Sangkara - The Garden 5, The Serpent and the Spider

I would like to post link trees, where ever you may feel most comfortable reading this chapter.
https://www.pixiv.net/novel/show.php?id=13216785

http://www.hentai-foundry.com/stories/user/ichormongrel/39946/Sangkara---Empress-of-Blood/113488/Chapter-10/The-Garden-5-The-Serpent-and-Spider

https://www.deviantart.com/ichormongrel/art/Sangkara-The-Garden-5-Serpent-and-Spider-846829815

Otherwise, enjoy the story.

Nearly all Sangkara’s life she had been awoken by one thing, one annoying thing, the writhing, twitching, fluttering, and churning of her heart. Often her atria would kiss and tickle her breasts in such a minute way, or her ventricles would twist and pound hard enough it almost felt as though she were being punched by the throbbing. She was extremely sensitive and ornery when she was tired for many reasons, but she would often do what she could to quiet her heart like a mother to their child. If she were smart about it while standing or laying on her back she could hold her heart closely enough in her chest that it appeared like little more than a lump of soft, pink flesh, almost unnoticeable to herself and others and placid enough at home within her that she could sleep. Feeling her gentle pulse and the rocking of her heart this way made her feel almost normal. Almost. There were times though that her lungs or diaphragm would press her heart almost completely out of her, nearly to the hilt, and exposed in this way, she and it were easily agitated. Her relationship with her body this way was always in flux. Rarely did she feel whole. Sometimes it felt as though her heart were angrily trying to be rid of her, to tear out from her. Other times it felt cold and desperately trying to crawl and beat on her chest to be let back in. 

It was in this way, like so many other times before, that Sangkara was awoken, her heart both throbbing to be free and ramming to be let back in. Instinctively, she held her hand close to her chest and nestled with her fragile organ a moment, letting the looping currents of warmth arc within her in a fetal position. A dull, pulsating pain returned to her senses at her touch. As her mind focused on it, the feeling was somewhat more acute, a stinging pain agitated by every contraction. She cracked her blurred eyes open. It was painful, even in this low light near darkness. She felt only the light of dusk in this dreary, humid place.

She rested her pained heart in the palm of her hand to look at it. It weakly rippled there, almost as if it were limping along with her. Even in her blurred vision, she could see that almost the entire lower third of her heart was bruised. Growing up this way, examining herself, she had gotten used to observing her coronary arteries in great detail. She was very well aware that if even one of them broke she could die. This was the only time her heart had ever been bruised, but the bleeding didn’t appear to be spreading. She didn’t know if she should be relieved or not, wondering only if this were something that could even heal. Perhaps she had awoken now only to witness her inevitable death. 

Slowly, carefully, she began to feel out the rest of her state and her surroundings. Everything ached, fused together by a stiff, throbbing soreness and the raw, exposed nerves of so many cuts. 

Her left arm had been pinned all this time in shooting pain. The shaft of the arrow that hit her, it seemed, had slipped between bone and bicep, then had driven itself into her rib just meeting her breast. From her running and subsequent fall, the arrow had broken, with the broken shaft and fletching still piercing through her arm, and the independent arrowhead and shaft still embedded in her torso. For now, they would be left until she could find better light. They also did not appear to be bleeding, at least not badly.

In her abdomen though, she could feel a deep, cutting sensation like an open wound. Perhaps she really was dying. Upon shifting so she could feel, she realized she was laying in a wet puddle. 

Suddenly, she was alert she could still be bleeding. All she could think was that she was bleeding. Frantically she searched for the wound, then had an annoyed idea. She stopped looking and instead wiped her fingers across her inner thighs. They were soaking. She pulled them up to look at them, dejected, then tasted it. She had gotten her period.

She nearly laughed with relief at the feeling, but all she managed was a half-hearted sigh. Since she had become a woman, it had not been uncommon for her to have such dreams, or to get her period as she slept and awaken to laying in it. However, in a position of being owned as property, where her value had been tied to such a vacuous thing as virginity, she had been too stressed to ovulate. However, the windfall of release in her womb now felt welcome. Though under more stress than she had ever been, the Garden was indeed a fertile place.

