Crawling Trap
interaction: @aleks drašković wc:942 dialogue thoughts
date:8th November 2025
The cold air struck the young brunette’s face like a sudden slap, sharp enough to make her pause on the path and reconsider every decision that had led her out of the warmth of the dormitory. Autumn had settled in with quiet finality — the wind carried the brittle scent of fallen leaves, and the low sun seemed to cast longer, more skeletal shadows with each passing day. Yet Victoria Blythe still moved as though summer clung to her, a faint stubbornness in her stride, a reluctance to yield to the season’s bite.
She adjusted her hold on the thick book pressed to her chest, the hard spine firm beneath her fingers. The destination was already fixed in her mind: the Great Lake. Since her first year, it had been her haven — a wide expanse of water ringed by trees whose branches dipped low in the wind, a place where the noise of the castle melted away. In the warmer months, it was rarely hers alone, but now that the air carried a persistent chill, the lake was mostly abandoned. That emptiness was what she craved.
She imagined herself sitting by the shore, knees pulled up, the book open in her lap, the steady lapping of water against stone drowning out every stray thought. The picture was so vivid that the intrusion, when it came, jarred her like a sudden slap.
A faint, unsettling tickle rippled across the skin beneath her sweater. She froze mid-step, frowning slightly as her eyes dropped to her sleeve. There, clinging to the pale grey knit, was a vivid green insect — small, jointed legs flexing, its body no larger than a coin yet somehow monumental in its presence.
Her breath locked in her throat. Victoria’s hatred of such creatures went beyond distaste; it was visceral, primal, something that lived deep under her skin. Panic surged, hot and sharp, obliterating every rational thought. She flung her book onto the damp grass with a thud and began batting at her arm in jerky, desperate motions.
The rest of the world fell away. The swaying trees, the faint murmur of voices from the courtyard, even the low, constant whisper of the wind — all of it blurred into nothingness. There was only the insect and her frantic need to make it gone. Her foot struck something hard and unyielding. A rock, half-buried in the earth. The sudden shift in balance sent her forward, and before she could right herself, the ground tilted away beneath her.
She hit the pile of leaves with a muted whump. Red, gold, and copper leaves flared around her, catching the last light of the day like embers scattered in the wind. For a fleeting moment she thought she had been lucky, that the leaves had broken her fall — until they gave way beneath her, swallowing her into darkness.
The cold earth met her back with a jarring thud that sent a pulse of pain through her ribs. Air rushed from her lungs in a startled gasp. For a few moments she lay still, disoriented, her mind scrambling to catch up with her body.
When she finally blinked upward, she could see the ragged circle of the hole she’d fallen into, framed by the faint orange light of the dying sun. The upper edges were littered with disturbed leaves. What in Merlin’s name—?
Had someone dug this intentionally? A prank, perhaps? The thought brought with it a prickle of unease that sank into the base of her spine. Why on earth was there a pit this close to the Great Lake?
She pushed herself upright, the damp soil clinging to the palms of her hands. Her heart was still hammering from the shock. For a moment, she considered trying to climb out, but the walls of the hole were sheer and slick with packed dirt. She would only tire herself for nothing.
A shiver crept over her skin, and she lowered herself back to the ground, knees drawn up, wrapping her arms around them. Her breath misted faintly in the cold air.
That was when she saw it.
A small, spindly-legged spider, no larger than a thumbnail, sat almost imperceptibly atop the smooth leather of her black shoe. Its tiny body glistened faintly, each movement slow and deliberate. The scream ripped from her throat before she could stop it.
She kicked her foot violently, sending the creature tumbling into the dirt — but when her gaze followed its path, her stomach twisted. The ground was crawling.
They were everywhere. Spiders of every size, spilling from cracks in the earth, scuttling across damp leaves, disappearing under shadows and reappearing somewhere else entirely. The dirt around her seemed to ripple with them.
Her pulse thrashed in her ears. A cold, nauseating fear gripped her lungs. She could barely breathe for it. Every instinct screamed at her to move, but there was nowhere to go.
She tilted her head back toward the fading light, forcing air into her lungs in short, shallow bursts. Her voice, when it came, was unsteady, laced with the sharp edge of panic.“Is anyone out there?!”
The words vanished into the open air without answer. She had once loved the way the Great Lake fell silent in the colder months. Now that silence pressed down on her like a weight.
Her eyes burned. A small, shaky sob escaped before she could swallow it down. She raked trembling fingers — pink with cold — through her hair, forcing herself not to glance at the ground again. She didn’t need the reminder.
