Chapter 166: Reckoning
Abandoned Cathedral, Textile District,
Janetta's POV,
The webs had gone up two hours before moonrise.
She'd worked the rafters first, then the pillars, then the dark corners where the old stained glass no longer let in enough light to matter. By the time she was done, roughly half the cathedral belonged to her more than it belonged to the god it had once been built for.
The effect of she had come to call the 'Queen's Lair' hummed under her skin the whole time, a low continuous thing, like a held breath that never needed releasing. Within any space she claimed with her webs, every strand became part of a single living network. Sometimes it made her a third stronger, sometimes nearly half again as strong. She had never discovered why the increase varied, only that once the web was complete, the cathedral itself seemed to breathe with her.
She could feel the whole structure of it if she wanted to, the way a spider feels a fly three threads away.
