Spiderlord's Domain

Spiderlord came to believe fully in the future after his head was removed from his absurd human body.

Head removal brought with it great serenity and contentment. As a corporeal man he had always been desperate and rather melancholy, prone to stammers of doubt and apt to indulge in psychoactive pleasures to relieve his angst. Achieving the condition of monster brings now a certain placid pleasure, an awareness of being detached fully from the mere human mire and blood of petty morality.

A transformation, a liberation: the removal of the body and the consecration of the autonomous and sovereign head. Which brings with it its own sacrifice…

Spiderlord expresses his wishes to us: clickety-clackety-click. Little metal stilts skittering on the steel deck, apparently unstable. Tapping out irregular messages in private morse.

His myriad minions, with whom I am privileged to count myself, scuttle to interpret his directives and carry them out. Some go to the lymph bank and fetch a fresh flask. Others make new lists of enemies to be terminated.

I make my guess and mount the deck to scratch an itch at the nape of Spiderlord's neck stump, where it joins to the spiderbod. I take a tube of hogfat unguent from the hip pocket of my grey coveralls and spread it on the irritated spot, creamy white on the pale green.

This causes Spiderlord to writhe with sensual delight, his milky pupils going cross-eyed with pleasure. Gurgles and grunts, the last remaining human noises made by his pharynx, are the soft music which rewards my self-starting audacity. He tippety-taps out an operation on his control panel. Distant cogs clank and whirr.

I am promoted to the next level, my sustenance gruel to be upgraded with some five grams daily of sweetening agent. Those who guessed wrongly are to be punished with judder-tingles or in extreme cases are life-nullified for restarting. We chortle at the ones who jiggle and jerk on the smooth floor. Harsh but fair, we think. And what else could we think?

I step down from the steel deck and join the other joyous ones on the main floor. The minion charged with swabbing the drool from Spiderlord’s scabbed chin steps back up. One day, if I continue to be lucky, I will be that one.

We look at our lord where he sways, great greenish-pale head on metallic spiderbod. His bulbous cranium is stuffed with action items, directives which he struggles to convey to us. Because he is merely a dead - or almost dead - head on a mechanical life support vehicle made of tentacular rods and pistons, we must scurry and scuttle so as to realize his needs.

All that uncommunicated intent bulges out of the temples, veiny and vermicular, pulsing and throbbing. We stand and watch for more, hoping we can carry out his dreams and suffer just that little less. The hall pulsates with breath, the veiny temples throb, the waxy pale green skull stares sightless over his servants.

His dreams are all that there are now. We others just couldn’t afford dreams like he has and so we stand and wait.

=== SPIDERLORD'S DOMAIN / END ===

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