Therids are spiders. Setae-furry, with colorful tufts to distinguish individuals, and big ol’ abdomens larger than their heads. They’ve got claws on their paws, and chelicerae (fangs) with enough venom to kill just about anything their own size — or larger.
Their leg-span’s about a meter and a half, and they slump instead of standing, rising about half a meter. Most bugs look down on them, and the sprawly gait means they move pretty slowly.
Most therids are female, the ratio’s about five to one. Ladies are larger, of course, but the specifics vary. While it’s not quite a caste system, there’s a skew in the size of the females, and it’s the largest that reproduce.
But none of that is what’s really interesting about them.
Therids craft webs cooperatively, but due to their size, the definition of “web” is a bit frayed here. Their preferred dwellings are covered in silk netting, if not outright stitched together (pretty viable in warm climates, but you want something more solid in the cold). Their architecture is written in the language of rope bridges, ladders, and hammocks. But that’s just their shelter.
As carnivores, they devise traps of all sorts, snares, deadfalls, and ever more complex arrangements — the complexity has in a way become more of social signal, an art form.
But they aren’t only carnivores. They craft special velaria or “greenwebs” which cultivate mats of algae within. The algae secretes greendew, a sweet and nutritious drink. Therids can eat it — it’s the only sweetness they can know, a simple pleasure. They can even subsist off it, but the real purpose of it as a lure to prey.
Therids are, to some extent, sapiovores; without dining on nous-rich bugflesh, they enter a kind of starvation state, blunting their mental acuity.
Part of why their trapmaking ways are so advanced is that their oldest art as a species is devising ways to trick smart bugs into getting eaten. There are beetles and other subsapient farm bugs that therids can eat and thereby retain clarity of mind — but they’ll never be quite as savory or fulfilling as sapient prey.
Mantes are, of course, the notorious conspecific cannibals, but it’s not something therids have never indulged in.
It’s this arms race, the pursuit of ever-evolving, ever-refined means of trapping sapients, that cement the utility of therid sociality. They share their tricks and teach them to their young. Couple that with the mundane benefits of sociality — shared shelter, division of labor, all those network effects — it’s clear how therids embarked on the road to civilization.
How did they actually get there, though?
The key lies in their webs. When picking spots to lay traps and nets, how do you communicate to your sisters where you laid them, or what points of interest you saw? It’s not hard to imagine using their abundant webs to craft maps of their surrounding, pinning the information down that way. Once you have maps, it’s easy to imagine the information growing compressed and abstracted, until it stops being a representation and starts being a language.
Spiders don’t make a sound. They communicate with body language, with the mutual brush of pawed legs and pedipalps against another’s, and with the vibration-strum of a melodious silk drawn between them.
Silk tied into symbolical knots then becomes their fourth medium of verbal intercourse. But it’s not just a language, it’s a means of account. Spiders trade — goods, yes — but also secrets and reputation; all is recorded in the web.
The web. Because once you start building maps and weaving records, why not collate it all into a grand library for the whole colony? Call this a loreskein.
Now, a problem that haunts real life social spiders is inbreeding. As arachnids, they can’t have a nuptial flight like ants and wasps and termites, so a colony mostly ends up as an incestuous soup. Therids don’t have that problem, since they might travel far and wide when scouting for trapping locations, so it’s not hard to scout for other therid webs and trade males, too.
Another thing about social spiders is that they don’t all form huge colonies; sometimes they wind up in lil’ groups of a few members. That happens with therids, too; sometimes a trapper lives out in a hole in the sticks, away from the hustle and bustle of the big web.
It’s a temperment thing, and a certain fraction of therids are wired differently. They can’t stay in one web all their life; they get restless and start to wander. And if they’re leaving anyway, why not send them packing with a precis of your great loreskein-library to trade?
Nomads are essential to keep webs in touch with each other. But it’s a dangerous world out in the wilds of the heartlands. But if there are solitary trappers or trapper-covens camping out in the countryside between colony-webs — would the spiders have hospitality?
So, we’re going to shift gears a bit here, as we drift from first principles to the contigencies of recorded history, because the exact social organization therids have ended up with is probably not strictly a consequence of their biology.
It’s probably enabled by it, though. Maybe it’s because of their profound patience, deriving their food from waiting on traps and gathering sunlight. Maybe it’s because of the threat they pose to each other, each chelicerae tipped with venom potent enough to kill a conspecific. Maybe it’s the nature of their species art, building webs, connections between things. Maybe it’s all the inbreeding.
But therids get along well.
It’s considered customary for trap-coven to welcome any passing therid in as if she were a member of your family. Because, call it an ideology, call it a religion, call it a memetic virus, but for a millenia, the reigning belief among heartlands therids was that all therids are sisters.
