, and had industriously shut off what should have been a prime source of food for the wolf tribe by encircling it with opaque webbing.
Although the jungle held many strange mysteries, no-one had ever heard of a group of spiders working together so well before, or so quickly. The thick, heavy bands of webbing marking the start of spider country were oddly uniform, and barely any strands stuck out past them. It was as though someone had said “stop spinning here” and every single spider – there must have been thousands in the trees and bushes within – had obeyed.
Zoey, ever eager to prove herself, had announced her plans to map the interior, or at least deduce why the spiders had expanded so suddenly and just as suddenly stopped. Her mother Trinity, keenly aware of what kinds of monsters lurked in the jungle, had absolutely forbidden Zoey from doing something so reckless. The declaration had stopped Zoey for all of an afternoon.
When the young huntress didn’t reappear the next morning, her kinsmen began to worry. Her sister Chloe had enlisted the help of everyone available to help search the forest. So here she stood, frustrated at Zoey for doing something this stupid and getting herself caught and eaten—
No. That was a bad way to think. It was entirely possible she had just gotten lost, like young girls did, and had wandered in circles overnight. It was that much more important they find her as soon
as possible. Eve gritted her teeth, raised the torch in her hand, and forced her way past the initial layer of webbing, into what she really did not want to believe was a deathtrap.
To her pleasant surprise, there was a fair amount of room at ground level. Eve could walk around with space to spare, although the canopy and treetops were thoroughly covered in dark grey webbing, brightened only slightly by the sun filtering through it. The lemur woman had been worried the spiderwebs would suffocate any noise inside them, but that was only partly true: she could hear the soft chittering of a thousand tiny legs as dark arachnid shapes scurried through the trees above her and bushes around her.
Better stay as far away from the foliage as I can, she thought. It was a shame to see so many leaves covered up like this. While Eve tried to choose the best way to search an area mostly devoid of light, a distinctly mammalian sound carried through the forest trails to her ears. It sounded like a grunt.
The lemur woman, anxious to meet a friendly face, hurriedly followed the sound along shady, spidery trails, until she turned a corner and found her prize.
Zoey crouched at the edge of a large clearing, hunched over and fiddling with her something with her back turned to Eve. She was covered in patches of spider silk, which stuck to her fur, and had a few scratches which Eve could see on her back. Her obsidian knife and hunting spear lay next to her, within easy reach. She was also completely naked.
Personally, Eve did not think highly of clothes – her perilously immodest bikini was formed of only a few leaves and vines, after all – but she knew Zoey tried to be covered unless she had good reason not to be. The lemur girl strode across the clearing. “Zoey, there you are.”
The wolf girl shot to her feet, spear at the ready, before she truly processed the words. By the time Eve had closed the distance to her, Zoey had dropped her spear and her face had melted into a smile. “Eve! I’m so glad to see you. You would not believe what I saw in here.”
“You can tell me about that later. What happened to you? You’re not hurt, are you?” Now that Eve had a good look at her friend, she could see the silk was more firmly affixed to the front of her torso and legs. The wolf girl also bore more scratches, though fortunately none of them seemed too deep.
“No, I’m pretty fine, considering what could’ve happened. I’m sure you want to leave, and I do too, but you really need to see these things.” Zoey reached down to the ground.
“These things?” Following her friend’s movements, Eve noticed the ground around Zoey was covered in the husks of spiders, many of which had been stabbed or crushed. She glanced up – had they fallen down? – but the trees were empty. It did not occur to her how odd that was.
“Yeah, these little guys. They’re pretty nasty if they get the drop on you.” Zoey stood up, holding an intact husk gingerly in one hand. Now that she had a good look at one, Eve realized they were mostly normal-looking spiders aside from the abdomen, which bore a distinct white spiral marking. “You see this?” Zoey said, pointing to it. “I swear, they use this pattern to hypnotize prey too large for a web to catch. They tried to do it to me, but I don’t think it’s strong enough to work.”
“Wait,” Eve said, holding up her hands, “they tried to use it on you? They tried to eat you? We should leave right now, the border is only—”
Zoey’s giggling cut her short. “Eve, relax,” she said. “You just squash a few of them and the rest get scared off. Anyway, we can leave as soon as I get this off my ankle.” Zoey stepped back with one foot to reveal something Eve had not initially noticed: her right foot was anchored securely to the bushes ringing the clearing. Everything up to her calf was covered in thick white silk. There was also a small pot of green paste next to Zoey on the ground. As Eve watched, Zoey bent down, stuck her finger in it, and started rubbing the paste on the silk covering her leg. After a minute, the webbing began to dissolve. “I really should have brought more of this,” the wolf girl remarked.
