The Spider - A Child Of Two Worlds

Prologue

Authors note: All texts are originally written in german. The original german version can be found on here as well under the title „Die Spinne - Söhne der Schatten".
Translations were made with the help of Deepl.com. I appreciate any help and feedback, especially regarding translation mistakes and odd phrasing.

Prologue

Quiet were the footsteps on the damp moss, their rhythm in tune with the hum of the small procession moving through the night on its way to desecrate a sanctuary.
Visese shuddered as his breath faded into the haze, the mist creeping into the folds of his dark robe with deathly cold fingers. And he also shuddered at the thought of what might await him if his participation in tonight's events should reach the wrong ears.
It seemed an infinitely distant day to him when the priests of Godsheim had chosen him as their spy, sent out to infiltrate the separatists who, according to rumour, were hiding in the shrine of Goronde and mocking the name of the Mother Goddess. They had sent him, unaware that Visese himself was secretly a sceptic of the kindness of Goronde.
He had kept this dangerous secret locked away in his heart for a long time, knowing full well how non-believers were treated. He would never have dared to touch the secret sigil of the separatists, as worn by the others in the procession, for if he already knew about the sigil, it was by no means secret enough. Until tonight, he had not been a dissenter, but merely someone who had questioned things that were taken for granted.
He endured his doubts alone, confiding his true thoughts to no one. Not even when he was sent to spy and joined these possibly like-minded people, whose existence he had not been entirely convinced of until this very evening. One of the men had whispered to him in the shadows within the temple walls. In other words, despite his caution, they had found him before he could find them and he had been invited to take part in this very special ceremony, however dangerous it might be for everyone involved.
Well, he could still pretend to have gathered evidence to justify his participation in the shameful rite if the worst came to the worst. But in truth, he simply wanted to see it with his own eyes, to finally find out what the alternative to Godsheim's strict law had to offer and where the journey of a sceptic would lead.

