Adon watched in horror as his incarnation and the other lead creatures in the horde of beasts engaged the horned humanoids.

Although “engaged” would have been a misleading term to apply.

The fight was a bloody, one-sided slaughter. Adon’s past self mindlessly tore into those enemies who were bold enough to confront him, grabbed at those who tried to flee and slashed them with its claws, and then smashed its body into the buildings, trying to get at those occupants of the village who hid from its wrath.

The rest of the rampaging monsters acted likewise, killing the humanoids in their own preferred ways. Though his past self was not especially interested in what his fellow beasts were doing, Adon found it morbidly fascinating whenever he caught a glimpse of one of their myriad killing methods.

The tentacled monsters liked to drill a hole through the abdomen with the tip of their tentacle appendage, and Adon thought they might be implanting eggs inside their victims. The giant sloth-like creatures tended to slit open their victim’s throat or belly with that characteristic long claw of theirs. And the reptilian creatures were just savagely tearing into things like whatever Adon’s incarnation was.

The creature whose point of view Adon shared kept turning away from the carnage other creatures were inflicting, however, to focus on its own mission of violent destruction. Adon thought it could afford to just sit back and watch.

This was only a small village, but it seemed to Adon to be inhabited by a disproportionate number of women and children. So many of them seemed to be dying on his past self’s claws. Perhaps those were the creature’s preferred prey. Or possibly Adon simply felt those deaths more.

Why is my past self—no, why is the being who sent my past self here—doing this? What possible gain is there?

He had the sense that this village was not a militarily significant entity that could defend itself. More and more, Adon wished that the creature whose body he now inhabited would ease off. He had no way of turning off his ability to see through the monster’s eyes, and he sensed that the bloody horrors he observed would not soon leave him.

Adon wondered if the Goddess was actually the reason why he was experiencing this specific memory. That would explain why he could not leave. She was working in her mysterious way, and her work could not be disrupted.

Perhaps this was one of his earlier incarnations, and all this wanton death had stained his soul forever. Maybe these killings were the source of all his bad karma. And this was what he was being punished for by being alone and unhappy in so many of his future lives.

He chewed on that thought for a moment and could neither accept it nor disprove the idea.

Of course, it was possible this vision of the sins of his past did not mean what Adon imagined they might mean. In any case, the brutal violence was disgusting.

Within a few minutes of the beginning of the assault, Adon estimated that as much as a quarter of the village might have been slain in this unexpected attack. The bodies were beginning to stack up, as the monsters did not completely eat the humanoids before moving on to the next victim. Adon could feel his incarnation’s claws and fur growing increasingly matted with blood and gore as it repeatedly reached for its next victim, killed them, and moved on.

He wished to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.

Then creatures around Adon’s incarnation began falling. Dropping dead suddenly, gushing blood. The beast Adon inhabited took a moment to notice, as it was preoccupied with snapping a small child’s neck.

Then the monster turned, and Adon was able to see the new enemy. A group of a half dozen male horned humanoids standing in a semicircle, between the monsters and another group of females and children. Some of them wore bits and pieces of armor or carried weapons, and a few glowed with magical auras as they prepared to cast attacks of some sort.

Clearly they had not expected this fight, from the fact that they did not appear entirely prepared for battle.

But it appeared the defenseless village had some fighters after all.

As if on cue, the wave of monsters charged together. Adon could feel creatures pressing in on all sides of him as his incarnation and the other beasts tried to rush the defenders.

There’s no way they can win this, he thought. There are just too many…

Then he found himself staring down at the ground. Although he felt the incarnation’s pain at a remove, he could still sense the hole that had suddenly opened in his past self’s chest, and the thick torrent of blood that gushed from it. It was obvious that the wound was fatal.

Thank the Goddess. It’s over.

The vision faded to black. Adon could not help wondering if the humanoids had somehow managed to fend off the tide of creatures—if perhaps some rescuers had appeared on the horizon that his incarnation had not lived long enough to see—or if the overwhelming force had snuffed them out.

I never thought I would be glad that one of my lives ended early. He felt unclean after witnessing what his past self had done at the behest of some unseen master. Killing predators who were trying to eat him, or even the offspring of predators, was one thing. Hunting down innocent people—or whatever the humanoids were—just because some force told him to do so was something else.

How many similar crimes would I find, if I went through every memory of my past lives?

It made further exploration of his history during his chrysalis days into a suddenly much less appealing prospect.

Adon forced his brain into an increased alertness until he finally felt confident that he was fully awake. It was a relief to sense what he interpreted as the dim morning light in the room around him. He thought his eyes might have grown back in the last day or so. It was hard to be certain, since even without his eyes, he somehow sensed some of what was going on around him, and even with the eyes, he only had a vague sense of his surroundings through the thick chrysalis.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

He tried not to think too much about the vision he had just experienced.

I won’t let myself sleep again until I have to.

And he would try to find happier memories to dwell on next time. Hopefully that would prevent a similar experience from recurring.