Therids like making patterns, drawing strands together into beautiful patterns. There’s a reason that, shortly after they developed languages, they began centralizing written works into libraries and canons and loreskeins.
That impulse to organization is why the concept of the truthskein holds so much allure for them. The truthskein is the book of all things, a pedigree for every beating heart, a map encompassing the universe yet contained within it.
But its beginnings were humble. Therids had long exchanged silk-letters and woven personal troves of gossip — while the chorus-roaches still dwelled in caves, therids crafted and distributed social networks.
Therids hatch with the innate ability to weave silk, and as such, hardly a moment passes where they lack the ability to write. Therids are defined by their patience, and will spend hours each day organizing their webs.
Altogether, this gives asynchronous, textual communication between therids a certain ubitiquity, a certain natural fluidity it can never have for any other creature.
A colony has the resources to maintain a detailed directory of its inhabitants, a social graph listing formal relationships and community standing. You can imagine nomads would ferry copies of this information between webs. You can imagine distributing digests of the information to each member of the web, a kind of arachnid yellow pages.
We’ll never knew if it was deliberate or emergent. We’ll never be sure if it was a divergent mind, mere pragmatic power seeking, or the product of mind-altering drugs. Perhaps all are true, tied together in the tangles of history.
The first skeinmother was a therid tasked for decades with maintaining the library of the largest colony. Most therids rotate out of a task-assignment after a few years, careers being fluid things in vageries of communal labor. But the skeinmother devoutly worked upon the loreskein, tightening old knots, replacing frayed threads, and revising the errors of centuries.
Perhaps she went mad among the repetition, but she insisted that the skein conversed. It bore a message and she read. It didn’t command her, it didn’t even address her, but she could feel it. The thing ached to be expanded, completed, to embrace all of its children in its infinite threads.
The thing about the therid social graph is that it’s public, and yet a skeinweaver is going to have so much more time to grow acquainted with it. Perhaps the first skeinmother was simply canny, perhaps the loreskein whispered its secrets to her — or perhaps she falsified the records
However it happened, the skeinmother waxed in power and influence, persuaded other therids to her cause. Soon just about every node on the local social graph tied ever more tightly to her own.
The truthskein is the final, complete weaving, and you already understand why therids long to tie everything together. The thing is, every colony has its own skein. It references and incorporates the others, but it operates according to local patterns, local history. Far enough apart, and even the knot-language is different.
The truthskein wasn’t just an idle wish or dreamsweet hope. It was a mission. It was a threat.
The first skeinmother maintained the records for the largest colony, and she thought it ached to be completed. To expand, to consume all the other loreskeins and produce the last, authoritative word.
Sometimes, the process is even enriching; creative parallels are drawn, imaginations and lexicons broaden to incorporate the fruits of another colony. Sometimes, though, the two are incompatible. And contradictions unravel — that’s the simple truth.
You could call it a crusade, but the closest thing the therids have to warfare is poisoned strikes from the shadow or webs set ablaze.
All therids are sisters. Bonds of silk are bonds of flesh. Strangers shall be adopted into the family; loose threads unravel.
The skeinmother taught that what is written in silk is as real as flesh and lymph. Every therid, then, has a body of silk woven into the social graph. Her node in this graph, recall, was tied tight to all the others.
Every sister is her daughter, and every loreskein crafted in the image of the truthskein is also her daughter. (Silk is flesh, after all.)
The true nature of their kind is the marriage of the two; they are not just therids, but skeinlings.
Other bugs sometimes translates ‘skeinmother’ as ‘queen’, but when the skeinmother died, there was no successor. (Her silk persisted, though.)
The social graph draws bonds between therids as a product of how therids write about one another. The bonds between the skeinmother and her daughters was authentic celebrity. It would be also incorrect to translate ‘skeinmother’ as ‘president’, but skeinmothers are, in a sense, elected.
A consequence of truthskein-orthodoxy is that therids can coordinate about as well as bees or weevils. And yet, there’s something fragile about it.
Skeinlings are torn between two competing impulses: to expand and complete the truthskein with new knowledge and proliferate children; and to remain cloistered and isolated, preserving purity and manageable order.
The therid population, like with all naturally selected organism, grows, though not unchecked: egg cannibalism is a common practice; and more than one skeinmother has culled her children to solve resource scarcity. And yet, as there come more therids, wayward colonies may drift afray.
A spider finds a hollow space, and throws a strand of silk to span the extent, woven into rope to support her weight. Netting, forked and knotted, forms radials across this hollow space. She spirals in with further strands, spinning a complete web. Come prey, come wind, come the ravages of time, and the strands fray and must be straightened. The spider consumes her own silk in sacrifice-salvage.
A web must and will be maintained until she dies; until then, in that hollow space it will remain effective and beautiful and, one believes with dreamsweet hope, true.