Previously in HERALDS…

At the edge of the world, beyond the natural laws of time and space, the enigmatic Delphi consults her mystic Oracle at the behest of the sinister Lady Mandarin, Mistress of the Ten Rings.

Lady Mandarin seeks to learn the identity of the five women who will become her Heralds in the near future, but for reasons unknown Delphi instead reveals six Heralds: The Wasp, The Black Panther, Spitfire, Clea, Namora and a young Jotunheim frost giantess named Skadi. Before Delphi can learn more, her life is tragically extinguished byAmora The Enchantress, who doesn’t take kindly to being spied upon – and who correctly perceives the Mistress of the Rings as a threat to all existence.

Witnessing these events via a series of indistinct visions, Clea travels to the snowy wastes of an other-dimensional realm known as The White, inadvertently transporting her companions along with her. But The White is lair to a terrible threat – the vampiric ice maidens sometimes called the Yuki-Onna are a savage breed, and they proceed to ravage the disoriented Heralds, leaving them defeated and bloody with wounds that will surely prove fatal… unless a mysterious observer, the Bride of Nine Spiders, can somehow come to their aid.

Meanwhile: Years ago, scientist Tamara Hashioka was a member of a SHIELD squad tasked with subduing the monstrous rampages of the gigantic Godzilla. Now Tamara lives near London with her seven-year-old daughter Suki, a budding genius, and the pair recently aided the Heralds when Godzilla came marching up the River Thames, threatening England’s capital. Suki believed this would be the end of her adventures… but that may not necessarily be so!

THE WHITE

Part IV: That The Spiders Wove To Hide Blushes Of The Sylvan Bride

By Meriades Rai

“Lights out now, Suki! You’ve got school in the morning…”

Seven-year-old Suki Hashioka acknowledged her mother’s distant voice with a non-committal grunt and continued reading her New Scientist magazine. Snuggled down among numerous pillows beneath an outrageously pink duvet, by the light of a bedside lamp decorated with fairies, Suki seemed like an ordinary girl but in truth she was anything but; she was actually a genius, just like her mama, with a particular interest in futuristic engineering. The article she was currently re-reading for the fourth time was about a potential new app for the StarkPAD that would apparently allow regular folks the opportunity to view the geological particulars of distant planets, render-mapped by Stark-Richards teledigital cosmic imagery tech. Which, of course, was awesome. Almost as awesome as Tony Stark himself.

There was a photograph of Tony attached to the article, one of him in a sky blue suit and aviator shades, taken out in sunny California. Suki would have drawn a big red heart around Tony’s face like some of the other girls in her class did with pictures of pop stars, if not for the fact that couldn’t bear to tarnish the man’s magnificence. Suki loved Tony Stark. When she was old enough she was going to marry him and they were going to have genius babies, and a dog with a special collar that allowed it to talk, like Dug from Up. And the fact that Tony would be, like, middle-aged then, that wouldn’t matter, because in ten years’ time someone was bound to have invented a new genetic modification app that made people younger, like DNA-based cosmetic surgery. Maybe Tony himself would invent it, just so he and Suki could be together.

Suki had it all worked out. The only problem, obviously, would be that pinch-faced little cutesy-harpy Virginia ‘Pepper’ Potts, Tony’s above-her-station business manager who the newspapers claimed–

“Suki! Lights out. Now.”

Her mama’s voice again, echoing up the stairs. Suki gave an exaggerated sigh and reluctantly put down her magazine. She never liked going to sleep because her brain was always buzzing with a dozen wonderful ideas at once, and she never seemed to dream about Tony as she hoped she would. She dreamed instead of monsters – mutated fish-people with sharp teeth, or gigantic lizards – or, sometimes, those pretty and colorful superhero ladies she’d recently met when one such giant reptile, Godzilla, had attacked London. She dreamed especially of the woman named Clea, with her silvery white hair and eyes the same shade of violet as her wonderful cloak. Unfortunately none of the dreams were particularly nice, but still. Better than fish-people. Clea was a sorceress, honest-to-gosh. She’d read once that Tony Stark hated magic but Suki couldn’t help but think it was kind of wonderful. And Clea–

“Whoa. What’s that?”