“So it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes, right?” Eve asked. Zoey nodded, and the lemur girl turned back to the clearing she had been ignoring. Nothing had changed. “Well, if there’s no helping it, why don’t you tell me what you saw in here? I’d like to know if I should be worried.” The lemur started flicking her tail nervously and shivered.
“Well,” said Zoey from her seat on the dirt, “there’s some good news and some bad news. The good news is that I’m pretty sure I figured out why these spiders are so good at working together. The bad news is it’s this huge, super-creepy queen spider, and I don’t know why it can control the smaller ones.”
Eve decided she was shaking too much to properly hold the torch, and planted it firmly in the dirt. Orange shadows flickered across her white and black fur, casting her in monochrome. As Zoey went into further detail about her time in the spider jungle, Eve’s tail crept higher and higher, tensing like a rod. “So there I was, surrounded by waves of creepy crawlies,” Zoey continued. When her lupine friend described the first time the jungle’s thousands of spiders had tried to cocoon her, Eve actually jumped off the ground in fright.
Oddly, she did not come down again properly. Looking up, the lemur girl saw the tip of her tail snagged in a low-hanging web, which was strong enough to keep her on her tip toes instead of allowing her to stand normally. Tuning out Zoey’s story, Eve grabbed hold of her tail and pulled, only to accomplish nothing; the web allowed her a few hands’ worth of leeway, then promptly returned to its original position. In fact, she now had both of her feet off the ground entirely, and the position had hiked her ass up uncomfortably. Anyone standing behind her would have had a clear view to her womanhood and round butt, and anyone in front of her would have noticed her plump breasts beginning to spill out of her leafy top.
Eve glanced back over at Zoey, but thought better of asking for help. It’d be pretty embarrassing to ask for help while trying to rescue her, she thought. With determination, she swung upside down and began bouncing herself up and down. The vines holding her clothing in place flopped around her toned, lithe body from the effort, but she remained stuck. Every upward bounce seemed to stick a little more of her tail to the web above her, but with her eyes closed in exertion, Eve only had a vague idea she was inching herself higher and higher, breasts and hips swaying.
Okay, time to swallow my pride and ask for some help.
Eve opened her eyes to re-orient herself and discovered the largest spider she had ever seen was in front of her, creeping down silently from a higher web in the tree. Eight spindly legs led to a cephalothorax with eight beady black eyes. Just like its progeny, this one had a stark white spiral on its thick abdomen, which was squarely pointed at its prey.
The lemur girl managed not to scream, partially because she was out of breath and partially because she didn’t quite believe what she was seeing. Faintly, words spilled out of her mouth. “Zoey, you mentioned a queen spider or something.”
“I was just getting to that part!”
“Right, would this spider queen be about twice the size of me and have a giant spiral on its back half?” As Eve watched in horror, the spiral began to glow eerily.
“Yep, that’s it. I’ve seen it, but never gotten close. Why do you ask?” Zoey hadn’t heard anything odd, or even seen the torch move, so she was completely focused on dissolving the silk on her foot. She had removed almost a third, but nothing short of a total cleaning would free her.
Eve, meanwhile, had helplessly beheld the spider as the marking on its abdomen lit up and then began to move. The lemur girl had no idea how it was doing that – it should have been impossible, and yet there it was, rotating and widening and narrowing and widening again. “Oh, nothing,” she said like a docile animal as the pattern overrode her panicked thoughts and forced her into calmness, “I just wanted to make sure I’d know it when I saw it.” She sighed the last few words. Even the act of speech was getting harder.
But that was wrong. She should have been doing something. She should not have been hanging there staring at it, but the spider spiral was so hard to look away from. What had she wanted to do? She didn’t know. Eve tried to recall why she had been scared, but the only thing in front of her was the enormous spiral pattern, swaying back and forth as it descended towards her.
If Zoey had turned her back, she would have seen Eve’s eyes quickly shift from their normal hue to the same black and white spiral pattern the lemur was staring at. The queen spider approached silently, closing the final distance between her and her prey. With scarcely more than a whisper, the spider began to wind silk from her spinnerets around the black-and-white prey’s tail, securing her to the web. Eve shivered at the touch, black nipples stiff in the shady air, as her arms drifted downwards beneath her head and her legs splayed out horizontally. Her entire supple body was on display like so much meat, but all she could think of was the pleasant buzzing slowly displacing her thoughts.