She began to look about at her surroundings. This place smelt rich in minerals, that kind of wet stone smell, but mixed with a heavy coating of cave mildew. She lay on a beach inside of some cavern. No doubt the Garden was riddled with passages and caves like these, so much volcanic stone embroiled in a constant war with the rivers that accumulated here in the caldera. The chamber was almost completely dark, but she knew there was a pool in front of her because trace dripping could be heard on its surface, the kind of errant, diasporic drips from hanging stalactites. On the far side, the cave wall hung like a curtain over the pool’s surface, only just meeting it for the erosion of a silent current had long ago eaten it away. Some bleak glow, perhaps of daylight, shone through the water on the far side of that stone wall, through a forest of choking weeds. Beyond that, Sangkara could see little else, for the darkness consumed all. 

The gentle echoes of dripping painted the cavern in ways light could not tell, running across the edges of the dome she was under. But there was more information in the echoes than she was trained enough to understand. The sound was swallowed by recesses and tunnels it did not return from. She knew passages like these could extend for miles, and she shuddered to think of choosing one long way and being lost forever. She might have only one chance to choose the right direction toward her freedom. All other directions could spell death.

Piecing together how she had gotten here was now a matter of survival. She remembered little after falling, only the agony she felt. Perhaps she owed her life to someone who had brought her here. Perhaps the rivers and swamps had dumped her here by their natural currents. There was little way of knowing, but if she had gotten here, she could get out. If she did not know where she was in the Garden it was better to assume she was in danger.

Wide-eyed, Sangkara took great care to disturb nothing of this den she was in. Though she dreaded disturbing the pool or exposing herself in the light by the weeds, she had no other choice.

Her bleeding arm holding her hand on her heart, she slipped into the cold water, taking care not to make a single sound. Shortly after leaving the small beach she had awoken on, she could feel no bottom to the pool, only the ghostly strands of the overcrowded plants she needed to brush aside to swim. She did what she could to quiet her mind and her fears, but her imagination ran wild with all of the things that could have been lurking just beneath her. 

She made for the light she could see glowing from beneath the water on the far side of the dome she was under. If anything went wrong, she knew she would have to return to this dome and its air, but she had to try. 

She drew in one last deep breath before submerging beneath the curtain of stone, feeling it with her hand as a guide to return. She could see almost nothing through the thick underwater forest of submerged weeds, not even the source of the glow she had been searching for. Though she used all of her senses, she might as well have been cave diving blind. With her hand, she searched the stone ceiling above her for even one pocket of air, at least enough to gather her thoughts and consider if she could keep going or would have to turn back, but she inched ever closer to a point of no return. Without hesitation, she turned back knowing she could return to the flooded cavern she had found herself in. This could not have been the way out.

Just as she looked back into the inky forest of weeds she noticed something else had disturbed the water behind her. A black shape like the finned tail of a serpent slipped away into the darkness below like a ribbon, fanning water behind it. There was no mistaking it. It was a snake the width of a human. Sangkara could not know its length in great detail from the sight of the tail, but she had seen enough pythons and boas to know that it could have reached thirty feet or more with such a width.

Naked, alone in the dark, defenseless, Sangkara now knew returning to the cavern was out of the question. She doubled back into unknown territory, ripping and tearing through the weeds to gain distance from whatever she had just seen. It did not matter that her torso was being cut by the arrowhead still in it or that her left arm was impaled. She fought through the pain to swim harder and harder. Frantically, she searched for a single pocket of air. Her bruised heart felt as though it might split open, charging to meet Sangkara’s demands and fight her fears, and unable to feed itself with oxygen. 

In a desperate moment, she brushed across a single palm-sized bubble with her hand against the ceiling. She kissed the stone and sucked in whatever she could before kicking off deeper into the darkness. No matter what lurked there, it would be better to take her chances than to remain exposed and she needed something to defend herself. She descended into a depth of icy blackness so deep she could feel her ears aching, her lungs squeezing, her heart shuddering as though death itself held it in its palm.

