Leaving the cave of the ùvano with the cocoon, Gràinne, Irimë, Ekhart and Faolan cut the silk open to find Dolidh, the daughter of Ceana, still alive, but paralyzed by spider poison.  Ekhart climbed the nearby trees and discovered a similar man-sized cocoon hanging from the highest boughs.  Gràinne, Irimë and Faolan followed him up and spotted a score more.  As Irimë attempted to haul one up to her bough, a giant spider descended and attacked Faolan.  Gràinne used her glaive, Mahtarocco, to cut the strand of web on which the spider descended, and Faolan shot the creature from the treetops with a well-placed arrow.  The still living spider fell to the lower boughs, but caught itself before beginning its return ascent.  Gràinne leapt from the treetops onto the giant spider, impaling it from above with her glaive, and it skittered away into the forest with Gràinne holding onto her glaive for dear life and bucking wildly on its back.  Faolan sent one last arrow into the creature’s thorax, dropping it in the dirt made muddy by its own foul ichor.

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Gràinne, Irimë, Ekhart and Faolan cut down the remaining cocoons and found only five survivors.  As they tended the living, a band of Woses – low men from the banks of the River Isen – and their hunting dogs came upon them from the south.  Believing that the cocooned bodies were sacrifices to “the master,” the Woses greeted the party.  When Gràinne and Irimë learned of the Woses’s intentions, they attacked them, but Ekhart and Faolan diffused the tensions before any fatalities occurred and convinced the Woses that the ùvano was dead, and that they now served a new mistress:  Gràinne!  Suddenly, they heard the chittering of thousands of spiders descending from the trees and they fled out of the primordial forest into the familiar woodlands of the Enedwaith.  In the confusion, two Woses attempted to flee with one of the survivors, and Faolan gave chase.  The remaining Woses led Gràinne, Irimë and Ekhart back to their encampment a day’s travel to the south, where Ekhart promised the tribe a better life in the city of Tharbad, free from the tyranny of any ùvano.  Still needing to treat the wounded survivors extracted from the spider cocoons, Gràinne, Irimë and Ekhart followed a nearby ravine to a cove of poisonous water snakes, the venom of which could be fashioned into an antidote to the paralytic spider poison.  There, they encountered a band of friendly but starving Stoor Hobbits, who helped them capture some snakes.  In gratitude, Irimë used her Elven magic to make the land around the ravine fertile enough for farming, and Gràinne hunted game for them and returned with enough rabbits, deer, geese and pheasants for an enormous feast.

 

The Stoors orchestrated an impromptu party in the ravine under the stars.  Gràinne and Irimë recounted to the Stoors their only other encounter with their kind – the river bandits, Féagol and Fobbin, and the Stoor elder, Dobbin Stoutfoot, begged that they show the bandits mercy, as the Stoors of the Gwathlò had lived a hard life.  After the feast, Gràinne, Irimë and Ekhart returned to the Wose encampment, where Irimë gently extracted the venom from the snakes, who spoke to her of a great evil deep underground that has been driving them to the surface holes of those “nasty little murderous creatures,” the Stoors.  The snakes could give no other detail about this chthonic menace except that it was dark and extremely powerful.  The following morning, the Woses broke camp and Gràinne, Irimë and Ekhart led them on a week-long journey across the Enedwaith to Tharbad, where they were given a new life.  There, they holed up for the winter to prepare to bring the surviving Ar Muin back to their people . . .