The Celestial Spider

The existence of the Voidlings are a known fact among the Nine Realms, even if they are few and far between. Their appearence always causes death and destruction until they are killed off. Being killed by Voidling doesn't just result in physical death, but also the death of the soul/spirit. Given how powerful these beings are, mortals always wonder why they appear so infrequently. This has lead to the belief of other beings/creatures existing outside of the Nine Realms, who stand against the Voidlings. While nothing is known about these other creatures, it is believed that they must be spiderlike, as the bridges between realms have a resemblence of spider web, thus their name of @web.

As there has never been an appearence of these "spiders" their existence only lives in myth and legend, not even those that have asked the Gods have recieved a confirmation. This has lead to each of the Nine Realms coming up with their own stories about these spiders, but they have all agreed on the same name, and have simliar origin.

---

When the World Tree was young and just starting to grow within the void, it started to attract the attention of these Voidlings, beings native to the void. As these voidlings started to feed off the life energy within the World Tree, it started to focus it's energy upon the creation of a Celestial Spider, to protect it. The branches of the Tree all formed a wall around a central point where the Spider was being created. As the Tree struggled against the Voidlings, it poured its energy into creating the Celestial Spider. As the Tree neared death, the spider emerged and feasted upon the Voidlings attacking the Tree. It gorged itself upon an untold amount of Voidlings, and depending on the Realm, either gave that energy to the Tree causing it to grow nine buds that became the Realms, or laid nine eggs which grew into the Nine Realms.

The Celestial Spider now lives among the branches of the Tree laying its webs to both catch Voidlings and connect the Realms, allowing there to be travel amongst them. There are those belive that it also laid eggs creating an unkown number of smaller spiders that help maintain and repair the webs when they are damaged by the Voidlings.

There are of course variations between the Realms, some believe that the Tree created an egg, from which the Celestial Spider hatched from. Others say that the Spider emerged from a flower, and some even claim that the spider merely emerged from the the Tree itself.