She could feel her enemy encircling her. The tangling weeds parted revealing only portals deeper into darkness and despair. Locked away within the tangling mess were the bones of other poor souls that had been lured into this death trap. 

Suddenly, Sangkara grabbed onto something with her right hand that was not leaf or root. It cut her like the fang of some animal, but rather than recoil she thrust her hand around it and gripped it tightly, the jagged edges of its teeth embedding themselves in the palm of her hand. 

With fury, she wrenched her bleeding hand out of the hole with whatever she had found and slashed it behind her, clear-cutting whatever weeds were there in a single arc of her arm. Glowing eyes and flashing fangs met her fury with a shriek and whatever creature they belonged to whipped away in a cloud of black ink, its massive body trailing behind it. 

Her muscles rent, her heart thrashing, Sangkara did not stay behind to catch even a single glimpse of her attacker. She kicked on, gripping her survival weapon tighter and tighter. 

Through the forest, she could see what appeared to be a single source of flickering light, pale as the moon in the ceiling. Kicking and pulling, Sangkara struggled to the top with all of her strength and speed. 

She shot from the water, throwing herself onto the lip of a well, and clawed her way out of the water gasping for air. Immediately she held her hand and her eyes to threaten the well she had just emerged from, waiting for her black blooded enemy to return. All she could hear was her heart booming, echoing off of stone and water. It sputtered irregularly, ready to give out only a moment after she had filled her lungs with fresh air. She held it close to her like a mother and child as she could feel her blackened arteries return to their vibrancy. 

She watched the black depths of the well for any sign of movement, any reason to ambush, but the well remained silent. After a while, her muscles’ call to rest finally won and she fell on her back in the bowl of the well she lay in, exhausted, just breathing to her heart’s content. Finally, she remembered the pain in her palm and she released what she had taken from the bed of weeds. It clattered on the floor she lay on with a distinct, glassy clang. Her hand stung and shook with the large gash it had left. Strangely, in a moment where her entire body hurt, as she lay there with her outstretched arm, the warm blood trailing down it was soothing.

Upon closer observation, Sangkara realized that what she had used to defend herself was a small, jagged fragment of obsidian. So simple and common were these stones in Andrala that they had been a way of life, but this one seemed different. This one had been cracked by some natural formation into a long, jagged, curved teardrop or sabertooth fang. The tip was razor-sharp. Upon looking at it closer, Sangkara realized it would have passed cleanly through her hand without trouble had she gripped anywhere else. There was some kind of inclusion trapped within the stone, embedded in a fault, but it was too dark for her to make sense of it. 

She noticed that in pulling herself ashore of this well, she had apparently collected some invisible threads of spider silk draped across her body, strung with dew like diamonds. As she peeled them off of herself, somewhat annoyed, she observed they pervaded the halls of the cavern she was in. Besides the sharp, metallic smell of her own blood, the semi-natural cave she found herself in was fragrant and lovely. It wreaked of fresh earth, the kind of sweet, softly rotting, fertile soil that fed moss, herbs, and mushrooms. Practically everything was covered in a humid dew, beading up on the local flora like diamonds. She looked up toward a break in the cavern ceiling some fifty feet above her. It was a port in a domed ceiling choked by a natural chandelier of vines and ivy. This natural chandelier devoured a stream of pale light leaving only a soft green glow to diffuse on the cave walls. What little cool green light there was illuminated a steady stream of rain which trickled heavily down into the well from which she had emerged. 

By this light playing with the prismatic water, she could make out more of her surroundings. She stood next to the embedded well in the center of what seemed to be a circular chamber. The floor here had nearly a foot of water standing within it, all streaming over the lip of the bowl that housed the well. Megalith upon megalith, draped in moss, mushrooms, and braided spider-silk, stood like tree pillars in a crossed array as far back as she could see, all standing in this great pool of water facing the well. 

