Hermit's Crawl

Author's Note: Enjoy the poem and R&R.

Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to or of the House of the Dead series.

Summary:

A poem based on the pursuit of the Hermit, set during The House of the Dead.

This is it! Can truth prevail to ennoble evil compliment? Behind the lava bridge, a cupola of life.
Walled by cultivation dome's techno-greenery. Bestride the trapdoor leading to the limestone cavern.
Worm-tongued spider sheathed in chitinous ivory, six-eyed, tailed imposture a carnivore to itself.
Without chelicerae, a mutation unique. Down that octagonal hole, it jumps.
Grafted its spindly stilts are the donated skin grafts of the mad scientist's dormant masterpiece.
Follow Rogan and G, squashing back daddy's long-legs' two-toed scratch.
Curien's third research center lies beyond the alternating green and red fallout shelter-thick bows.

Bleeds human blood and upchucks cerebral palsy pain. Plasticized whiplash, again and again.
Climbs deeper to duck the agents' pitiless shots. Through the cave's recesses, a hunter defamed.
Upturned, the knitter-anchorite wriggles thoracic muscles unseen.
Claws to the eight corners, it squirts fluid web packs outraged.

Exhausted its supply of natural grenades, the tunneller runs foul and afoul.
An improvident, suicidal charge, head helmed in adamantine grapnels.
Flashbangs go off as the metatarsi unseal to attack. Fleshier scraps blasted off while its guard it retracts.
The recluse is pushed to the pit base. Smothered in cartridges till its trochanters buckle.
It screams.
Lifeless husk hitting the corrugated metal.
Squinches not into a ball to die, yet flat against the tube, like a roadside carcass.

It was six thousand eight hundred three, once stomped underfoot.

I can't prove my mettle, for I'd rather flee. What is it to show how good you are, but to wait and see?

So disconsolately dead, the lonely spider.