Steel spiders, immense scuttling horrors moving with a strangely horrifying clockwork precision, metal claws driven by hundreds of tiny gears. They are a mockery of organic life, a ghastly parody sculpted in unfeeling metal, scurrying tirelessly across the dead stone of the abandoned cities and enmeshing it with steel webs. Thousands of tiny chains, each link barely larger than a grain of sand, and each bearing a barbed spine. Anyone touching the twisting chain-webs would become ensnared. And then the arachnids descend from shadowed alcoves, bladed claws scratching maddening rhythms across the stone as they come to feed, the needle-sharp fangs of glittering silver stabbing cruelly into the veins of their ensnared victims and draining every drop of blood into the burning furnaces that give them life. Life without flesh or blood, without bone or muscle, without heart or brain. Turning gears and hydraulic fluid serves for flesh and blood, steel struts and pistons for bone and muscle, and their hearts are relentlessly ticking escapements. And as for the brains of the nightmare creatures… It is whispered that the pulsing, dark red crystals set within the body of every one of the horrors holds some malign intelligence. What dark soul looks out through those glittering green lenses that serve as eyes? In what light do they see the world? Have they emotions? Any concept of love and beauty, care and compassion? Or are they merely automata with no motivation other than to feed and grow and survive… and kill?