Lexicon:Modern/Glaera

Glaera
Stage	Modern CLT
Pronunciation	/ˈglaɪ.ɾa/
Part of speech	Noun
Etymology	from middle CRT glārē, from Proto glara
Related words	Brosdhun, Clearhold

Glaera — the lure predator of the deep caves and mountain hollows.

Notes

A large arachnid, the body roughly the size of a big dog and the leg span four or five feet. It builds web systems across mountain forest and cave mouths, and the silk is tougher than anything natural — the anchor lines will hold a grown person’s weight. The web is not sticky. It tangles, and the more a caught person struggles the worse it gets.

The lure is the point. Glands on the abdomen produce a light-making compound which it applies to particular strands, and at night those strands glow a faint warm gold that in mountain darkness reads as a distant lantern or a campfire. Travelers move toward what they take for a settlement and walk into the web.

The venom is a neurotoxin that paralyzes over about half a Spaen. The bite hurts and does not immediately disable, so a person with companions has time to call out. Alone, it is fatal.

Hangs in the dark and puts out a soft steady light of its own, and what comes to look at the light is what it eats. The light is the whole of the animal’s method and it has nothing else. Miners know it well and know that a light in a place where no light should be is not a lantern. The phosphorescence has been studied at length and is not the same as that of the glow globes, though the question is raised at the Academy about once a generation.