Her second call was louder, breaking somewhere in the middle, torn raw by fear.
“Can someone please help me?!”
Crawling Trap
The season between overheated asphalt and wet socks in leaky boots was his favorite. Rain came often, leaves fell like dramatic dead birds from the trees and stained the landscape into a chaos not unlike his flat in Portsmouth. Shades of red scattered everywhere. They cracked beneath his steps, speckling the otherwise tidy grass with freckles of withered nature. Aleks didn’t want to miss the season, feeling forced to step outside more frequently.
With homework nagging at the back of his mind, too many emotion-soaked problems pressed down and tangled up his thoughts. Out here, amid Mother Nature’s grime, he felt more at home than in the Slytherin dormitory.
With long strides he left the cobblestone path from the school behind him. Orange light brushed over the treetops and tangled itself in the unruly waves of his hair. As if the rays were a false thread, mistakenly woven into a blanket, they wound their way across Scotland’s many peaks.
Aleks tilted his head back and cast an admiring glance toward the clouds. Beneath them, the Slytherin hardly minded how disordered his presence might appear with freckles and moles scattered across his pale skin. The many shades of red, pink, purple, and yellow collided in chaos among the soft cotton tufts of the firmament. As though the they were nothing but blood and dirt, stirred up by a war between sun and moon. Morning and evening alike, Aleks could not help but imagine, that even the sky was never wholly content with rules and its hierarchy.
He let his hands slide flat down his hips, sinking them into his old trouser‘s pockets. In the left rested an old strand of Aiden’s hair, snuggling up with his fingers. Memories caught up with him. Back then, he had secretly plucked it from his best friend’s head and carried it as a lucky charm on a midnight trip. Though in this moment Aleks wasn’t sure how much of that bond with Aiden was as close as he‘d imagined. A finger curled around the artifact, tugged—and felt it snap.
His shoulders hung under the weight of the knowledge that, back then, Aiden had not been as open and honest with him as Aleks had believed. Perhaps he had only wished it. At least with the cold air around him, it was easier to keep some distance from the many questions. Aleks pulled the remains of hair out of his pocket and flicked it onto the lawn. Suddenly, a small smile flickered onto his lips. It was less genuine than forced, for brooding was something he despised. It gained nothing. Time could not be rewound, and gloom could never be weighed out in gold!
Seconds away, he pulled his hands from the old pockets. They hung loosely at his sides, feeling the cold autumn air brush against his knuckles. A few more steps carried his gaze down to the waters of the Great Lake drawing nearer. The waves broke against one another, crashing chaotically on the shore like a bearded old man at his very first ballet lesson.
With each step away from the castle, the weight in his chest seemed to lift. Aleks let himself be distracted by the shifting hills of the water’s surface, catching the sunset in golden specks. Only for the weight to suddenly return—crushing him with suffocating heaviness.
“Can someone please help me?!” The cry thundered from nearby. The bright voice, trembled with terror. There still chimed a softness. Everything in the Slytherin boy tightened at once. Aleks lurched back a step. He dragged air into his lungs, and stared toward the place the sound had come from.
His heart hammered. It pumped blood through his veins. Cinched his breath shut—as if fearing it might force him to forget the location of her cry. The world fell still before him. The crunch of leaves beneath his feet had gone silent with his first steps toward the sound. Even the waves stirred no louder than dust adrift in air. Only one thing mattered, pierced straight through his thoughts, pressing all else into the back of an endless queue: Victoria Blythe.
The voice was unmistakable. Over the past months it had lodged itself somewhere between his heart and the ache of a lost family member—like the emotional equivalent of a squatter who refused to leave where his feelings lived.
He couldn’t spot her anywhere. His eyes swept over field, water, and tree in a slow-boiling panic. “Vic?” Aleks called out, when something dark flickered at the edge of his vision. He turned his head—and there his gaze fell upon a hole, staring back at him from beneath a heap of leaves.
It jutted from the earth like an ugly reminder of hell itself and all things nightmare inducing that exist. The blood in his veins froze—yet his legs carried him across the distance in a single second, right to the edge. The Slytherin could only guess where the voice had broken through from, but its pitch sat in his throat like a stone, threatening to choke his breath. Aleks hurled himself to the ground.
His knees pressed into the leaves just as a small eight-legged creature crawled out, settling itself on his thigh. It earned no attention. His priorities lay elsewhere. The palms dug into the dirt, body weight balanced, until he could lean far enough to glance down into the hole.