There were five of them, the mysterious ones in the dark. Visese, two other men of the separatists and their leader Namahis with her newborn son in her arms. The child was still and motionless; more than once Visese was overcome by the uneasy feeling that he had stopped breathing, perhaps to escape what lay ahead.
The lantern, darkened with a cloth to provide only the barest light, finally illuminated the gate to the cave a few yards ahead of them.
No one spoke a word, only the eerie humming did not stop for a moment as one by one they passed through the stone archway and into the sanctuary.
Visese didn't know whether the dampness of the foggy night or the cold sweat had soaked his robes, but he was freezing and everything seemed clammy and cold. It was damp in the cave too, the light from the lantern flickering on the salt of the rough-hewn walls. It smelled strange, stuffy and unpleasant.
He had already received his instructions before setting off and took his place in the centre of the cave, surrounded by the others. They did not exchange a word, but the humming had changed to a kind of monotonous chant, strange words of elvish origin that were as unfamiliar to Visese as they were frightening. His companions were all elves and he still wondered why they had allowed him, the only human, to attend the rite.
Namahis was the highest priestess of the Mother Goddess, usually the leader of the faithful, master of midwives and dressed in light blue robes, she led the law-abiding rites and prayers. How bizarre it was to now see her, of all people, in the black robes of blasphemy, her hair unveiled and smiling enchantingly, but with an expression of sinister joy in her eyes and a ritual dagger in her hands. She had laid the frail, motionless boy on the sacrificial stone around which they had gathered and was now spreading her arms.
Visese was now sweating with fear. He wasn't sure if he was ready to see what was about to happen. There had been no mention of harming the child! New doubts arose in his heart. Should he charge at the elf? Should he wrest the dagger from her hands and flee into the darkness with the boy? And yet, he didn't do it. After all, he couldn't keep doubting and doubting and never find an answer. He had to stay and see where it led.
His trembling body was also paralysed by now and, unnoticed, he had begun to murmur the unknown words that had been whispered to him as if guided by a foreign power, the chanting of which was increasingly clouding his mind. The chant seemed to bounce off the salt walls, filling the cave as an endlessly repeated echo, while Namahis waved the dagger and spoke her own litany over the echo with her eyes closed.
All at once, the room was filled with firelight. Visese flinched, and the chanting had stopped abruptly. Startled, his gaze shot around the confined space, but no source of the light revealed itself to him. The elves now swayed silently to the rhythm of the flickering light and Visese swayed with them involuntarily.
Namahis now held the dagger with both hands, ready to strike, but instead of bringing it down on her son, she thrust it upwards with a powerful movement, as if she were ramming it into an invisible obstacle above the sacrificial stone. And indeed, the flashing blade seemed to disappear into the air, travelling into nothingness, and when she pulled the dagger back again with a jerk, an unreality that Visese had never seen before welled up out of the void. It was simultaneously dark shadow and glistening light and neither. It had strange shapes and was shapeless, terrible and beautiful. It faded and grew at the same time and Visese blinked hard in a vain attempt to grasp what he was seeing, to comprehend it, but it was as real and false as a dream that still hung like a veil before his eyes but would not go away.
The dagger had torn a hole that was slowly widening and the ghostly glow of fire in the cave now seemed to have a source, even though it had only appeared after it did. The elven magic surpassed even the poor spy's wildest imagination in its incomprehensibility.
At last, Namahis no longer spoke the strange elven language.
"Behold, the Otherworld, that lies beside ours, the sister of reality, its twin and its mirror, and as a mirror, our window to it shall be manifested. Look inside, human," she continued suddenly, turning to Visese. "Look inside, witness shadows and light, the spirits that are true. Let your heart forget the tales of Goronde and other idols, for they are nothing but foolish attempts by self-proclaimed wisemen to grasp the incomprehensible greatness of nature. Look into the Sister World that we elves have sought for millennia, from which our first souls were born and for which we yearn. Look inside and listen, for you are hearing the voices of angels."
Visese looked and listened. Yes, it was a mirror, like a small, shimmering pond, floating upside down in the room, reflecting the silent child lying beneath it. And Visese heard whispers, like a soft wind, a tickling in his mind, as if shimmering thoughts were crawling through his ears into his head. He barely noticed that Namahis had begun to undress.
Many a man would have brawled to marvel at the nakedness of the elven priestess, but Visese was too enchanted by the mirror, which rippled gently like water in a soft breeze. Namahis let the last of the cloth slide to the floor and stepped close to her child. Her swollen breasts and soft, shapeless abdomen bore witness to the recent birth; indeed, drops of blood had even stained the salt between her bare feet. Nevertheless, or perhaps precisely because of her maternal figure, the elven men regarded her body with great reverence and delight before turning their attention back to the floating mirror.
Namahis had begun to speak to it again in elven words. Visese felt as if the whisper was answering her, that the priestess and the mirror were having some kind of dialogue.