It was a cistern, an ancient and ruined cistern, carved in the very shell of the volcano. Perhaps at one time, this was all a natural volcanic sill filled with lakes of hot magma that had drained once a new vent had formed. The ceiling had perhaps caved in creating this natural cenote, and the first people who came to live here turned it into a cistern of some kind to collect the rainwater. Some primitive peoples had quarried great stones just to place them here, fortifying this natural wonder.

By the light of the natural port above her, Sangkara began to explore the great megaliths surrounding her. The flooded floor here held also a natural black silt, the accumulated dust, dirt, and soil of millennia trickling in from the open port. The megaliths must have been hundreds of tons, standing stories high, bearing no signs of chiseling or carving save for the thousands of years of erosion at their feet from the floor of the cistern flooding and draining like the tides. Somehow they had been placed here with such sophistication and precision. 

On each of them were crudely painted dramas from a long-forgotten mythology of bloodshed and war, all entombed within centuries of moss, mushrooms, and webs. Ash and blood composed the pigments to rugged scenes of sex and war that dwarfed all of known history. Humbling parietal glyphs depicted fields of skulls and blood, people impaled and crucified on trees, and cannibalistic orgies belonging to dragons and demons and twisted beasts. All of their hieroglyphs were framed by the thick red lines of rain and rivers of blood drawn down to the floor.

One such mural gripped Sangkara unlike the others, emblazoned by fire, skulls, and blood. It was a kind of mandala or taijitu in this ancient place, one of many upon the stones. Its center primacy was given to a scarlet red heart, trailing with many veins and arteries like the roots of a tree spreading out in all directions. They became borders weaving into streaming rivers of blood to all edges of the pillar, housing a kind of creation myth. Surrounding the heart was a great, hermaphroditic black dragon painted with charcoal and the poison black and purple ink of lotus flowers. It wept and nursed tears and milk, but Sangkara could not unsee how it pierced its own breast to relieve the blood of its own heart. She could feel the pain in her own chest just by looking at it. The tears, milk, and blood came down on the centerpiece, and carnage flourished from it like the petals of a flower.

It was at that moment Sangkara noticed some shifting shadow in the corner of her eye. She had taken care not to disturb anything nor make a sound, but she had always remained ready to fight. She had assumed it was the serpent trying to flank her, but instead, she was met with a greater surprise. 

Striding toward her like a ghost was an alien sight. Though she initially appeared in the shadows as a woman riding a giant spider, the truth revealed was far more disturbing. She was some taurian abomination between a giant spider and a woman, but her anatomy was graceful and complex. Though womanly, her figure was slender, petite, and youthful, clearly lending itself to her arachnid nature. Across her forehead and temples, she bore a dazzling and hypnotic gaze of black eyes that resembled both humans and spiders in their appearance. Where the woman’s waist ended, a human-sized spider body began, beginning with two great mandibles where her human legs would have been. She was both monster and human. She was an arachne.

She moved with frightening grace and silence, her legs in such a great concert that she appeared as if to glide. She was as fair as a porcelain doll, pristine and white as snow. Her hair was as dark as the night, blacker even than the stony hide of her spider carapace, and concealing the full number of her eyes. The nails of her hands were long, spindling, lethal needles. She wore only charms and amulets draped across her hair, neck, body, and many legs, the trappings of a medicine woman of her craft. Strangely, she bore the markings of a red priestess, the extremities of her limbs painted with blood-dyed ochre and the ancient markings of a witch painted over her hide. 

Sangkara knew not what to do, but she stood her ground. The spider-woman approached her less like an enemy and more like a piece in an art gallery, with intrigue and wonder. Perhaps it was the kind of wonder Sangkara might have had were she not so threatened, but there was another layer to it as well. There was a dead, predator-like, animal gaze to the arachne, the kind of dead stare an animal makes when it wonders if it can eat you, concealing all relatable expression.