The first thought was: it’s moving..? The second: Victoria!
“Vic…” Relief nearly washed through him at the sight of her alive. A faint warmth from her presence touched his face, tugging the corners of his mouth gently upward.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get you out!”, he promised with a serious undertone to his voice. Without hesitation, Aleks stretched an arm downward, pressing his torso flat against the ground. The chest fell into the leaves along the rim. He lowered himself further, partly leaning over the edge. “Give me your hand, I’ll pull you up.”
Only in this position did the gravity of the situation sink in. A shard of orange light bounced along the edges and down to the bottom. Her hair gleamed despite the dirt, yet she wasn’t standing in water as he had assumed. What shifted were no small ripples—tiny eyes stared up at him. Bodies of varying sizes crawled around her as if she were the midday feast of a spider society generations in the making. Something larger stirred, sliding slowly from a slit behind his Victoria. Hairy, wrist thick Legs protruded into view. Aleks swallowed. In a single heartbeat, he decided to say nothing about it—panic would be useless to them.
“Jump, I’ll grab you. I promise.” Somehow he would get her out. Even if it meant climbing down himself and carrying her on his shoulders. His supporting hand dug into the dirt, keeping a hold for his own weight.
 |
Interaction: @Victoria Blythe ──────────── Speech: #84319f 8/11/2025 Blablala-Whale-Song-Singing-Dominance-Asserting |
· · ────────────Oh a signature. Encyclopedia >CLIcK$<──────────── · ·
Stamina - 8 ✸ Evasion - 8 ✸ - Strength - 7 ✸ Wis. - 5 ✸ ArcPower - 5 ✸ Accuracy - 7
Stamina - 8 ✸ Evasion - 8 ✸ - Strength - 7 ✸ Wis. - 5 ✸ ArcPower - 5 ✸ Accuracy - 7
Crawling Trap
interaction: @aleks drašković wc:622 dialogue thoughts
Victoria was on the verge of surrendering to despair. Her cheeks were flushed a frantic pink, her lashes heavy with tears that glistened like trembling diamonds at their tips. Every ragged breath caught in her throat, threatening to burst into sobs she barely managed to swallow back. The oppressive dark pressed close, and for one suffocating moment she thought she would simply give in—until a voice, achingly familiar, cut through the haze of panic.
A boy’s voice.
Her head snapped upward, brunette hair falling into her damp cheeks, and through the blur of tears she saw him—saw the faint outline of his disheveled figure above the edge of the pit. Her blue, doe-like eyes widened, shimmering with a fragile mix of hope and desperation. “Aleks?”
The name left her lips as a breath, more plea than word. In that moment, every scrap of strength Victoria still had fastened itself to the Slytherin boy. If anyone could pull her out of this nightmare, it was him. She tried not to sob again, tried not to look at the writhing floor of spiders below her shoes. Her pale fingers trembled uncontrollably, digging into the dirt of the wall beside her as if that could anchor her. How could anyone stay calm—trapped in a pit crawling with hundreds of skittering legs, the air thick with the sound of them?
Then, at last, a face broke the darkness—messy brown hair, a familiar softness about his expression, and a smile. A quiet, careful smile. Somehow, against all reason, that was enough to make her lungs expand again. Aleks was here. He had found her. He had promised he would help.
When he reached down, extending his hand toward her, Victoria did not hesitate. Normally, touch made her falter—made her pause, recoil, calculate—but panic stripped her of restraint. Her hand shot upward and clasped his with more urgency than she’d ever allowed herself before. She would do anything to escape this foul hole. Anything, as long as it didn’t involve the things crawling beneath her feet.
She did not notice the flicker of unease in Aleks’s eyes. She did not notice the tension in his jaw. All she knew was that he was there, and she trusted him. She didn’t know why she trusted him, not really. It was strange—stranger still because she spent so much of her life building walls, forcing distance between herself and others. And yet this boy, with his untidy hair and steady presence, made her feel… safe.
When he told her what to do, she obeyed without hesitation. Fingers clamped around his like a lifeline, she shook the spiders from her ankles, braced herself, and leapt upward with every ounce of strength she could gather.
Her eyes screwed shut, braced for failure, braced for the crushing fall back into the pit. But then—solid earth. Her feet touched down on soft, blessed soil.
