The baneworm and its brothers emerged from the large
earthenware vase into the cool night air.
It sensed the warmth of a creature retreating rapidly but too far to be
of concern. There were other heat sources
nearby as well. Many more then the
creatures were used to, but still not in the immediate vicinity so it only made
the large, multi-legged insects stiffen restlessly rather then going into an
immediate hunt mode.
Then the pheromones impacted their senses.
All of them turned, their backward facing antennae arching
up into the night air to hone in on the female.
It didn’t take long for them to determine the direction and as one they
began to move quickly across the sand before diving underneath, leaving long
runnels as they moved toward their goal.
It was in the direction of the large group of heat sources, but at this
point they didn’t care. They were called
by their nature to mate, and their small insect brains were incapable of
resisting.
They were all about average for their species, being about
thirty to forty centimeters long with hundreds of legs spaced evenly along
their length. Their shells along their
multi-segmented bodies were dark purples and reds, designed to warn other
creatures away, and if that didn’t work, the long stinger on the tail end of
them was perfectly capable of curling up along their body and being thrust
forward to strike, injecting a nasty, very deadly, poison into anything not
fast enough to get away. It didn’t help
that they were aggressive, being known to chase anything that moved until it
left their territory.
No one ever wanted to see an agitated baneworm with half its
body raised in the air like a striking tail and all those legs wiggling in the
air. It usually meant you were in
striking distance, and shortly thereafter, very dead.
Tonight, the baneworm and its brother weren’t interested in
territory as they raced under the sand towards their goal. Occasionally one or the other would stop,
raising its thickly chitin-armored antenna above the sand to re-orient toward
the female before racing on.
None of the few night Terek guardsmen that the creatures
raced past were remotely aware of the danger under their feet. They were watching for man-sized trespassers,
and had no experience with the creatures of the deep desert. They might have noticed the bulges moving in
the sand if it were daytime, but not during the darkness of the night even with
one of the moons still full.
Fortunately for them, it allowed the baneworm and its
brothers to remain fixated on the female.
Somehow, the scent appeared to be diminishing which just made the
creatures move faster towards its source, not even realizing they passed
underneath a tent wall and were now moving under carpets that had been placed
under the large tent the Duke and his entourage were sleeping under.
They stopped toward one wall of the tent, milling about
under the sand before finally working their way up through the cracks in the
carpets laid down and arching their multi-segmented bodies up in the air. They were striving for the scent of the
female which was rapidly diminishing. It
caused confusion since there was nothing to climb that they could sense, and
the pheromones were coming from a few meters above them. They didn’t know the sponge that had been
lobbed onto the top of the Duke’s tent was specially designed to attract them
or that its payload would fade quickly into nothingness.
All they knew was that there was no longer a female to
pursue, and that suddenly they were surrounded by multiple warm bodies well
within their territory limits. It didn’t
matter who the intruders really were; they simply knew they had to drive the
interlopers away.
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