The spider moved downwards, neither hurrying nor waiting. She had seen the grey prey before, and she was dangerous, but the black-and-white prey was barely putting up a fight. Best to take what she could, and perhaps her children would take the grey prey afterwards. After securing her prey’s tail to the web, she moved down further and began weaving her silk over the prey’s leg.
The spider was using just two of her legs to secure herself to the web above, so her remaining six limbs worked with diabolical efficiency, plucking silk from her spinnerets like a harp before wrapping it around her prey. Eve felt one of her legs be pulled upwards, bending at the knee before her foot was secure against her butt. The spider quickly began binding her leg with a simple ribbon around ankle and thigh, tying Eve’s leg to itself. Pale silver silk covered both the grey of Eve’s meaty thigh and the striped black and white of her shin. Her fur was pressed down to her skin, which made the silk appear to cut into her flesh. Feels tight enough, Eve thought distantly, as the spider cinched the hardening threads around her tender flesh. If she had been less flexible, the pose might have been uncomfortable, but between her natural athleticism and the spider’s soft touch, she was practically getting a massage.
As the spider finished and moved to bind the other leg, the lemur girl realized two things: her hands were free, and she felt very warm. The spider spiral (heh, spideral) had moved out of her vision, affording her a bit of conscious thought. Although she would not be breaking free of her trance, she did have the wherewithal to move her hands back up to her body and begin to fondle herself.
The plump globes of her chest were first. They were quickly obscured by the black angular fur of her fingers, squishing and pinching as the lemur girl breathed heavily. This was it: she really had gotten caught and entranced. Her head lolled back and Eve stared at the ground while pleasuring herself. Her back arched sweetly. Even now, her grim fate was creeping closer and closer, touching her skin half a dozen times every second and sending cold tingles down her spine whenever it did, but all she could feel was excited.
Ah . . .I’m gonna be spider food . . .
As the spider tightened its final weaves around her leg, Eve looked back up at herself. From the waist down, she was trussed up thoroughly in silk: each of her legs doubled back on itself thanks to a tight white ring connecting each ankle and thigh. She could not see past the spider’s body perched in front of her, but she could feel the cocoon around her tail which secured it to the web above her. The only free parts of her body were her arms, her head, and her torso.
Giving her nipples one last tweak, Eve slid her hands up to her pelvis. The leaves and vines she wore had fallen from her chest easily, but the other “clothing” still clung stubbornly to her hips and obscured her view of her honey. She flippantly tore the vine in half and it fell off of her. Her hands stroked smoothly over her clit, wracking her frame with luscious electricity, before she slipped two fingers into herself and started jilling off. Her free hand kept rubbing her clit, palming the pink bud for all she could. Eve closed her eyes again and started panting, losing herself in the sensation. Her thoughts were unravelling into so much spiralling thread.
The spider queen was happy (as much as a spider can be) to see the black-and-white prey reacting so well, and wasted no time in securing her mouth. One leg gently nudged the prey’s mouth closed (“mmn, sorry”) before the rest wrapped silk from her lips to the back of her neck. The prey opened her spiralling eyes briefly before closing them again and going back to the motions at her breeding-place-on-body. Mammals were often strange, but at least this one’s behaviour did not pose a threat like the other one had.
Eve briefly worried the spider would prevent her from breathing, but the silk only went as high as her upper lip. When Eve had first seen the spiral, it made her whole body feel just as wavy and unstable as the marking itself, but the spider had been kind enough to fix that problem. Wherever the silk pressed down, she felt like a firm, friendly hand was helping her to reshape herself into what she needed to be. It was like being hugged by a bunch of different people all at once.
The thought would have brought over the edge if the spider had not grabbed her arms and begun tying them to her body at the elbow. The lemur’s eyes blinked open and she looked back down at herself. The sides of her arms pressed into her boobs, pushing them forward, but aside from that she was being completely immobilized. All she could do was watch as the spider drew layer after layer of silver silk from her elbows, under her bust, and around her back. She was being well and truly imprisoned now, and she couldn’t even get off.
What? Let me touch myself! I was just about to finish!
She tried to reach down to her sex with her forearms, but those were quickly folded back on her biceps and bound in place as though they had no right to be anywhere else. Eve could only whine as the spider wove the final bindings around her body. Sheets of the silver pressed down, stopping her struggles and painting white, firm lines just above and just beneath the grey orbs of her chest, which hung pendulously outward.
She was trussed with her elbows against the top of her hips and her wrists stuck to her shoulders. Her mouth was completely covered and silenced, and though she could still breathe through her nose, that was the end of it. The lemur girl felt good – the spider silk was cozy, and each plucking touch of the spider queen’s limbs was a friendly pat on her leg or tail or ass – but the hugs had turned from comforting to constricting.