For now, he reached out with his senses, conducting a systems check across his whole body. In addition to his eyes having regrown, he could feel a number of appendages. The legs he had always had seemed to have regenerated, there were short spines growing in like a layer of hair around his body, and some new parts made themselves known from up on his back.

Adon felt a fluttering inside himself as he tried to wiggle the new parts. He knew what they were.

Finally, he thought, and, I wonder how long I was asleep. He could swear he had not possessed much in the way of wing development before he descended into that memory.

I must be almost done.

Another day, perhaps, and he would be reborn. He wanted so badly to be free from his chrysalis now. To see Goldie again. To meet her children. Simply to move around freely!

The prospect of flight was breathtaking to think about. As he was pulling up a memory of the majesty of flight from his dragon life, he sensed movement around him.

Adon turned his head—though it was difficult, the chrysalis having grown surprisingly tight—and saw the shape of a figure lying down, tossing and turning. He recalled that it was in this direction that he had sensed the mind of the Princess.

So she was now moving. Had she awakened yet? As she lay still over the last few days, Adon had slowly recognized this was no ordinary sleep. It was the stillness of the comatose.

At least now she’s starting to look more like she’s just dreaming rather than dead to the world.

He thought about trying to reach out to her with his mind again, but decided, even assuming that he could reach Rosslyn, that it was better not to disturb her sleep.

He activated Telepathy anyway, though. He reached out for Goldie again, but he could not find her anywhere near him. He had been hoping she would appear at some point. He would not feel quite right until he knew that his friend was nearby.

Where is she? Adon wondered. How are she and her eggs doing?

—

In the same building as Adon, a level below where he was completing his Evolution, Goldie rested at the center of a large complex structure of webs.

She felt a sensation like a cool breeze passing over her exoskeleton, but as she looked down at her web, nothing had moved. So there was no breeze. Perhaps the room was simply growing cooler. Winter was coming, after all.

Goldie shifted closer to her little ones, aiming to keep them warm with the meager warmth that her body provided.

Only a little longer now, she thought, caressing one of their hard exterior shells. Soon you will walk beside me, in this almost completely safe environment I have created…

No humans or other large animals had entered the secret room in the last two days since she had exterminated all her arachnid competition. Unchallenged, she had connected the other spiders’ existing webs to hers in a large superstructure of webbing. Nothing could fly through the room now without being caught in a silk thread. Nothing could cross the entire height and length of the room’s wall space without touching a sticky strand of silk either.

It was almost a perfect death trap for her prey. If Goldie had more time, she would have put down a layer of webbing on the floor, too. But she wanted to be by her eggs at all times now, and she knew the additional silk was unnecessary.

As a result of her carefully applied violence, the amount of food that she harvested each day had increased sixfold. Goldie now possessed such a large stockpile that she felt no anxiety about whether her babies would have enough to eat.

So most of the last forty-eight hours had been her simply watching over her children as they prepared to hatch.

Goldie stared down at her eggs expectantly. They were almost completely transparent now, and she could see the spiderlings’ pale bodies slowly moving within the tight confines of the shells. They did not yet have the color patterns they would develop once they had consumed enough Biomass, acquired sufficient Evolution Points, and passed through their first Evolution. The Evolution that she intended to help them achieve.

Red, Adon, I wish you could be here to see this.

At the same time that she missed her mate and her friend, however, Goldie felt that this might be the single most important moment of her life. She did not mind meeting it alone. The joy of meeting her children would be profound, with or without the arthropods closest to her.

She knew that her bond with her young would be unlike any relationship she had ever experienced, excepting the possibility that she had been a mother in a previous life.

Come out, my beautiful ones, she thought. It is time. Plenty of food for you…

Then she activated Telepathy and sent the sentiments into the eggs, trying to make the thought as gentle as possible. She remembered how Adon had actually damaged wasps through Telepathy, but she wanted to encourage her babies if she could.

For a moment, Goldie was not certain whether any of the little spiders had understood her.

Then her eyes were drawn to a flicker of movement from the smallest egg. The hatchling inside of that one was extending a limb. As Goldie stared, stupefied, the spiderling tentatively tapped at the edge of the shell.

A thin crack appeared.

All around the first-moving spiderling, the siblings began to move as well. Copying the smallest one, the others tapped the sides of their shells with their forelimbs. They were much less tentative, as if now that they had seen the little one do it, they were confident it would work.

But Goldie’s eyes kept returning to the smallest one. Although it had started off cautiously, she now saw that the little one’s vigorous and repeated taps were breaking through its shell the fastest.

As if it was racing the others, she thought. You are a brave one. Rushing out into the world as if there was nothing at all to be afraid of…

She was not certain if she had ever been like that, even at the moment of her birth.

As she watched, the thin hairline fracture in the shell became a spider web of cracks.

A little head poked out of the shell, the newborn’s eyes fixed on Goldie’s. The spider felt a profound sense of connection.

She reached out to stroke its head lightly with just the tip of her forelimb.

Hello, little one. I am your mama, she sent.

Mama, the littlest spider echoed. Mama.