Ghost spiders

“They say each eye of a ghost spider sees into a different Realm.”

— unknown

Ghost Spiders are a species of Monsters present on most mortal realms. They are highly dangerous but also occasionally used as sources of wealth or as beasts of war.

Description

Ghost spiders are dangerous predators that can infest almost any area, including human cities. They are giant arachnids with dangerous paralytic venom and a very effective hunting strategy.

World walking

Ghost spiders are feared and renowned for their natural ability to produce magical webbing and use it to travel between worlds at a moment's notice. The webs they produce produce naturally create passages in the realm shell of mortal realms to other realms. If a cluster of webs suddenly seem to fade into existence near you, a ghost spider is weaving its web on the other side.

Ghost spiders have the ability to wander between the worlds that their webs connect to and can see what is near their webs in other realms, being able to see multiple realms at the same time. This allows them to ambush prey by suddenly shifting across worlds near a cluster of innocuous seeming webs, appearing like a ghost.

Young ghost spiders are primarily ambush predators, preferring to cover an area in webs that grant the spider high mobility, appearing near their prey and paralyzing it with their bite.
Older ghost spiders prefer to use their sticky webs to trap unweary prey or use their size to intimidate prey to cause it to flee into a cluster of webs to get stuck.
If sated, ghost spiders tend to wrap prey in their webs and carry them to their nest to store them for later consumption. This may lead the prey to potentially be stored on an entirely different realm than its origin realm.

Natural portals:
A sufficiently large cluster of webs may even create stable portals leading to other worlds that any creature may travel through. A traveler would have to get past the spider to do it however. The amount of web needed also means that these portals occur only inside of ghost spider hives. The portal remains stable until such time that the webbing degrades, which happens if the spider is not there to renew it.

Revenue generators
Fresh Webbing of a ghost spider is a potent alchemical and arcane ingredient and thus its harvest is a dangerous but worthwhile task and some communities sustain themselves by harvesting this substance at great risk. Ghost spider eyes may also be valuable but are more difficult to obtain.

Intelligence

Ghost spiders are remarkably intelligent. They are capable of pattern recognition and are thus able to recorgnize and distinguish easy prey from more dangerous foes.
They are capable of advanced planning, such as being able to sneak near a prey's burrow and using their web to weaken the local realm, then jumping straight into the burrow to catch its prey unaware.

Communal Species:
Ghost spiders can also live in communities. If there is sufficient food available, ghost spiders will see no need to spread their populations out. They will even cooperate on hunts for larger prey and defend their collective nesting grounds against intruders.
However these creatures have no inherent loyalty or empathy and will cannibalize eachother if they are hungry. Older spiders will not shy away from devouring the younger ones if food gets sparse.
They also do not have any advanced form of communication and thus will not pass down tricks and strategies down across generational lines. This means that older ghost spiders are always more dangerous than younger ones.

Ghost spider colonies can appear rather small, but due to their unique abilities the colony can be spread across multiple worlds. A colony can thus be larger than it appears.
Colonies with more than a dozen spiders are exceptionally rare and most ghost spiders are solitary creatures.

Tamed Spiders
Due to their high intelligence, ghost spiders can be tamed as beasts of hunting or war. They always remain dangerous, but can be trained to respond to commands when rewarded with food. However its spinnerettes will have to be burned out to prevent the spider from escaping, preventing it from using its world-walking abilities.

Life cycle:

Ghost spiders are born from light gray eggs about the size of a human torso. They are immediately able to produce webbing and grow up over the course of roughly 10 years to their mature size.
Male spiders stop growing beyond the size of an horse while females never truly stop growing, though it does slow down signifficantly after reaching maturity.
Female spiders lay eggs once per year. As a female grows both older and larger, it is capable of producing more eggs each year.
Ghost spiders can live up to 200 years old.

Hunting strategy

The difficulty in hunting ghost spiders is preventing them from escaping.
If faced with actual danger, a ghost spider will always attempt to flee, mostly to another realm. The only real exception being when it is currently defending a clutch of eggs, at which point it will fight to the death.
It is always possible to burn the webs of a ghost spider nest, but it is likely the creature will just wait on another world until the danger has passed and spin its webs again.

Thus the usual method of actually killing ghost spiders is by ambushing them. A group of warriors will wait in hiding with a live animal tied to a rope near a known ghost spider web.
Then when the spider attacks the bait, the warriors attack the creature while preventing it from reaching its webs by blocking its path and or destroying its webs. The spider can then be killed with minimal losses.
Alternatively it is possible to poison the spider either through tainted bait or by using a poisoned weapon, so that the spider dies later even if it manages to escape to its web.

Trivia

Ghost spiders are named after the way they appear while walking along their webs, seeming to fade in and out of existence like ghosts.

Appearance:

Ghost spiders are human-sized upon hatching, Horse sized upon maturity and can grow up to be the size of elephants if they live long enough. However these old spiders are very rare.

They are commonly a gray coloration, though black and white are not unusual.