Suki’s eyes narrowed. In the midst of reaching out to switch off her bedside lamp she’d paused when noticing an unfamiliar book lying in the middle of the pink rug that covered most of her bedroom floor. She slipped out of bed and padded over, barefoot. It was the Big Book of Fairy Tales. Which was odd. Real life magic was one thing, but Suki hadn’t been interested in kids’ stories for a couple of years now, and she didn’t recognize this book anyway. So why was it in the middle of the floor…?

Suki picked up the book and it immediately fell open in her hands, the pages fluttering suddenly as if caught by a strange wind. Suki gasped. When the book finally settled it was open at one particular story.

Suki read the title and grimaced. Well, how horrible! Certainly not a story she’d ever heard before, and one that promised to give her yet more fuel for bad dreams. She should have just put the back aside… however, she felt compelled to read on regardless.

Well, okay then.

“The Bride Of Nine Spiders,” seven-year-old Suki Hashioka read, softly. “Once upon a time…”

“…no!”

Janet Van Dyne awoke with a start, recoiling from a gathering of dark and twisted shapes that had plagued her in her dreams. So many legs, so many eyes…! She coughed and shivered, then immediately sat up and looked around. Her immediate environment – a small, shadowy room with bare stone floor and walls – was unfamiliar, and decidedly unsettling. A cell? No, there was an archway in one of the walls, but without a door, locked or otherwise. So where was she? What was the last thing she remembered?

The Cat Lick Club in Manhattan, and a themed girl group named Honey Bee and the Hornettes, looking for trouble and exhibiting harmonics-based sonic powers as well as a certain amount of bling and a keen ear for melody. Honey Bee had said something about a mysterious benefactor, a woman in a gold mask called the Mistress of the Ten Rings… but no. There was something after that, wasn’t there? There was…

…snow. Trees. Ice. The White. An awful lot of White. And in the whiteness, hunting them…

“Vampires!” Jan breathed. “Goodness! Or something very much like vampires. I got bitten, and Shuri–”

She glanced down at her left leg, wincing as she recalled how one of the vampire maidens had clamped down on her thigh with seemingly delicate jaws that had nonetheless torn through cloth, flesh and bone as surely as a steel trap. But there was no blood now, and also no more pain than a strange memory. Where there should have been a wound there was, instead, a mass of odd silver threads that were cool and sticky to the touch. It reminded Jan of Spider-Man’s web fluid of all things, and that in turn roused a flicker of her nightmare, causing her to shiver. So many legs, so many eyes.

Her skin prickling, Janet rose unsteadily to her feet and stared apprehensively into the darkness beyond the archway. She hesitated. It didn’t feel like anything was looking back at her, but you could never be too careful.

“Will you walk into my parlor…?” she murmured to herself, before she’d even realized she’d said it. She scowled. Damn it, she’d always hated that poem…

“You’re not dead.”

Shuri snorted at Namora’s rather emotionless pronouncement, sitting up with a groan and gritting her teeth at a dull pain in her back. “Well, you don’t have to sound so disappointed,” she muttered. “There’s plenty of time yet.”

“It’s not disappointment, it’s curiosity. And consternation. One of those white witches all but eviscerated you from behind. You should be dead.”

“And yet I vaguely remember you reassuring me that I was going to be fine, as I lay there in a dark pool of my own blood,” Shuri said, dryly. “People as brutally honest as you and I, Atlantean, we make terrible liars…”

There was just the two of them in the room, a small, shadowy chamber carved from bare stone. There was an archway in the far wall. Namora was dressed in a swimsuit of shimmering turquoise and black scales, the aquamarine hue of her arms and legs bare, but she seemed untroubled by the cool temperature that now caused Shuri, dressed in blouse and drainpipe jeans and high heels, to shiver where she sat. She struggled to her feet and glanced back over her shoulder, anxious to see what state she’d been left in by the attack of the maidens in the White… but there were no visible wounds. Just a mass of sticky silver threads, spread about the general areas where those wounds shouldhave been.

