bethen avilla ; the circle mage (bethe) wrote in thedas,
It was as if the thought he was prepared to vocalize had actually summoned the beasts. Bethen barely had time to process his sentence before they were descended upon by even more horrendous sets of hairy limbs; she somehow managed to stifle a yelp, instead gulping down air as her head craned up to see the spiders. She stepped out of the way and found her back pressed up against the cave wall, two sets of dazed dark eyes staring up at her. It made her briefly wish she hadn't given up her staff, as she had no intention of stomping them to death with her boots, and she was reluctant to continue burning through her mana when they were still so far from their exit.
Still, she had little choice but to try to hit them with something. Beth brought her hands up as she silently picked out the spell from her memory, thrusting both palms outward to blast one of the spiders with a bright bolt of light. The arcane energy forced it reeling backwards and upended. Its legs continues to twitch madly in the air for a few seconds, but it seemed unable to right itself before it stopped moving altogether. "We need to keep going forward," she said firmly, already striding briskly into the darkness in spite of the apprehension she'd held only a minute earlier. After all, they weren't any safer staying where they'd been than if they'd forged ahead.
The apprentice could hardly see ahead of her, if not just because the torches had been snuffed out, then also because of the fine webbing that stretched across the opening in the rock. Translucent strands clung to her blue sleeve and her dark hair as she tried to brush it out of the way. She didn't look back to see whether or not Constans was still close behind her, and couldn't exactly discern his footsteps from the scurrying and trilling noises that the spiders were making from what seemed to be all directions.
Warm orange hues bled into the navy of the dim area in the short stretch before her, indicating the end of this particular tunnel. They were getting closer to their escape, she could feel it. Her anxious drive to get to the end of this inadvertent adventure nearly blinded her to the thick limbs that were crawling their way over the top of a boulder in front of her. Beth just narrowly managed to skid to a stop and throw her empty hands up once again, repeating the same frost spell that had worked on the mother spider. A burst of cold air surrounded the encroaching creature and ice rooted the arachnid in place as she began to summon a secondary spell, this time tapping into the element that surrounded them. A sizable rock came barreling forward, bashing the frozen creature's head in.
What she failed to notice during her brief moment of victory was the second spider that surged from the alcove to her right, the deep groove in the corridor curtained by an even thicker layer of silken weave. Suddenly it was upon her, a spray of web netting her into position, the weight of a heavy limb the size of both her legs bringing her tumbling down to the dirt floor. She let out a scream.