The arachne lingered there a moment, silent for far too long, staring, mesmerized by Sangkara. It was enough to unnerve her. Though her eyes were completely black and it was impossible to know what precisely they were staring at, Sangkara couldn’t help but feel they were each burning a hole in her chest and staring at the mechanism of her life, limping and injured as it was. If she wasn’t going to move, Sangkara would have to try.

“If killing or eating me is all you desire,” she said with a growl, “then let’s stop wasting time.”

The awkward moment passed as the arachne blinked and her gaze instead fixated on meeting Sangkara’s eyes.

“I was only curious,” the monster-girl said with a sense of child-like wonder, “I have never seen something like you in the Garden before. You are unlike the others.” 

By now Sangkara was used to being told how she didn’t belong anywhere, but she hated hearing it most of all here in the Garden.

“And yet I’m here.”

“You are, and not by chance,” the arachne said, perhaps detecting Sangkara’s defensiveness. “I do not speak of your weakness, huntress. I speak of your strengths.” She entreated her, “You can lay down your weapon, fair huntress. I am not your enemy.” 

Sangkara didn’t know what to trust anymore. She had relied on nothing but her own two hands for her survival all this time, even before the Garden. What’s more, she was not used to anyone addressing her for conversation. Remaining on guard and hostile had become a comfortable state for her.

Unable to rest the stone she held, Sangkara heard a hissing noise from the well. At first, she felt vindicated that it was a trick, ready to defend herself, but instead, she realized the pained noises and moaning were just cries for help. 

Pulling herself from the well was a pale woman, her human torso ending at her hips and flowing into the long, massive, slender body of a dark-green serpent or eel. Her shoulder-length hair and shining scales were the color of black jade. Her eyes were beautiful amber jewels, slitted like those of a serpent. 

She was distraught and bleeding a dark, nearly black blood from a wound Sangkara had caused her across her chest and shoulder. The lamia was gasping in exasperation from both her mouth and an array of gills like a shark’s which ran down her ribs. Shaken by shock and trauma, Sang could see the lamia’s soft tissue pulsing inside her gills.

Sangkara recognized then this was the same lamia she had seen before near the spring and the red taproot. She had been badly wounded by Sangkara’s own blade, her ink-like blood pouring from her arm at the shoulder. She held out her hand as the arachne went to her aid.

“Come no closer,” the arachne warned as she approached the lamia. “Marazca’s blood is toxic to you.” The arachne waded towards the lamia and leaned over to ease her suffering with a single touch of her hand. They embraced together and kissed each other longingly.

“Your arm is strong and true, huntress,” came the sharp voice of the lamia. “This is a deep wound.”

“Do not worry,” the arachne assured her, “it will heal.”

“Don’t worry?” Sang said somewhat defensively, “This is the second time I have been attacked by you!” she said, addressing the lamia.

The arachne laughed softly, “Strange, before your first encounter I had never known Marazca to let any of the others live. But after your first meeting, she was actually the one to tell me about you. You are the one from my dreams.” Sangkara took on a look of disbelief. The arachne smiled, “After all you have seen, is that so hard to believe?”

“It’s not that,” Sangkara said. With reluctance, she admitted, “I just don’t know why anyone would want me to live.” Something in her wanted them to be her enemies. Something in her just needed to keep fighting for fear that if she didn’t she might die.

The arachne and the lamia looked to each other and the lamia assured her lover before leaving her embrace.

“I know what it is like to be an outcast,” the lamia professed. “I know too what it is to be lost--”

“You don’t know anything about me. I don’t even know who you are.”

“I am Nephirith of the Lotus,” the arachne declared first, “Disciple of the Blind Mother and Daughter of Blood as you are, sister.”

“I am Marazca of the Abyss,” the lamia followed her lover. “Fang of the Black Waves and Daughter of Blood as you are, sister.”

Unable to fight any longer, Sangkara dropped her weapon with tears in her eyes, her hand all but numb from the pain, her whole body aching. She was so tired. Exhausted, she fell to her knees.

Cautiously, Nephirith came to her aid. 

“You are safe, huntress,” she said before embracing her and holding her close.

Sangkara quietly cried herself to sleep in her arms.