“What is this stuff?” she snapped. “And what happened to us? How did we get here?”

“Questions I would hope our resident sorceress could answer,” Namora mused. “A shame that the enigmatic Clea is notable by her absence.”

Shuri snarled deep in her chest, her muscles cording and her senses now afire with a new rush of adrenalin. “One thing’s for sure. Whoever brought us here is going to regret–”

“Ohmygod, ohmygod! I never thought I’d be so glad to see anyone… especially you, Shuri!”

Shuri and Namora both glanced up warily as a sudden flicker of color and hum emerged from the darkness of the archway in the wall. It was Jan, the winsome Wasp, shrunken to the size of an insect and carried aloft on vibrating gossamer wings. She was buzzing frenetically back and forth, and Shuri had to restrain her instinctive urge to swat her.

Janet swept into the gloomy chamber and circled both of her companions’ heads before returning to the arch, beckoning with both hands. “Come on, what are you waiting for? An engraved invitation?” she cried, impatiently. “The others are in the next corridor along…”

“Clea isn’t with you?”

It was the first question Shuri asked of Jacqui and Skadi when she, Jan and Namora arrived at the next occupied room, a similarly bare stone affair lit only by eerie light filtering down through cracks in the ceiling. Jacqui shook her head, her expression rather vague behind her curtain of blonde hair. She couldn’t seem to meet anyone’s eyes, and she was wringing her hands fretfully.

Skadi, frost giantess from Jotunheim, had reduced her size from mythical to the mundane. When her friends had first encountered her in London the girl had been disguised as a bespectacled auctioneer’s assistant with black hair and vaguely oriental features, a complete contrast to the dazzling glacial hair and skin she possessed in her true form. Now human-sized once more she was different yet again, this time dusky haired and skinned with a definite South American complexion. It was most disconcerting, as Asgardian magic tended to be, and it betrayed the fact that Skadi at heart was little more than a highly confused, innocent young girl, even though she could grow taller than five double-decker buses stacked atop one another.

“I’d hoped the sorceress was with you,” Skadi said. Shuri and Namora exchanged glances.

“She was, at one point,” Namora confirmed. “But not any more. That bodes… ill. She was badly injured when last I saw her. Then again, that was also true of the Panther.”

“Are you okay, Jacqui?” Jan asked, noting the other woman’s demeanor. “You look–”

“They hunted me,” Jacqui whispered, her voice raw with emotion. “Like a bloody animal. I was going fast, top speed, setting the air alight… but they were so quick, so quiet, riding the wind. Those vampire women. It was like a game to them. They set on me like a pack of wolves, started ripping at me… thought they were going to kill me. Me. I didn’t actually think I could die…”

“You need to pull yourself together,” Shuri snapped. “You’re alright now, aren’t you? Same as the rest of us, Clea excepted.”

She pointed out the patches of sticky threading where Jacqui’s wounds presumably would have been visible. Jacqui scowled at the Wakandan, her eyes flaring.

“I’m sorry that we’re not all as straightforward as you,” she said. “I’m having trouble adjusting. But this is just all in a day’s work for you, isn’t it?”

“Actually, considering she’s not carried the mantle of Black Panther very long, I’d guess she’s as scared witless as the rest of us,” Jan said. “Being a bitch is her coping mechanism. Maybe it’s her everything mechanism. But, for what it’s worth, she’s right. We need you focused, Jacqui. Everyone. We need to find Clea.”

“And you have a suggestion how to go about that?” Namora asked. Jan pursed her lips as everyone looked at her. It was almost a rhetorical question, but not really; as antagonistic as their relationship was as a group, they did reluctantly look to her for leadership from time to time, usually when things got desperate. Even Shuri.

