By the shear thread of life

Summer, Year 743 of the New Age
Glenmore, Glenwood


Clumsily the spider fell down towards the ground. It rolled into a ball; legs pulled in and it actually bounced a little after landing. The spider was dislodged from its web in the bush after it had finished eating its latest prey, a fly. Getting caught in the net meant death and it seemed to have known it. It had fought to get free, causing the net to shake, but its efforts to get free just led to two things. It got even more tangled into the sticky threads and gave the spider its location. There wasn’t much suffering, not after the spider’s bite of death. As the poison started to take affect, making its victim paralyzed, the spider could spin its strong thread around its prey without getting harmed. When that was done, the poison had worked its magic and transformed the inside of the fly to a perfect meal for the spider.

The fly’s struggle and how the spider overpowered and ate it had been observed by a set of almost pitchblack eyes. Only in direct sunlight you could detect a slight hue of brown in them. Her pelt was also rather dark; it was just on the underside of her slender neck and belly that gave away a warmer color. Besides her white muzzle she didn’t have any other markings. Standing in the shades of a thicket that created a good protection, not that the doe felt she needed it.

The one year old dark doe stood on her own at the edge of what the herd saw as their main grazing area. Her stepmother, her aunt, had just left her after a good scolding and a tug of her ear. Elita had shrugged it off. Some said that she should be grateful that her aunt had raised her as one of her own. Bah! Tailrash! For such a small creature she thought very highly of herself and moved like she would have been one of those golden ones, those that was said to be in Áilltes image. Elita knew she belonged to the royals, that she was "better" than most of the others in the herd, she was for example much better than her aunt that had a simple light brown pelt. She had been graced by Áillte…perhaps not fully, just by a few more drops than her aunt, just like her mother that she vaguely remembered if she tried hard enough. Like the shell of a gold bug her mother’s bronze colored coat had shimmered in the sun and she had always smelled like flowers.

Elita’s coat didn’t shimmer nor did she smell like flowers, but she wasn’t like her mother either. Her aunt had thought of her sleeping when she had talked to another doe about Elita’s mother. It made her angry…at her mother… if she had tried to defend herself better perhaps she would have lived longer than just have given birth to her! She had tried to ask her father about her but he claimed to not know what really happened either. Tailrash! He had hardly wanted her to know anything about her mother, but sweet words had made him talk eventually. Her father had only been able to tell little snippets and wasn’t really much of what she really already had known. Taken, gone and then she returned, marks covering her body. It had been just in the middle of the rut. When she came back she was clearly pregnant…with Elita. That alone started rumors and whispers about her true heritage. It spread more and them some when Elita was just about a month old, give or take a week or two and her weakend mother passed and her father's sister stepped in. She had a fawn her age and plenty of milk. Yet like a cuckoo chick she took just a little more than her fair share, and she left her aunts own fawn a bit thin. It had been easy to push away; easy to pin down, much of the scolding she got was due to her playing a bit too rough, both with her aunt’s fawn and others.

She liked to pin them down to the ground, hold them firmly till they started to get afraid, to see that in their eyes, to feel it, to hear them bleat after their mothers. Her aunt had sighed over her, saying she was too fearless for a doe….that all this couldn’t end well. A doe shouldn’t behave like she did! Elita had looked at the stags as they practiced, letting their horn clash together, their shoving and grunting as they did and she was sure that she was just as good as any of them. If only she had a horn…if she only was a bit taller. As time passed she learned that it was better to pretend to be a friend to get what you wanted than to just…take it. Sometimes however it was hard to resist. It was so much fun.

Her aunt had been very angry this time, her precious baby had been in Elita’s way and one of her hooves had nicked the other fawn on the head. It didn’t even bleed, not much anyway. They had just boxed a little bit…no biggie. Elita shook her head. It had stained her hoof red and it made her feel pride. She had pretended that her aunt’s fawn had been one of their rivals outside Glenmore. She had won rather easily.

Dark eyes followed the spider she had pushed down by poking at the plant where its net was several times. The brown spider had almost reached the safety of the plant when she put her hoof on it and squished it. As she removed her hoof there was only some twitching in few legs. The spider was fairly flat but she stomped on it again for good measure. Eyelids narrowed over dark eyes, a smile grew on her face as an amused chuckle escaped her.