When she noticed how aconite slid across her skin, she understood that there was no turning back, that the life she knew would become a memory she would have to lock away in the most hidden corner of her heart. Pride had driven her to that point in which she now stood, a pride for which there was no room for regret.
The effects were slow. First came the itch on the tongue, which spread through the pharynx to reach the esophagus. Breathing became slow, almost imperceptible. The pain arrived after half an hour.
A thousand daggers stabbed her body from within
. She collapsed to the ground with a muffled moan; she could not move. Her gaze blurred. She opened and closed her eyes like a fan in the heat of an endless wave.
With the tongue already swollen, she felt her organs being crushed, how the nose flattened until it disappeared and how the tongue conquered space, spreading through the entire oral cavity until it clogged it. She tried to scream, but could not. Her breathing shifted to her abdomen. Her face had vanished under a veil of tiny filaments. The last thing she saw with her human eyes was her skin evaporating, like water drawn away by clouds in an approaching storm.
A spasm ran from her feet to her head, leaving her rigid. Her heart stopped. She lost consciousness. Her muscles stiffened. First came the extremities. The arms shrank, sharpened, and hardened like stones. To the abdomen clung the arms and legs, while new limbs sprouted: eight in total, four on the left and four on the right.
When she woke from that trance, everything around her had multiplied in size. The loom that had accompanied her since birth was now an impossible mountain, loaded with threads that looked like ship rigging. She tried to blink, but she could not. She no longer had eyelids or eyelashes to fulfill that function. Everything was blurred and a purple hue had taken over the space. The world had lost the vibrant colors that characterized it. Even that tapestry that had been the cause of her misfortune. The figures, once human, were now giants of whom she could only glimpse the toes. She recognized them because, although their form had changed, their memories remained intact.
No longer did hot blood course through her body; a kind of sap was now responsible for her vital functions. She tried to take a step, but those limbs stuck to the abdomen were the ones in charge of movement. She gave them the command, but nothing happened. The human brain still ruled her mind. The animal brain would never fully replace the human, though it would in her offspring. Her humanity would be trapped inside that small spider, doomed to weave forever.
That had been the goddess’s revenge for daring to weave the audacity of the gods, for rising as the victor of the loom contest. She, who had mastered the loom from a young age; she, who had never admitted that her gift was a gift from Athena; she, who had defied the goddess of feminine arts. Now she was a tiny insect at the mercy of the cruelty of a world of giants.
In the distance she saw another giant: the woman who had arrived dressed as an old woman to contest her victory in the art of weaving and who had turned out to be Athena herself, the goddess hungry for vengeance.
In the contest, Athena, disguised as an old woman, wove her own tale: how she had won Poseidon’s patronage of Athens by gifting the olive tree to its inhabitants. In the corners, the braided thread showed mortals who had dared to challenge the gods and the punishments they had suffered. Meanwhile, Arachne etched in the finest silk threads the gods’ mistakes, deceptions, abuses, and infidelities.
It was not Aracne’s artistry, nor even that she rose to triumph, but the theme of her work that enraged the elder, who restored her true form. Arachne, before the vision of Athena, who hurled insults and curses, tried to beg forgiveness. She knelt, cried, pulled at her hair, and clung to her knees, but nothing could appease her.
Finally, she placed a noose around her neck so that Hades would welcome her into his realm. Athena took pity… or, rather, deemed that death was too mild a punishment. She rescued her at the last moment and cursed her forever, and all her offspring: she would be a spider, condemned to weave for the rest of her days, condemned to remain human inside a tiny and insignificant animal body.
And so, now, suspended from the olive tree Athena bore, Arachne weaves with the finest threads her future.