"I feel your presence, shadow being," one of the elven men whispered. "We have come to offer this child to your favour. Infuse his soul with your power and grant him a bond with your world of shadow and light. Accept this boy as a link between our worlds, a sign of our alliance."
Namahis raised the dagger again and cradled the blade in her hand so that the glow of fire shimmered on it.
"The angel has granted us its hearing. The shadow being takes a liking to my son, for he is already a child of two worlds, half elf half human. It is a being of shadow and light that will perform his baptism. It requests a body," she said calmly.
Three pairs of eyes suddenly turned to Visese and, as if he had dipped his head in ice water, he suddenly awoke from his trance.
"Come Visese, it is time to make your contribution to this sacred alliance."
The men were smaller than him, delicate and agile like all elves but with unexpected strength.
They seized him before he could take a step towards the exit.
"Stop!" he shouted in horror. "There was never any talk of this! A baptism! You told me a baptism!"
"Be quiet, human. Consider it penance, for we know who sent you into our midst," Namahis said calmly, turning her gaze back to the mirror. "And take comfort, for your sacrifice will change this world. And you would have faded away soon anyway, as all mortals do."
"Don't! No!" Visese screamed now, squirming in the elves' iron grip. "Are you mad, I don't want to die!"
"What does it matter when it happens? It's your fate already, my dear. You humans are the perfect sacrifices," Namahis stated, unimpressed by the human man's panic. "Consider yourself lucky, because our friend only wants your flesh. Your soul will migrate to the next world, as it does for all mortals. You will have long left your body by the time the shadow beings use it."
Visese was now kicking and screaming like a child, yes, like the poor infant on the cold sacrificial stone should have done. But the child was not the offering, he, Visese, was. Planned from the beginning, those filthy elves! He hadn't wanted to believe it, had dismissed it as the gossip of small-minded peasants. That the elves were different and evil, that they were so cruel, so untouched by the sad fate of mortals. He hadn't wanted to believe the gossip was true, of blasphemous necromancers who really only saw humans as short-lived creatures, but now these smug pointy-ears pushed him at the feet of their high priestess like a goat to the slaughter.
Visese screamed and kicked at the elf with his boots. He had been right to doubt the gods. Oh Parakur, oh Goronde! If you existed, you would not have allowed this devilry! He had not survived the Coast War and the Battle of Kelassba only to die at the damned baptism of a little child!
The priestess suddenly turned and the elven men too shifted their attention to the sacrificial stone, for the child had finally begun to whimper. Visese continued to squirm, but he stopped screaming when Namahis lowered the dagger and smiled.
Even at that moment, Visese was not unaffected by the sweetness of the child's voice, which rang through all the horror like a sigh of hope. Had life finally returned to the child?
He weakly lifted his skinny arms, his lament becoming one with the whispering of the mirror above him. His little fingers almost touched those of his reflection.
"I sense another presence," Namahis whispered, and Visese saw that she was not actually smiling at her son, but at the cursed mirror, whose surface was beginning to quiver. The whisper was joined by a hiss, a cold snarl and the child began to cry horribly, his face red and contorted with despair, fear, perhaps even pain, but Namahis only smiled wider and she reached out to the mirror.
A storm now raged in its surface, swirls of shadows that had torn apart the infant's reflection and an apparition took its place. It was terrible and sinister, shapeless and yet figurative, it faded and yet seemed to grow and it approached them, very close to the mirror and looked at them. It had a face and yet no face, its shape was confusing and impossible to grasp. One moment she was a spider with long black legs, the next a woman with a pale, horrible face, the look of her staring eyes red and glowing and she opened her black mouth and spider legs sprang out and Namahis laughed and held out her hand and to Visese's horror a pale hand emerged from the mirror and stretched out towards Namahis, its nasty long fingers about to grab the priestess.
Visese pulled away with all his strength, this time successfully, and made a leap, he didn't know why, but not to the exit of the cave, but to the sacrificial stone. Without thinking, roughly and without caution, he grabbed the screaming child, tore him from the stone by his swaddling clothes and pulled him close before his feet carried him out of the cave at a sprint.
Screams exploded from behind him, first from the elven men, then loud, resounding and horribly drowned out by Namahis, a death cry, echoing endlessly from the salt of the desecrated sanctuary. Acrid, black smoke billowed up behind Visese, spewed out with him from the maw of the cave, and he chased into the forest, into the sheltering shadows, the boy clutched to his chest, and he ran and ran in madness through thorns and branches, away from here, blinded by horror and knowing in his heart that Namahis and the men had met their deaths, and yet he ran, clutching the child to him so that the phantom's dreadful fingers could not grasp him and drag him into the mirror of hell.
So this was the alternative to Godsheim and it was where a doubter's journey led. Visese's faith in Goronde and the other benevolent idols had not returned, for he was a man of doubt, but he believed what he saw with his own eyes and he knew that today he had caught a glimpse of hell.