The spider queen, content with the binding of its black-and-white prey, slowly and carefully stepped off the web and onto the jungle floor. It was imperative the grey prey not be allowed to get her sharp-long-brown-thing or sharp-short-black-thing before she was entranced. Perhaps her bite would need to come before the cocooning. She stepped forward gingerly, beginning to spin a small length of extremely sticky thread between her two longest legs. The held-fire in the ground scared her, but she pushed the fear back with feral strength.
This is so dumb! Lemme out, lemme out, lemme feel good!
Behind her, Eve struggled mightily against her bindings. Her left wrist was most freshly bound, and the silk connecting it to her shoulder had a bit of give. She twisted in her webbing, barely able to move, but applying enough force to free one arm. Her hand shot back to her womanhood and she began fingering herself raggedly. She reached her peak just as the spider queen reached out to ensnare Zoey, who had just finished cleaning her foot.
“Mmph!” Eve’s orgasm flooded over her as she rocked back and forth. Zoey’s ears perked up at the sound. She turned just in time to see the spider and the thread it held. The spider darted forward and Zoey threw herself into a sideways roll over her spear and into the middle of the clearing. When she came up, her spear was in her right hand, but she had not been able to avoid the spider’s attack completely: her left arm was coated in rapidly hardening silk that stuck it to her chest.
“Eve!” Zoey called, just now getting a good look at what had happened to her friend. Dammit, how had she been so deaf? Horror flashed through her before she had to focus on the spider again. It hissed and leapt towards her, fangs and forelegs slashing through the air as she jumped back and pivoted on her left foot to stab forward with her spear.
The spider, nimble for its size, dodged back again and stayed at range. She had seen what the sharp-long-brown-thing had done to her children the first time they met the grey prey, and knew better than to go near it. The black-and-white prey continued making strange noises, but she could see it in one of her back eyes and her bindings held strong. She knew more of the strange mammals were afoot in her home, and she could not afford to spend any more time with this one. Her last option was risky, but she had no choice.
Zoey and her adversary paced around the middle of the clearing, orange torchlight flowing across them from behind and before. The wolf girl struggled to flex her trapped left arm, but it was no use: whatever kind of silk the spider queen had used was too strong to break without the use of her free hand. Unless she could scare the spider off, she would need to do this one-handed. “Eve,” Zoey called, “are you awake?”
Eve giggled drunkenly. “Hah, yeah, I’m great, Zoey, you should try it,” her muffled voice trailed off as another wave of pleasure swamped her mind. When Zoey’s purple eyes glanced back to her foe, she found herself bewildered. The spiral on the queen’s abdomen had begun to glow pale white. Zoey had seen the smaller ones do this trick before – they had tried it on her, in fact – but she had not expected their queen to have the same power.
The wolf girl tried to squeeze her eyes shut, but realized she could not afford do that: the queen was deathly silent, so her ears were not good enough. She tried to move her head so she was only looking with the corner of one eye, but that almost made things worse when the commanding spiral began to wiggle in and out of her vision. Zoey stumbled in her pacing and nearly fell. The spider crept forward a handful of steps in an instant, ready to seize any opening.
“Nngh.” Zoey gritted her teeth. She could feel damnably pleasant numbness radiating from her queen’s— the queen’s abdomen. Look away and get bitten, or keep looking and want to get bitten? Every glance around the clearing was a little harder than the last, and each time her eyes magnetically found their way back to the spider’s spiral. The wolf girl could feel her breathing slow as she spent less time blinking and found it harder to grasp her spear.
She needed to act fast. Zoey staggered towards Eve, trying to take shelter near the torch and clear her head. The spider queen followed her each step of the way. She crept closer and closer until suddenly Zoey spun and threw her spear at the spider’s abdomen. The beast ducked to the ground but Zoey had just enough time to spin down, grab the torch from the earth, and brandish it back at the spider.
Zoey expected to use the torch to halt the spider’s advance after exposing herself. What she had not expected was for the spider to remain exactly where it was as it rose to its feet. The only thing that had changed was the intensity of the spiral, which now practically shone outwards and into the young wolf girl’s mind.
She never stood a chance. The stark monochrome filtered through the torch in her grip and touched something deep within herself. “W-huh,” was all Zoey could mutter before she felt her higher brain functions compress to the back of her skull as her queen gave her new ideas. They were not spoken – it was too obvious to need words. She looked down at the torch, bright like her thoughts, and dropped it to the ground where it sputtered against the grass.
