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Azlu; the Spider Hosts

• more detail on Azlu; the Spider Host
• Wight Spiders
• Spitting Spiders
• Spinner-Hag; the Queen of Poison

Myths speak of the bloated and nightmarish Spinner-Hag, who scuttled through primeval forests and under great mountains until at last Father Wolf caught her and tore her to bits. Yet during the chase, as she ran on her 12 spiderlike legs, she laid eggs — hundreds, thousands of them, each one the size
of a mouse’s skull.

After the Gauntlet came down, the eggs began to hatch.

The Azlu don’t truly understand the instinct that compels them to weave, but weave they must — and gather they must. Each egg hatches a fleshy spider the size of a tarantula with a shard of spirit essence and a glimmer of intelligence. The original shards at the heart of the Spider Hosts seek to unite with one another, and they feed on mundane spiders to increase their bulk. An Azlu bearing the shard of a single egg might eventually grow as large as a pigeon.

The largest and most potent Azlu, with the shards of many eggs within them, are much worse. Such creatures can take the forms of horrible swarms of spiders, of tremendous spiders the size of a small car, of chitinous parodies
of the human form, or even of blasphemous amalgams of human and arachnid. And of course, once large enough to catch a human in its webs, it can drink out her
innards and leave nothing but a useful skin.

The Azlu are driven to weave — it is as powerful a drive as a spirit’s ban. Loci are their favorite places to spin — werewolves need loci to enter or leave the Shadow Realm, and other supernaturals seem drawn to loci for their own reasons. A locus is the perfect place to draw one’s food into one’s web. Some Azlu are singularly powerful and spin alone; others weave communal webs and share in the feasts equally.

To a lesser extent, the Azlu work to strengthen the Gauntlet with their Numina. In part they do so in order to seal off loci that they haven’t claimed for their own, as a form of herding their prey toward their webs. But in
part they also do so from instinctual fear. Some part of the Spinner-Hag’s fear of her pursuer was imprinted on the shard within each of her eggs, and the fear remains.

Though the Azlu do not fully understand why they must seal the spirit world away from the flesh, they all suffer half-remembered nightmares of the Great Wolf that would destroy them if it could find them. When the Azlu cross paths with the Uratha, they recognize that enemy reborn. And the werewolves do hunt them down. The Spider Hosts work to control loci, which to some extent helps cut down the influx of spirits, which can even aid the werewolves’ efforts to an extent. But they do so for horrible ends — and they enjoy the taste of werewolf flesh. Worse, they also strengthen the Gauntlet and close loci anywhere but their hunting grounds. For the Azlu to push the two worlds even farther apart would carve the heart from the physical world, leaving nothing but shells with the faintest semblance of life. Of course, that could be what the Spider Hosts want — a world full of docile, half-sleeping cattle for them to prey upon at will. A werewolf pack can easily dispose of a solitary small Azlu, but a powerful Spider Host is not only intelligent and strong, it has potent venom and spirit Numina at its disposal. And when Azlu share territory, supporting one another instead of attempting to subsume one another — then they are a danger indeed.

Azlu in Great Britain

The generally benevolent place of spiders in British
folklore is a pointer to the weakness of the Azlu. There are
no stories about spiders being dangerous, no legends about
spiders portending evil and chaos. In the British folkloric
canon, spiders are humans’ helpers. This is because the Azlu,
although they do spin their solitary webs around the Isles,
have had little or no effect on the nation’s soul.
Fragments of the Rat Scripture apparently tell of a war
between the Azlu and the Beshilu on the fields of England,
and the defeat of the Spider Hosts. Whether this is true or
not, the Beshilu certainly have a huge advantage over the
Azlu. In fact, British Azlu have even been known to cooperate
with Uratha against the Beshilu. These alliances
are always brief, and often end badly anyway, as the mutual
distrust between the two species grows into violence of one
kind or another.

Spitters

Accounts of Azlu who have the ability to spit
their poison have come from most parts of the
world. These slightly smaller, more agile Spider
Hosts are very rare in most countries. Here in
the UK, they actually constitute the Azlu majority.
There is no really convincing reason as to
why this should be; there are certainly no real
spiders like that in Britain. Whatever the reason,
attacking an Azlu head-on is rarely a good idea;
having one’s eyes burnt out of their sockets
makes it a lot easier to be eaten, and the Azlu
don’t hurry when they eat live prey.

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