Demon Lord´s tarantual

Written by Drax-TheDarkLord

The Whitestone Island is a home to all kinds of strange creatures, from the crystal fish up to the colorful parrots. However when it comes to arachnids, none come close to the remarkable Demon Lord's Tarantula, found in the deepeest parts of the green jungles.

Description:

The spider is not really any different from others in terms of size, comparring to an average human's hand. What tells one apart from the others however is the bright orange coloring with aggressive red and black markings, sprinkled around it's body which give it a rather menacing look.

Biology and Behavior:

As others of it's kind, the Demon Lord's tarantula tends to stick to the forest floor, using small, abandoned dens of rodents and other small critters as shelter, which it covers in a thick coating of sticky webs.
Despite the eight eyes set on top of it's head, the tarantula is nearly blind and relies mostly on vibrations. Despite this, it does not rely on the true and tested strategy of waiting for the food to come to it, but instead goes for the method of a scavanger. Strangely, the tarantula prefers already dead prey to a live one, no matter how big or small it is.
Using a sort of in-built blind GPS, it is able to rememeber it's exact location and all the path it travels. Using this, the tarantula leaves it's home, searching for food, until it finds a rotten corpse, which it liquifies using it's poison and drinks up the tasty soup left afterwards. Once the feast is over, the tarantula returns to it's lair, waiting for weeks until it's time for another meal.
While the strategy of a scavenger is rather dangerous, the tarantula has a trick up it's sleeve. While the bite is quite painful, the venom is worse. Not only does it cause immense pain, it damages cells, which can cause the wound to literally fall apart into something much worse. While in a bloodstream, the venom becomes dilluted and only causes the mentioned pain. But if it ever manages to concentrate in one area, it can cause internal bleeding, or worse.

Lair:

While the lair itself is just a hole covered in webs, the Demon Lord's tarantula does not stop there. Not only are it's surroundings covered in a sea of white spots, but the den is surrounded with around half a meter of additional webbing, meant to trap anything that passes by, or alert the tarantula of a potential intruder.

Religious significance:

As the name inplies, the Demon Lord's tarantula is named after Gaurus the demon lord, a force of evil in the Masked of Dantea religion. While mainly named so due to it's orange coloring, many speak of it being a spawn of the demon lord himself. These tarantulas live far from humans, making them a rare sight to behold and with their less than peaceful nature, it's no wonder the locals avoid them on sight.