“Okay. Best guess?” Janet said, with a deep breath. “This silvery stuff we’ve got all over our clothes? Looks like web silk to me. In which case, if we want answers… maybe we’re going to have to follow the spiders.”

She pointed to the wall near the archway, and when everyone looked that saw something that only the Wasp – at her reduced size – had noticed until now. There was movement on the shadowed stone, very subtle, but unmistakable once you realized it was there. A crooked line of scurrying black shapes, enough to produce a shiver in even the hardiest observer and outright panic in any fully-fledged arachnophobe. Spiders. Dozens of tiny, black spiders. And they were heading somewhere, deep into the dark caverns of wherever this ominous place might be.

“Well then,” Jacqui said slowly, recovering some composure. “Hagrid eat your heart out. But if we end up having to be rescued by a magically-animated Ford Anglia in the middle of the Forbidden Forest, I will not be renewing my membership with this team, you understand me?”

Namora looked blank. “Magically animated what now…?”

“Once upon a time,” Suki Hashioka read in the Big Book of Fairy Tales, “there were nine beautiful, identical sisters, each with hair as black as crows and eyes as bright as stars, and skin as white as milk. These sisters were due to marry nine great kings from neighboring realms, but on the eve of the Grand Ceremony when all nine unions were destined to take place, a dire secret was revealed.

“A stranger from a distant land arrived with grave tidings. This stranger, a woman in a golden mask and with ten beautiful rings upon her fingers, revealed to the nine sisters that a terrible deception was being undertaken, for the kings were not men at all but in fact spiders from the darkness beneath the earth, who had woven disguises of skin and jewels and bone stripped from the bodies of dead royalty passed in generations gone by, and who had bound those disguises with their own magic silk.

“The spiders planned to wed these unfortunate girls so that they might breed with them and raise an army, with which they could conquer the sisters’ land and all the many lands beyond it. The sisters were horrified and were, of course, no longer willing to go ahead with the Ceremony… but the masked stranger, in her sorrow, advised them that the only way to thwart the spider kings would be to trick them in turn.

“One of the sisters was required to sacrifice herself by pretending to be each of her siblings in turn, and to marry each of the unsuspecting kings one after another. The kings would discover this duplicity all too late and, knowing that only one of their number might breed with her, they would fight over their new bride and hopefully kill one another. The other eight sisters would stand ready to slaughter whichever one of the nine spider kings remained alive at the end of the battle.

“The nine sisters reluctantly agreed to this plot, and each donated a single strand of crow black hair to the stranger, who proceeded to choose one strand – and one sister – to act as sole consort to the kings, whilst placing the other eight strands in a pool of ice water. The day of the Ceremony came and the sister who would forevermore be known the Bride of Nine Spiders fulfilled her terrible duty… but, in a cruel twist of fate, her siblings were prevented from rescuing their sister when the spider kings went to war. Such was the fury of their battle that the skies were filled with hundreds upon thousands of strands of webbing, covering the ground and the trees and the castle where the Ceremony had occurred with pure white silk, and blotting out the sun, moon and stars with silken clouds. The air cooled and began to fill with snow; in their grief, the sisters cried until their eyes turned black, they gnashed their teeth until they were ground to needles, and they starved themselves until their skin became translucent and their bones hollow; and, trapped in the castle of the warring kings, the Bride remained frightened and alone…

“…until one spider king emerged victorious. And, soon after, it was time for the Bride to give birth.”

Suki turned the page, but there was nothing more to read. That, it appeared, was the end of the story.

Suki sat back, her small eyes wide. “Holy catfish,” she said, in a very, very tiny voice. “That… was so not Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.”

Casting the book away with a shiver, as if it had suddenly grown fur and eyes and legs, Suki saw something come loose from inside the back cover. It was a sheet of parchment, fluttering to the floor. She picked it up and turned it over. There, scrawled in faint, fancy handwriting, was a message. It read:

Your story isn’t over yet, Lady Hashioka. In fact, it’s only just beginning. Prepare yourself, handmaiden to the Heralds. Be vigilant, for the Mistress of the Rings seeks to ascend to the Throne of Death, and only you hold the key to what was and what will be. Hold your nerve… and remember!

