Billgreen - Opus 1 : The Rescue of the King of Sylvestra

Chapter III : Meeting Scorpus

After another long, long walk, Billgreen stopped at the bottom of a very strange wall. It was made out of so many spiders' webs so thick that it was impossible to get though.

« Considering the size and the thickness of the web, there must be an awful lot of spiders in here. » Billgreen through.

But, in fact, there weren't many spiders but only one, a huge, hairy, enormous one, something like thirty nine inches in diameter with enormous poison fangs.

Its mandibles were truly threatening, and Billgreen would have been killed if he had not reacted quickly enough. He stepped back into a small room that he had noticed and crawled inside a narrow corridor, much too narrow for the spider to follow him.

Stuck in this room, he was unable to get out for fear the spider would kill him ; the only things he could see were a few dismantled boxes through which wisps of appeared straw out. There were also spadefuls of sand which were of no use to him. He was really prisoner. The only exit was guarded by the spider.

Was he doomed to perish here ?

He thought it over and over and carried out a plan to, hopefully, help him gain a little time. From a piece of cloth of one of his unstitched pockets he made a head : he used two pieces of coal to draw the nose, the eyes and the mouth. Some straw for the hair...

« Now, I must tie on these pieces of wood which will represent the arms and the legs. Some of this straw will do. That's it ! This sand for the shoulders and the stomach ! Looks as though I am getting a little bit fat, these days ! That should be good enough to fool the spider. Let's hop so anyway ! A little bit of sand, to help the puppet slide out of this place. » Such were the dwarf's thoughts as he continued working.

He very patiently waited until the spider moved to the right side and he threw the puppet rapidly to his left.

The monstrous spider rushed at the puppet then after catching it, tore it into pieces while Billgreen ran to the right side of the room ; he managed to grasp a torch.

He rushed towards the spider's web door that he had decided to set on fire. Once at the door, he threw his torch in the middle of the cobweb, seized another one, opened up a way through the horrible tangle until he reached a door whose planks easily yielded when he pushed them.

Behind the closed door, he would be protected from the monster. But unfortunately in front of him, there were more resistant planks.

He was still stuck, but this time it was in this strange stalemate. By striking his fist on the surface in front of him, he felt like he was behind a big piece of furniture.

He tried to find a small hole to see something in the other side of the room, but this "panel" only allowed him to see a few inches away. He looked for some kind of mechanism in the wall.

There had to be a way to get out of here...

He could hear the enormous spider beginning to bite into the rotten wood. Right behind him, the scary mandibles were getting nearer and nearer his back. As he groped, he discovered several shapes that he tried to push and pull.

He could feel the fangs slightly touching him when suddenly the big nail he had just pulled out unlatched an opening in the piece of furniture.

He rushed behind the furniture and prevented him from opening more with the weight of his body. While searching in this new room, he found nearby a bench that was there, and managed to block the furniture.

And suddenly, without Billgreen doing anything, everything came back to normal. Relieved at first, Bilevert turned around... and found himself in front of Scorpus.

He never had the time to avoid getting caught in the tangle net which brought him to a standstill.

He was utterly at the sorcerer's mercy, the sorcerer he had come to challenge...