Victoria’s chest heaved as she dragged in uneven gulps of air, panic still clawing at her lungs. Without realizing it, she clutched Aleks’s wrist tighter, grounding herself with his presence, unwilling to let go. She had no space in her mind for dignity or composure; she could think of nothing but whether any spiders still clung to her clothes, her hair, her skin. The thought alone made her shudder.
She swayed closer to him, unconsciously seeking his steadiness, and through her rapid, shallow breaths managed a small, trembling whisper. “...I- That was- Thank you.”
The words were barely audible, but they carried everything she couldn’t yet express—the fear, the relief, the fragile trust. The tears still glittered on her lashes, and her body still quivered with shock, but he had pulled her from the nightmare. And for now, that was enough.
Crawling Trap
His hand clutched firmly against the back of hers, fingers knotting for a solid grip. Without hesitation, he braced himself backward. Through narrowed eyes Aleks saw movement in the hole. Two thick legs crept slowly toward Victoria’s feet. Smaller rustling spiderlings made room for their mother.
Everything in him contracted. Air hissed through his nose and throat, flooding into his lungs at the sight of the approaching monster. “Fuck!” burst from his mouth. The pulse hammered in his ears. The spider’s head pushed slowly out of the hole. More eyes glared out. The air-chewing fangs already scraped against each other. Overhead, light caught on the liquid dripping from its maw. Thin hairs fringed the uneven skin, rimming the hollow eyes.
Disgust swallowed him. Panic followed, and Aleks yanked on her arm as if Victoria were exempt from the laws of physics. He tore her body from the hole just before the Mother‘s hair could touch Victoria. Bangs fell into his face as Aleks stumbled back from the opening. The girl was dragged with him like a sack bound to his body.
Leaves crunched under them. The Slytherin felt them under his back and arms and released her hand. Breath rushed in jagged intervals through his body. Protectively driven, his blue eyes instinctively sought her out.
Victoria looked safe—right beside him on the autumn ground.
However, the panicked adrenaline still had its ugly claw around his soul. Aleks pressed his hands into the dirt and pushed himself upright. A cold breeze swept over the boy's hair and nape, warning him that sweat clung to his skin. “Are you hurt?” he inclined sharply, more serious. Aleks leaned toward Victoria and began to pat her down, checking over back and arm, and brushed stray leaves from her body.
When a small spider peeked out on her shoulder, Aleks wiped it off with a dark glare. “Fucking vermin,” he hissed under his breath. Her uneven breathing kept his reasoning strangled with worry. The imagination of what might have happened had he not by sheer chance overheard her choked him.
He had barely noticed that Victoria had kept her hand locked around his wrist—still less that her grip had suddenly tightened. Even as the girl shuffled closer, Aleks saw nothing but concern and a better chance to search for any leftover remnants of those hole-squatters.
Sitting upright, his breathing began to steady. Aleks scanned her hair, head tilting to the side to inspect the nape as well. Another stray leaf was plucked from her shoulder when she thanked him haltingly.
The words fled from her quietly, but the simple fact she could still use her voice—and wasn’t a spider‘s meal —soothed him somewhat. It was only now that tension released his shoulders.
Aleks replied, “Of course. Anytime,” as if it were the most self-evident thing in the world. It was, for him.
At least Victoria seemed clean enough—for the moment, nothing crawling was in sight. Having regained a measure of calm, he studied her more intently. Something seemed to glimmer in her eyes. It clung to her long lashes, threatening to throw itself off her fragile face. A gentle tremor ran through the otherwise composed body, too. It didn’t even remind him of Halloween—the adrenaline was missing. To Aleks, the girl looked as though the world had stolen her last scrap of pride and left her heart behind as a smoldering heap of shit.
A small, warm smile slowly spread across his lips. Aleks laid his free hand on her cheek and wiped a wet trail from beneath one eye. “Hey… it’s okay… you’re all right,” he cooed. “Don’t worry, yeah? If any of them come up, I’ll skin them.” He almost wished they would, after scaring her, some revenge would be appreciated.
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Interaction: @Victoria Blythe ──────────── Speech: #84319f 8/11/2025 Blablala-Whale-Song-Singing-Dominance-Asserting |
· · ────────────Oh a signature. Encyclopedia >CLIcK$<──────────── · ·
Stamina - 8 ✸ Evasion - 8 ✸ - Strength - 7 ✸ Wis. - 5 ✸ ArcPower - 5 ✸ Accuracy - 7
Stamina - 8 ✸ Evasion - 8 ✸ - Strength - 7 ✸ Wis. - 5 ✸ ArcPower - 5 ✸ Accuracy - 7