Socotra Limestone Caves

Description

Naturally formed limestone tunnels, holed through like Swiss cheese so that passages which start apart run into one another without warning. Cool, damp, and branching almost immediately from either entrance. The floors are smooth stone and carry drag marks. The air smells of organic decay and silk.

Entrances open at the spring’s cave mouth at ground level and again about thirty feet up the cliff face; both lead to the same system.

Notable Features

• The webbing. Not stretched across passages like a curtain — thick cables laid along walls, ceiling and floor as structural supports, trip lines and vibration sensors. Every touch announces a position. It burns in a sudden whoosh and fills the tunnels with acrid smoke and ash.
• The junction. The upper and lower tunnels intersect in a massive cavern, which is how the party’s two search groups found each other underground.
• The cocoon chamber. High-ceilinged, hung with suspended silk bundles — fresh ones lower and at the edges, older desiccated husks further in and further up. Beyond them, against the far wall, a woven mass of egg sacs with the breeders braced over it.
• Fire is the only advantage. The spiders will not cross open flame, and they will not follow anyone past the shadow line at the cave mouth into daylight.
• Navigation. The party marked their route with twine and chalk on the way in, and got out on it.

Connections

• Socotran Cave Spiders — what lives here.
• Jumman and Freddy were cocooned in the high chamber and cut down alive. See Socotra Cave Rescue.

Appearances

Relationships

• Part of Socotra — Riddles the limestone cliffs above the sheltered bay
• Haunts Socotran Cave Spiders — Their nest, hunting ground, and egg chamber