Suki’s hand was trembling as she carefully set the note aside. She looked around, catching sudden movement out of the corner of her eye… and she saw a spider on the wall, near the head of the bed, just small and dark against bright pink paint. It wasn’t very large and seemed to be minding its own business, but Suki shrieked nonetheless and grabbed the first thing at hand, her copy of New Scientist. She folded it in half and then launched herself, slapping crazily at the spider on the wall until it was nothing more than a smear.

There was a thud of footsteps on the stairs and then Suki’s bedroom door flew open.

“Suki, aren’t you asleep yet?” her mama cried, exasperated. “I told you, turn off the light. What was that noise? Are you…?”

Suki held up her magazine, her expression stricken. There was squished arachnid all over Tony Stark’s face. Tamara Hashioka was taken aback.

“Ew. Really, honey? I had no idea you were scared of spiders…”

Suki Hashioka looked down at the Big Book of Fairy Tales at her bare feet and shivered. “Me neither,” she said, quietly. “But that’s the thing about child geniuses. We always have to be open to new ways of looking at things, don’t we?”

“I apologize for your isolation, my lady, and for your inevitable confusion. Your injuries were worse than those suffered by your companions… and your inherent power is more intriguing to me. I have plans for the others, but you I wish to keep close at hand…”

It was painful for Clea to open her eyes but the unfamiliarity of the voice addressing her was an encouragement. She was in trouble, that much was certain, and she needed to know just how much. Unfortunately, she quickly came to regret her actions; she could have lived for a hundred years and never once felt the need to see this.

She was in a small, stone chamber filled with webs – and the webs were in turn filled with spiders, most small but some of them big and black, the size of walnuts. There was an awful lot of them, and a disagreeable number of them were alarmingly close. She felt tickling in her hair and on her bare hands, and in that moment she was glad – rather absurdly – that she wasn’t one of these super-harlots who felt the need to wear ridiculously low-cut, zippy, fetishistic costumes that exposed acres of bare flesh. On the other hand, her cloak was going to need one hell of a hot cycle spin in a washing machine when she got back to Earth. If she got back…

She tried to move, and it was only then that she realized how hazardous her situation actually was. She was rendered immobile by a thick spool of silvery threads about her arms and legs – a web cocoon – and there was an ominous tightness at her neck, suggesting a silken noose of indeterminate sharpness wound about her throat. It made it difficult to breathe, especially as she had no desire to open her mouth in case something wriggly and gruesome dropped in it.

“You won’t be harmed, if that is your immediate concern,” the voice from before breathed. “However, I would suggest you don’t struggle or attempt to cast a spell. That… might prove problematic.”

The speaker stepped forward, into a faint pool of light that spilled down in random shafts from the stone ceiling overhead, and Clea’s anxiety intensified at the sight of the woman overseeing her capture. She was tall and slender with frost-pale skin, and inky black hair scooped up from an angular face to be secured about her temples by a tiara woven from silver silk. Her throat was ringed with a spiked collar and her body sheathed in a glittering gown of black chitin. Otherwise she was the image of the vampiric ice maidens who had assailed Clea and her companions out in the snowy forest.

The woman inclined her head and smiled slightly, and Clea then saw a subtle movement in her hair and a ripple beneath her dress of shining black scales. A shiver of spiders. The trapped sorceress exhaled a helpless sound, squirming in her silken bonds. This panicked movement caused the arachnids clustered about her to quiver in response and to flex and flicker with their nasty little legs.

Don’t struggle, her captor had advised her. Easier said than done.

“My friends,” Clea whispered, licking her lips. “Where…?”

“I rescued you all from my sisters’ excited attentions, and had my children heal their wounds with their special silk. So you see, despite what you may think, I’m no monster. I need your companions alive, not dead.”