Her spiralling eyes went back to her queen, who raised a single leg and slowly moved it in a circle. Zoey understood immediately, and began rotating where she stood. After the first two rotations, she felt cool smoothness stuck to her waist. It was her queen’s thread, and she was the spool. The more she spun in place, the easier it was for her queen to embrace her, to pin her arms to her sides and cover them in silk, to bind her limbs and torso and neck in silver bliss that pressed her fur down and made her shudder with carnivorous pleasure.
If Eve was a display mannequin, Zoey was a dangerous but beautiful artifact being prepared for safekeeping in the boughs of her queen’s territory. She spun herself around pleasantly, feeling her queen caress her with six limbs that prodded and poked and plucked and posed her so the silk could best veil her from outside eyes.
Half a minute later, she was covered from the waist up, with a small gap for her to breathe. Half a minute after that, she was completely gone, and her queen was pulling her and her friend prey into the boughs where they could rest and relax just as she wanted them to.
“You are officially never allowed to make fun of me for anything ever again, sis.”
“Mrgn.” Zoey blinked. Bright light, painful but clear. Where . . .?
She tried to bolt upright and fight the spider only for a palm to plant itself on her collarbone and force her back down onto what she now realized was a bed. “Take it easy. You’re probably still woozy from whatever that thing dosed you with.” Zoey looked around and tried to focus her swimming, blurry vision. At length, she saw the hand on her collar become an arm, which became her sister Chloe.
“Eve?” she croaked weakly. She could not believe how thirsty and sore she was. She was in one of her tribe’s mud huts, and even the light coming through the door behind her was enough to make her temples throb. She was covered in a thin blanket. Chloe sat on the end of the bed.
“Woke up a bit before you, and she’s fine. It was easier to get her out of her, uh, ‘cocoon’ than yours. That thing really did a number on you.” Chloe’s arm pulled back, and she let her sister sit up and rest on her shoulder.
The smaller wolf just tried to breathe, confused and thankful to be alive. “Last I know, in trees.” The words felt like sandpaper on her throat. Thinking them was even harder than speaking them.
Chloe handed her a small stone bowl full of water, which she lapped up greedily. “It was so dumb of us to split up, but everybody was worried about you, and Eve said she’d be okay alone, so that’s what we did. If a larger group had gone in where she had, none of this would have happened.”
Chloe looked around the room as her sister drank, but Zoey tapped her sister on the shoulder, which got her attention. Zoey held up her hand and waved it. Go on. “Oh, right, what actually happened was that you and Eve got cocooned and bitten by the big spider, then hidden away in the trees.”
“The queen,” said Zoey, suppressing a shudder.
“Is that what you called it? Close enough, I guess. It was big and nasty, but we outnumbered it. Once we’d driven off it and a bunch of the smaller ones, we used torches, knives, and more of that paste to get you and Eve free.”
“Then what?”
“We burnt the whole grove down. Mom didn’t want to at first, but after she saw you, she snapped.” Chloe looked at her sister and saw her stunned face. “Oh, Mom says it’ll grow back stronger, so don’t worry about that. It just means we need to find other places to hunt until it does.”
Zoey nodded. She finished the water and rested her head on Chloe’s shoulder. The two of them sat there for a minute, enjoying each others’ company. “So,” Zoey croaked, “that was pretty stupid of me, wasn’t it?”
“Yes it was so stupid!” Chloe threw up her arms before crushing her sister in a hug. “You could have died! Or worse!”
“Ackptht.”
“I am never letting you do that again, and if you do, you’ll wish a spider got to you instead of me!” Chloe’s loving tone betrayed her words, though, and the two were giggling by the time she finished.
“Okay, but I should tell you I don’t need a pet tarantula after this. I’m not obsessed like some people I know.”
Chloe’s cheeks turned beet red and her ears folded back. “You are so lucky you nearly died so I can’t beat the fur off of you.”
“Why do it yourself? Get your snake boyfriend to do it.”
“That was one time!”
“Wouldn’t it technically be twice? Snakes have two—”
“That’s it!”
Outside, Trinity and Eve listened as the hut’s interior was redecorated by two angry she-wolves. “Are you sure they should be doing this?” Eve asked.
Trinity chuckled. “It’s just how they are. If Zoey’s strong enough to mouth off, she’s strong enough to get her mouth smacked off.” She turned back and began walking to the main village. “Anyway, you’re lodging with them until you both recover. Have fun!”
“Right . . .” Eve looked back to the hut and the growls coming from inside it. Surviving a spider was one thing, but these two would be a real challenge. Just my luck, she thought before dodging a bowl and stepping into her new home.