Clea hoped she didn’t look as utterly unconvinced as she felt. The woman in the spiked collar smiled wider.

“This is providence,” she said, sweetly. “Generation upon generation I’ve waited for ones such as you. Warriors, strong enough to survive the White beyond the walls of the castle – albeit only barely – and, hopefully, strong enough again to emerge victorious from the battle that lays in store.”

“Battle?”

“Yes. I am the Bride of Nine Spiders, my lady. A long time ago, nine devious spider kings sought to deceive my sisters and I for their own ends, but we tricked them in turn. I was the unfortunate sibling who wed each of those kings, and who then stood by and watched as a bitter and jealous war ensued between them. Eight kings fell, one remained… but my sisters were unable to enter this castle to vanquish him and rescue me, and thus our design was undone. I have been in the last king’s thrall ever since… until now.

“Now, my lady, King Zath of Yezud shall finally know destruction, and I shall be freed!”

Clea was momentarily nonplussed, but then realization dawned and her eyes flew wide. “By the flames of the Faltine,” she breathed. “My friends! You’ve sent them–”

“Into Zath’s royal lair, yes.”

And then the Bride threw back her head in rapture, arms spread wide, and in that instant a torrent of wriggling black spiders disgorged from the ripple of her gown, scattering among the myriad webs that filled the chamber, and all Clea could hear was their hideous, furry whisper of joy.

“Follow the spiders, you said,” Shuri snapped. “Wonderful plan, Van Dyne. Any other cracking little drops of wisdom you’ve got, don’t hesitate to send them our way, you hear?”

Janet couldn’t even rouse the ire for a retort. She, like her four companions, were watching forlornly as the trail of spiders they’d been following for what seemed like an hour now disappeared into a narrow crack in the stone wall before their eyes, stealing hope away with them. Corridor after corridor, junction after junction, they’d tagged along behind these eight-legged critters in the unspoken belief that they’d lead them… somewhere. But it had all been worthless.

“I could break through the wall,” Skadi offered, with genuine eagerness. Namora appeared to be in favor of this option, given that it involved smashing something.

“Or, I could scout ahead,” Jacqui said, less enthusiastically. “At top speed I could cover, oh, at least a hundred narrow, dark, web-filled passageways inside an hour.”

“Wasp could shrink and follow the spiders through that crevice,” Shuri said. Jan shot her a murderous look and the Wakandan smirked and shrugged. “What? Don’t you insect types all get along…?”

“Let’s see where this corridor goes, at least,” Jacqui sighed. “I am the obvious person to take point, given I can move my pert behind fastest if there’s danger – and also because I can do this.”

She began to rub her hands back and forth at preternatural speed, so swift that her movements became a blur, and within a few seconds the chemical energy she was releasing ignited to create a fiery glow that offered greater illumination in the gloom. Her companions all recoiled instinctively, squinting their eyes after so long being accustomed to the shadows… and, further along the passageway and directly ahead of them, something else hissed and shifted heavily against the stone walls.

The five women froze, turning in the direction of the sound.

Jacqui’s flames pulsed, and carried along the corridor to where they reflected in a cluster of enormous spheres looming in the dark. There was more heavy dragging, and then the clicking and snicketing of something sharp. Not teeth. Mandibles. And those spheres, it was pretty obvious that they were eyes, all eight of them.

“Oh you have got to be kidding me…” Shuri croaked.

But it was true.

With a shriek that was something between hunger, fury and some gruesome, gurgling laugh, King Zath of Yezud – a gigantic spider the size of a Cadillac – came scurrying along the passageway at horrifying speed, his immense legs scrabbling at the floor, walls and ceiling all at once, his maw stretched wide and dripping poison, and his eyes reflecting the sheer terror in the faces of his victims…

NEXT: The conclusion of THE WHITE! Can our heroes survive the murderous attentions of King Zath and his webbed bride? And what of the Yuki-Onna? Don’t miss HERALDS #10!